Friday, December 28, 2007
Symposium: The “Moderate” Muslim Brotherhood?
By Jamie Glazov
December 21, 2007
Just recently, the Muslim Brotherhood released its political platform, part of which would establish an Iranian-style mullah council overseeing Egypt's democratic institutions. It also prohibits Christians and women from serving as President.
What does this particular development signify? What does it highlight in regards to what U.S. policy should be toward the Muslim Brotherhood?
A heated debate among policymakers and analysts is in progress at the moment about how the U.S. should deal with the group. Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke, for instance, have advanced arguments about “the moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” emphasizing that the U.S. should see the group as a notable opportunity, to nurture engagement with it and not to treat it automatically as it would treat terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. Other experts, such as Patrick Poole, firmly disagree with this approach, arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood is anything but moderate and that it needs to be designated as a terrorist organization and to be treated like one.
Today we have assembled a distinguished panel to discuss these and other questions regarding the Muslim Brotherhood. Our guests are:
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Douglas Farah, a former Washington Post correspondent, now an author and consultant on terror finance issues. He is currently a senior investigator for the NEFA Foundation, for whom he wrote the paper on the Muslim Brotherhood in America, based on the HLF court papers. He is also a senior fellow for the International Assessment and Strategy Center (IASC). His most recent book is Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible.
Jeff Breinholt, a terrorism expert and former prosecutor. Breinholt has written about the Muslim Brotherhood from his position as Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the author of My Year Inside Radical Islam , which documents his time working for the extremist Al Haramain Islamic Foundation.
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FP: Douglas Farah, Jeff Breinholt, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
I am a bit confused as to what can be moderate about a group that yearns for a world without non-Muslims and women. If you don’t want certain people and groups in “high office” it is obvious what you are saying about them, and purges are the next result.
Douglas Farah?
Farah: One of the things the Brotherhood has done extremely well through the years is couch its extremist agenda in moderate language, particularly to the outside, non-Muslim world. They master the ways, language and structure of the non-believing world, and learn how the system operates before beginning to penetrate it, influence it and ultimately, seek to bring about its collapse.
International Muslim Brotherhood leaders seldom offer a direct defense of their platform to the outside world, even in the case of beating one's wife, stoning to death and other parts of the broader platform they endorse as part of their acceptance of Sharia law. They hedge, call for a moratorium on the activities and generally try to move on quickly, because they cannot disown it, yet they cannot embrace it without alienating those they are courting in the West.
Yet, the Brothers have to speak a different language to their followers, and that is the beauty of documents like the platform, the Holy Land Foundation exhibits and others. There, the leaders are speaking to their followers and laying out a much different, more coherent and true agenda. The caliphate, the ultimate goal of the Muslim Brotherhood, would be a place where non-Muslim pay extra taxes and cannot hold high office, where women are relegated to permanent second-class status, where arms are amputated for thievery, adulterers stoned, music banned, democracy and human rights denied in favor of their interpretation of the Koran, etc. etc. There is no room for equivocation on what the Koran demands, in their view.
So let's not fool ourselves. The Americanized and European-ized Ikhwan are still Ikhwan. They cannot say their agenda in Europe and the United States is "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions," as they write in their U.S. declaration of intent. So, they say they are working for "civil rights," to "end oppression and discrimination," etc. If they stated their real objective they would have no access to power. By reframing their public agenda as something Americans and Europeans understand and embrace (a true touch of genius), they have access to the FBI, DOD, presidents, secretaries of state etc.
So, as Patrick says, they tell us what we want to hear, but never abandon their true intent, and intent they make clear in their internal writings.
Breinholt: I agree with much of what Patrick and Doug describe about the Muslim Brotherhood. The more interesting question is why there is such a debate about a group whose manifesto describes its goal as “jihad.”
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When things are not going well, there is a tendency to think about radical solutions. Just like the lonely guy at the bar at closing time, ugly people start looking attractive if they offer the prospect of some new way of thinking and the means out of the morass. Doug has illustrated this in his book about Victor Bout, once we needed to keep supplies efficiently flying into Iraq. I think this dynamic is in play with the Brotherhood, who claim to favor democracy and look relatively un-bad to those looking for a novel way for winning the hearts and minds of the Arab world, at a time when we otherwise seem not to be doing very well. To this, you add the difficulty of pinning the Brotherhood down on its core goals, and you have a recipe for some bad official partnering. Is the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal impose Shari’ah law on the unwilling? If so, it’s not something they advertise. When you ask them that question, as Christianne Amanpour recently did on that CNN series, you tend to get a deer in the headlights.
If this is the cause of the recent willingness to embrace of the Brotherhood, what is the remedy? It is to insist that the Brotherhood operate transparently, under our laws. Surely, no one can seriously object to this suggestion. After all, this is what we require of American political candidates, and U.S. charities, in order to assure that voters and donors are not sold a bill of goods. It's what we require of companies traded on the New York stock exchange. If the Brotherhood within the U.S. is a legitimate, democracy-loving political movement, let’s have it send a list of its members to FPM to publish. Why have they circulated documents describing the need to practice tradecraft to conceal their true membership and goals? Americans have been convicted of felonies for making illegal political campaign contributions, and for such things as lying to the government. Ask George Steinbrenner, or Martha Stewart Whether the Brotherhood has violent goals within the U.S. is rather beside the point. That’s never been an element of white-collar fraud, let alone choosing international partners. If our criteria in deciding whether to embrace the Brotherhood is that they are not as bad as Al Qaeda, it would seem that there has been a serious dumbing down of deviancy.
There still exists little problem for the Brotherhood’s U.S. supporters: what’s the deal with this “jihad” business? If the Brotherhood is not really serious about conquest through violence, why is that term in their manifesto? Of course, some of my conservatives colleagues have suggested that “jihad” does not really mean violence, but that’s a little hard to accept when the Brotherhood manifesto also talks about “dying in the cause of Allah” and it highest glory. If you accept that the Hamas is one of the components of the Brotherhood, it has plenty of American blood on its hands since 1994.
I challenge Robert Leikin and others to meet with Stephen Flatow and other surviving victims of Palestinian terrorism, as I have, and to try to maintain their warm feeling towards the Brotherhood.
On the question of whether the U.S. should embrace them, count me among the highly skeptical.
Gartenstein-Ross:
... I believe that the question of whether we can gain strategic advantage by engaging members of the Muslim Brotherhood in dialogue remains open. There may be some benefit to doing so: the U.S. should fight smarter in general, and engaging members of the Muslim Brotherhood in dialogue may (or may not) be an effective way to bolster moderates within the group’s ranks and drive our enemies against each other. Yet effective engagement requires a solid understanding of the ideology of groups that we intend to engage: the unrealistic assumptions of those who currently urge us to engage the Brotherhood is perhaps the best argument about why doing so at this particular juncture is not a good idea.
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Engagement with groups like the Brotherhood, if it is to gain us anything, needs to be done against a backdrop of knowledge about what the group actually believes. Sadly, it seems that advocates of engagement are first obscuring what the group believes, and then claiming that engagement is justified based on their fictionalized accounts. This is a recipe for disaster.
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Farah: To me one of the most instructive things about the Brotherhood is an experience Patrick and I had together, involving the Foreign Affairs piece published by Robert Lieken. Leiken, and many others since, make a significant point of praising the writings of MB leader Hassan al-Hudaybi and his "Preachers, Not Judges" book, which, according to the current MB lobbying efforts, was written in rebuttal to Sayyid Qutb's violent strain of Islam.
Qutb, the leader of the MB who was hanged in 1966, wrote "Milestones," which remains the seminal work on violent jihad that the MB embraces. According to the current MB storyline, al-Hudaybi's work is embraced by the global Umma and the MB in particular, while Qutb's quaint notions of violence and war against the infidel and apostate regimes have gone out of date. Al-Hudaybi is the evidence of MB's ideological and theological rehabilitation.
A nice story, but only a story that Westerners, sitting at the bar at closing time and looking for something to grab on to, embrace. In fact al-Hudaybi very likely did not write "Preachers" at all. Even if he did, the target was not Qutb, who is never mentioned. Beyond that, and this is the key point to the deception, al-Hudaybi's work was only published twice, both times in Egypt by the regime that likely paid for the book's publication, and only in Arabic. One cannot find the book today. In contrast, "Milestones" and other work by Qutb is sold on all Ikhwan websites, remains one of the best selling Muslim texts in the world, and has been translated into dozens of languages. It circulates widely in the United States, distributed through the MB legacy organizations here. "Preachers" cannot be found.
Yet, by offering to guide unschooled outsiders through the process-the source in the case of Leiken and other articles was al-Hudaybi's grandson and active MB member by his own account-the MB controls the information and language. The storyline of "Preachers" surpassing and replacing "Milestones" became a part of the policy debate. The false equivalence strategy is brilliant and hard to fight.
We see much the same thing, in my opinion, in the current efforts to change the word "jihad" to "hirabah," a word that means "sinful violence." Hirabah may be a useful word, but it is not part of the Muslim theological lexicon, as Jihad is. It was used for a few centuries, long ago, and now has no currency. Yet, in an effort to let the MB and others off the hook for their open embrace of Jihad, some are looking for another word. Hirabah seems to fit. But this is another run at false equivalence. Jihad has a specific meaning in Muslim theology. Hirabah is a minor, little-known and little used word, but suddenly given as an equivalent in the debate.
To close, my point is that the MB is masterful at appropriating the language and terms of debate, both about itself and about their true goals. Patrick and others have been extremely helpful in trying to wrest that control away and set new terms, but this has not yet taken root in policy circles in the U.S. government. There, the MB's spoon-fed and self-serving appropriation of language and agenda still dominate.
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Gartenstein-Ross: Doug spoke of the experience he and Patrick had debating about engagement of the Muslim Brotherhood, in which Hassan al-Hudaybi’s book Preachers, Not Judges was given far more significance by Western scholars writing about the Brotherhood than it is by the Brotherhood itself. I had my own bizarre al-Hudaybi experience a couple of years ago when debating against Mahdi Bray, the executive director of the Muslim American Society’s (MAS) Freedom Foundation, in the pages of the Dallas Morning News. For the uninitiated, MAS is the name under which the U.S. Brotherhood (or, rather, one branch of the U.S. Brotherhood) operates.
An excellent investigative report published in the Chicago Tribune in late 2004 details how a contentious debate among Brotherhood members preceded MAS’s incorporation, and provides a glimpse into MAS’s internal educational curriculum—a curriculum dominated by the most violent Brotherhood ideologues, such as Sayyid Qutb.
In my Dallas Morning News column, I criticized MAS for propagating radical teachings internally while simultaneously trying to promote itself as a paragon of moderation: at the time, the group was loudly speaking about building youth centers to keep young Muslims “away from the voices of extremism.” Naturally, Bray’s response introduced Hudaybi: “Mr. Ross’ information concerning MAS and the Muslim Brotherhood is equally flawed. For example, he mentions Sayyid Qutb ‘advocating militant Jihad against non-believers,’ but fails to mention that the leader of the Brotherhood in the ’60s, Hasan Hudaybi, wrote an extensive refutation of Mr. Qutb’s views.”
While this was a natural move for someone on Bray’s side of the debate, his argument was worse than irrelevant. I didn’t mention Qutb in my column because of his association with the Brotherhood: rather, he was relevant because MAS’s internal curriculum and required reading features Qutb. I have posted .mht copies of that internal curriculum at the Counterterrorism Blog, and Patrick has posted the text of the curriculum here at FPM. A quick look at the curriculum shows the irony of Bray’s argument: while a top-level MAS member will have encountered four different works from Qutb, Hudaybi is nowhere to be found. The exchange with Bray illustrates Doug’s point about control over the information and language concerning the Brotherhood: the notion that Hudaybi’s tract demonstrates the Brotherhood’s moderation has become so ingrained in the minds of some debaters that they will trot his work out even when it is completely irrelevant.
John Esposito, the founding director of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, provides another example of this phenomenon. He and his colleague John Voll wrote a somewhat bizarre letter to the editor of the Washington Post in September 2004 criticizing an article that the Post had published about the Brotherhood:
It also presented a flawed picture of the Brotherhood, which is based in Egypt . Readers might think that Sayyid Qutb—described as a “Brotherhood leader” in the 1960s who “advocated militant jihad against nonbelievers”—represented the position of the organization. In fact, the Brotherhood rejected his extremism. The general guide of the Brotherhood at the time, Hasan Hudaybi, wrote an extended refutation of Mr. Qutb’s views.
In addition to the problem that Doug has outlined with this analysis—that Qutb’s work is more prominent within the contemporary Brotherhood than Hudaybi’s—Esposito had to contradict his own academic work to argue that Qutb should not have been described as a “Brotherhood leader.” Esposito in fact used the same phraseology when describing Qutb in his contribution to The Oxford History of Islam: “Thousands were arrested and Brotherhood leaders—among them the militant ideologue of Islamic revolution, Sayyid Qutb (1906-66)—were executed” (emphasis added). Elsewhere in the same contribution, Esposito describes Qutb as “the great theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Other authors in the Esposito-edited Oxford History go even further in tying Qutb to the Brotherhood. Vincent J. Cornell, for example, described Qutb as the “chief ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
All of which demonstrates a significant point. Those who argue that the Brotherhood is moderate often like to portray their position as more nuanced than those of us who are concerned about the Brotherhood’s ideology—painting their debating opponents as making assumptions that are not reflective of reality. Yet many of their arguments for the Brotherhood’s moderation, such as the Hudaybi narrative, are demonstrably guilty of unrealistic assumptions.
Jeff has now twice noted the Brotherhood’s lack of transparency. Some policymakers and journalists are so desperate to promote ostensibly moderate Muslim organizations that they will look past this lack of transparency and even alarming signs of radicalism (such as, for example, the endorsement of suicide bombings). At the very least, I think we can all agree that policymakers and others should be very skeptical about regarding organizations like MAS—which refuse to be open about their association with the Brotherhood or honest about their Brotherhood-influenced teachings—as partners in the battle against Islamic extremism.
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Gartenstein-Ross:
... First, policymakers and analysts need to better understand the Muslim Brotherhood before even thinking about engaging the group. It seems that I’m the only panelist who thinks it possible (though not necessarily probable) that, if done right, engaging the Brotherhood could help bolster moderates within the group and, as President Bush called for just after 9/11, turn our enemies against each other. But at present, calls for engagement are premised on a false idea of the Brotherhood, one that sharply distinguishes it from terror groups that pine for a global caliphate.
To accept this illusory idea of the Brotherhood, it is necessary to ignore the group’s political platform, the writings of its key ideologues, and its history. The only way we can gain anything from engaging the group is by entering discussions without illusion or self-deception, but the loudest voices for engagement have been characterized by false hope—and, consequently, by false characterizations of the Brotherhood. Before we seriously entertain the possibility of engagement, the advocates of this course need to demonstrate a better understanding of the Brotherhood—and base their arguments for engagement on the Brotherhood as it is, not as they would like it to be.
Second, the Brotherhood has shown a penchant for guile and duplicity. They have done this internationally—as Doug observed, by “master[ing] the ways, language and structure of the non-believing world”—and have done this through affiliate groups in the West. This is one reason that dialogue with the Brotherhood based on the assumptions urged by analysts like Leiken and Brooke would be so dangerous. A productive dialogue is only possible if the U.S.’s representatives are able to refute the Brotherhood’s false representations, rather than swooning when a Brotherhood member expresses his admiration of the Western literary canon.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not the Islamic equivalent of the Kiwanis Club: it has an unequivocal ideological agenda. Jeff quoted from an internal Brotherhood document speaking of settling Islam in the United States as a “‘Civilization-Jihadist’ process” working toward “destroying the Western civilization from within.” The Brotherhood cannot be declared moderate by pretending that such documents do not exist. Rather, for the group to truly be moderate, its ideology and concomitant agenda must somehow change. Aside from the absence of evidence indicating an ideological shift, there is another reason to be skeptical of the Brotherhood. In his classic study The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Richard P. Mitchell describes the Brotherhood’s fifth conference, which came on the group’s tenth anniversary. In memorializing the Brotherhood’s ideology, and the conference insisted on
(1) Islam as a total system, complete unto itself, and the final arbiter of life in all its categories; (2) an Islam formulated from and based on its two primary sources, the revelation of the Qur’an and the wisdom of the Prophet in the Sunna; and (3) an Islam applicable to all times and to all places.
When Muslim extremist groups speak of “an Islam applicable to all times and to all places,” that should serve as a warning sign. Such groups believe that their political mission is driven by an immutable religious imperative. Since their raison d’être holds that their religious obligations are unchanging, it is difficult for these groups to “evolve” away from extremist principles without undercutting their core rationale.
Third, we should be wary not only of the international Brotherhood, but also of the group’s U.S. branches. American affiliates follow the group’s established pattern of deception, packaging themselves as “civil rights” groups devoted to pluralism and dialogue while propagating Islamic supremacist teachings internally. I spoke of MAS’s history and curriculum in this symposium; it is clearly not the only domestic Brotherhood affiliate.
The Muslim Brotherhood has not abandoned its extremist principles. Contra Leiken and Brooke, I do not think that “the beginning of wisdom lies in differentiating [the Brotherhood] from radical Islam.” Rather, the beginning of wisdom lies in seeing the group as it truly is.
FP: Douglas Farah, Jeff Breinholt, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Patrick Poole, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.