US Interests in Egypt vis-a-vis the Muslim Brotherhood

Here's an essay I penned about a year ago for a magazine article. Parts are overcome, of course, by the so-called "Arab Spring"


Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda Versus American Security

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan Al-Banna in 1928 in Cairo to resist the secularization of Egyptian politics and to contribute to the Palestinians who were rioting in then-Palestine. Along with sharing many of their salafist religious views, Al-Banna based some of his operational skills on the Wahhabi Ikhwan under the contemporaneous command of Ibn Saud in the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Banna himself described the Brotherhood as “a Salafiya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a political organization, an athletic group, a scientific and cultural union, an economic enterprise and a social idea.” [Hiro, p. 61]

The religious duty of Jihad to Al-Banna was a mass-based movement based on “The Quran is our constitution.” [Kepel, p. 12] with a broad-brush conception of “jihad” containing elements of Sufism and other heterodox strains which repelled purists like Sayyid Qutb. Banna’s loose concept of “jihad” resembled more a passive aggression against secularism [Peters, p. 161] than the later violent extremism of Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, who started as a Muslim Brother, but was a leader of Al-Jihad when it killed President Anwar Sadat.

My thesis is that relatively peaceful movements like the Egyptian Brotherhood will continue to serve as a seedbed for germinating more radical and terror-minded zealots who may eventually migrate to organizations like Al Jihad and Al Qaeda. The difference in the beliefs in Jihad between the original Egyptian Brotherhood and its offshoots like Al Jihad, inspired by Sayyid Qutb, whose Salafist writings inspired the Egyptian Al Jihad and its eventual partner-in-terror Al Qaeda, are very wide and deep. [Kepel, p. 226] Their differences also separated the Brotherhood systems from the Al-Jihad/Al Qaeda dramatically in the view of the rest of the Arab world. Outside the purview of this paper, Al Qaeda had spawned imitators in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, perhaps Nigeria and has executed attacks on India and on foreign tourist spots in these countries to demonstrate that the original doctrines of takfir and other exclusive Hanbali traditions under the Salafist code remain active.

The “so what?” question vis-à-vis US policy would normally intrude, but the 9/11 events [starting in 1993] and their aftermaths have made American foreign policy decisions contingent to some extent on arcane interpretations of Islamic theology and religious practices. This isn’t a logical progression, but it is a sort of reaction which takes place when a protean non-governmental underground attacks a statist entity like the U.S.A. As when anarchists were assassinating Europe and America’s leaders around the beginning of the twentieth century, there naturally ensues an impulse to know one’s enemy if only to learn how to stop its advocates from gaining new recruits. Therefore touching on inconsistencies in American foreign policy as they concern sectarians such as the Wahhabi movement and its Al Qaeda offshoots as well as the Egyptian Brotherhood and its offspring such as Al Jihad can be relevant to understanding past mistakes and mapping future policy. As an apt example, American troops should not be based in Saudi Arabia ever again.

Indeed, the overall problem is far more complex than mere adjustments in American policy. Sadat’s assassination in 1981 was portrayed by its perpetrators as a being caused by Camp David, but probably had its proximate cause from Sadat’s harsh crackdown on religious and political dissidents only months prior to Sadat’s death. And in a parallel manner, perhaps, the murder of 241 Marines in Beirut by Hezbollah were manifestations of a Syrian/Hezbollah joint operation with control of Lebanon as its aim rather than related to Israel, at least as a primary goal. An intelligence agency’s reach often exceeds its grasp in the intricate and shadowy underworld of the raw material of constructivist theory. And think tanks and academics rarely concern themselves with the sordid pettiness of sectarian factions and ethnic clumpings in a country like Lebanon. Or Sufi rivalries and clan feuds in Egypt or Syria. Or any number of the powderkegs which historians always infer from their post-mortems on events like 9/11. The Middle East is like tomorrow’s weather, only less predictable the further out one projects the future. An observation made in the early ‘90s puts the problem this way: “the reassertion of Islam in the social and political sphere came to world attention as one of the most unpredicted movements of modern times……eviscerat(ing) the models used by a confident America to predict the future in the aftermath of victory in Word War II… [This] is attested to by the fact that between the end of World War II and the onset of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-79, a bare handful of books about contemporary Islam were written by Americans….[here he cites Richard Mitchell and Morroe Berger as exceptions]…..Muslim assertiveness did not develop out of sight of non-Muslim observers; the observers simply failed to see. [Bulliet, opp.193-4] .” I believe that American policy in the Middle East can be placed in the realist camp since World War II, or rather the foundation of Israel, with few sincere efforts to change the balance of forces in the region, which since Israel’s victories over the Arabs has largely favored American interests to such a degree that America was blinded to alternative paradigms to its own hegemony.

The only two major idealist exceptions to US policy’s benign neglect have been The Camp David Accords of the late ‘70s and the Idealist shift by the G.W.Bush administration after the military victory in Iraq, although Condoleeza’s Rice’s insistence that Hamas participate in the 2006 Palestine Authority elections might be considered a third. [This miscalculation followed the Israeli miscalculation in the early ‘80s when they set up Hamas as a religious-based movement to counter the secular PLO!]. In Iraq, after post-victory chaos brought about an insurrection based on sectarian and ethnic divisions, Wilsonian idealism was conveniently unpacked to engage in what G.W. Bush ‘s inner circle had previously derided as “nation-building.” In Iraq, this invasive and intrusive methodology has led to democratization and the liberation of Shi’ite and Kurdish minorities [although the Shi’ites actually comprised a demographic majority of Iraqi citizens.] The Shi’ites, along with America and Israel, are one of the three top “enemies” of the Arab Umma in Osama bin Laden’s bogus “fatwa.” [Wright, pp. 47-48]. In the funhouse mirror perceptions of the Al-Qaeda/Al-Jihad worldview, the Shi’ite ascent in Iraq would increase their paranoia and that of the mindset of their Sunni Islamicist allies post-9/11.

But as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and in this and many other respects, American regional policy toward the Middle East has differed sharply from country to country and from U.S. administration to administration with regard to supporting democracy, human rights, and other basic freedoms in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and environs. The American hands-off policy has led to the prolonged continuation of the Egyptian Brotherhood’s domestic suppression and a lack of any democratic progress in Saudi Arabia, leading to underground movements seeking on the one hand, a more free and open democratic government in Egypt [the Brotherhood], and on the other more strict elimination of kufr in the Islamic shar’ia enforcement in Saudi Arabia [Al-Qaeda].

Finally, the strong and steady support which the United States has given Israel since its foundation as a state in 1948 has built up a strong anti-American bias among the average Arab on the street, varying widely from country to country. For Osama bin Laden and his Al-Jihad partners in Afghanistan, Israel was and remains the focal point of outrage which justifies terrorist acts against the West and America, the convenient puppeteer manipulating everything from backstage. Twisted and un-Islamic as most of Osama bin Laden’s uncanonical “fatwas” may be, they fall on a receptive audience. This paper cannot do more than outline the problem facing US policy, but it can attempt to describe the Islamicist garden and some of its bitter fruit.

“The Wahhabi revolution in the 18th century…marks the first withdrawal of consent from Ottoman Turkish supremacy. Although without any conscious or explicit Arabism, it was a movement of Arabs away from the predominantly Persian and Turkish ideas and practices that had reshaped Islam since the Middle Ages. Although the ….. full Wahhabi doctrine found few converts in the Middle East, the religious revivalism it brought influenced Muslims in many lands and infused them with a new militancy….”[Lewis,p. 103] After a dormancy of the Saud-Wahhabi alliance through much of the 19th century, Abd al Aziz bin Saud in the early 20th century employed it in the process of stitching together the constantly feuding and warring tribes outside Ottoman jurisdiction by encouraging tribal conversion to Wahhabism. Ibn Saud did this to suborn what was left of the Ottoman Empire’s rule in Arabia and turn the tribes’ plundering ways against the Saud family’s other enemies. This led to Ibn Saud’s establishing of around 200 Ikhwan “colonies” averaging 2000 inhabitants and controlled from Riyadh through tribal notables held as hostages. [Helms, p. 131]

The height of Ibn Saud’s long string of successes from 1928-35 in establishing himself as unquestioned ruler of most of the Arabian peninsula coincided with the foundation and rapid expansion of the Muslim Ikhwan in Egypt under Al-Banna’s leadership. At the same time, Ibn Saud’s ‘Asir’s conquest, ratified by the Treaty of Taif [Wilkinson, p. 161] in 1935, included many ancestral Yemeni lands and clans of Yemeni settlers. This loss of ‘Asir and other Yemeni lands to Ibn Saud’s family rule was to present one of the significant grudges that much later Osama bin Laden [along with many other Saudi “citizens” of Yemeni heritage] was to hold against the Saudis, whom he considered the invaders of Yemen, his ancestral family’s homeland. Later Osama bin Laden would center his global network through Yemen by having his operations center in Sana through which he directed Al-Qaeda worldwide from Afghanistan. He would intermarry with young Yemeni tribal notables’s families a la Ibn Saud [Wright, p 338]. As a sidebar to the entire 9/11 fiasco, the NSA would intercept these Yemen-op center messages and refuse to share them with either the CIA and FBI or the NSC in the White House, one of the many great blunders leading to 9/11’s “success.” [Wright, pp. 283]

The conservative brand of Islam that stimulated Egyptian Brotherhood martyr Sayyid Qutb to write “Milestones” was based on Islamic theology of Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) who originated the strict takfir theology which Mohammed Al-Wahhab preached as the original political theory of the Arabian Ikhwan, [Peters, pp. 43-44] Ibn Taymiyya influenced to a lesser degree the Ibadis of Oman and the Zaydis of Yemen. These strains of fundamentalist Islam were based on the writings of the Hanbali School of Islamic theology, the most conservative of the four schools. All three only recognized shar’ia law and considered all other legal and political systems as degrees of kufr [unbelief]. The Wahhabis were the most stringent in that all who did not submit to shari’a law were considered guilty of shirk [polytheism]. Indeed, it was through this kind of fundamentalist indoctrination that Ibn Saud had raised an army of fanatical soldiers who extended the rule of the Saud family throughout the greater part of the peninsula by military force backed by religious zealotry. [Hiro, pp.108-116]

Hasan Al Banna’s organization, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood “should not be confused with the Brotherhood of Saudi Arabia although the groups had similar views on many issues.” [Munson, p. 76] Among the shared views were the liberation of the Islamic state from all foreign powers and rule by shari’a law. But the Egyptian Ikhwan did not consider those disagreeing with their strict interpretations as being apostates and thus worthy of death. The Wahhabis did so.

Al-Banna’s assassination in 1949 broke up the Brotherhood’s unity, which at its peak had over 500,000 male members throughout Egypt. The Free Officer’s Movement under Nasser soon threw the chief Brotherhood members into prison where Sayyid Qutb composed a simple lucid exposition of how and why the western-influenced Arab secular states were in jahaliyya, or a polytheistic pre-Islamic condition, and must be overthrown through revolution by true Islamic believers. Qutb’s book Milestones, written while he was a political or rather religious prisoner, became vastly influential after his execution in 1966 [Wright, pp. 7-40].

In 1996, Zawahiri and Bin Laden and their companions were expelled from Sudan after a failed assassination attempt on Mubarak. Finally, Al-Jihad formally combined in Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda in 1998. [Wright, pp.268-9] In a sense, Egyptian competence and worldly skill-sets were allied with the Arabian peninsula’s visionary millenarianism to form a deadly underground movement.

Dr. Al-Zawahiri as the Egyptian head of Al-Jihad, considered Egypt as the lynchpin of the entire Al Qaeda enterprise. However, Osama bin Laden was a visionary thinker and set several plots underway against the United States, including attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as an attack on the US Cole in Aden harbor in Yemen.

Osama’s chief strategist and organizer of the attacks on the USA, which bin Laden obsessively blamed along with Israel & Shi’ites for all the ills of the Islamic world, was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was a gifted organizer and enlisted an Egyptian engineer named Mohammed Atta as spearhead of Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, which KSM’s nephew Ramzi Yousef had severely damaged in 1993 more or less outside the Al Qaeda organization.

But Osama’s preoccupation, one might say obsession, with overthrowing the Saudis or setting them against what he regarded as their American puppet master led to the WTC operation being staffed mainly by 15 young “martyrs” carrying Saudi passports. Of those fifteen, at least 10 were of Yemeni origin by heritage or birth, like Osama bin Laden. [Wright, pp. 304-315]

After the astounding success of the World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda leapfrogged over the secular leftist Arab organizations such as the PLO and Ba’ath Parties as the most effective opponent of western hegemony over the Middle East. Because he had actually attacked and succeeded, he was an immediate icon. Yet as an underground organization, Al Qaeda had no home address other than Afghani caves and its membership there was decimated immediately after 9/11 with the US B-52 attacks on Tora Bora. [Wright, p. 371] Bin Laden was one of the few survivors as was Zawahiri, and lives a furtive medieval existence now in Pakistan’s Tribal Territories. He apologized to the ruling Taliban for inciting the American invasion just before they themselves were violently removed from power in Afghanistan.

With 9/11 and the Pentagon attacks, America’s sense of itself felt violated, but its foreign policy had lashed out in a 20th century military-first manner. Although G. W. Bush made the immediately politically popular responses, only his invasion of Afghanistan had broad long-lasting international support. And despite Clinton’s pulling off a Bosnian war without UN sanctions, Iraq was a harder sell and only a few NATO allies supported the attack on Saddam, which was largely discredited after the lack of WMD and nuclear bomb development materials.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the world was to later discover the mushrooming of other underground franchises more or less spontaneously in various Arab countries, particularly ones like Egypt where normal political participation is denied to the Muslim Brotherhood, the main political party. In the past, just belonging to a formally banned party like the Brotherhood registered one’s Islamic cred, so to speak. But now it appeared in Egypt, a sort of tectonic shift which formerly made Brotherhood membership a symbolic protest against secularism was now deemed somehow insufficient for full alignment with one’s religious beliefs. As Albert Hourani noted in his epilogue: “As a political movement, the [Egyptian] Brothers were more like a nationalist movement than Mahdism or Wahhabism: their object was to generate popular energy in order to seize power rather than to restore the rule of Islamic virtue. [Hourani, p. 360]

In addition, corner-grocery terrorist cells were formed of Muslim expatriates living in Europe, sometimes highly-educated skilled Arabs like Mohammed Atta who were underemployed or without any job whatsoever. Arab and Pakistani students in Germany and other generous amnesty countries were also invited to join cells which sought “jihad” to mimic the 9/11 attacks in a scaled-down manner. Mosques in France, the UK and Germany also were recruiting grounds. [Wright, 306-07]

Other acts of planned terror by Al Qaeda and its clones have been nipped in the bud by good police and intelligence work in the US and Europe. [Thiessen, pp. 409-437 Appendices II, III] In Europe, horrific “successful” acts of indiscriminate terror in London and Madrid have often been on symbolic anniversaries of previous acts of terror, an Al-Qaeda trademark even if Al Qaeda had no hand in organizing the mass murders.

Although the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Al Qaeda’s virtual physical neutralization in neighboring Waziristan have largely shut down the operational aggressive function of Al Qaeda itself, the absence of any successful attacks on the United States since 9/11 does not mean that there is not a continuing threat, as the capture of the unsuccessful underwear bomber in Detroit on Christmas, 2009, demonstrated. As a sort of Johnny Appleseed of death, Osama bin Laden still influences American political, military, and symbolic values. [And after his death, this snake's poison is still lethal.]

The overarching problem that the current international deadlock in the Middle East presents is the inability of any Islamic political party to succeed on a trans-national basis without employing the extraordinary religious militancy peculiar to the region. Coupled with this is an American policy of gradual disengagement as practiced by the Obama administration. Morocco, Kuwait, and Jordan do allow Egyptian Brotherhood sister parties to function openly as loyal opposition. Otherwise, with the exception of the diplomatically-isolated enclave of Gaza, where the Egyptian Brotherhood’s sister party, Hamas, exerts a tyrannical grip and an uncompromising stance vis-à-vis Israel, all parties affiliated with or sharing the shar’ia state goals of the Egyptian Brotherhood have been vigorously suppressed, and in Algeria at the cost of a long bloody civil conflict after the secular government overturned an Islamic victory at the polls.

American foreign policy may be waning in influence over the region’s politics compared to what it had under previous administrations such as Clinton, Carter, Reagan and the two Bushes. As long as Mubarak is in charge in Egypt and the Saudis remain in a feudal monarchy, there is little hope for movement unless another completely unexpected turn of events occurs. If Iran is any prologue, a “White Revolution” attempting broad reforms might turn bloody at the first sign of weakness in the leadership of either country. And as Iran demonstrated, the US would be relatively helpless at crisis management in such a situation.

Useful Books I would suggest are:
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright
Muslim Extremism in Egypt, Gilles Kepel
Arabia’s Frontiers, John C. Wilkinson
Islam and Revolution in the Middle East, Henry Munson, Jr.
Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, Dilip Hiro
The Cohesion of Saudi Arabia, Christine Moss Helms
Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam Rudolph Peters
The Arab Predicament Fouad Ajami
The Dream Palace of the Arabs Fouad Ajami
Courting Disaster Marc A. Thiessen
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East, Bernard Lewis
Islam, the View From the Edge, Richard W. Bulliet
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1789-1939, Albert Hourani