The Muslim Brotherhood

by Alison Pargeter

  The document made provision for new international leadership structures comprising a General Guidance Office and a General Shura Council. The General Guidance Office was to consist of thirteen members, eight of whom must be from ‘the region in which the Supreme Guide resides’, with another five being chosen ‘in accordance with regional representation’. Under the Guidance Office was the General Shura Council, comprising at least thirty members who represented Brotherhood organisations in different countries and further including three ‘specialised and experienced members who are nominated by the Guidance Office’. At the top of this new hierarchy, heading both the General Guidance Office and the General Shura Council, was of course the Murshid. He was formally tasked not only with representing the movement, but also with supervising all departments and summoning the general guides of different countries to meetings when necessary. Somewhat surprisingly, the document did not specify that the Murshid should be Egyptian. Instead he was to be nominated by the General Guidance Office from among the most popular candidates in the various national branches and elected by the General Shura Council, where he had to receive at least three quarters of the votes. Hence in theory a Murshid could be chosen from any of the national branches.

  In many ways therefore this was a compromise document, allowing other branches to take part in the leadership structures and in theory enabling non-Egyptians to have a shot at taking on the role of Murshid. However, the weighting of the new bodies, and of the General Guidance Office in particular, clearly enabled the Egyptians to dominate. Moreover, in spite of the elaborate structure put in place to choose the new Murshid, the rules were not followed in subsequent years. As former Egyptian Ikhwan Abu Ala Madhi has described, ‘The first test for the new system was in 1986 when Omar al-Tilimsani died. However, the Ikhwan chose Mohamed Hamed Abu Nasser without going through the stages.’27 Nor was the new system followed when Mohamed Abu Nasser died in 1996 and Maimoun al-Hodeibi appointed Mustafa Mashour as the next Murshid in the famous graveside pledge described in Chapter One. Clearly this document was something that the Egyptians believed they could pick and choose from, using its rules and regulations only when expedient.

  As well as consolidating the Egyptian presence in the new leadership structure, the document also put in place a system whereby the national branches were formally bound by decisions made by the centre. The leaders of national branches were obliged to ‘commit to the decisions of the general leadership represented by the Supreme Guide, the Guidance Office and the General Shura Council’; to adhere to the ‘policies and positions of the Muslim Brotherhood towards public issues as determined by the General Guidance Office and the General Shura Council’; and to commit to ‘obtaining the approval of the Guidance Bureau before making any important political decisions’.

  The leaders of national branches were also required to consult and receive the approval of the Murshid or the Guidance Office before they adopted resolutions, and to inform the Guidance Office of their political stances towards local issues. In addition, they were expected to set their own local statutes, which must be approved by the General Guidance Office before they could become effective. Each local branch had to pay an annual subscription for dawa work. The document also ruled that Ikhwani residing outside of their own countries should ‘comply with the leadership of the movement in the country in which they reside’.

  As such, the new system was very much a way of controlling the activities of the various national branches, which had until then been able to operate as largely independent bodies with informal ties to the mother branch. Egyptian intellectual and well-known critic of the Brotherhood Dr Rifat Said explained this new relationship between the mother branch and the other national branches: ‘Every national branch has the right to do what he wants under the banner of the Ikhwan but it should be linked to the centre by money and by following instructions such as “You should change your attitude towards this or that.”’28 Although this comment is somewhat of a harsh oversimplification, it certainly captures the essence of what this group envisaged the international tanzeem to be. Former Ikhwani and highly respected Kuwaiti scholar Sheikh Abdullah Nafisi was heavily critical of this internal restructuring, observing that all the articles related to membership ‘emphasise the member’s duty, from the giving of baya to membership payments and even to punishment procedures that the tanzeem should adopt against those members who are not fulfilling their duties. Yet we can’t find any article that gives the members the right to complain.’29 He added that this system ‘opened the door for the leadership to expel, make exempt or freeze members who differ with them in one thing or another regarding the group’s affairs’.30 Similarly one Egyptian Islamist complained: ‘Despite the fact that a great number of those who have talent and intellectual expertise are outside Egypt, we find a tendency in the general system and more importantly in practice towards confirming the Egyptian leadership and orientation.’31

  Abdullah Nafisi did not restrict his criticisms to the centre’s attempt to consolidate power; he also complained that the Gulf countries were given a far greater weighting in this new system than that afforded to those Ikhwani in ‘more important’ Arab countries such as Syria and Algeria. He asserted that this unfair weighting enabled the Ikhwan from the Gulf to ‘manipulate the political and social path of al-jama’a and to shape its ‘social and political stances according to their own way of thinking’. Nafisi put the reason for this over representation of those from the Gulf down to the international tanzeem’s need for money. It is true that the financial opportunities provided by the Gulf states were always a driving factor in Mashour’s bid to develop an international organisation. As Ibrahim Ghuraiyba has commented, ‘The Egyptians were the most interested party in the international tanzeem in order to get donations.’32 As such Nafisi’s argument would appear to hold water.

  What appeared on paper to be a relatively equitable way to bring the Ikhwan’s different branches into one unified system was, in fact, a means to create a highly centralised system that gave an ambitious group access to control and to finances that would feed both their local and international ambitions.

  Whilst some elements within the Brotherhood, such as those in the Gulf and in Jordan, were broadly happy with this new system, others were less than enamoured with the new set-up. This included Sudanese Brotherhood leader, Hassan al-Turabi, who resented Mashour’s mission to bring everything under his control. Turabi, himself an ambitious internationalist, who had become somewhat of an Islamic personality in his own right, refused to be put under such a tight yoke and refused to give his baya (allegiance) to Mashour. Unable to accept such disobedience, the Guidance Office in Cairo took to wooing those Sudanese Ikhwan who were uncomfortable with Turabi’s stance. This included Sheikh Sadeq Abdelmajid, who had been educated in Egypt and whose ‘heart was with the Egyptians’.33 According to Sudanese brother, Dr Alamin Osman, Mustafa Mashour ‘fought harshly against Dr Hassan al-Turabi and encouraged Sheikh Sadeq to break away’.34 Consequently in 1985 a number of Sudanese brothers led by Sadeq split from Turabi and joined the Ikhwan’s international structure, thereby splitting the movement inside Sudan.

  Turabi’s refusal to submit to Cairo’s authority came as a major blow to the Egyptians and shook their confidence at a time when they believed that the world was their oyster. As part of the Nizam al-Khass, they prized obedience as a core principle of the Brotherhood and they clearly could not countenance any challenge to their belief that as Egyptians, they were the natural leaders of the entire Ikhwan movement. Yet the inflexibility of this group at this time highlights one of the Ikhwan’s more systemic problems. Their rigidity and unwillingness to accept anyone with a different political or intellectual approach has meant that they have never allowed any space for personalities to develop inside the movement. This has resulted in figures such as Hassan al-Turabi, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Tunisian scholar Rashid al-Ghannouchi moving out of the Brotherhood and its tight hierarchy in order to progress t
heir thinking. Indeed, Cairo’s insistence on running the show and keeping the role of Murshid an exclusively Egyptian post has lost the Ikhwan some key thinkers who might have moved the movement forward in a more creative way.

  Golden Age

  The Turabi crisis aside, the Ikhwan continued to develop its international structures and to expand its reach. As Hossam Tamam has correctly observed, ‘The 1980s were the golden age for the Ikhwan. They established themselves everywhere.’35 Indeed, the brothers made the most of the Islamic revivalism that flourished at this time to build up their networks of mosques and activities in Europe, which became a key propaganda centre. They also made use of their global networks to support their activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The international tanzeem used its close relationship with Saudi Arabia to facilitate money flows and propaganda efforts aimed at bolstering the mujahideen in the Afghan struggle.

  It was also in the 1980s that the Ikhwan made use of important personalities like Egyptian businessman Youssef Nada to extend their international reach. Nada, who was dubbed the King of Cement, having made his fortune in the Egyptian cement business and supplied cement to Saudi Arabia during the boom building time of the early 1970s, had fled Egypt in 1960 and eventually settled in Campione, an Italian municipality in Switzerland. Although a member of the Brotherhood, Nada was an important figure in his own right and his immense wealth, important connections and shrewd intellect made him a valued resource that the Ikhwan was keen to make use of. As a result Nada who held no official position with the Guidance Office or other organisational structures became a sort of roving ambassador for the Ikhwan and was responsible for managing the movement’s important international relationships.36 He guided the Ikhwan’s relationship with the new regime in Tehran following the Iranian revolution of 1979 and arranged for a number of Ikhwani delegations to go to Iran to pay their respects to the new leadership. Nada used his finances to fund some of these visits, allegedly paying $30,000 in one instance to charter a special aeroplane to take one Ikhwani delegation from Islamabad to Iran.37 He also mediated on behalf of the Ikhwan in relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and between the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) leaders in prison and the Algerian government during the 1990s. He was clearly a linchpin in the Brotherhood’s international structures.

  However, Nada is perhaps most famous for setting up the Al-Taqwa bank in 1988 along with Syrian Ikhwani Ghaleb Himmat and Ahmed Idris Nasreddin. After the 9/11 attacks, the US treasury accused the bank of financing terrorism and funding al-Qa‘ida and in 2001 the US pressurised the Bahamas to revoke the bank’s licence. Nada himself was also put under investigation by Swiss prosecutors, who raided his villa and that of Himmat in 2001. Although the case was eventually dropped through lack of evidence, the controversy did little to assist the Ikhwan in its bid to be the moderate face of political Islam. Al-Taqwa is often referred to as the ‘Ikhwan’s bank’. Furthermore, many of the bank’s shareholders were members of the Ikhwan and other figures with close links to the Ikhwan also held shares. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, for example, is reported to have held 5,285 shares in the bank as at April 2000.38 But to present Al-Taqwa as a financial arm of the Ikhwan is to misrepresent it somewhat: as Nada himself explained, ‘The Ikhwani do not have money in the bank as a group, but as individuals.’39 However, whilst Al-Taqwa was not a Brotherhood institution as such, it was a useful conduit for financial flows that enhanced the Ikhwan’s international position at the time.

  Just as Nada brought the Ikhwan unwanted controversy so too did a document that was found in the house of his colleague Ghaleb Himmat during a police raid on his villa. Dubbed ‘The Project’, some commentators have portrayed this document as evidence of the Brotherhood’s sinister project to take over the Western world.40 The document dated 1 December 1982 laid out the Ikhwan’s goals in its bid to create an international Islamic strategy. These goals were divided into twelve key points, and include the following pledges:

  To know the terrain and adopt a scientific methodology for its planning and execution.

  To reconcile international engagement with flexibility at a local level.

  To work loyally with Islamic groups and institutions in multiple areas to agree on common ground.

  To accept the principle of temporary co-operation between Islamic movements and nationalist movements in the broad sphere and on common ground such as the struggle against colonialism, preaching and the Jewish state, without however having to form alliances.

  To construct a permanent force of the Islamic dawa and support movements engaged in jihad across the Muslim world

  To use diverse and varied surveillance systems, in several places, to gather information and adopt a single effective warning system serving the worldwide Islamic movement.41

  In spite of the allegations, this document is a fairly mundane wish list and would appear to be largely an expression of intent that reflects the ambition and optimism of the time. The document was produced at the beginnings of the international tanzeem and seems to be a broad set of objectives that were typical of the ideas that were doing the rounds then. Helbawy noted that there was much consultation and many such documents being produced in the early 1980s. Nada also asserts that he has no idea what the document is.42 Therefore, whilst much has been made of this text, it would simply seem to reflect the dream of internationalisation that was taking place within the movement at the time.

  The Kuwait Crisis

  By the end of the 1980s, however, this dream was looking increasingly distant as a far more serious crisis was to unfold. It would kill the dream of the international tanzeem and flag up serious doubts about how far ‘international brotherhood’ could really extend. This crisis was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which plunged the Ikhwan into complete disarray and that challenged its administrative and ideological unity. Whilst some branches were more sympathetic to the Kuwaiti predicament, others felt that their loyalties lay with Saddam. According to Bassam al-Amoush, a former Jordanian brother, ‘The Ikhwan’s stance during the second Gulf crisis was terrifying. There was a big division in the movement and no clear Ikhwani vision as to which stance to take.’43 Just when the Ikhwan needed to take a clear stance and to direct the movement’s response, the international tanzeem proved unable to step up to the mark.

  On the day that Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait the Guidance Office in Cairo issued a statement signed by Murshid Mohamed Hamid Abu Naser. Although the statement expressed the Brotherhood’s surprise and disappointment at the Iraqi regime’s actions, it came across as a rather lukewarm and unconvincing denouncement of the invasion that simply called upon Iraqi leaders to ‘reconsider what they had done’ and expressed the Ikhwan’s hope that these leaders would ‘go back on their steps’.44 Whilst the statement asserted that the Islamic world and the umma had condemned Iraq’s actions, there was no explicit condemnation of Iraq by the Muslim Brotherhood itself. As the former General Guide of the Syrian brotherhood Ali Saddredine al-Bayanouni admitted in retrospect, ‘The first statement we issued, we condemned the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq. We condemned the occupation in a way that might be considered to have been mild.’45

  The statement was so tepid that just nine days later the Guidance Office issued another in which it tried to clarify its stance. This was slightly more forceful in its criticism of the invasion although still not particularly strong and simply stated that the Brotherhood ‘opposes any military intervention by an Arab or Muslim state against another Arab or Muslim state.’46 But by this point the international situation had changed. The first US forces had arrived in Saudi Arabia in preparation for action against the Iraqi regime. Furthermore, the Arab League had also voted to send Egyptian, Syrian and Moroccan forces to join the Western troops in their bid to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The Brotherhood therefore came forward in this second statement to express their total rejection of the presence of American forces in the region, declaring:

 
The Muslim Brotherhood condemns and fiercely opposes the American military intervention in the Gulf crisis whatever justification the US is using for their presence … Their presence is rejected on every level and by every means because it will result in a return to the era of the protectorate and to occupation of the region.47

  The statement was also unequivocal in its objection to Arab troops working alongside those from Western countries.

  The contrast between the Ikhwan’s lukewarm criticism of Iraq and its outright condemnation of the US in this statement is striking. It was as if America’s entering the conflict had provided the Ikhwan with a much-needed get-out clause. It gave the brothers a rallying point that they could focus on, as it was far easier to retreat into the safety and comfort of anti-Westernism than it was to take sides between Iraq and Kuwait. Opposing the ‘Western enemy’ not only had a broad populist appeal; it was also something that the various national branches of the Brotherhood could be guaranteed to agree on. As Tunisian leader Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi summarised, ‘We are not worshiping personalities, but anyone who confronts the enemies of Islam is my friend and anyone who puts himself in the service of the enemies of Islam is my enemy.’48

  However, some branches were so forthright in their condemnation of foreign intervention that to some Kuwaiti eyes they appeared to be supporting Saddam Hussein. As Dr Kamal Helbawy tactfully explained:

  The official stance was that we were against the invasion of Kuwait and we were against seeking assistance from the Americans. But individually yes maybe some people were … the Palestinians and the Jordanians were closer to Saddam Hussein and some other countries and personalities were with the Kuwaitis, you could say. But I am sure everyone was against the presence of the American troops in the area … Some of the Syrians who had lived with Saddam Hussein maybe supported him beyond the reasonable limit. But it was a time full of crisis and that is why the Ikhwan advised Saddam to pull out.49