About the Muslim Brotherhood

"... That fleeing of Muslim Brotherhood members – people who had been radicalized by Qutb, the Mufti and Nazi ideology – and the consequent spreading of their message, is something that the world is still living with.

According to that same BBC article, “Qutb and (Pakistan’s Syed Abul Ala Maududi) inspired a whole generation of Islamists, including Ayatollah Khomeini, who developed a Persian version of their works in the 1970s.

Author and journalist Robert Dreyfuss also claims that the groundwork for the Ayatollah Khomeini was done by an Iranian by the name of Ali Shariat who was influenced by the Brotherhood.

As a sidenote, with respect to Hezbollah, it is widely reported that the organization got its beginnings in Iran. That is an oversimplification.

“The origins of Shi'i Islamism in Lebanon go back not to Iran, as is commonly thought, but to Iraq in the 1960s where a Shi'i religio-political revival took place in the "circles of learning" (hawzat al-'ilmiya) in Najaf, led by the charismatic Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr,” according to an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs - Sept. 1997.

“Hezbollah represented a militant, nonsecular alternative to the Nasserite Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups that took their bearing from Pan-Arabism rather than Islam. Hezbollah split the Shiite community in Lebanon -- which was against Sunnis and Christians -- but most of all, engaged the Israelis. It made a powerful claim that the Palestinian movement had no future while it remained fundamentally secular and while its religious alternatives derived from the conservative Arab monarchies.” (22)

Iran’s importance only became more noted upon the death of Sadr, and the success of the Iranian Revolution led by Khomeini. By 1984, Iran was financing around 90 percent of Hezbollah’s social works in Lebanon.

As it stands now, Hezbollah “subscribes to Khomeini's theory that a religious jurist (wilayat al-faqih) should hold ultimate political power. The authority of this jurist, both spiritual and political, may not be challenged; he must be obeyed. Hezbullah sees itself fulfilling the messianic role of turning Lebanon into a province of Islam. In its "open letter" of February 1985, Hizbullah declared that Muslims must "abide by the orders of the sole wise and just command represented by the supreme jurisconsult, who is presently incarnate in the imam_Ayatollah Khomeini. It also called for a battle with vice, meaning foremost the United States, and for the destruction of Israel to make way for Palestine,” according to that same Middle East Review of International Affairs article.

Eventually, says Loftus the control of the Muslim Brotherhood passed to the United States and the CIA - or its earlier form – as a counterweight for Arab Communists.

But this still doesn't explain how we get the current form of Islam Fascists. For that one needs to remember that after Nasser expelled the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt many of them went to Saudi Arabia.

According to Loftus, "during the 1950s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. Now, when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood, like (Dr Abdullah) Azzam, became the teachers in the madrassas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabism.”

“Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam—the Saudi version of Islam—is typical, but it's not. The Wahhabi cult has been condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. Wahhabism was only practised by the Taliban and in Saudi Arabia—that's how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.” (23)

Interestingly, according to a Wikipedia entry on Wahhabism, Al-Banna, is said to have been influenced by the Wahhabis. “The Muslim Brotherhood also claimed to be purifying and restoring original Islam. When the Muslim Brotherhood was banned in various Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia gave refuge to Brotherhood exiles. This seems to have set the stage for a mingling of Brotherhood and Wahhabi thought under the aegis of the term Salafism. Rebels against the Saudi state found justification in the thought of Sayyed Qutb, a member of the Brotherhood who spent years in Egyptian jails. Some Wahhabis, or Salafis, rejected what they call Qutbism, as a deviation from true Salafism. Thus there is now a considerable spectrum of religious opinion within Saudi Wahhabism/Salafism, to a great extent divided on the question of whether the Saudi state is to be supported, endured patiently, or violently opposed. The modern day Salafis, deny that Hassan al-Banna or Sayid Qutb were followers of the Salaf, since they upheld the view that it is allowed to overthrow the Muslim leader, and to make "Takfeer" (the act of placing a Muslim out of the fold of Islam, making him a disbeliever) on him based on Major Sins. (24)

To this last point, Trevor Stanley also writes that today there are "a profusion of self-proclaimed Salafi groups," where each accuses "the others of deviating from 'true' Salafism."

Stanley notes that "Since the 1970s, the Saudis have wisely stopped funding those Salafis that excommunicate nominally Muslim governments (or at least the Saudi government), condemning al-Qaeda as ‘the deviant sect’. The pro-Saudis correctly trace al-Qaeda’s ideological roots to Qutb and al-Banna. Less accurately, they accuse these groups of insidiously 'entering' Salafism. In fact, Salafism was imported into Saudi Arabia in its Ikhwani and Qutbist forms. This does not mean that the pro-Saudi Salafis are necessarily benign - for example, Abu Mu'aadh as-Salafee’s main criticism of Qutb and Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna is that they claim Islam teaches tolerance of Jews." (25)

Meanwhile, non-Muslims and mainstream Muslims alike use the ‘Wahhabi-Salafi’ label to denigrate Salafis and even completely unrelated groups such as the Taliban, adds Stanley.

It was in the Saudi Arabian madrassas, or schools, of Abdullah Azzam that Nazi Fascism with religious extremism were married.

And in one of those madrassas, the student Osama bin Laden studied.

"Should it further surprise us that Osama bin Laden accuses 'the Jews" of "holding America and the West hostage' given the fact, that the founder of Hamas, the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, was at the same time the most important teacher and patron of al Qaida's leader?" asks Dr. Matthias Küntzel (26)

"The origins of Bin Laden's concept of jihad can be traced back to two early 20th century figures, who started powerful Islamic revivalist movements in response to colonialism and its aftermath," writes Fiona Symon, a Middle East analyst. "Pakistan and Egypt - both Muslim countries with a strong intellectual tradition - produced the movements and ideology that would transform the concept of jihad in the modern world."

"They blamed the western idea of the separation of religion and politics for the decline of Muslim societies ... This, they believed, could only be corrected through a return to Islam in its traditional form, in which society was governed by a strict code of Islamic law," Symon writes, adding: "Al-Banna and Maudoudi breathed new life into the concept of jihad as a holy war to end the foreign occupation of Muslim lands." (27)

Loftus – and many other authors - says that with the Russian invastion of Afghanistan in 1979, "the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage."

"So we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians," according to Loftus. "We had to rename them. We couldn't call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi past was too known. So we called them Maktab al-Khadamat al-Mujahidin, the MAK." (28)

One of those people shipped off to Afghanistan, after being indoctrinated in Azzam's madrassas, was Osama bin Laden - and who in turn melded the ideas of Hassan al-Al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood with those of Pakistan's Syed Abul Ala Maududi's Jamaat Islami after being exposed to it while fighting in Afghanistan.

Their terror has now extended to the entire world.

While the vast majority of believers in Islam certainly cannot be labeled as Islam Fascists, it remains that there is a group within the Muslim ranks that does have its roots based in National Socialism and Fascist ideologies. In an effort to brand Bush as politically incorrect, anti-Bush politicians and bloggers who are ignorant of history have become unwitting apologists for Islamo-Fascism, a movement within Islam that many Muslims claim is heretical."

Click on the title to read the whole article. Long but very interesting.

H/t to Maria for providing such interesting article about the Muslim Brotherhood.