Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (16 page)

When pressed, Brotherhood officials still fudge the answer.

“We need to make a distinction between Western-style democracy and the kind of democracy we believe in,” Habib said. “We believe that ballot boxes must be transparent. And we believe in state institutions with real separation of authority between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

“But democracies can look different from place to place,” he added.

“For us, we want whatever laws are passed to be in keeping with Islamic Sharia.”

Like many Muslim countries, Egypt already requires laws to be compatible with Sharia. The Brotherhood has done little to specify how strict it wants those laws to be. But it has indicated some limits. In a press conference after the 2005 election, Habib argued that Egyptians should have the right to vote for presidential candidates from parties other than the ruling National Democratic Party. But he also declared that all presidential candidates had to be Muslim—in a country where ten percent of the population is Coptic Christian and Muslim-Christian suspicions run deep. “If we are to apply the Islamic rule, which says that non-Muslims cannot have guardianship over Muslims, then a Christian may not be president,” he told reporters.
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For now, the movement emphasizes peaceful transformation. Its public literature warns, “Ruling a totally corrupt society through a militant government overthrow is a great risk.”
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“We are against revolutions in general and definitely against chaos,” Habib told me. “We are also against using armed struggle for change and military coups. No, no, we prefer peaceful change through constitutional and legal channels. There’s no violence in our ideology.”

That was not always true. The Brotherhood has evolved through at least three phases since 1928. Launched in the Suez Canal port of Ismailya, it was initially a grassroots religious and social reform movement with small but ambitious outreach programs. It spent the first decade penetrating Suez cities and then Cairo. In a precise formula, each new branch established an identical set of institutions that included an office, a mosque, a school, a workshop, and a sporting club.

The utopian goal was to create Muslim societies, the seeds for creation of a different kind of state. Founder Hassan al-Banna invoked Islam as a way both to lead one’s life and to rule a nation, as in the faith’s early days. “My brothers,” Banna told his new followers, “you are a new soul in the heart of this nation to give it life by means of the Koran.”
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But in the 1940s and 1950s, the Brotherhood entered a militant second phase. Angered by the monarchy, heavy British influence in Egypt, and Banna’s thwarted attempts to run for parliament, the movement bred an extremist wing known as the “the specialists” or “the secret apparatus,” which launched sporadic waves of attacks on both domestic and foreign targets. After four hits on British occupation forces in 1946, Brotherhood gunmen then assassinated the Egyptian judge who convicted their brethren for the violence. Its most brazen act was the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Nokrashi after he charged the movement was plotting to topple the monarchy and ordered it to dissolve.
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Three months later, Banna was gunned down on a Cairo street, in apparent retaliation.

In 1954, two years after the monarchy was toppled, President Nasser charged the Brotherhood was trying to assassinate him, too. He jailed thousands of Muslim Brothers.

The Brotherhood now tries to distance itself from past violence and its extremist offshoots across the Middle East. “The two incidents that happened during Banna’s time—Nokrashi and the judge—were two individual acts conducted by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they were carried out without the knowledge of Banna and condemned by Banna at the time,” Habib said, dismissing his organization’s responsibility.

“As for the attempt to assassinate Nasser,” he added, “this was a play, an act, which was orchestrated by Nasser himself to get rid of the leaders of the Ikhwan and to detain tens of thousands of them so that he was alone in power.”

Yet that period of militancy has had an enduring impact well into the twenty-first century and well beyond Egypt. Among those jailed in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb, arguably the most influential ideologue that the Brotherhood—or any modern Islamic group—has ever produced. Decades later, al Qaeda’s first angry treatise in 1998 against the United States and its Arab allies borrowed heavily from Qutb’s work.

Ironically, Qutb had been radicalized in the United States. A midlevel Ministry of Education official in Cairo, he had been dispatched to do graduate work from 1948 to 1950 at a small teachers’ training college that later became the University of Northern Colorado. But the American experience had repelled Qutb because of what he viewed as excesses and materialism.

In a 1951 essay he wrote upon his return to Cairo, “The America I have Seen,” Qutb expressed disgust at everything from racism to the water wasted on big American lawns, from the sexuality expressed on the dance floor to the physicality of sports matches.

America’s primitiveness, he wrote, “can be seen in the spectacle of the fans as they follow a game of football…or watch boxing matches or bloody, monstrous wrestling matches…. This spectacle leaves no room for doubt as to the primitiveness of the feelings of those who are enamored with muscular strength and desire it.”

Qutb lived in Greeley, Colorado. Named after newspaper editor and Republican presidential candidate Horace Greeley, the conservative community was founded by an agriculture editor on Greeley’s
New York Tribune
who wanted to set up a utopian society in America and carefully sorted through applications to decide who would be invited to settle in Greeley. The town was established in the nineteenth century on the principles of temperance, religion, and family values.
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Even in the mid-twentieth century, when Qutb attended college in Greeley, alcohol was banned, and public entertainment was limited largely to church socials.

But the Egyptian found decadence even in this reserved environment. He wrote,

He was scathing about American women.

Of his American experience, Qutb concluded, “Humanity makes the gravest of errors and risks losing its account of morals if it makes America its example.”

After Qutb returned to Egypt, he joined the Brotherhood and quickly became its most prominent author. He continued to write even after he was imprisoned in 1954, raging at the illegitimacy of modern societies, American and Arab alike, for barbarous ignorance comparable to the uncivilized period before Islam.

In his book
Milestones,
Qutb called on the faithful to topple illegitimate regimes and create pure Islamic states to free mankind “from every authority except that of God.”
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Qutb was released in 1964 after a decade in prison, only to be arrested again eight months later for preaching the same radical doctrine. This time, he was sentenced to death.

The government offered clemency if he recanted his call for a militant jihad to topple the Egyptian regime. Colleagues urged him to accept, and many at the time thought he would. But in the end, he refused to back down. In 1966, Qutb was hanged for treason.

Qutb’s influence proved even greater after his death. His writing inspired young activist Ayman al Zawahiri as well as a new generation of Egyptian militants in groups such as Islamic Jihad. His appeal crossed sectarian and ethnic lines as well as national borders. His thinking influenced Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1960s and 1970s in the run-up to Iran’s Shiite revolution. Like Qutb, Khomeini warned against what he called “Westoxication,” or poisoning of the spirit by lax Western morality.

After Qutb’s execution, his brother Mohammed left Egypt to teach in the more hospitable climate of Saudi Arabia. Among his students at King Abdul Azziz University in the 1970s was Osama bin Laden.
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Qutb’s ideas have since been adopted by militants as far afield as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. They remain popular in the twenty-first century. When I travel in the Middle East, one of the things I always do is stop in local bookstores or libraries to see if Qutb’s works are available. Usually they are.

The Brotherhood’s third phase began in the 1970s, after President Sadat released many of the thousands who had been imprisoned along with Qutb. “History evolves gradually, but I can say 1974 and 1975, when Sadat allowed a greater climate of freedom on the campuses and around Egypt,” Habib told me, “that was the turning point of our Islamic work.”

The Brothers gradually—and somewhat reluctantly, at first—began to absorb a younger generation. The movement was reenergized by student activists who ran for leadership roles on university councils and by professionals like Habib. The movement also began to emphasize again the kind of social outreach programs initiated by founder Hassan al-Banna.

The Brotherhood, in effect, tried to build a state within a state.

In the late 1980s, I visited a complex built around a Cairo mosque by a Brotherhood sympathizer. The three-story stone building in the al-Duqqi neighborhood included a clinic, an elementary school, a small library, and a rooftop observatory to explore the heavens. The classrooms were full. A long line waited to see a doctor; the basic charge was fifty cents a visit. Medical staff at the clinic told me they treated more than 200,000 patients a year.

Egypt soon had hundreds of clinics and schools operated by Islamic groups or individual sympathizers.
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The Brotherhood does not discuss specific numbers, since any facility with a formal connection to an outlawed movement can be closed down by the state. And some have been.

“Schools are under a lot of scrutiny,” Habib told me. “Many of the education organizations have been dissolved because of regime harassment. But you could say we still have tens of thousands of students and many Islamic health organizations.”

In a country with seventy-six million people, most of whom live on a narrow strip of fertile land along the meandering Nile River, the Brotherhood’s social services reach only a small minority of Egyptians, analysts in Cairo told me. Yet the Ikhwan’s services are reliable, they conceded, and even Egyptians who did not vote for them believe the movement sincerely intends to help people.

After a devastating Cairo earthquake in 1992, the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups were the first to respond with food, blankets, and welfare for thousands of victims left homeless. Engineers put up temporary shelter; medical staff treated the injured. The Ikhwan also gave a thousand dollars to each family to rebuild. The government’s reaction was belated and limited.
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In 2006, I again visited facilities unofficially linked to the Brotherhood. The Islamic Medical Organization operated a three-story hospital with an outdoor staircase in Talbeye, a poor area near the Pyramids that has dusty, garbage-strewn streets traveled mainly by donkey carts and battered old taxis. There was no other government or private facility anywhere nearby.

In the whitewashed emergency room, a clean but bare-bones facility, a large sign printed on pink paper read, “The idea of the organization is to get closer to God through medical work. The organization facilitates the means of diagnosis for every patient who needs it, regardless of his financial ability, social status, or medical condition, without discrimination because of color, gender or faith.”

A calendar on the wall nearby sounded a less ambiguous note: “Islam is the solution.”

The hospital staff included gynecologists, pediatricians, cardiologists, ophthalmologists, general surgeons, dentists, and others. The basic fees were all under three dollars. Once a week, a sign on the bulletin board next to the reception desk advertised, the facility offered free diabetes testing.

The state within the state continued to grow. And tensions between the Brotherhood and the Egyptian government deepened.

Habib’s first stint in prison was not long after he returned from studying in the United States. In 1981, facing internal opposition to his peace treaty with Israel, President Sadat ordered a sweep of more than 1,500 religious activists, both Muslims and minority Coptic Christians.
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“I am dealing with fanaticism,” Sadat said in an angry three-hour speech to justify the controversial crackdown. “This is not religion. This is obscenity.” He charged that a sophisticated conspiracy was trying to destroy his authority.
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“Don’t fear that we will have a Khomeini here,” Sadat announced at a press conference, referring to the father of Iran’s revolution two years earlier.
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Less than a month later, Sadat was gunned down by extremists from Islamic Jihad.

Habib was not charged with anything. He was released five months later. Six years later, he won a seat in parliament.