The booklet is in Arabic, and provides a Marxist analysis of Egypt’s largest Islamist opposition group, and outlines the Socialist strategy vis a vis it.
A must read… الإخوان المسلمون: رؤية اشتراكية… تأليÙ� Ø³Ø§Ù…Ø Ù†Ø¬ÙŠØ¨
The feature was co-written back on 13 October, but only went online two days ago.
I have also uploaded to my flickr account some historical photos of el-Banna, that we obtained from the Brotherhood.
Muhsin Radi says too little is known about Hasan Al-Banna, the founder of a movement which would become Egypt’s strongest opposition group and inspire Islamists across the Arab world.
“I hope that there will not be fears about this production. We do not want, as some people think, to spread the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Radi said. “Rather, we want people to be acquainted with the character of Hasan Al-Banna.”
I wonder if it will be banned in the current environment… It will definitely be seen as MB propaganda, especially with all the nationalist overtones of al-Banna’s leadership in the fight against the British.
On a related note: Last night I found out that NYU was hosting a talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, featuring prominent middle-generation Muslim Brother Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh as well as Western “experts.” I rushed to get there on time only to find out that Aboul Fotouh and a Jordanian Islamist who was also due to speak were prevented from entering the United States. No reasons were officially given for this, although the NYU people said they were looking into it.
Making this stupidity worse, we were left with a panel on the Muslim Brotherhood manned entirely by Western terrorism experts — the chair was Peter Bergen — and people who seem to have a rather sophomoric understanding of the MB. I don’t claim expertise myself, but former Sunday Times journalist Nick Fielding talked about the Muslim Brothers in the vaguest possible terms and mentioned it existing across the region, including in Morocco and Algeria (where he said it was similar to the FIS). The other panelist, a researcher called Alexis Debat, was a bit better but started talking about the MB’s economic policy based on its writings in the 1940s and 1950s (or more accurately, Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam). It’s an interesting topic, but since then the global economic system has changed two or three times, so it all seemed rather beside the point. None of the panelists mentioned, except in passing, the MB’s parliamentary performance, the ongoing crackdown against it (biggest since the 1960s, remember), or more specific internal issues of governance and changes in the way it operates. And since Peter Bergen is an al-Qaeda expert, much of the discussion (at least until the point I walked out in disgust) revolved around whether the MB is a violent group, or whether it will get violent, and how Osama Bin Laden joined the MB in Jeddah when he was 17. I’m not saying that’s not interesting, but surely a little academic precision would be in order and focusing on the MB’s role in Egyptian politics would be more useful, especially as it’s highly dubious that a world Muslim Brotherhood really exists as an organized institution — a country-by-country approach seems much more fruitful.
In any case, NYU students and staff could have had information about the MB from the horse’s mouth, and in Aboul Fotouh they would have had one of its most articulate spokesmen. I would have loved to grill him on a number of issues, but instead I got Whitey and Whitey. A waste of time.
Meanwhile, a handful of Muslim Brothers journalists demonstrated in front of the Press Syndicate, protesting the closure of the group-affiliated paper, Afaq Arabiya, seven months ago by the government. The journalists posed as vegetable sellers, to symbolize their financial difficulties. “We are left with nothing but selling vegetables ya hokouma,” they were shouting.
Recommended Book:
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam
Photographer and friend Amr Abdallah was there…
Al-Masry Al-Youm reported yesterday that the Ministry of Religious Endowements, Mubarak’s arm in the religious establishment, has drafted a proposal for a new law banning demos and “gatherings” in mosques. The proposed penalties for “breaking the law” would be either three months in jail, a minimum LE500 fine, or both.
Related link: MB spearheads Danish boycott campaign
The lawyer was initially detained by State Security police on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of secular intellectual Farag Fouda. A court had cleared Mansour of the charges but, as with the case of thousands of other detainees, the interior ministry kept him in custody for 14 years using the powers decreed by Egypt’s notorious emergency law.
Related links:
Two more citizens tortured in Arish
Forgotten victims of another war on terror
Recommended Book:
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam
Bilhaj said his son, Abdel Qahhar, disappeared last Sunday, and held the Algerian authorities responsible for his safety.
More details could be found in the following Arabic statement I received from the IOC…
Related link: Algeria’s secret torture chambers
Recommended Book:
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam
There is certainly little evidence that non-violent Islamist groups are totalitarian in any way — even if some of their practices are dubious and those governments run by Islamists have a generally poor human right record. Backwards and repressive, yes. Totalitarian? It would be a compliment.
I do actually find some of what Amis wrote funny — his idea for a novel about an Al Qaeda planner who decides to converge 500 rapists to Greeley, Colorado (which famously hosted Sayyid Qutb), is mildly amusing. Qutb certainly deserves to be lampooned, and I have absolutely no problem with anyone poking fun at Islam. In fact, I positively long for the day that a Muslim Life of Brian is made with violent repercussions for its creators. But Amis’ piece is infused with anti-religious sentiment:
Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief – unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses.
This kind of statement, which I personally sympathize with, is not really helpful in understanding a thoroughly religious society — and, in case Amis hadn’t noticed, there are still plenty of religious people in the West too.
Where the essay really falls apart is at the third part, which is so full of bad arguments and mangled facts that it barely makes any sense. We learn, for instance, that:
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers.
Because there is no concept of individuality in the Muslim world, nor many varied interpretations of what Islam is, how it is practiced, or the degree to which it informs everyday life.
We also get the obligatory reference to the number of books the Islamic world publishes or translates and an approving reference to Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong. This is then followed by comparisons between Islamism (again, with no notion of nuance and what a broad label that term is) and Nazism and Bolshevism.
The worst is kept for last:
First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule – for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room – did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The ‘electoral policy’ of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, ‘has been classically summarised as “One man (men only), one vote, once.”‘
Rather strange, considering that democratically elected Islamist parties in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Turkey (among others) have reiterated many times their commitment to democratic processes. In Turkey, they are actually in power. The track record of Islamist governments that reached power by force may not be great, but thus far the ones who have come through a democratic process have not proved a threat to that process.
Also:
Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd – a disposition which looks set to resume.
I’m not sure what country is “real.” I suggest that Amis should prepare himself for the inevitable dissolution of his own England, which surely will return to its Anglo and Saxon components anytime now.
I could go on — just after this comes a great line about the fall of Baghdad being particularly painful for Muslims because it is the seat of the Caliphate (actually many Arab and non-Arab Muslims recognized the Caliphate in Istanbul until 1921) — but it all gets rather tiresome. Yes, Martin Amis, some Islamists are repellent, reactionary people with a bankrupt philosophy. But we hardly needed an examination of Islamism that reads like a hastily-researched essay of an Oxford undergraduate (i.e. wittily written, smug with borrowed moral authority trying-to-please-his-tutor-a-little-too-hard but ultimately utterly mediocre) when, five years after 9/11, newspapers should be educating their audience about the many fascinating, occasionally worrying but also often positive, trends in contemporary Islamism.
The former member of parliament for the Muslim Brotherhood, Mukhtar Nouh was planning on releasing his first CD with political songs, when reaching a dead end, in form of the entertainment cencorship committee.
The committee, refused to comment on why they decided not to give Nouh´s CD the license and the go ahead, but judging from this following quote, the critical lyrics is behind the decision.
“One song in the album talks about a ruler who tours his country every year. In one province, one of the citizens stops the ruler to ask why food, medicines and jobs have become so scarce,” recounts the bearded Nouh.
“The next year, another citizen asks the ruler the same question, but adds where has the first citizen gone!”
As Fustat points Nour is a middle-generation Brother. A lawyer and former treasurer at the Bar Association, he was arrested in 1999 and put on military trial at Huckstep army base over a long period before being sentenced in 2001. In the early 1990s, Nouh was instrumental — some say the key strategist — in the Brotherhood’s push in syndicate elections. He was released, I believe, in 2002.
If anyone has Muslim Brotherhood political songs, or any other interesting political songs, do let me know. I’d love to create an archive of Egyptian political songs (I have a pretty big Sheikh Imam collection, but would like Islamist stuff too.)
