Conflicted S4 E11: The Muslim Brotherhood: Who Are They?

Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean

Thomas: Hello, dear listeners, you've tuned in for another episode of Conflicted with me, Thomas Small.

Aimen: And me, the great yet humble, Aimen Dean.

Thomas: Aimen, I am about as nervous about doing these episodes as I was when we embarked on our episodes on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, if you remember from last season.

In the next couple of weeks, we're going to be talking about a very divisive, rather nebulous organisation, our old Egyptian friends, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Aimen: Well, it's a minefield, and I mean it in the figurative sense, not in the literal sense here.

But it is a minefield of course, because every time I had a discussion about the Muslim Brotherhood since the Arab Spring in particular, there are people, and I mean it, at least two of them were no longer on speaking terms with me, because I was criticising the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power in Egypt. And I believe basically that these people are going to ruin Egypt.

Thomas: Well, the Muslim Brotherhood sure is divisive. And after our exploration into the historical figures who in many ways set up modern Salafi jihadism, we are now going to have a look at an organisation who, some say prop up Salafi jihadism in the modern era.

Others say they're a force for peace and charity in the Muslim world, and yet others say they're a clandestine puppet master of various Islamic governments. Who are the Muslim Brotherhood? Moderates, radicals. Let's jump right into it.

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So, Aimen quickly, and really, we have to do this quickly because we have, in a way told the story of the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood directly and indirectly, many times across Conflicted, because it's all rooted in that ferment, that fomenting political maelstrom that preceded and then followed the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

And when we're talking about the Muslim Brotherhood, we're talking about Egypt. Now, Egypt, which was part of the British Empire, and then in 1922, achieved partial independence from that empire, thanks to some nationalist activism oriented around a kind of secular liberal party known as the Wafd Party.

We talked about this in our previous two episodes about Sayyid Qutb. He was coming of age during this time, as was someone else whom we've talked about a lot on Conflicted, Hassan al-Banna.

Aimen: Hassan al-Banna, as we have discussed before, is the product of his day. He was a teacher, a graduate of Dar al-Ulum, the same school that Sayyid Qutb went to, to complete his education. And also at the same time, he was a preacher, a religious scholar, though a minor one.

In 1922, Egypt achieved what would someone call a window-dressing independence from Britain. Really, the British gave independence to the Kingdom of Egypt, newly established at that time, however, they were still in charge, especially in the strategic Suez Canal zone.

And they really run the economy. They ran the banks, and they ran more or less the military especially in Egypt. Hassan al-Banna therefore came into the scene in 1928, 4 years after Turkey abolished the caliphate and the Ottoman Empire was no longer existing. The office of the caliphate has been abolished, and with it the fact that Egypt was still under a significant British control.

So, Hassan al-Banna was an anti-colonialist, to some extent anti-monarchy, but because the monarchy was under the control of the British, and he was pro nationalist Islamist ideals, and he wanted to put all of this in a politically organised movement that would harness the power of two elements in Egypt, which were in abundance, faith, and youth.

Thomas: That's a great way of putting it, Aimen, honestly. I think to be fair to Hassan al-Banna, his political ambitions grew from 1928 onwards. The organisation that would become known as the Muslim Brotherhood started out with slightly simpler ambitions.

It was largely involved in preaching. Hassan al-Banna would preach in cafes and Ismailia, where he lived. And the movement spread, he emphasised increasing the individual's Islamic faith and piety.

But yes, for sure, underlying this and growing over time, his political ambitions would expand. Feeding into that was this ongoing unrest, not just in Egypt, but in Palestine, especially from the 30s onwards.

As we also talked about in the last season of Conflicted, the 1930s was the period when Zionism was clashing with nascent Arab nationalism, Islamic nationalism in Palestine leading to more and more conflict between Jews and Muslims there overseen at that time by the British who were losing control of the situation.

Hassan al-Banna was animated to defend Muslim interests in Palestine. And so, this movement that he founded, the Muslim Brotherhood, took on. In fact, in 1936, a sub-organization was created within it dedicated to Palestine, took on the further ambition of extending beyond Egypt really, more widely into the Muslim world.

Aimen: Indeed, in fact, 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the Syrian clerk, who was leading the militant resistance against the Jewish Zionist migrations in the Palestinian mandate of the UK at that time, as well as against the British forces.

He had a lot of help support financial and otherwise from Hassan al-Banna and his organisation to the point where 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam was thought of as an honorary member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Even though he was not Egyptian, he'd never been there, except in the 1920s.

Thomas: Loyal listeners of the podcast will know what happened next. In 1949, as a result of continuing unrest in Egypt, which had become violent, and the Muslim Brotherhood had participated in this widespread political violence. The British operating through the Egyptian monarchy, assassinated Hassan al-Banna in February 1949.

Three years later, Egypt undergoes a revolution. The King Fat Farouk is toppled. Eventually, President Gamal Abdel Nasser rises to power, turns against the Muslim Brotherhood, and begins waves of suppressing it violently inside Egypt.

This history is tied to the life of the character we discussed in our previous two episodes, Sayyid Qutb, who was arrested by Nasser because he had, by that point, joined the Muslim Brotherhood and become its top ideologue.

In prison Sayyid Qutb had written a number of very influential books, advocating an increasingly more radical position in terms of the strategy that Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood specifically should be following to achieve its aims.

And as we said in the previous episode, he was eventually released from prison, following a heart attack, then was re-imprisoned, and at a show trial was condemned to death and hanged.

But Aimen, we have to admit that we left out an important detail from our story of Sayyid Qutb's life, especially at the end of his life. And it's about the Muslim Brotherhood, and specifically about a very important person in the Muslim Brotherhood at that time called Hassan al-Hudaybi.

Aimen: Hassan al-Hudaybi, born in the late 19th century, he came from a poor background. His family were not a well-to-do family, but nonetheless, they were able to send their kid to a good secular school.

He graduated, went to law school, and graduated as a lawyer. And from there, he started to rise in the ranks all the way until he actually achieved one of Egypt's highest judicial office in the land, which is the Office of the Chancellor of the Court of Appeal. It's more or less really the top judicial authority in the country.

Thomas: Despite his status there at the top of the establishment in the late 30s and early 40s al-Hudaybi formed a friendship with Hassan al-Banna, and by the mid-40s, he had joined the Muslim Brotherhood.

Following Hassan al-Banna's assassination in 1949, the Muslim Brotherhood appointed al-Hudaybi, his successor as al murshid al am, the Supreme Guide of the organisation. We're going to talk more about that role later, but for now al-Hudaybi was at the top of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, the brotherhood hoped that appointing him to that position would help relieve pressure on them from the government because he was so establishment, he was so respectable, and they didn't necessarily expect him actually to govern the organisation because his views, as it turned out, were quite moderate.

Aimen: It was obvious that a lawyer and then a judge would have a moderating effect on the Muslim Brotherhood. After all, everything has to be by the book. And as a judge, he wanted to do everything by the book.

And what angered many members of the Muslim Brotherhood at that time was for Hassan al-Hudaybi to call for the dissolution of the secret apparatus of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What is that? Basically, it is a paramilitary intelligence organisation that we're ready to collect information as well as deploy violence whenever necessary to protect and defend the interest of the organisation.

And so, it wasn't out of the question for many parties in Egypt at the time, during the chaos of the 1940s, to have paramilitary arms. I mean, this is what even leftist and right-wing political parties were doing in countries like Germany and Italy and other parts of Europe.

Thomas: Yeah, the 30s and 40s were when political parties were violent.

Aimen: Indeed. And Egypt did not escape that phenomenon. And so, the fact that al-Hudaybi wanted to dissolve that organisation, he wanted to send a signal that the Muslim Brotherhood is genuinely a political party and genuinely a social welfare organisation that is trying to better the welfare of the society.

Thomas: That would in time put al-Hudaybi on a collision course with Sayyid Qutb. Remember Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned in the mid-50s, and he stayed there more or less for the rest of his life apart from a brief sort of year out of prison.

But from prison, Qutb was advocating going beyond even Hassan al-Banna’s emphasis on preaching and began stressing for the need for a violent vanguard, a minority of Muslim Brotherhood members who through violence and in the name of self-defence but would actively seek to overthrow the established powers and expand the movement that way.

His rhetoric and his writing was increasingly advocating this approach and the clash between Sayyid Qutb in prison, a Muslim brother and a chief ideologue of the organisation, and Hassan al-Hudaybi, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, that clash between these two men can act as a symbol of an ongoing question, really at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Are they radical or are they moderate? This is the question that everyone has to ask himself when he is looking at the Muslim Brotherhood and trying to understand it.

I don't want, Aimen, you to rush to answer that question right now because I know you know the answer, but I want to get there slowly. I want to ease the listener in to Aimen Dean's pronouncement upon the Muslim Brotherhood.

So, as an opening gambit here, let's say the moderate dimension of the Muslim Brotherhood is a real thing. It exists. There are members of the Muslim Brotherhood who advocate moderation in their tactics at the very least. For example, Hassan al-Hudaybi, perhaps the sort of archetype of this tendency.

So, when Qutb was publishing his books, which were advocating violence, Hudaybi published his own book. It was called Preachers, not Judges, a very telling title. This title was obliquely, directly critiquing Qutb's hard-line views.

And al-Hudaybi taught that the Muslim Brotherhood should continue preaching, should continue advocating righteous Islamic living, but not condemn people who failed to live that way.

And it is arguable that most Muslim brothers across history have advocated that approach. Would you agree, Aimen?

Aimen: Of course, they have advocated that approach to some extent. It's not that I agree or disagree with whatever approach. We are not disagreeing or agreeing on means, we are talking about ends, if you see what I mean.

Thomas: I do know what you mean. And when you talk about ends, in a way, you're talking about ideology.

Aimen: Yeah.

Thomas: And I want to postpone our discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology until the next episode in this two-part series on the Muslim Brotherhood. I think it might become one of our classic clash statement, I don't know, maybe we'll agree. We'll agree and skip off into a lovely sunset together. I don't know. Sometimes it doesn't happen.

In this episode, I really want to focus on, let's say concrete reality, the Muslim Brotherhood as an actual organisation actually embedded in the world.

Often that part of the Muslim Brotherhood is neglected in discussions of the brotherhood. And you can leave whole articles, indeed books about the Muslim Brotherhood wondering, okay, fine, but what is it? What is this organisation? So, how do we begin?

I can tell you, Aimen, to prepare for this episode, I read a recently published book by Joas Wagemakers, at least, I think that's how that name is pronounced, The Muslim Brotherhood: Ideology, History, Descendants, quite a good book. Clearly inclined towards seeing the Muslim Brotherhood as essentially a moderate organisation that has been more sinned against than sinning in terms of its reputation.

So, as I was reading it, I realised this person might have an agenda. But it was very informative and yet reading it, I was constantly reminded of Monty Python's film, the Life of Brian and the endless debates happening between all the different Jewish revolutionary movements in Jerusalem as depicted in that film.

The Judean people's front, or the people's front of Judea clashing with other — this constant evermore microscopic splitting of political tendencies into different branches and sub-branches and everyone fighting with each other.

Reading a sweeping history of the Muslim Brotherhood leaves you with that impression. Like, it's not one thing. They're always arguing, and splinter groups are splintering off, and then political parties are founded and they break off and they come back and change their name and different this and different that.

So, the question is like, is it even appropriate Aimen, to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood? Are we not better off talking about Muslim brotherhoods?

Aimen: Okay, if you are talking about a political organisation, there are plenty of them. If you are talking about an ideology, there is only one.

Thomas: Well, let's talk about the organisation then.

Aimen: Yeah. The Muslim Brotherhood is, if I could borrow a Christian phraseology here, is a broad church. And this church encompasses so many different chapters, strands, different schools of thoughts.

You have from the so moderate to the so radical, from the violent extremist all the way to the doves and the pragmatic technocrats. You have of course, local chapters who organise according to the needs of their prospective countries.

They always differ with the mother organisation. When I say the mother organisation, I'm talking here about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, also known as at al-ikhwan al-muslimīn, in which means the international organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Thomas: So, it is true that the mothership of the Muslim brothers is still in Cairo. It is essentially an Egyptian organisation to this day.

Aimen: Exactly. I mean, to this day, because how do I prove that there is a mother organisation, and the other chapters belong to it somehow? I would say that the fact that not a single other chapter, not in Iraq, not in Yemen, not in Libya, not in Algeria, not in Morocco, not in Turkey, and not in Syria, these were the Muslim Brotherhood organisations were present. And even in Pakistan known as Jamaat-e-Islami, none of them elected a rival supreme guide.

Thomas: Al murshid al am, the supreme guide who is always in Cairo.

Aimen: Exactly. Or an Egyptian in exile sometime. But there is always an Egyptian murshid al am, general guide or supreme guide to the Muslim Brotherhood. And this is why whenever someone try to argue with me, “Yes, Aimen. But there are separate Muslim Brotherhood here and separate Muslim Brotherhood there, and there is no evidence yet of an organisational link between the two.”

I say, “Okay, let them elect a supreme guide of their own then, what is stopping them?”

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, this gets to the heart of the confusion about the Muslim Brotherhood, that on the one hand it is wrong, I think to say that there is a strong, centralised global organisation that controls everything that the Muslim Brotherhood does, because as you've said, the Muslim Brotherhood is internally divided, very fragmented, and with many local and national chapters across the world, including in the West.

But all those chapters do, in some sense, answer to a central body overseen by one man, always an Egyptian and usually in Egypt.

So, my question to you, Aimen, as we continue this conversation is why has the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in Egypt as an organisation, largely concerned with Egyptian affairs, how has it been so successful in being copied in this way across not just the Muslim world, but the whole world? Why is that?

Aimen: Well, I'll answer this from a corporate mindset. I would say it's the brand first because it's clever. It's a Muslim and brotherhood. And after abolishing the office of the caliphate, which by then it was completely symbolic, irrelevant, and powerless, and just ceremonial.

Yet the symbolism in having a caliph more or less was not lost on many other Muslims because there was an attempt to reestablish the caliphate in the Hejaz in 1925 unsuccessfully by the Sharifs before they were chased out of the Hejaz by-

Thomas: As we discussed last season. Absolutely.

Aimen: Yeah. By King Abdulaziz, the founding king of Saudi Arabia. So, the khulafā was just gone, the caliph it was gone. So, they wanted to emulate it. So, remember, it's the word brotherhood and the word Muslim. Therefore, the brand itself is signifying a pan-Islamic solidarity, Muslim and brotherhood.

Thomas: I'm raising my finger as I sometimes to telling Aimen. Save it for later, because this is leaning back into ideology. Let's talk about the organisation.

Now, it started in Egypt. It started out of a kind of context of achieving Egyptian independence from the British, while at the same time calling for the reestablishment of the recently abolished caliphate, which gave it automatically a pan-Islamic dimension as well, which then resonated strongly with Muslims elsewhere, who were also largely trying to throw off colonial domination at the time, and also wanted to reestablish the caliphate in many instances.

So, this strange mixture, it's a kind of mixture of nationalism, pan-Islamic solidarity, anti-colonialism. It's a mixture allied with Salafism, with this idea that modern Islam has somehow gone astray. And we must look to the sources of the religion to renew it, to purify it.

It's a mixture. And this mixture, this powerful mixture was definitely bound to clash with the prevailing form of state organisation in the modern era, the nation state.

So, what would you say, and be honest now in terms of its organisational structure, what is the Muslim brotherhoods relationship with the nation state? It does often work cooperatively with established nation states.

Aimen: Of course, they have to because it's means to an end. The Muslim brotherhood structure, at least in Egypt at the beginning, was really looking like a government in waiting, ready to supplant the existing government and to take over the government of Egypt.

They had intelligence, they had paramilitary, they had a powerful educational and welfare programs, absolutely. They were a state within a state.

So, when they finally take over, let's say in Egypt, they would look at supporting the other chapters in other Arab countries with the aim of establishing the same structure that would take over the governance of these countries, with the aim in the future to have the communist equivalent of the superstructure, the pan-socialist, pan-communist.

But of course, here we are talking about pan-Islamist dream of reestablishing the caliphate because that's the only way you can do it.

Thomas: Okay, I hear you. It makes sense to me. And by invoking the spectra of communism, you're resurrecting ghosts, like wicked ghosts from the past, ah, communism.

But to play devil's advocate, how is the Muslim Brotherhood's ambitions in that regard, different from the ambitions of liberals? So, liberals have organised in different nation states have created within those states, organisations, chapters, groups, cooperative organisations.

They've reached out through business partners and in the charity sector to build up para state organisations seeking to expand the frontiers of liberalism globally. They have established massive institutions like the United Nations, but even more so like the World Trade Organization to expand the dictates of liberalism everywhere.

And let's say in Europe, so like the European Union is very much that thing, the nation states are there, and yet within the nation states, the European Commission embeds technocrats loyal to it, to kind of transform those states from within that they would conform their legislation and their constitutions to the European union's vision of a liberal capitalist paradise.

So, how is the Muslim brotherhood different from that, from the liberal attempt to create a globalised liberal free market world?

Aimen: There are a lot of similarities, but also there are a lot of differences. Everything you said can truly apply to the Muslim Brotherhood in terms of their methodology of how to achieve power in order to preach their vision of what the Muslim world should be.

But also at the same time, don't forget that from their point of view, unlike the liberals, their aim, and the goal is first the individual, second, the family, third, the society, fourth, the government, and the fifth, the whole Ummah. So, these are the five steps towards that. So, first you have-

Thomas: Well, you've missed six and seven, which ends with the world.

Aimen: Exactly. There will be the mastery of the world. And I will come to that in the ideology one when we talk about-

Thomas: Okay Aimen, forgive me, I'm going to interrupt you, but it still doesn't sound that different. I mean, don't liberals take control of the education systems? And first they turn individuals liberal through pumping them TV shows and pop music and they read magazines that are all about spreading the virtues of radical liberalism.

And that through that reason, the children put pressure on the families and the families become liberal, and then the neighbourhoods become liberal, and then they vote for liberal political parties. And how is it different?

Aimen: It is similar, extremely similar, yet it is extremely different because liberalism is in the end about liberalism, and the ultimate aim is to achieve that liberal utopia.

For the Muslim Brotherhood is about power in order to impose what they see as Islamic conservative utopia.

But the difference is the Muslim Brotherhood is completely against the nation state. They want to abolish the nation state completely. While liberalism still at least on the face of it, does not want to unite countries in terms of dissolving completely the national identities of everyone and joining them in one complete superstructure. Come to think of it actually-

Thomas: Yeah, I have some Brexiteer friends, Aimen, who would disagree with you about certain institutions.

Aimen: Actually, now I'm talking, and I started to feel like, hey what am I talking about? I mean, actually liberalism does seek that too.

Thomas: I mean, so the truth is it does come down to ideology in the end, and we will get there, dear listener.

Aimen: It just hit me.

Thomas: Aimen and I are going to talk about it. So, the question is, eventually it'll come down to Islamism versus liberalism, which is a kind of subsection of right wing versus left-wing.

Anyway, we'll get there. Let's take a break and when we get back, we'll continue to discuss and debate the Muslim Brotherhood and describe the way it functions in the real world. Stay with us.

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We're back. We're talking about the Muslim Brotherhood, and I achieved a great ambition. I got Aimen Dean to admit that maybe there's something similar between the ambition of liberal globalists that dominate the world economy today and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Aimen: Absolutely. I think this is why lots of liberals have some sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood. I mean, they see-

Thomas: That's funny. That's true. They do.

Aimen: Themselves in the mirror.

Thomas: That's true. How interesting. I said at the beginning that it's difficult to wrap your head around the Muslim Brotherhood because it's so complex. So many chapters, so many different tendencies within it, et cetera.

But there's another reason and maybe an even bigger reason for why it's so difficult to understand the Muslim Brotherhood. And that's because at heart, the Muslim Brotherhood is a clandestine organisation. It possesses an essential secretiveness that means you never know for sure whether you can trust anything it says about itself.

It's a big problem. It's certainly the reason why there are so many conspiracy theories about it. A lot of people do talk about the Muslim Brotherhood like they're in a cave somewhere, for example, the way right-wing antisemites will talk about the Jews controlling the world, living in a cave somewhere in Switzerland, drinking the blood of children, babies, and controlling the world through machines.

People sometimes talk about the Muslim Brotherhood like that. And though obviously that's not accurate, the secretiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood does lend itself to that kind of paranoid interpretation, right?

Aimen: Well, yes, in a sense, because they are a clandestine organisation. And when I remember someone told me “Yes, Aimen, but they became clandestine because of the repression by multiple governments against them, especially Nasser.”

Thomas: Which is true. The Muslim Brotherhood has been at the receiving end of much repression from Egypt, Syria, Yemen at times, you name it.

Aimen: And yet Thomas, they established their secretive apparatus in the 1940s, a decade before any oppression would really reign upon them.

Thomas: Yes, you're right. The thing Aimen, why can't the Muslim Brotherhood just be a political party? Why can't it be like say the British Labor Party, a more or less transparent organisation with more or less transparent aims, subject to scrutiny by journalists and having membership that vote openly on the political party's platform.

Why can't it be like that? Because it's not like that. There is no political party anywhere called the Muslim Brotherhood. In each country that the Muslim Brotherhood operates, to the extent that that country involves any party politics at all, the Muslim Brotherhood will form as a separate organisation, a political party, or more than one political party to advocate its ambitions politically.

But the organisation itself is never and not a political party. Why can't it just be a political party?

Aimen: Because it's resembles more an order than a party. It feels to me sometime as if they are mirroring the Masonic lodges where you have the grandmaster, the murshid and then you have the Masonic Brotherhood all over the place.

They come from different parties, they can advocate for national or local interests, but in the end, they are all working towards one aim and one goal.

Thomas: The Freemasons. Aimen, you're brilliant. And you know why you're brilliant? Because it further justifies my belief that the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood are quite similar to the aims of global liberalism because that's what the Freemasons were.

They are a chief engine for the liberalisation of the world through this secret organisation that created networks across borders and worked with politics, when necessary, but also didn't, and were often brutally repressed by authoritarian governments like the Czar in Russia. Isn't that interesting?

Aimen: Exactly. And also, because don't forget that the Muslim Brotherhood, they have a system and they have their own meeting rituals. They have their own organisational structure, which-

Thomas: Initiation as well. You have to work hard to be initiated through some kind of secret. I think there's secret rituals, as you say, involved because Hassan al-Banna had come to some extent from a Sufi background, and there's a slight Sufi element in the Muslim Brotherhood in that regard involving rituals and chains of initiation of ever increasing sort of authority over everyone.

Aimen: Exactly, a pyramid. Again, we come back to that symbol from Egypt. There is a pyramid where the top of the pyramid, you have al murshid the grand master of the order of the Muslim Brotherhood. And then you have all the council below him, and then the Shura, and then you have the young masters, the teachers, the engineers, the lawyers, the judges, the army offices.

So, you have actually a pyramid shaped organisation just like the Freemasons. However, while the Freemasons are trying to establish, for example, or at least to make it easy for the establishment of a liberal order around the world, the Muslim Brotherhood is looking for a pious religious Islamic order based on the caliphate system within the Muslim world.

Thomas: You mentioned the murshid, the supreme guide who lives in Cairo, let us say. And if we're talking about rituals, one key ritual around the murshid, around the Supreme Guide is the swearing of allegiance to him. Why don't you tell us more about that? Because it's another one of these slightly secretive aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood that does make people uneasy. Let us say.

Aimen: First of all, all members of the Muslim Brotherhood at rank and above must swear an oath of allegiance to the al murshid al am, whether they are in Pakistan or in Morocco, whether they are in Turkey or in Bosnia, or in Albania or in Somalia

Thomas: Or in London.

Aimen: Or in London or in Houston, Texas. It doesn't matter. The reality is that they must swear an allegiance to al murshid because I remember a hymn, I used to sing when I was young, it talks about the 10 pillars of the allegiance. It's called the 10 Pillars of the Allegiance, which contains many things like jihad, patience, honesty, loyalty, understanding, sincerity.

So, there are 10, these are the 10 pillars of the bay’ah. I remember the nasheed exactly when I used to sing it when I was young, [Speaking Foreign language] these brother, are the pillars of our bay’ah, that our Imam, our murshid, has called upon us to swear.

Thomas: I think you told us about this before in a previous episode, but I can't remember why in God's name were you chanting a Muslim Brotherhood hymn? Were you a member of the Muslim Brotherhood as a child?

Aimen: No, but some of my teachers were.

Thomas: And they were trying to influence you in this way.

Aimen: Not only me, everyone around me. So, the Muslim Brotherhood were very strong in Saudi Arabia in terms of their organisation of something called Al Jawala. In fact, they have infiltrated several universities in Saudi Arabia, including the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. They had a chapter there called Al Jawala.

And they have infiltrated also the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Al Jawala means the Boy Scouts, but at the university level, they infiltrated the education system in Saudi Arabia quite successfully.

And they were in particular good at organising desert outings, trips to the mountains, boy scout stuff like, and absolutely, and this is how it all started.

Thomas: Yeah, maybe like the Boy Scouts, that other clandestine organisation that is spreading godless liberalism across the planet.

Aimen: Goodness, you and the Boy Scouts. But in fact, one of those actually who was a member of the Jawala in King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals would become later a minister of the cabinet in Saudi Arabia. This, just to show you the level of infiltration, his name was Saad al-Jabri, who would later-

Thomas: We’re going to talk about him next episode, yeah, Saad al-Jabri.

Aimen: Exactly. So, actually the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into each society, whether it is in the UAE at some point in the past, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia.

I mean, just look at Turkey, look at Morocco. For a while there was a government run by the Muslim Brotherhood in Morocco. There is a government run by the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey for the past 20 years.

Thomas: Oh, now you're really giving the game away because this whole series on the Muslim Brotherhood is setting up a series on President Erdogan of Turkey and his political party, we're trying to lay the foundations for understanding President Erdogan. That's really what this is all about.

So, I'm glad you mentioned it, but I want to stick with not Saudi Arabia specifically, but I'm glad you brought up Saudi Arabia because it reminds us that the Muslim world all divided now into modern nation states, more or less functional can be divided into two types, the republics like Egypt, and of course the monarchies.

And you're always talking about how the monarchies in the Arab world, the monarchies in the Muslim world, are more stable and more effective means of transforming their societies in accordance with modern ways.

And in fact, the Muslim Brotherhood has an interesting relationship with the monarchies. It has tended to succeed more in monarchical states like Morocco, for example, where under the influence, I suppose, of the good governance of monarchies.

The Muslim Brotherhood has tended to adopt more pragmatic down to earth moderate means than in the places the republics like Egypt, where they were so violently repressed and suffered so much deprivation and imprisonment and torture and execution, that they tended to be more radical there.

So, what is this thing that the Muslim Brotherhood is more moderate in monarchies, and yet the Muslim Brotherhood is not pro monarchy, is it?

Aimen: Yeah. I mean, there is this contradiction because again, we come back to the means and ends. So, within the means, they are more than happy to work under a monarchy in order to prove themselves to be competent at governing.

So, for example, in Morocco, they were happy to contest elections under the king of Morocco, and they had the prime ministerial ship. They had the majority of the cabinet positions, and they did fairly well.

Thomas: Yeah, just to give the listener an idea of the history here, Morocco has its own fascinating history. I swear one day we will do an episode or two on it. It's a magnificent country.

And because it is a monarchy and it has its kind of own flavour of Islam, a kind of Moroccan Islam that is tied to the monarchy and the monarch’s descent from the prophet. And there's a lot of Sufi movements in Morocco. Morocco has its own thing going. A very attractive thing if you ask me.

But it's politics, maybe because it was for some time a French protectorate are very complicated. But throughout that complicated political sort of chaos in the 1998, a political party emerged, the Justice and Development Party, which reminds me of another party maybe in Turkey. Anyway, the Justice and Development Party that eventually did achieve power there and ran the government for a while.

Aimen: Indeed. And you see the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, the monarchies was okay for a while, for a reason, because no matter what, the king acted as a ceiling against the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood to have a total governance.

And in fact, the king in Morocco played a very good moderating role on the Muslim Brotherhood governing and governance style in Morocco. That mix succeeded.

And in fact, when it was time for them to concede defeat in elections, they did so because why? They have no other choice. The king is the supreme commander of the armed forces, whether they like it or not, if they lose an election, they should hand over peacefully that power, and they did.

Thomas: So, for that reason, the Muslim Brotherhood finds it less easy to contest power against monarchs because monarchs rise above ideology. Whereas in an ideological state like Nasser's Egypt, they were confronting a rival ideology that was in inimical to their own. So, they must fight it.

Aimen: Actually, Thomas, when in 1936, Hassan al-Banna travelled to Saudi Arabia, the newly established kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and there he met King Abdulaziz during the Hajj season.

And there he actually asked King Abdulaziz to establish a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, an office. So, King Abdulaziz looked at him rather bewildered and he said, “But Sheikh Hassan, we're all Muslim brothers here.”

And that's when al-Banna decided not to basically encroach on Saudi Arabia at that time. But just to show you that a monarchy behave in a very different way. It wasn't ideological. It's like, it's obvious, aren't we all Muslim brothers? The same thing will be answered by every single monarch in the Arab world.

Thomas: But because the monarchies of the Arab world are themselves based on a very complicated system of bay’ah, where the individual swears allegiance to his clan leader who swears allegiance to a sheikh of a subtribe who swears allegiance to a tribe, all the way up to the monarch, I can imagine that the monarchs of the Muslim world find the bay’ah system within the Muslim Brotherhood very problematic.

Because if you come to me even as the leader of a political party that is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and you've been elected to run the government, and you go to the king and you say, yes, I swear allegiance to you to govern, to head up your government according to the law of the land, et cetera, et cetera, I swear allegiance to you.

The monarch's going to be thinking, well, you also swore allegiance to this murshid guy in Cairo, whose allegiance is your priority?

Aimen: Exactly. And in fact, the later clash between the Arab monarchies and the Muslim Brotherhood would be primarily upon this question of who do you serve?

Thomas: Yes, we're going to talk about that in the next episode. But having talked about the monarchies, let's go back to talk about the republics. Syria is a very prototypical case of the Muslim Brotherhood clashing with Republican government in a country.

It was established there in the 40s, 1945, 1946, several Islamist activist groups that were already there inspired by Hassan al-Banna merged to form an official Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And initially they had great success in politics there. It was a different environment from the environment of Egypt. And in 1949, they were already sending members to Parliament in Damascus.

But then listeners from last season will remember that the 50s and 60s in Syria were incredibly chaotic. All political parties went through periods of being banned as dictatorship emerged in the country, and then they were brought back in when dictatorship went down.

And then eventually the Baʿth Party came to power, and the Muslim Brotherhood would really clash with the Baʿth Party. And throughout the 70s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, as a result of the oppression from the secular, you know nationalist Baʿth Party became extremely radicalised.

And this led in 1982 to the notorious Hama Massacre when tens of thousands of Muslim brothers were surrounded by Syrian forces, and Hama was absolutely destroyed over a series of some months, I think.

This Hama Massacre really kind of redons into the present in the memory of the Muslim brothers.

Aimen: Again, we come back to the question, the Muslim Brotherhood set up themselves as the champions of what I would describe as Islamic flavoured democracy.

Thomas: Yeah, eventually there was a great debate within the Muslim Brotherhood about whether they should participate in democratic politics or not.

But on the whole, in the end, by the 1980s for sure, most chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood had agreed that participating in democracy was not in itself against the Sharia.

Aimen: And this opened the flood to the participation in elections, even in Egypt during the Mubarak era under different parties and even in Turkey, which banned religious parties, several parties were established winning some seats, then being dissolved and winning seats again, then being dissolved in a game of cat and mouse with the secular authorities in Turkey.

The story of the Muslim Brotherhood chapters in many different countries is littered with failures and successes, with tragedies, with triumphs, with ups and downs. I mean, it's a rollercoaster.

Thomas: Like any political movement, honestly.

Aimen: Yes. They were championing what they advocated as an Islamic flavoured democracy, as Rached Ghannouchi himself, the leader of Ennahda Party, the Muslim Brotherhood Party in Tunisia once said in a lecture I attended actually in 1999 in London, where he said that democracy is originally an Islamic idea, and we must reclaim it. That's what he said. And so, reclaim it he did.

Thomas: But a lot of radical Muslim brothers and other groups outside the Muslim Brotherhood really, really disagreed with him when he said that.

Aimen: Oh, of course. I remember even jihadist clerics such as Abu Qatada in London made takfir against him, excommunicated him straight away.

Thomas: Because the real hardliners say democracy and Islam are polar opposites. There is no democracy in Islam. But the Muslim Brotherhood largely disagrees with that and says, no, no, there is scope for democracy in Islam, in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Aimen: Yeah. But it has to be a Islamically flavoured. But again, we come back to what do they really want and what do they mean?

Thomas: Yes, exactly. We come back to what do they really want. So, speaking again organizationally, let's imagine that the Muslim Brotherhood achieves its goal of erecting a global caliphate. I mean, it's impossible to imagine this happening but if they did it, what would that regime be like, Aimen?

Aimen: I don't have to imagine it. In fact, I will let one of their leading thinkers and statesmen actually of the Muslim Brotherhood answer this question. It is none other than Hassan Al-Turabi.

Thomas: The Sudanese ideologue and politician.

Aimen: Exactly. He is the one who was the real puppet master at the beginning behind the coup led by General Omar al-Bashir in Sudan in 1989. And all the way until the late 1990s, he was the puppet master. And of course, the puppet was Omar al-Bashir.

Thomas: And a member of the Muslim Brotherhood that is undoubted.

Aimen: Yes. Yeah, absolutely Hassan Al-Turabi is a Muslim Brotherhood through and through. He's the one who invited to Osama Bin Laden to come from Afghanistan to Sudan, to shelter him in the early 1990s. He sheltered the Egyptian Islamic jihad in the 1990s in Sudan and many other different unsavoury jihadist groups.

So, Hassan Al-Turabi, I was listening to a lecture on a cassette of his, ironically, when I was in Azerbaijan of all places in 1996, just after I left Bosnia. And I was in Baku, and I was listening to that lecture where he talks about the vision for a caliphate, what would a caliphate look like under the new order of a Muslim Brotherhood, reaching the power, whether by force or by elections or by peace or by consensus in different Muslim countries and uniting them together.

So, there will be a meeting of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders, he called them the people of authority. So, people who speak in authority on behalf of Islam. He meant the real leaders of the various different chapters and Muslim Brotherhood organisations.

They would elect from among them a khalifa, a caliph. And under the caliph there will be the council of ministers and of course the council of governors of the different states.

And then under that would be a 314 member Shura council. This Shura council would be in the future, responsible for the election of a new caliph every time there is the need to do so, whether by death or incapacitation or deposition. So, it sounds like China, Ismalist.

Thomas: I was going to think that it's like there's a people's Congress and also Soviet Union like a bureau headed up by the general secretary, but yet, presumably then just like in Communist China, there will be like caliphate offices in every major city.

And then in order to be a teacher, say, you have to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and then be authorised by the party, let us call it the party, to be a teacher or to be a banker.

And then the Muslim Brotherhood will just achieve power like that, like the Communist party of China operates.

Well, I think that is where we'll bring this episode to a close. Aimen, I hope we did the Muslim Brotherhood justice, as I said at the outset, dear listener, it's a complicated organisation, quite secretive in many respects.

We've ended up with an imagined but quite realistic depiction of a global caliphate, as the Muslim Brotherhood would wish to erect and saw that in its structures at least it's quite totalitarian a bit like Communist China.

But whereas Communist China has been pursuing in various guises, a radical leftist Marxist inflicted ideological path, the question remains, what is the ideological path and the ideological ambition of the Muslim Brotherhood?

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Is it as radical as people say? Could it justifiably be considered a moderate response to the challenges of modernity, to the challenges of an Islamic world that was somewhat conquered by European states that threw off those states that were then influenced by radical left-wing, radical right-wing movements of a secular nature?

Is the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology possibly a moderate response to all of those challenges? That's what we will try to discuss and perhaps reach some consensus about in the next episode of Conflicted. Stay tuned for that.

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.