How to Deal with the Muslim Brotherhood - Part II

The Case for Suppression

Copyright © 2020. Investigative Project on Terrorism

In the previous post I introduced the debate over how to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. In this follow-up piece I argue that toleration has been tried and failed, both in the West and in the Middle East, and that legal suppression is now the only way forward.

My main argument for this is that there is no “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood. Every branch of the organization works towards its primary mission as summarized in the works of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb: a theocratic Islamist caliphate under the rule of a literalist form of sharia law. Although initially re-created in historically Muslim lands (including Spain), this would ultimately be carried elsewhere by the sword or by mass migration. In this long-term objective they differ little from jihadists like al-Qaeda, varying only over how to get there and on what timescale; worse, their “long war” political Islam is often a gateway to violent jihad when conditions are ripe. Both are as incompatible with liberal democratic Western values as the Soviet aspiration for global communist hegemony during the Cold War.

Advocates of toleration argue that the Brotherhood no longer seriously embraces the radical vision al-Banna enunciated, nor the establishment of an Islamic State. They claim the Brotherhood is ready to participate in ordinary politics and, through that participation, would further moderate. In contrast to the “Islamized Leninism” of Qutb, the alleged new model for the Ikhwan (Brothers) is more akin to the Christian Democratic parties of Europe. On this view, we should not ban them for three reasons: not all of their chapters are violent, they are not fundamentally anti-democratic, and the social and diplomatic backlash would be too severe.

All these arguments have been proven fatally naive over the last decade. Let’s examine each in turn.

“They’re Non-Violent”

That the Brotherhood has inspired violence and that its members have carried out attacks is not in doubt; whether it is essentially violent was harder to say a decade ago, but the evidence now suggests the answer is yes.

The Brotherhood has chapters in dozens of countries, loosely coordinated by an international organization headed by the Supreme Guide of Egypt’s Brotherhood. Some of these have indisputably engaged in terrorism and other forms of political violence. In Syria the local Brothers tried and failed to launch an armed uprising against the government of Hafez al-Assad in the late 1970s and early 1980s, only to be crushed at Hama in 1982. The Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, represented by Hamas, routinely uses terrorist tactics against Israel, which is why it is already designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.

The Egyptian Brotherhood itself conducted terrorist attacks against the Egyptian government in the 1940s–60s until its second leader forbade revolutionary violence, a prohibition that seems to have only partially held after the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brother, in 2013. His fall immediately led to the massacre of nearly 1,000 Muslim Brother protestors at the Rabaa mosque by its enemies. Even as the leaders of the organization continue to call for peaceful protest, its younger members have attacked private property and government targets, as well as perpetrating a fair bit of violence against Coptic Christians.

Hama, Syria after the Syrian Army suppressed an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Ba'athist government in 1982

Nor can it be denied that its founding ideologues (including al-Banna himself) accepted the utility and legitimacy of political violence. In his tract On Jihad he quoted another legist approvingly on the subject: “Jihad … it is the slaying of the unbelievers and related connotations, such as beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their shrines and smashing their idols… It is obligatory on us to begin fighting with them after transmitting the invitation to embrace Islam, even if they do not fight against us.” Sayyid Qutb likewise promoted the doctrine of takfirism in his notorious work, Milestones, which permits “the stigmatisation of other Muslims as infidel or apostate, and of existing states as unIslamic, and the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society.”

Terrorism is thus morally appropriate when it suits the Brotherhood, a vision that inspired radical splinter groups like Al-Qaeda. Prior to the Arab Spring in 2011, the Brotherhood leadership had few qualms about supporting their goals. In September 2010, the Supreme Guide, Mohamed Badie, delivered a sermon mirroring the themes of Al-Qaeda’s August 1996 declaration of war against the US. Calling on Muslim regimes to resist the “Zio-American” regime, he declared that “resistance” can only come from fighting and understanding “that the improvement and change that the [Muslim nation] seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”

To put it mildly, this is not the sort of credo one hears from a Christian Democratic party like Germany’s CDU. There is no willingness to reject political violence in principle, just an opportunistic assessment of its usefulness in a given context. When faced with strong states that would not hesitate to repress it, as in Jordan or Egypt, or in places where Muslims themselves are currently a weak minority, as in Europe or North America, such extreme behavior is avoided. But elsewhere has been a different story. And even within the West, its leaders have a habit of preaching non-violence in English while talking up (and sometimes, allegedly fundraising for) resistance and even jihad in Arabic in places like Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.

“They’re Democratic”

Another argument one encounters from those who want to tolerate the Brothers is that we must let ideologies compete as long as they respect democratic norms. This competition must include Islamists, who are hardly alone in attempting to inject religion into public life. Europe has many Christian Democrats who take their title seriously, after all. The Republican Party in America holds that “God-given” rights to life, liberty, and property underpin the Constitution, and governs accordingly. If these are legitimate forms of political activity, it’s equally fine for the Brothers to strive for power through elected office.

The skeptics – and I’m one of them – reply that political Islam is exceptional. Its theology, history and the behavior of its adherents stand out in ways that mark it as irreconcilable with democracy and secularism in a way that Christianity is not. Unlike Christian Democrats, the Muslim Brotherhood take an instrumental view of elections to seize power then subvert the system for theocratic ends: “one man, one vote, one time,” as the saying goes. Any appearance to the contrary is just them playing al-Banna’s long game. As Recep Erdogan, the Islamist President of Turkey, notoriously said about democracy, “it is a train that we ride until we get where we need to get and then we get off.”

This theocratic ambition has deep roots in Islam. Whereas Jesus was a political dissident executed by the state and Moses famously a leader without one, the Prophet Muhammad was a political leader who founded a polity himself. Muslim scripture was powerfully shaped by that biographical difference. The Koran contains myriad direct legal injunctions, ranging from the implementation of the hududpunishments for offences such as apostasy to specific rules on civil questions like inheritance – hence al-Banna’s boast that “the Koran is our constitution.”

Despite plentiful rules for individual conduct, the Koran is hazier about the form of government to administer them. Indeed, the most famous schism in Islam, between Sunnis and Shias, arose immediately upon Muhammad’s death. His followers were unable to decide if the Caliph – his successor as leader – should be elective or hereditary. Notwithstanding the lack of scriptural clarity on the point, Muslims came to regard the caliphate itself as an essential part of Islam. This fact further politicized the faith, as hereditary caliphates – fusing secular with religious power – became the model for Islamic politics for the next millennium.

It was the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s and the abolition of the last caliphate by Ataturk’s secular Turkish republic that ultimately led to the modern-day Islamist movement. Muslims like al-Banna, humiliated by European imperialism, rejected secularism, democracy, and the nation state as Western imports at odds with Islamic tradition. But he also saw the achievement of a new theocratic caliphate as something that would unfold gradually, each step requiring different tactics. Islamists might downplay their theocratic goals early on, and even partake in elections, if it improved their position in the long term.

This sets the stage for the present dispute: have his followers come to accept democracy as part of all stages of their political theory, or are they still theocratic opportunists at heart?

Aside from Hamas, the Brotherhood group that controls Gaza and turned authoritarian almost as soon as it won elections in 2006, Exhibit A for the skeptics is the Brotherhood’s native Egypt. The short-lived Islamist president, Muhammad Morsi, seemed to govern for the Brotherhood alone. He flooded the bureaucracy with Islamists, declared his decisions beyond judicial review, and infuriated the army by attending a rally where clerics urged Egyptians to join a jihad in Syria. In the autumn of 2012, he oversaw an effort to draft a new constitution that would have increased the role of sharia in Egyptian courts, alarming secularists. By the time a military coup removed him in 2013, his autocratic behavior in power had done much to discredit the view that the Egyptian Brothers had moderated.

Exhibit B is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president. Another avowed Islamist, he threw his full weight behind the Brotherhood when it took power in Egypt and has backed other Islamist parties in Libya, Syria, and Tunisia since the Arab Spring. Domestically, he has grown more autocratic the longer he has been in power. After 11 years as prime minister he was elected president and set about turning that previously weak post into a hegemonic one. After an attempted coup in 2016, he had tens of thousands of people purged from their jobs or arrested, often for the merest suggestion of a connection to the religious group blamed for the plot. He has also steadily co-opted institutions and eroded checks and balances, turned much of the media into a tool of state propaganda, censored the internet, and jailed many of his critics.

Defenders of the Brotherhood claim that the authoritarianism displayed by Morsi and Erdogan reflects their national political environments rather than an anti-democratic essence in their ideology. More hopeful examples, they say, might be found in Tunisia and Morocco. Tunisia’s Brotherhood party, Ennahda, which styles itself “Muslim democratic,” was the biggest party in parliament – until President Kais Saied suspended the assembly in July 2021. Similarly, in Morocco, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), another supposed moderate Islamist outfit, was appointed by King Muhammad VI to lead the ruling coalition, until suffering a crushing defeat at the polls a month later.

Both Ennahda and the PJD seem to have learned from the Egyptian Brotherhood not to overreach and to share power with more secular groups. For example, when large protests pushed Tunisian democracy to the brink in 2013, Ennahda compromised over a new constitution and relinquished power. The PJD also tried to downplay its Islamist image; it failed to stop laws pushing French in education at the expense of Arabic, for instance, and despite pledging never to do so, its prime minister presided over the normalization of relations with Israel.

We cannot prove whether such parties are still playing al-Banna’s long game. But advocates of tolerating the Brotherhood tell us that, in environments that do not encourage authoritarianism, it is not a necessary development. If Morocco’s King or Tunisia’s lack of a strong politicized army can place effective checks on how much power they amass, surely mature Western democracies could do at least as well?

But there’s no good reason to be so sure that the liberal democratic conditions of the West will necessarily work to encourage moderation. Instead, they can create opportunities for Islamist minorities to exert disproportionate impact. See how the Muslim Brotherhood Islamists encourage and exploit the two tier system of justice in Western Europe or the implementation of DEI diktats in America. The seemingly sudden mobilization of mobs that fill the hearts of Western cities with genocidal cries of globalize the Intifada and from the River to the Sea, Israel Shall Be Free is another illustration of MB duplicity in action.

Another cautionary tale in this regard is Indonesia, a secular democracy where no avowedly religious party has ever received more than 8% of the vote in national parliamentary elections even though the country is majority Muslim. But locally elected Islamists have passed over 400 local ordinances based on Islamic law since the country’s regions were granted more autonomy in 1999. In Aceh province alcohol is prohibited, women’s dress is restricted, and adultery and homosexuality are punished with whippings.

Indonesia shows how the workings of democracy can magnify the power of an illiberal minority at the local level. The danger for the West here is obvious. As I pointed out in my post on the British local elections, for instance, mass immigration has already produced several hundred local council wards with an Islamic majority. This has been accompanied by the emergence of a grassroots campaign group called “The Muslim Vote,” pushing a sectarian agenda. Sharia-lite is a de facto reality in Britain and other European countries with a serious presence of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are “family courts” that officiate marriages (including polygamous ones), divorces, and child custody. If the borders stay open and the Brotherhood remains active, then local demand for Islamist legislation will inexorably increase, whether it’s more mosques and religious schools or greater restrictions on alcohol sales and on mixed-sex public facilities. The phenomena of honor violence and female genital mutilation have now been a reality in various European countries for at least three decades. Even in the minority, Islamists will be able to ratchet up restrictions.

The Risks of a Crackdown

The final argument for tolerating the Brotherhood is that it would be too risky to ban them. Diplomatically, it would put a wrench in the works of America’s alliance with Turkey, a key regional ally of the Brotherhood. A decision to designate the Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization would also forbid the U.S. government from engaging with foreign officials from Brotherhood affiliated parties, which have in recent years included the governments of counter-terrorist partners like Morocco and Tunisia.

Domestically, it would risk driving non-Islamist Muslims into the Brothers’ hands by creating a narrative of anti-Muslim persecution. Driving this sort of wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims in America, Europe and elsewhere, it is argued, would be seriously counter-productive.

I concede that the diplomatic risks are real. However, the US and her allies can deal with these countries without agreeing to tolerate subversion of their societies by a hostile foreign entities. They must also be offset against the diplomatic benefits to our relationship with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE, all of whom have proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood domestically and are beginning to defund the petro-Islamic groups they birthed. They have asked Western countries to follow suit, and conditioned trade and security deals on such a crackdown. As for Turkey, we shouldn’t forget that its motives are varied and the US has leverage. Its President has weakened his drive to promote political Islam abroad and has spent the last couple of years mending fences with regional powers like Egypt, Saudi, and the UAE, whose help he needs to support the Turkish Lira. He has also ordered news outlets launched by Brotherhood exiles not to criticize Egypt’s military regime, and even reached out to the Assad government, who are mortal enemies of the Ikhwan. To be sure, Erdoğan hasn’t totally changed his spots; he has been fiercely critical of Israel’s conduct during its conflict with Hamas, accusing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu of genocide, and halting all trade with the Jewish state. But overall political Islam is a weaker force in Turkish foreign policy in the Arab world than it was, meaning a US/UK crackdown on our Brotherhood affiliates will be less of an irritant.

As for the risk of a domestic Muslim backlash, we shouldn’t be too moved by Middle Eastern precedents. From the Shah’s iron rule in Iran, through Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, to the coup that ousted elected Islamists in Algeria in 1992 and the repression of the Brothers in Syria, it is said that attempts to ban them have produced at best a precarious stability and at worst civil wars. But this overlooks huge differences between autocrats in the Middle East and Western societies. To be sure, the record of crackdowns in the former is bad. Unlike these autocracies, however, Western societies offer durable prosperity, generous welfare states, and expansive political and personal freedoms, including the freedom to live one’s life in accordance with Islamic precepts. All of this, combined with much smaller Muslim populations, reduces the risk of a violent backlash. 

To the extent that there is an Islamist population that might be radicalized by the move, this just highlights the fatal flaw in the argument: the poor track record of tolerating political Islam in the West to date. If the assumption was that by giving the Brotherhood free reign we would starve such views of support, it hasn’t worked. Europe has seen thousands of radicalized Muslim youth joining terrorist groups, the rise of Islamic ghettoes, polls indicating widespread support for Islamist views and civil unrest along sectarian lines, most recently in Britain and in France. In America, where Muslims are only 1% of the total population, let’s not learn these lessons too late. The key threat here is not an Islamist takeover of the country, but an Islamist takeover of its Muslim citizens. As the most prominent Muslim organizations were either created by or are associated with the Brotherhood, the absence of a strong tradition of Islam means that immigrants are more susceptible to being won over by their purism. This makes it even more important for us to call for a crackdown.

Recommendations

 I like to end these posts on a positive note, so here in brief are my recommendations for how to go on the offense against the Ikhwan:

1) Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, starting in Egypt and then on a case-by-case basis in other countries as appropriate. This piecemeal approach is to be preferred to a blanket global designation, as it requires proof of “material support” (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) to salafi-jihadist movements.

2) Explore the use of sedition charges (18 U.S.C. § 2384) against other domestic Brotherhood affiliates that do not fall under the material support statute.

3) Develop foreign policy mechanisms to deter Turkey and Qatar from facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood and its global affiliates, including those in the West. Particular attention should be paid to the Turkish-EU economic relationship and Turkey’s status as a NATO ally. 

By taking an axe to the roots of this rotten tree, we’ll allow more light to shine upon those Muslims at home and abroad who believe in democracy and the separation of mosque and state.