{"id":10229,"date":"2011-08-13T19:53:40","date_gmt":"2011-08-13T15:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=10229"},"modified":"2011-08-13T20:40:03","modified_gmt":"2011-08-13T16:40:03","slug":"former-muslim-brotherhood-members-speak-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-politics-analysis\/former-muslim-brotherhood-members-speak-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex Brotherhood Members Speak Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Is Egypt\u2019s Muslim Brotherhood moderate? That\u2019s what everyone wants to know now that Hosni Mubarak is out of power and the Islamists are flexing their muscles, not only against the military junta\u2019s transition authorities, but also against the liberal activists who brought the autocratic president down.<\/p>\n

The Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s spokesmen have been waging a PR campaign in the West for many years. They know exactly what to say and what not to say. They tell Western reporters that they\u2019re activists for democracy and civil society. They don\u2019t say they want to ban alcohol, force women to wear headscarves or veils, or further restrict the rights of religious minorities.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cmoderate\u201d is relative, though. Surely the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate compared with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but that\u2019s a meaningless standard. The Taliban and al-Qaeda are the most politically extreme Islamist organizations on earth. Fidel Castro is moderate compared with Pol Pot, and the Ku Klux Klan is moderate compared with the Nazis, but so what?<\/p>\n

It hardly matters at all that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate compared with mass-murdering totalitarians whose weapon of choice is the suicide bomber. (Besides, its leadership supports the suicide bombers of Hamas, which ought to go without saying since Hamas is the organization\u2019s Palestinian branch.) The only question that matters is: what does the Muslim Brotherhood actually stand for? What do they say when Western reporters aren\u2019t in the room? The only way a Western reporter like me can know, short of bugging their offices, is to interview former Muslim Brotherhood members who will tell it to me straight. So that\u2019s what I did.<\/p>\n

Mohammad Adel used to work for the Brotherhood\u2019s Web site, but he recently quit and threw his support behind the April 6 labor movement instead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was opposed to the editorial line,\u201d he told me in a tent his new comrades erected inside the liberal activists\u2019 tent city in Cairo\u2019s Tahrir Square, \u201cso I created a parallel site. The party accused us of collaborating with the ministry of the interior and the security forces. The Web site reflects the ideas of the Brotherhood\u2019s leadership, and a lot of us felt it didn\u2019t represent the group as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow is the editorial line different from the views of the group as a whole?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt only publishes quotes and articles that are by and about the leadership,\u201d he said. \u201cIt pays no attention to the rest of the members. It prevents the publication of news items or press releases by any other member. If someone from the Brotherhood was arrested, and that person had a problem with any of the leaders, the Web site wouldn\u2019t publicize that person\u2019s arrest even as a news item.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theoretically he could still be an Islamist, albeit a disgruntled one, with that list of complaints, but he doesn\u2019t sound like one. Not any more.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey aren\u2019t going to do well in the upcoming elections,\u201d he said. \u201cMost of the votes they got before were protest votes against Mubarak\u2019s NDP rather than votes for<\/em> the Muslim Brotherhood. Now that the NDP has been dissolved, they don\u2019t have that base to fall back on.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been told there are around 40 political parties in Egypt right now, though I\u2019m not sure anyone who gave me that number actually counted them or could name them. Most of those parties are microscopic and irrelevant, but some are serious and should do reasonably well in a free and fair election, and they span the same ideological range that exists everywhere else, with socialists on the left and capitalists on the right.<\/p>\n

\u201cLots of parties are coming up quickly,\u201d Adel said, \u201cand they\u2019re getting popular. The Brotherhood is afraid of two parties in particular, the Free Egypt Party and Mostafa El-Naggar\u2019s Justice Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Free Egypt Party is a secular, anti-sectarian, and free market capitalist party founded by a Coptic Christian businessman, though the party is by no means a \u201cChristian\u201d party the way many Lebanese political parties are Christian. The founder just happens to be a Christian. I saw a number of women wearing Islamic headscarves in one of their offices when I went in there for an interview. Their platform is as anti-socialist as it is anti-Islamist.<\/p>\n

The Justice Party, meanwhile, stresses \u201csocial justice,\u201d though it is centrist and includes activists from both the left and the right, including Mohamed El-Baradei\u2019s sister Mona, an Egyptian economist.<\/p>\n

These parties are new and, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, their platforms are modern and products of the 21st century.<\/p>\n

There are five main Islamist governance models that currently exist. The Taliban in Afghanistan is, of course, the most extreme, and the Turkish AKP is the least. The AKP has been in power in Turkey for years, and alcohol sales have been restricted in some parts of the country, it hasn\u2019t been banned. Women don\u2019t have to dress conservatively if they don\u2019t want to, and huge numbers in the large cities don\u2019t. The other Islamist models include the thoroughly reactionary Saudi Arabia, totalitarian Gaza under Hamas, and Iran under the Islamic Republic. I didn\u2019t mention any of these to Adel, but I had all of them in mind when I asked my next question.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there a model of governance that exists somewhere in the world that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to emulate here?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of them went to Turkey to learn from that model,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the Egyptian youth who would otherwise be similar to the youth in Turkey\u2019s Islamist party have been expelled from the Brotherhood here. They were seen as being too non-religious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTurkey\u2019s AKP isn\u2019t religious enough for the Brotherhood?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Brothers think of the AKP as liberal and they don\u2019t want that here,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve expelled the liberal Islamists from the group.\u201d<\/p>\n

I could only assume then that Gaza is what Egypt\u2019s Brotherhood has in mind, or maybe a Sunni Arab version of what Persian Shia Islamists have built in Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like for the Muslim Brotherhood to be more like Hamas,\u201d Adel said.<\/p>\n

That stopped me cold. \u201cYou want the Brotherhood to be like Hamas?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause Hamas is more liberal. The Brotherhood here no longer has any liberal members. Hamas is more willing to cooperate with other movements than the Muslim Brotherhood is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to make sure I understand what you\u2019re saying,\u201d I said. \u201cYour view is that Hamas represent liberal Islamism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNot that they\u2019re liberal,\u201d he said, \u201cbut they have members who are. They have a liberal Islamist element<\/em>. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has chosen to expel its liberal Islamists. The Brotherhood thinks dealing with anyone who is a former member, someone who was expelled or who resigned, or someone from other movements and parties, is like dealing with an infidel.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Abdul-Jalil al-Sharnouby also quit the Muslim Brotherhood recently, and I had a lot more time to sit down and talk to him than I had with Mohammad Adel.<\/p>\n

Before he resigned he was the editor-in-chief of the Brotherhood\u2019s Web site, Ikhwan Online<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. He even got some serious attention in Western media for his high profile job before he walked out. The Daily Beast<\/em> described him<\/strong><\/a> as \u201cradical Islam\u2019s tech guru,\u201d but he\u2019s not a radical Islamist anymore. He is a man in transition with one part of his heart and his mind in his old ideology and another part of his heart and his mind in something more liberal and open. And the truth is he\u2019s been in transition for a while now and was very nearly ready to bolt at the time the Daily Beast<\/em> interviewed him, though no one had any idea at the time. He wasn\u2019t even yet ready to admit it to himself, but that would start changing \u2014 and fast \u2014 as soon as the revolution in Egypt was on.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a member of the Brotherhood for 23 years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how old he is, but he doesn\u2019t look a day over 40, and he said he joined up in high school. He dedicated his entire adult life to the organization before he quit just a few months ago. And its reactionary rigidity is not what he says he found attractive. \u201cIslam is a religion that can also be a way of life,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s also adaptable and flexible in ways that differ from what Al Azhar University teaches, which is where I studied. I was actually expelled from Al Azhar as a means of preventing me from being a representative of the organization on campus. All of my experience with this gave me some credibility within the student body.\u201d<\/p>\n

He worked as a journalist after graduating while moving up in the Brotherhood\u2019s ranks. Eventually he became the editor-in-chief of the Web site, though he began to chafe against the restrictions the leadership put on him. \u201cThere were trends within the organization that indicated the leadership lacked tools for dialogue. They were very stubborn and refused to let go of their opinions. This was most clear in what touched upon my own work involving the media and the arts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quitting wasn\u2019t an option, however. For one thing, his closest friends were in the Brotherhood. The biggest reason he couldn\u2019t quit, though, was because Hosni Mubarak was still in power. \u201cHe would not let more than five of us gather in one house,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd because of Mubarak\u2019s tyranny I couldn\u2019t blame the Brotherhood or their leaders because it might justify his oppression of them. The government could then argue that if one of their own is criticizing them, then clearly we were justified in oppressing or banning them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like just about everyone else I interviewed over there, he says the Brotherhood had little to do with the anti-government uprising, that the organization opportunistically joined up late before turning on the revolutionaries altogether.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe revolution was produced by people who didn\u2019t belong to any organization,\u201d he said. \u201cAll those who were members of various organizations at the time had some relationship with Mubarak\u2019s regime, and they made their own calculations with him. The people who took to the streets on the 25th of January were only upholding one banner, and that was a national one. The real revolutionaries are those who were on the streets on the 25th of January, not the people who followed in the days afterward.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was one of the first people down there, so you might say his analysis is a little self-serving, but it\u2019s worth pointing out that the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization was absent. Even after the square filled with tens of thousands and even hundred of thousands of people, the Brotherhood hadn\u2019t shown up. They were too busy calculating. They did not see the revolution coming \u2014 nobody did \u2014 and they had no idea what to do after it started. They certainly were not its leaders.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in Tahrir Square for the 18 days,\u201d he said. \u201cOne day I went down into the streets with two French journalists. We left the Brotherhood office and were subjected to a pre-meditated attack by thugs from the baltageya<\/em> right outside the building. They took all my papers and two mobile phones. Eight days later a group of thugs followed by a group of soldiers stormed the Brotherhood office at dawn and destroyed computers and arrested twelve people.\u201d<\/p>\n

For reasons that I can\u2019t explain, the Brotherhood leaders took this in stride. They were strangely aloof from just about everything that was happening in the country at the time. I find it odd. Al-Sharnouby found it infuriating.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mention these attacks,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause experiencing the emotional ups and downs of the revolution, and being attacked the way I was, stood in such contrast with the calm felt by the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. When we were right in the middle of Tahrir, the Brotherhood announced that it would negotiate with [military intelligence director and vice president] Omar Suleiman. People in the square came to me and said, \u2018you\u2019re the editor-in-chief of the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s Web site. Why are you guys negotiating with the army?\u2019 Talk of negotiations with Mubarak\u2019s government was firmly rejected by everyone in Tahrir.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Brotherhood has been doing that all along. Many of the liberals and socialists I spoke to have the sense that the Islamists are against the revolution or are at best waging their own parallel revolution, and they seem to be right.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were calls for a second Friday of rage in May,\u201d Al-Sharnouby said. \u201cThe Brotherhood leadership gave me a press release to publish on the Web site, and it was very harsh. It said that anyone who went down to the second Friday of rage was either betraying the nation or trying to trigger clashes between the people and the army.\u201d<\/p>\n

He published the press release, though, without editing it. He wasn\u2019t happy about it, but that was his job. There was nothing the Brothers could do to stop him from going down to Tahrir anyway, though, so he did.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who had become my brothers and sisters during the 18 days were surprised to see me,\u201d he said. \u201cThey said to me, \u2018doesn\u2019t the Brotherhood think we\u2019re all infiltrators and spies?\u2019 And I said, \u2018even if that\u2019s what you are, then I would rather be on your side.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

His decision to leave the Brotherhood wasn\u2019t a snap one. His mind had been changing slowly over time even if he wasn\u2019t always consciously aware of it, like tectonic plates shifting an inch or so every year until the pressure is released in an explosive earthquake. The epicenter of Al-Sharnouby\u2019s personal earthquake was Tahrir Square during the revolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw blood in the streets,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw people die who didn\u2019t belong to any organization. The people who died in the revolution weren\u2019t making political calculations. They weren\u2019t entering into negotiations with the regime. They died because they wanted to be free. So we should be with the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

He paused for a moment, then asked me a question.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you with the people?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course!\u201d I said. At least I am with Egypt\u2019s liberals. I\u2019m an American. Who else could I possibly sympathize with? The anti-Western Islamists? The military dictatorship that blames foreigners like me for everything wrong with the country?<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay then,\u201d he said and smiled. \u201cHave some coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he ordered me another coffee.<\/p>\n

My colleague Armin Rosen and I interviewed Esam El-Erian, one of the Brotherhood\u2019s senior officials, the day before. It was the strangest interview I have ever conducted<\/strong><\/a>. El-Erian yelled at us for an hour. He said he hopes the Saudis stop selling us oil so we will learn to respect the Arabs. He said the United States is against the revolution in Libya, even though American planes are bombing Qaddafi on behalf of the rebels. He says the United States is against the revolution in Syria, even though Washington is ratcheting up sanctions on Bashar al-Assad and mumbling about war crimes indictments. He not so coyly suggests that the United States government, rather than Osama bin Laden, is guilty of the crimes on September 11. And he proudly supports suicide bombers in the West Bank and Gaza. He\u2019s an unapologetic ally of mass-murderers and terrorists.<\/p>\n

And it was this man, Esam El-Erian, who finally drove Abdul-Jalil al-Sharnouby to resign from the Brotherhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cEsam El-Erian said the reason people were angry at the Brotherhood was the way the protests were covered on the Web site,\u201d he said, though it was, of course, El-Erian and his colleagues in the leadership, not al-Sharnouby or anyone else at the Web site, who denounced Egyptians for daring the demonstrate in Tahrir. \u201cWhen that happened,\u201d he continued, \u201cI realized the Muslim Brotherhood was not going to change, and I submitted my resignation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The leadership tried to talk him into staying, but another problem he had was its refusal to take a clear position on just about anything. I\u2019ve had the same experience with the Brothers myself. My recent interview with El-Erian wasn\u2019t my first. I spoke to him in 2005, as well, and he was slipperier than a buttered-up eel. He refused to provide a clear answer to a single one of my questions. Would the Muslim Brotherhood like to ban alcohol? Force women to wear headscarves? He wouldn\u2019t say yes and he wouldn\u2019t say no.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told the supreme guide that it was inappropriate for an organization with the Brotherhood\u2019s history to be unable to take a clear position on anything,\u201d al-Sharnouby said. \u201cI knew the situation wouldn\u2019t be fixed or clarified and announced my resignation on Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n

He<\/em> ought to know what the Brotherhood leaders want, though, as he spent all of his adulthood working with them and for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you think the Muslim Brotherhood is culturally democratic?\u201d I said. \u201cIs their objective to govern Egypt or to be one party of many?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course they\u2019re objective is to govern Egypt,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I realized as soon as he answered that I didn\u2019t phrase my question the way I should have. The Democratic and Republican parties hope to govern the United States, but that hardly means they aren\u2019t democratic. They hope to govern after winning elections, but they don\u2019t try to overthrow the government when they lose.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I meant to ask,\u201d I said, \u201cis if the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s leaders want to be Egypt\u2019s next pharaohs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The organization\u2019s spokesmen don\u2019t tell American journalists that they wish to impose an Islamist dictatorship. If anyone like me tries to get them to confirm or deny this, they dodge the question. They are very well practiced in dodging that question. But al-Sharnouby should know. He knows what they say when people like me are not listening.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the Brotherhood in its current state takes power,\u201d he said, \u201cit will be a serious crisis. There will be a mixing of what is religious and what is political. In its current state, the mixing of politics and religion, in my opinion, is wrong and worrying. It\u2019s very worrying for me personally. We have to give credit to what happened on the 25th of January. We accomplished a feat which ensures that no one will ever rule Egypt again the way the pharaohs did. No one in the Brotherhood understand this, though, because they did not create the revolution. The Brotherhood as it exists now wants to come to power and rule the way Hosni Mubarak did.\u201d<\/p>\n

He still describes himself as an Islamist even though he finds the prospect of political Islam, as he put it, worrying. Islamism is by definition political Islam, however. I think he is confused, that what he meant to say is that he\u2019s a Muslim<\/em>, not an Islamist, but I am not entirely sure what he was getting at. So I had to ask, \u201cwhat exactly do you mean when you say you\u2019re an Islamist?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI see Islam as a way of life that is beautiful,\u201d he said, \u201cthat understands that people can be different, that people should communicate with each other. The Koran says God created male and female, different populations and tribes, so that we would know each other. To me this is the idea behind Islam, that people are from different cultures and places, and that we should know each other. God put me on earth not to point my finger at people and say who is going to heaven and who is going to hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

He sounds to me more like a like a liberal or moderate Muslim. Whatever label best suits him, Islamist<\/em> probably isn\u2019t it. But he\u2019s a man in transition who only very recently broke with a movement he\u2019s been a part of for more than half his life and his entire adulthood. Perhaps in a few years he\u2019ll work out these contradictions. For all I know he could even end up like the famous feminist and atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who herself once identified with the Brotherhood. He certainly interprets the Koran differently than the likes of the Taliban.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook,\u201d he said, \u201cat the rules about adultery. They were put there to make it almost impossible to prove that adultery ever took place. You have to bring four witnesses who saw it happen. Adultery takes place during a human being\u2019s greatest moment of weakness. There is a hadith<\/em> about a man who went up to the prophet and said he found two people committing adultery. He was very proud of himself. Yet the prophet said, \u2018what are you doing? Why are you scandalizing them? What\u2019s it to you? You should have just covered them up and left.\u2019 These conditions aren\u2019t put in there to punish people. They are there to allow human weakness.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the biggest problems with his former Islamist colleagues is their visceral detestation of any kind of art.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Brotherhood today doesn\u2019t have a reasonable mechanism for dealing with the arts,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s the literary output of the Muslim Brotherhood? Leftists under Nasser were just as oppressed as the Brotherhood, but they managed to produce literature. They wrote plays and movies. The reason the Brothers don\u2019t produce anything literary or artistic, unlike the leftists, is because they have a serious intellectual problem with art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWould they want to impose a ban on art if they had the power to do so?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d he said. \u201cOf course.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course? I was slightly surprised to hear this, but only slightly. The Taliban banned music and art, after all. It isn\u2019t unprecedented. \u201cThey might not ban it directly,\u201d he continued, \u201cbut they would limit it and place obstacles around art and artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is still a conservative Muslim, even so, at least in some ways. \u201cEvery freedom has its limitations,\u201d he said. \u201cAmericans who talk about freedom and the oppression of women in different parts of the world don\u2019t recognize how women in their own societies are oppressed by things like pornography.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has, however, set off on a new trajectory, one that may eventually take him very far indeed from where he began.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw two paths before me,\u201d he said, \u201cand had to decide which one to take. One is the path of the Muslim Brotherhood, the other of humanism. I have chosen to follow the path of humanism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MICHAEL J. TOTTEN: What exactly is the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘game-plan’ for Egypt? One way of finding out is to talk to former loyalists…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":10230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,124,83,235,60,482],"tags":[24,1501,169,982,7215,378,1696,125,2892,18300,354,4276,8330,39,5819,8178,278,227,2323,18306,1879,8329,2098,18332,1625,3400,8320,8167,8323,4328,389,1313,583,18275,18330,399,1374,18325,18302,3849,2020,580],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}