Tag: Islamism

The Quranists

I haven’t had time lately to look into the arrests of several members of a “Quranist” group — people who reject the hadith and present a reformist practice of Islam based entirely on the Quran — but as well as being a blatant violation of freedom of belief, there seems to be several other overlapping elements here. One is that at least one of the Quranists, Amr Tharwat, is involved in the pro-democracy NGO Ibn Khaldun Center, run by the prominent Egyptian-American liberal Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Tharwat was involved in election monitoring.

The other is that the arrests could be a response to the Quranists’ mockery of al-Azhar recent fatwas about urine-drinkling and adult breastfeeding, which cause a furore here last month and put the august institution on the defensive. By al-Azhar’s Sunni standards, the Quranists’ beliefs are highly unorthodox if not downright sacrilegious (I don’t know enough about the Quranists to be sure). So what we are seeing here is yet another form of the state Islamism that has become rampant in Egypt since the 1970s. Who needs to worry about the Muslim Brotherhood when you already have bigots in power?

I’ve pasted some statements about this case below, with links to the Quranists’ website.

Continue reading The Quranists

US considering engaging Muslim Brothers?

The rabidly Zionist, MEMRI outlet, New York Sun has an interesting piece by Eli Lake, a reporter formerly based in Cairo who knows the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, about how the State Dept. and other US agencies are considering engaging with the MB. Robert Leiken, who recently wrote a Foreign Affairs piece advocating engagement (see posts on that here and here), participated in the findings.

Today the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research will host a meeting with other representatives of the intelligence community to discuss opening more formal channels to the brothers. Earlier this year, the National Intelligence Council received a paper it had commissioned on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood by a scholar at the Nixon Center, Robert Leiken, who is invited to the State Department meeting today to present the case for engagement. On April 7, congressional leaders such as Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, attended a reception where some representatives of the brothers were present. The reception was hosted at the residence in Cairo of the American ambassador to Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, a decision that indicates a change in policy.

The National Security Council and State Department already meet indirectly with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood through discussions with a new Syrian opposition group created in 2006 known as the National Salvation Front. Meanwhile, Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, is a leader of Iraq’s chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. His party, known as the Iraqi Islamic Party, has played a role in the Iraqi government since it was invited to join the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.

These developments, in light of Hamas’s control of Gaza, suggest that President Bush — who has been careful to distinguish the war on terror from a war on Islam — has done more than any of his predecessors to accept the movement fighting for the merger of mosque and state in the Middle East.

I personally think Leiken has a tendency to put the various Muslim Brotherhoods in the same basket. Whatever the links between them, they are clearly separate entities with local leaderships and warrant different approaches from the US. For instance, from a practical standpoint the US is forced to deal with the MB in Iraq, and from a political one engaging the Syrian MB makes sense if one is pursuing a policy of regime change in Damascus, particularly as exile Syrian groups have relationships with the Syrian MB. In Egypt, the situation is quite different: engagement with the MB has been extremely cautious, restricted to parliamentarians and is subject to close scrutiny from a regime that is close to Washington. In Palestine, engagement with Hamas is left to countries like Egypt since dealing with Hamas directly would contravene every ideological tenet the Bush administration holds dear, and presumably anger their neocon friends.

However, there are signs that the Egyptian MB can be useful: last week, reports emerged that Fatah’s strongman in Gaza and US-Israeli tool Muhammad Dahlan (who is blamed even by his Egyptian intelligence handlers for starting the recent violence in Gaza) had sent out an emissary to MB Supreme Guide Muhammad Akef, asking him to reach out to Hamas. The Egyptian intelligence services have used Akef’s good offices with Hamas for a while now, it seems, and despite the ongoing crackdown against the MB domestically, the regime realizes they can be useful (and perhaps the MB hopes to win some lenience in return), even if the MB’s official support for the Hamas government clashes with Egypt’s decision to only recognize the Fatah-backked Fayyad government in the West Bank (and Egypt’s help in making sure Hamas leaders cannot leave Gaza and other forms of coordination of the blockade with the Israelis, even if some Israelis are unhappy.)

It’s also worthwhile noting that Hamas is making an attempt to get the US to engage directly with them — note that Ismail Haniyeh’s advisor Ahmed Youssef had op-eds in both the NYT and WaPo yesterday advocating engagement and defending Hamas’ democratic credentials. Hamas has also been making noise about negotiating the release of of BBC journalist Alan Johnston (what were they waiting for, anyway?)

In the context of this debate about engaging the various Muslim Brotherhoods, it’s worth highlighting that Human Rights Watch has put up interviews of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood detainees who were imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptian security services. It’s a novel and unusual attempt by an establishment institution to put a human face on the MB, which tends not to make front-page news when its members are (routinely) arrested and mistreated. HRW is not only defending their human rights, but also the MB’s freedom of association and expression, which is bound to make many in Cairo (and not just in government) unhappy. The full list of interviews is on the page linked above, but here’s a YouTube version of the interview with Mahmoud Izzat, the Secretary-General of the MB, recalling the brutal 1965 wave of arrests, which was widely credited for radicalizing a part of the MB and creating the spinoff groups that would become Islamic Jihad, and ultimately join al-Qaeda.

Congressional delegation meets with MB – again

Remember how a few weeks ago a Congressional delegation met — both in parliament and at an embassy function — MPs from the Muslim Brotherhood? That time around, the Egyptian government did not respond, even though it has always opposed contacts between foreign countries and the MB. Yesterday, another delegation met with MP Saad Katatni, the MB’s leader in parliament, and Egyptian officials were this time quick to speak out:

Egypt criticized the U.S. Sunday after four Congress members met with a lawmaker from the banned Muslim Brotherhood, less than two months after House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer met the same politician.

The bipartisan delegation headed by Rep. David Price, D-N.C., met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak early Sunday before heading to parliament to talk to a group of lawmakers that included the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Saad el-Katatni.

“The United States says that it doesn’t establish relations with a banned group, whether in Egypt or outside Egypt,” said Mubarak’s spokesman Suleiman Awaad. “The U.S. says it is meeting with the Brotherhood as Parliament members, but doesn’t make the same distinction and refuses to talk with Hamas, who is heading the Palestinian government and is occupying the prime minister’s seat.”

While that’s an excellent point about Hamas (there’s nothing wrong with meeting with them, just like there’s nothing wrong meeting with the MB MPs) it’s rather disingenuous to trot it out when Egypt is a full partner in the US-Israeli strategy to bring down the Hamas government. And it’s not like the Egyptians are particularly fond of Hamas anyway, or that they’re likely to change their approach to the group. As an American official recently told me (I paraphrase), “the Egyptians think they’re doing us a big favor with Hamas, but we keep reminding them that it’s in their interest too.”

Anyway, the interesting thing with this second US congressional meeting with the MB is that things are beginning to look like a pattern. The first meeting a few weeks ago looked like a feeler, as if US diplomats were testing the waters. That may still be what’s taking place, particularly if it’s something that the congressional delegation asked for (I believe the previous one wanted to see something different than the usual NDP apparatchiks). Or it may be a genuine change in policy, using the loophole the US embassy has always reserved — that it feels free to meet any elected official, but will not meet MB leaders outside of parliament.

The question then becomes, to what purpose? Simply to keep a channel open to what is, after all, the largest elected opposition group in Egypt? To send a signal to the regime that the US is not happy with the current state of things, notably the campaign against the Ikhwan, the continued imprisonment of Ayman Nour and the recent constitutional amendments? Or maybe I am reading too much into it and it’s just a few curious congresspersons. It’s worth noting, though, that the head of the delegation, David Price (D-NC) is the chairman of the House Democracy Assistance Commission (and a former political scientist at Duke University). Part of what that commission does is help “emerging democracies” develop better parliamentary practice and infrastructure.

Muslim Brothers: so hot right now

As they face one of the biggest crackdowns in decades and the military trial of some of their top funders begins, the Egyptian Muslim Brothers are attracting ever more attention. There is a long piece in the NY Times Magazine — a pretty decent and sympathetic portrait of the group and some of its personalities, even if it is generally inconclusive — that looks at their recent pro-reform parliamentary record and what various members of the group say about issues such as alcohol, Copts, and so on. James Traub, the author of the piece, is working on a book on democracy promotion and it shows: there are references to the Bush administration’s stance towards the MB, which Traub posits as being at odds with the Forward Agenda for Freedom (Bushspeak for democracy promotion.) To me it seems the democracy promotion angle (a US policy issue) is a bit awkwardly tackled to the more general look at the Brothers’ democratic credentials, but of course it’s an interesting issue.

As it has fully entered the political arena, the brotherhood has been forced to come up with clear answers on issues about which it has been notably ambiguous in the past. Some are easy enough: There seems to be little appetite among them for stoning adulterers or lopping off the hands of thieves; and all deprecate the jizya, or tax on nonbelievers, as a relic of an era when only Muslims served in the military. Some are not so easy. I asked Magdy Ashour about the drinking of alcohol, which is prohibited in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Islamic states. He was quite unfazed. “There is a concept in Shariah that if you commit the sin in private it’s different from committing it in public,” he explained. You can drink in a hotel, but not in the street. This was flexibility verging on pragmatism. I wondered if Ashour, and the other brotherhood candidates, had offered such nuanced judgments on the stump; a number of detractors insist that the group’s campaign rhetoric was much more unabashedly Islamist.

There are, of course, more fundamental questions. In the course of a three-hour conversation in the brotherhood’s extremely modest office in an apartment building in one of Cairo’s residential neighborhoods, I asked Muhammad Habib, the deputy supreme guide, how the brotherhood would react if the Legislature passed a law that violated Shariah. “The People’s Assembly has the absolute right in that situation,” he said, “as long as it is elected in a free and fair election which manifests the people’s will. The Parliament could go to religious scholars and hear their opinion” — as it could seek the advice of economists on economic matters — “but it is not obliged to listen to these opinions.” Some consider grave moral issues, like homosexual marriage, beyond the pale of majoritarianism; others make no such exception. Hassan al-Banna famously wrote that people are the source of authority. This can be understood, if you wish to, as the Islamic version of the democratic credo.

It’s also interesting to see MB rhetoric for why Americans should talk to them:

But why not engage the brotherhood openly? Is what is gained by mollifying the Mubarak regime worth what is lost by forgoing contact with the brotherhood? “Americans,” Essam el-Erian said to me, “must have channels with all the people, not only in politics, but in economics, in social, in everything, if they want to change the image of America in the region.” Of course, that principle applies only up to a point. The administration has, understandably, refused to recognize the democratic bona fides either of Hamas or of Hezbollah in Lebanon. But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all its rhetorical support of Hamas, could well be precisely the kind of moderate Islamic body that the administration says it seeks. And as with Islamist parties in Turkey and Morocco, the experience of practical politics has made the brotherhood more pragmatic, less doctrinaire. Finally, foreign policy is no longer a rarefied game of elites: public opinion shapes the world within which policy makers operate, and the refusal to deal with Hamas or Hezbollah has made publics in the Islamic world dismiss the whole idea of democracy promotion. Even a wary acceptance of the brotherhood, by contrast, would demonstrate that we take seriously the democratic preferences of Arab voters.

Ultimately, though, what I like best about Traub’s piece are the little vignettes about what it is that Muslim Brotherhood MPs and activists do at the local level. It’s worth reading fully.

While on the topic of the MB, Robert Leiken, the establishment conservative policy type who advocated (with mildly neo-con [edit:see comments] Steven Brooke) engagement with the MB in the pages of Foreign Affairs a couple of months ago, follows up on critiques of his argument in the National Interest — particularly the critique “more neo-con than me you die” Joshua Muravshik articulated in Commentary. So basically it’s an argument between conservative policy wonks. All credit to them for having the argument, and I am not so familiar with centrist and liberal debates on this issue in Amreeka (my friends Samer Shehata and Josh Stacher, who have argued for engagement with the MB, are scholars not wonks). Indeed, I find the pages of places like the Center for American Progress rather barren on such topics — or am I wrong? The debate has to be broader than this to be significant.

Nonetheless, there is a fundamental truth that if you talk about engaging the MB in an American context, no matter what you think about what the MB wants to do in Egypt, there is the question of its support for Hamas. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood supports terrorism, since it supports Hamas, and Hamas is considered to be a terrorist organization in US law. In some anti-MB arguments, that “support of terrorism” charge can seem to mean that the MB supports al-Qaeda — and the debate hits a brick wall. Nonetheless, that critique is not serious. Hamas is not al-Qaeda and while it makes use of terrorism, it does so in resistance to occupation. That argument of course won’t get you far in American circles either, but one that might is that if the US does not engage with the MB because it supports Hamas, should it break off diplomatic relations with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Egypt which have given money to the Hamas-controlled Palestinian government or facilitated those donations? (I am leaving out the obvious imbalance in US treatment of Palestinian use of violence against civilians to resist occupation vs. Israeli use of violence against civilians to perpetuate occupation.)

There is perhaps another issue worth raising: what is the MB’s position towards the situation in Iraq, and does the MB encourage people to go fight the jihad there? I have no evidence the MB is involved in this, but there have been quite a few Egyptian mujahedeen in Iraq and you have to wonder about the recruitment networks they came through.

In any case, if people want to debate this in the comments, can we refrain from the all-caps messages about how the MB are the spawn of Satan?

Burke on Morocco

Jason Burke, author of “Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror”, has a long Magazine piece in today’s Observer. It’s pretty much your standard Morocco at a crossroads between modernity and tradition piece of the kind that gets written all the time by foreign journos, even if it does contain a decent and eclectic selection of interviewees. While worth a read, I found it ultimately disappointing particularly as it has no particular focus when it talks about the need for reform and does not really seriously look at the presence of al-Qaeda inspired groups in Morocco, which should be very timely.

The recent arrests and attacks in Casablanca are very much worth investigating. In Morocco itself there is a debate between those who believe the group was linked to al-Qaeda or merely inspired by them. The government is pushing the line, credibly from what I’ve gathered from Cairo, that they were an amateur group that was much less sophisticated than, say, the group behind the 16 May 2003 bombings or the recent bombings in Algeria. There is also a debate in the Moroccan media about whether prisons are in effect becoming indoctrination centers for Islamists. Some of the men involved in this latest group were minor Islamist fellow travelers who were apparently radicalized in prison. They were pardoned and released a few years ago, as part of a royal amnesty on Islamist prisoners since so many had been rounded up after 16 May 2003. Burke’s piece largely points to poverty as the key radicalizing factor — a dominant analysis of the success of Islamist groups in Morocco (both non-violent and violent). Although there’s no denying that Morocco is a country of much poverty and many injustices, I have problems with this way of looking at things. It dismisses the very real, pragmatic manner in which a terrorist cell is formed: someone not only has to provide the guiding radical ideology (not mainstream Islamism, but rather its violent radical form) as well as the knowledge and resources to acquire and build weapons, stay secret, escape police surveillance, and more.

The group that was recently dismantled obviously did not have any great training. But to say it was merely the result of poverty is obscuring the threat of individuals, or networks of individuals, that are propagating this type of radical Islamism. Terrorists can be rich or poor, we have seen. Last year, the Moroccan security services dismantled another cell that included of former military officers — not the poorest of the poor. To keep on pointing to the poor allows to escape accountability on the really important sources of terrorism: radical Islamist websites, funding networks from the Gulf and elsewhere, information networks such as the ones led by “former” radical Islamists in London, and the experience of veterans from the Afghan civil war and now the Iraqi civil war. And, of course, the regional and global symbolic context of a “clash of civilizations” or “war on Islam” backed by very real occupations, daily scenes of injustice and selective disregard of national sovereignty does not help. Some types of poor people — notably young men — may be easy to recruit from, but focusing on poverty brings the risk of considering the poor inherently suspect.

The Brotherhood on US TV

I got home this evening after a day spent at NYU at a very interesting literary symposium (that I hope to blog about tomorrow). Flipping channels, I happened on a segment of the PBS series “America at a Crossroads” called “The Brotherhood.” It’s interesting but I can’t help finding parts of it a bit tendentious and alarmist–the show’s main question (“Does the Brotherhood support terrorism?”) seems to be largely rhetorical. One problem is that when Brotherhood members express support for Hamas and Hezbullah, this is taken as evidence that the organization may be “terrorist.” Typically, the narrators interview a Brotherhood member, saying something like “we do not support violence,” and then cuts to a shot of masked Hamas members waving guns. The other problem is that the Brotherhood’s goal of establishing “Islamic rule on earth” is seen as an actual practical aim (rather than an ideological statement) and as inherently troubling. The narrators show a document that mentions this goal, to a background of ominous music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favour of establishing any religious rule on earth, but would people be equally concerned about an organization that said its goal was to establish “Christian rule on earth”?

I didn’t see the whole segment (I think I caught the last half). I do think it’s an interesting topic to cover–I’ve always wanted to find out more about the inner workings of the Brotherhood–and that it’s great that it’s being covered by a serious program on US TV. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the show left me with more questions than answers.

It’s Islamofascism Awareness Day

Oh yes it is:

The campus project was planned by conservative writer and activist David Horowitz as a response to attempts last year by officials at Pace University to prevent a Jewish student group from hosting a screening of “Obsession” on the university’s West-chester, N.Y., campus.

Mr. Horowitz, whose Terrorism Awareness Project is sponsoring tomorrow’s events, said the use of the term “Islamofascism” is part of the educational mission of the “teach-ins” planned around the film showings.

“The most important thing is to make people recognize who the enemy is. People cringe when we use the word ‘Islamofascism’ because they haven’t been prepared for it,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that there are real similarities between Islamic extremism and the fascism of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. “It’s not for nothing that the Iranian army goose-steps.”

“Obsession” won best feature-film honors at the 2005 Liberty Film Festival. It has been widely praised by conservatives and broadcast on the Fox News Channel.

The movie made headlines when members of the Pace chapter of Hillel, a collegiate Jewish organization, said they were “intimidated” by university administrators after a campus Muslim group complained of Hillel’s plan to show the documentary in November as part of Judaism Awareness Week.

Can’t wait for Christianofascism and Judeofascism (better known as Zionism) Awareness days. Come to think of it, how about Shintofascism and Hindufascism Awareness?

[Thanks, E.]

MB op-ed defends Kareem Amer

An intriguing op-ed by a young Muslim Brother:

Egypt’s Two-Faced Regime: Not Secular, Not Islamic, Authoritarian

There is an increasing realization amongst Egypt’s opposition political factions that the regime has no ideology to defend, least of all a secular one. The regime’s crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood are not part of a sincere attempt to uphold “secularist” values, such as democracy, pluralism and civil rights. They are simply measures to quash political opponents. In fact, these so-called “secularist” values are embraced by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The regime was not sincerely upholding Islamist values when it sentenced Amer to prison for attacking Islam. As an Islamist, I am of course against the hate speech and the anti-Islamic sentiments Amer expressed in his blog. But I am also against his imprisonment, which I’m sure is politically motivated, merely because he harshly criticized the president.

If attacking Islam is a “punishable crime” in the regime’s eyes, why wasn’t the minister of culture prosecuted when he attacked al-Azhar and Islamic Shariah, just as Amer did? If the constitution’s second article stipulates that Islamic Shariah is the main source of legislation, then why does the regime ban any political activity based on a religious ideology? The answer, again, is simple: The regime has monopolized religion.