Continuing on the path of Qutb: Dr Mohamed Badei, the new Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood?

Just when it looked like the war between the so-called "conservatives" and the "reformists" over the next phase of the Muslim Brotherhood was coming to a close, it heats up again.

The Brotherhood was scheduled to announce the successor to Supreme Guide Mohammad Mahdi Akef, but that has been postponed until the weekend. The Cairo-based English-language weekly Al-Ahram explains:

"Three members of the group's conservative wing -- Mohamed Badei, Rashad El-Bayoumi and Gomaa Amin -- competed for the post.

Sources say Badei is most likely to become the next supreme guide, having won 66 out of total 100 possible votes on the group's Shura Council. His seemingly clear cut victory has been undermined by the support El-Bayoumi, 75, secured from the group's international affiliates."

According to the independent Egyptian daily Al Sharouk:

"Objections raised by what is called the "Global Shura Council" to choosing Mohamed Badei as the 8th Supreme Guide (and the de facto Supreme Guide for Muslim Brotherhood Movement worldwide), forced the Movement to reschedule the press conference to announce the name of the new Guide to take place on Sunday instead of yesterday.

…

According to well-informed sources, Mohammad Mahdi Akef is trying to convince the members of 'Global Shura Council,' gathering in Beirut now, to accept the nomination of Badei for the sake of protecting the reputation of the Muslim Brotherhood and its cohesion."

This leaves the Brotherhood in a potentially tricky spot. Akef technically is no longer the Supreme Guide. Mohammad Habib, a reformist and the former first deputy, has resigned and Kharait al Shater, the second deputy, is in jail due to one of the Egyptian government's frequent crackdowns on the Brotherhood.

As we previously reported, reformists were routed a few weeks ago when the Brotherhood announced the new members of its guidance bureau – the group's main governing body. Through questionable gaming of the election process by outgoing Supreme Guide Mohammad Mahdi Akef, Mahmoud Ezzat and hardliner allies ensured the reformists were virtually squeezed out of the movement's leadership. Hence, Habib resigned, calling it "selection rather than election." One reformist Brotherhood member has been protesting the results on his blog. He states:

"I can't accept Sayed Qutb's ideology in Muslim Brotherhood, and it's clear that the new office will adopt the Qutbic Ideology, most of the office members were arrested with Sayyed Qutb in 1965."

Qutb was a highly influential Brotherhood intellectual executed by the Egyptian regime in 1966. His two most prominent works, Milestones and In the Shade of the Quran, inspired a new generation of jihadists, including Osama bin Laden, who was taught by Qutb's brother Mohammad at a university in Saudi Arabia.

Qutb saw the Muslim world as having descended into jahilliyya, or pre-Islamic ignorance. Qutb called on Muslims to wage jihad to "liberate" the entire world from the servitude of man-made laws, which would be replaced by Shariah.

If Akef is successful in his lobbying efforts and Mohammad Badei becomes Supreme Guide, the next phase of the Brotherhood's history will likely be defined by Qutb's ideas and deepening fundamentalism. Badei has held prominent positions in the past on the guidance bureau and in two Brotherhood-dominated professional associations. Some have tried to paint Badei as a consensus candidate who is widely liked in the movement. However, he makes it clear where his influences lie. An article posted on the Brotherhood's English-language website notes that Badei "has been said to follow the conservative ideals of the late Sayed Qutb" whom he defends as a reformer rather than a hardliner. Badei is seen as "one of the most loyal leaders to the organization of Sayyid Qutb," according to the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayah.

In an interview last November with Al Youm Al Sabi'e, Badei was stalwart in his opposition to the idea of a woman or a Copt assuming the presidency of Egypt, basing his decisions strictly and solely on Islamic law. When asked about a woman becoming president, he replies, "[O]ur Fiqh [jurisprudence] choice is that women are not suited to lead the state." On Copts, Badei cites "a Prophetic Hadith which forbids a man from outside the faith from assuming the leadership of the state." When asked if such logic results in a religious state, Baddee explains:

"We are a Muslim state, not a religious one. The leader undertakes a religious burden alongside his leadership like the Messenger (may God bless him and grant him peace) did in the first Muslim state, being the leader of the state and the executer of legal rules; and he led the army."

The interviewer then asks if the people have the right to choose what they want. Badei's answer is chilling to those of us who believe in freedoms of speech, religion, association and other central tenets of democracy: "If the people choose something against the Sharia, it is not proper to implement it. If there is a conflict with the Sharia, it must not be put into force."

But what else can we expect from someone who was imprisoned with Sayyid Qutb? According to Al-Hayah:

"The new general guide was sentenced in a number of cases, the most famous of which was a 15-year imprisonment in 1965 in the military case that included among the sentenced the fundamentalist leader Sayyid Qutb; Badi spent 9 years in prison on the basis of that sentence…"

The now-overwhelming influence of hardliners among the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood will ensure the movement will remain – at its core – strictly committed to establishing an Islamic state with Shariah as the law of the land. Past advocates for the Brotherhood who view it as a "moderate" organization that can serve as a bridge between the West and the Muslim world and a counterbalance to al Qaeda may want to rethink their views.

IPT

Sayyid Qutb and the Virginia Five – by Robert Spencer

When five young Muslims from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan for trying to join jihadist groups, the local Muslim community professed to be puzzled as to how it could have happened.

Ashraf Nubani, an attorney for the mosque the five attended, said of their relatives and fellow worshippers: “There’s shock and disbelief in these families and in this mosque.”

Mahdi Bray of the Falls Church-based Muslim American Society, sounded a plaintive note: “We want to know: What did we miss? We saw these kids every day. In hindsight, what could we have done?”

If Mahdi Bray saw these young men daily, that might have been a clue right there as to what went wrong. For the Muslim American Society (MAS) is the American arm of the international Islamic supremacist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, the forefather of Al-Qaeda and Hamas.

A captured internal Brotherhood document says that the Brotherhood’s mission in the U.S. is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

And according to a 2004 Chicago Tribune expose of Brotherhood activity in the U.S., “to be an ‘active’ member” of the Muslim American Society, “–the highest membership class–one must complete five years of Muslim community service and education, which includes studying writings by Brotherhood ideologues al-Banna and Qutb.” These are the Muslim Brotherhood’s two great theorists, its founder Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, “the father of modern [Islamic] fundamentalism.”

Of these, Qutb is the more influential today. His writings can be found easily in Islamic bookstores in the U.S. And Americans, particularly law enforcement officials, should know what’s in them.

Sayyid Qutb actually lived in the United States from November 1948 to August 1950, and wrote about his experiences in revealing ways. While hospitalized for a respiratory ailment in Washington, D.C., in February 1949, he heard of the assassination of al-Banna, an event which, he later claimed implausibly, set the hospital staff to open rejoicing.

His disgust with the gaudy materialism of postwar America was intense. He wrote to an Egyptian friend of his loneliness: “How much do I need someone to talk to about topics other than money, movie stars and car models.”

Moving to Greeley, Colorado, he was impressed by the number of churches in the city, but not with the piety they engendered: “Nobody goes to church as often as Americans do. . . . Yet no one is as distant as they are from the spiritual aspect of religion.” He was thoroughly scandalized by a dance after an evening service at a local church: “The dancing intensified. . . . The hall swarmed with legs . . . Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.”

The pastor further scandalized Qutb by dimming the lights, creating “a romantic, dreamy effect,” and playing a popular record of the day: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He regarded American popular music in general with a gimlet eye: “Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.”

More at FPM

The Threat Of Political Islam

By Sadia Dehlvi

The trail of terror continues with cricketers as the latest target. The Mumbai and Lahore attacks, public executions and the murder of over a thousand civilians in the Swat valley by Taliban style terrorists are horrifying examples of atrocities committed by militant groups thriving on political Islam. Global Muslim communities require urgent measures in condemning the agenda of political Islam that distorts religious scriptures to legitimise violence. This ideology of Islamism is threatening to replace a moderate and spiritual Islam, leading to the destruction of society, particularly oppressing women and minorities.

Muslims have a moral responsibility to engage in the social, political and economic development of the societies they live in. Global Muslim societies would do well in following the exceptional efforts of the Indian clerics in denouncing terrorism and de linking it with Islam. Sincere moral outrage needs to be expressed at Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, political kidnappings and assassinations, militancy in Kashmir, Shia Sunni killings in Iraq and Pakistan, fatwas that condone suicide bombings in the Israel Palestine conflict and other such atrocities that effect innocent lives. Muslims require the consensus of the international in combating extremism but our credibility is lost when we demonstrate selective outrage as in the aftermath of the Danish cartoons.

Political Islam draws its lifeblood from the ideology of fighting the oppressor, but has clearly become the oppressor.

Even though some Islamist groups have renounced violence and accepted the principles of democracy, marginally improved their stand on women and minority rights, they remain socially conservative. In Jordan, the Islamist party does not support the rights of women to file for divorce. In Kuwait the Islamists fought against the right of women to vote. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood will not allow a woman or a person from a minority community to become head of state. Unfortunately, militant Islamist groups thrive in the political vacuum created by oppressive regimes in most Islamic countries.

Muslims must stop blaming the problem of extremism on catastrophic foreign policies for two wrongs simply do not make a right. Islamism is primarily a Muslim problem, threatening both Muslim and non- Muslim societies. We need to acknowledge there is a problem of theology when extremists talk of going straight to heaven after taking innocent lives.

The roots of all modern militant Islamic movements can be traced to one man called Abdul Wahab from Nejd in the Arabian Peninsula. He set out to ‘purify’ Islam, believing that Muslims had drifted away from true religion. Wahab’s followers destroyed many sacred sites he considered idols. Attacking the arts for being frivolous and dangerous, Wahab sanctioned the rape; murder and plunder of those who refused to follow his injunctions. He was considered a heretic by most, for Makkah and Madinah were then centres of contemplative Islam, inhabited by Sufis from all over the world.

In 1774-5 Wahab negotiated a deal with the then nomadic tribe of Saud, forebears of the current royal family in exchange for support in their quest for political domination. Most Saudi’s reject the name Wahabbi; they either call themselves Muwahuddin- Unitarians- or Salafi, refering to salaf, the venerated companions of the Prophet. In this blinkered view, no other version of religious truth can exist. This new face of Islam has nothing to do with Sufis, music, poetry, miracles or the countless devotional customs of Muslim cultures across the world.

Under the patronage of the Saudi Arabia, Wahabism went from strength to strength. Abul Ala Mawdudi, a journalist who translated the Quran outside the paradigms of classical propagated the Wahabi ideology. He founded the political party Jamaat e Islami in Pakistan, making jihad central to Islamic discourse. Addressing non-Muslims as infidels, he grouped Muslims into ‘partial’ and ‘true’ Muslims. Mawdudi’s ideas of Islam as a revolutionary doctrine to take over governments and overturn the whole universal order deeply influenced Syed Qutub of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. These groups have been motivated by political upheavals and the rejection of traditional scholars. Syed Qutub’s brother happened to be among the teachers of Osama bin Laden.

The extremism now found in Makkah and Madinah, the heartland of Islam, is the Wahabi ideology that the Saudis have spent millions in promoting through their outreach programs. There is no tolerance for Shias, Sunni Sufis or other Muslim traditions, leave alone non -Muslims. Unfortunately, there is no collective Muslim protest against the Saudi regime for bulldozing graveyards, destroying cultural and religious heritage in the holy cities, imposing a certain sexual segregation of the sexes inside the Prophets mosque at Madinah, radical sermons, or the distribution of radical literature outside Saudi mosques, many of them issuing calls for death to whoever they view as infidels or innovators of Islam. The problem of Muslim extremism began in the Muslim world and the responsibility of resolving it lies with us.

The inability to present a picture of Islam as a peaceful religion is a collective failure of global Muslim communities. We could begin with increasing the decibel in condemning violence, sectarianism, standing up for the rights of women, stop demonising the other as kufaar (infidels) and show increased support for democratic movements in Muslim countries. It is time for the devout, silent peace-loving Muslim majority to speak for Islam. Let us become louder than the radical voices that claim to represent us.

Sadia Dehlvi is a Delhi based writer and author of the forthcoming book, “Sufism: The Heart of Islam” published by HarperCollins India.

Source: Indian Muslims