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Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part
2)
By Marc
Erikson
Islamism,
fascism and terrorism (Part 1) (Nov 5, '02)
Osama
bin Laden has the money, proven organizational skills,
combat experience, and the charisma that can confer the
air of wisdom and profundity even on inchoate or trivial
utterances and let what's unfathomable appear to be deep
in the eyes of his followers. But he's no intellectual.
The brains of al-Qaeda and its chief ideologue by most
accounts is Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, 51,
the organization's number two man and former head of the
Egyptian al-Jihad, which was merged with bin Laden's
outfit in February 1998 to form the "International Front
for Fighting Jews and Crusaders".
Al-Zawahiri
hails from an elite Egyptian family. His father was a
professor at Cairo University's medical school from
which Ayman graduated in 1974. His paternal grandfather
was the Grand Imam at the al-Azhar Institute, Sunni
Islam's paramount seat of learning. His great-uncle,
Abdel-Rahman Azzam, was the first secretary-general of
the Arab League.
Such family background
notwithstanding, perhaps because of it, al-Zawahiri
joined the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood
(al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) as a young boy and was for the
first time arrested in 1966 at age 15, when the secular
government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser rounded up
thousands of al-Ikhwan members and executed its top
leaders in retribution for repeated assassination
attempts on the president. One of those executed by
hanging was chief ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Al-Zawahiri is
Qutb's intellectual heir; he has further developed his
message, and is putting it into practise.
But
without Qutb, present-day Islamism as a noxious amalgam
of fascist totalitarianism and extremes of Islamic
fundamentalism would not exist. His principal
"accomplishment" was to articulate the social and
political practices of the Muslim Brotherhood from the
1930s through the 1950s - including collaboration with
fascist regimes and organizations, involvement in
anti-colonial, anti-Western and anti-Israeli actions,
and the struggle for state power in Egypt - in
demagogically persuasive fashion, buttressed by
tendentious references to Islamic law and scriptures to
deceive the faithful. Qutb, a one-time literary critic,
was not a religious fundamentalist, but a Goebbels-style
propagandist for a new totalitarianism to stand
side-by-side with fascism and communism.
Hitler's early 1933 accession to power in
Germany was widely cheered by Arabs of all different
political persuasions. When the "Third Reich" spook and
horrors were over 12 years later, a favorite excuse
among those who felt the need for one was that the Nazis
had been allies against the colonial oppressors and
"Zionist intruders". Many felt no need for an excuse at
all and simply bemoaned the fact that the Nazis' "final
solution" to the "Jewish problem" had not proved final
enough. But affinities with fascism on the part of the
Muslim Brotherhood and other segments of Arab and Muslim
society went much deeper than collaboration with the
enemy of one's enemies, and collaboration itself took
some extreme forms.
Substitute religious for
racial purity, the idealized ummah of the rule of
the four righteous caliphs of the mid-7th century for
the mythical Aryan "Volksgemeinschaft", and most
ideological and organizational precepts of Nazism laid
out by chief theoretician Alfred Rosenberg in his work
The Myth of the 20th Century and by Adolf Hitler
in Mein Kampf, and later put into practice, are
in all essential respects identical to the precepts of
the Muslim Brotherhood after its initial phase as a
group promoting spiritual and moral reform. This ranges
from radical rejection of "decadent" Western political
and economic liberalism (instead embracing the
"leadership principle" and corporatist organization of
the economy) to endorsement of the use of terror and
assassinations to seize and hold state power, and all
the way to concoction of fantastical anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories linking international plutocratic
finance to Freemasonry, Zionism and all-encompassing
Jewish world control.
Not surprisingly then, as
Italian and German fascism sought greater stakes in the
Middle East in the 1930s and '40s to counter British and
French controlling power, close collaboration between
fascist agents and Islamist leaders ensued. During the
1936-39 Arab Revolt, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of
German military intelligence, sent agents and money to
support the Palestine uprising against the British, as
did Muslim Brotherhood founder and "supreme guide"
Hassan al-Banna. A key individual in the
fascist-Islamist nexus and go-between for the Nazis and
al-Banna became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
el-Husseini - incidentally the later mentor (from 1946
onward) of a young firebrand by the name of Yasser
Arafat.
Having fled from Palestine to Iraq,
el-Husseini assisted there in the short-lived April 1941
Nazi-inspired and financed anti-British coup. By June
1941, British forces had reasserted control in Baghdad
and the mufti was on the run again, this time via Tehran
and Rome to Berlin, to a hero's welcome. He remained in
Germany as an honored guest and valuable intelligence
and propaganda asset through most of the war, met with
Hitler on several occasions, and personally recruited
leading members of the Bosnian-Muslim "Hanjar" (saber)
division of the Waffen SS.
Another valued World
War II Nazi collaborator was Youssef Nada, current board
chairman of al-Taqwa (Nada Management), the Lugano,
Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Bahamas-based financial
services outfit accused by the US Treasury Department of
money laundering for and financing of Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda. As a young man, he had joined the armed branch
of the "secret apparatus" (al-jihaz al-sirri) of
the Muslim Brotherhood and then was recruited by German
military intelligence. When Grand Mufti el-Husseini had
to flee Germany in 1945 as the Nazi defeat loomed, Nada
reportedly was instrumental in arranging the escape via
Switzerland back to Egypt and eventually Palestine,
where el-Husseini resurfaced in 1946.
(©2002
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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policies.)
Next, Part 3: The Muslim
Brotherhood, Nasser and Sadat, and the reshaping of
Brotherhood Islamism into its present form by Sayyid
Qutb.
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