We are continuing the publication of Thierry Meyssan’s new book, «Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies : From 9/11 to Donald Trump». In this episode, he describes the creation of an Egyptian secret society, the Muslim Brotherhood, and then its re-creation after the Second World War by the British secret services. Finally, the use of the group by MI6 to carry out political assassinations in this ex-Crown colony.
Hassan el-Banna, founder of the secret society the Muslim Brotherhood. We know little about his family, except that they were watchmakers – a trade reserved for the Jewish community in Egypt.
The “Arab Spring” as experienced by the Muslim Brotherhood
In 1951, building on the foundations of the old organisation of the same name, the Anglo-Saxon secret services put together a secret political society called the Muslim Brotherhood. At first they used it to assassinate personalities who resisted them, and then, starting in 1979, as mercenaries against the Soviets. At the beginning of the 1990’s, they incorporated the Brotherhood into NATO, and in 2010, attempted to force it into power in the Arab countries. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Sufi Order of the Naqshbandi were financed with at least $80 billion annually by the ruling Saudi family, which made them one of the most powerful armies in the world. All jihadist leaders, including the leaders of Daesh, belong to this military structure.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
Four empires disappeared during the First World War – the German Reich, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Tsarist Holy Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Sublime Porte. The victors utterly lacked any sense of reason in the conditions they imposed on the defeated. Thus, in Europe, the Treaty of Versailles determined conditions which were unacceptable and unbearable for Germany, falsely blamed as the sole responsible for the conflict. In the Orient, the carving up of the Ottoman Caliphate was not going well. At the San Remo Conference (1920), in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreements (1916), the United Kingdom was authorised to set up a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while France was allowed to colonise Syria (which included, at the time, what is now Lebanon). However, in what was left of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal led a revolt both against the Sultan, who had lost the war, and against the Western powers, who were taking control of his country. At the Sèvres Conference (1920), the Caliphate was chopped into little pieces in order to create a variety of new states, including a Kurdistan. The Turko-Mongol population of the provinces of Thrace and Anatolia rose up and carried Kemal to power. Finally, the Lausanne Conference (1923) traced the frontiers we know today, gave up on the idea of Kurdistan, and organised gigantic population transfers which caused more than half a million deaths.
But just as in Germany, Adolf Hitler was to contest his country’s lot, so, in the Near East, a man stood up against the new division of the region. An Egyptian schoolteacher founded a movement to re-establish the Caliphate which the Westerners had defeated. This man was Hassan al-Banna, and his organisation was the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).
In principle, the Caliph was the successor of the Prophet, to whom all owe obedience – it was therefore a very coveted title. There had been several great lines of Caliphs in succession – the Omeyyads, the Abbassids, the Fatimids and the Ottomans. The next Caliph would have to be the man who seized the title – and as it happened, this was the “General Guide” of the Brotherhood, who was quite comfortable with the idea of becoming the master of the Muslim world.
The secret society spread rapidly. Its intention was to work from within the system in order to re-establish Islamic institutions. Applicants had to swear fealty to the founder not only upon the Qu’ran, but also on a sabre or a revolver. The aim of the Brotherhood was exclusively political, even though it expressed itself in religious terms. Hassan al-Banna and his successors never spoke about Islam as a religion, nor did they evoke Muslim spirituality. For them, Islam is no more than a dogma, a submission to God and the exercise of Power. Obviously, the Egyptians who supported the Brotherhood did not see it this way. They followed it because it claimed to follow God.
For Hassan al-Banna, the legitimacy of a government was not to be measured by its representativeness, the way we evaluate that of Western governments, but by its capacity to defend the “Islamic way of life”, in other words, the way of life of 19th century Ottoman Egypt. The Brotherhood never considered that Islam has a History, and that Muslim ways of life vary considerably according to region and era. Neither did it imagine that the Prophet had revolutionised the Bedouin society in which he lived, or that the way of life described in the Qu’ran is no more than a stage meant for those particular men. For them, the disciplinary rules of the Qu’ran – Sharia – do not correspond to a given situation, but fix inalterable laws upon which Power can rely.
For the Brotherhood, the fact that the Muslim way of life had often been imposed by the sword justified the use of force. The Brotherhood would never admit that Islam may have been spread by example. This did not prevent al-Banna and his Brothers from standing for election – and losing. If they condemned political parties, it was not because of opposition to the multi-party system, but because by separating religion from politics, they would succumb to corruption.
The doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood was the ideology of “political Islam” – “Islamism” – a word which was destined to become all the rage.
In 1936, Hassan al-Banna wrote to Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa El-Nahas Pasha. He demanded:
- legislative reform, and the conformity of all tribunals with Sharia law;
- recruitment within the armies to create a volunteer force under the banner of jihad;
- connection between all Muslim countries, and the preparation for the restoration of the Caliphate, in realization of the unity demanded by Islam.
During the Second World War, the Brotherhood declared itself to be neutral. In reality, it mutated into an Intelligence service for the Reich. But from the point at which the United States entered the war, when the fortune of arms seemed to be changing sides, it played a double game, and sold information about Germany to the British. In this way, the Brotherhood revealed its total absence of principles and pure political opportunism.
On 24 February 1945, the Brothers tried their luck and assassinated the Egyptian Prime Minister in the middle of a parliamentary session. This was followed by an escalation of violence – a movement of repression against the Brotherhood, and a series of political assassinations, going as far as the murder of the new Prime Minister on 28 December 1948, and in retaliation, the killing of Hassan al-Banna himself, on 12 February 1949. A short time afterwards, a tribunal instituted by martial law condemned most of the Brotherhood to prison sentences, and dissolved their association.
This secret organisation was in reality no more than a band of assassins who hoped to grab power by masking their ambition behind the Qu’ran. Its story should have ended there. Unfortunately, it did not.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s pivot away from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s West-centric model in an effort to build regional influence has left Turkey more isolated than ever in the Middle East, said an analysis in Cairo Review of Global Affairs.
During the Arab spring, Erdoğan aligned Turkey with Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, and thus gained great influence in Egypt with the rise of President Mohammed Morsi. But all this was lost with Morsi’s July 2013 overthrow by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Terrorism experts often describe the Muslim Brotherhood as a gateway to violence and further extremism, as proven by its rogues’ gallery of terrorist alumni, which includes Osama bin Laden, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, to name a few.
“Erdoğan’s grand ‘neo-Ottoman’ aspirations to shape the Middle East from Istanbul, where he often works in offices carved out of Ottoman-era palaces, have come to a halt,” Soner Çağaptay, director of the Turkey Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote for the latest issue of Cairo Review. “Today, Ankara is nearly isolated in the Middle East. With the exception of Qatar, Turkey has no friends or allies in the region.”
Turkish ties with the Gulf monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have suffered because of Erdoğan’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which they view as a domestic security threat, according to Çağaptay.
Today, the Muslim Brotherhood and its devotees find sanctuary in many nations, but its most prominent backers are the nations of Qatar and Turkey, which not only provide safe havens for the group’s top leaders, but also remain devotees to the group’s global Islamist agenda. Qatar is home to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who has publicly endorsed suicide bombings against American soldiers deployed abroad.
A bloc led by Saudi Arabia is now engaged in a regional battle for influence with the Turkey-Qatar axis. “This competition now extends to East Africa, where the axis is vying for influence against the bloc along the Nile Valley and around the Horn of Africa in a new Great Game,” said Çağaptay, referring to their efforts to build influence in Somalia and Sudan.
Turkey is in this position because Erdoğan sought to use support for Islamists as a way to build influence in the region, according to Çağaptay.
“As crafty statesmen, Erdoğan and (former prime minister Ahmet) Davutoğlu should have had the insight to not bet on just one horse, but rather on multiple regional competitors in foreign policy. Accordingly, today Ankara is more isolated than ever in the Middle East,” said Çağaptay.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TA NEA NEWSPAPER AND 3XY RADIO.
