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Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part
3)
By Marc Erikson
Islamism,
fascism and terrorism (Part 1)
Islamism,
fascism and terrorism (Part 2)
Islamism, or
fascism with an Islamic face, was born with and of the
Muslim Brotherhood. It proved (and improved) its fascist
core convictions and practices through collaboration
with the Nazis in the run-up to and during World War II.
It proved it during the same period through its
collaboration with the overtly fascist "Young Egypt"
(Misr al-Fatah) movement, founded in October 1933 by
lawyer Ahmed Hussein and modeled directly on the Hitler
party, complete with paramilitary Green Shirts aping the
Nazi Brown Shirts, Nazi salute and literal translations
of Nazi slogans. Among its members, Young Egypt counted
two promising youngsters and later presidents, Gamal
Abdel Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat.
In later years,
the Brotherhood had serious fallings-out with Nasser,
whom it attempted to assassinate on several different
occasions, and with Sadat, whom it did assassinate in
1981. But up until at least the time of Nasser's 1952
coup d'etat, all was sweetness and light between Hassan
al-Banna's brethren and Nasser's "free officers". In his
personal diary, Sadat wrote in the summer of 1940:
"One day I invited Hassan al-Banna, leader of
the Muslim Brotherhood, to the army camp where I served,
in the Egyptian Communication Corps, so that he might
lecture before my soldiers on various religious topics.
A few days before his scheduled appearance it was
reported to me from army Intelligence that his coming
was forbidden and canceled by the order of General
Headquarters, and I myself was summoned for
interrogation. After a short while I went secretly to El
Bana's office and participated in a few seminars he
organized. I like the man and admired him."
Whether al-Banna, who had already been in
contact with German agents since the 1936-39 Palestine
uprising against the British, or someone else introduced
Sadat and his free officer comrades to German military
intelligence is not known. But in the summer of 1942,
when Rommel's Afrikakorps stood just over 100 kilometers
from Alexandria and were poised to march into Cairo,
Sadat, Nasser and their buddies were in close touch with
the German attacking force and - with Brotherhood help -
preparing an anti-British uprising in Egypt's capital. A
treaty with Germany including provisions for German
recognition of an independent, but pro-Axis Egypt had
been drafted by Sadat, guaranteeing that "no British
soldier would leave Cairo alive". When Rommel's push
east failed at El Alamein in the fall of 1942, Sadat and
several of his co-conspirators were arrested by the
British and sat out much of the remainder of the war in
jail.
Islamist-fascist collaboration did not
cease with war's end. King Farouk brought large numbers
of German military and intelligence personnel as well as
ranking (ex-) Nazis into Egypt as advisors. It was a bad
move. Several of the Germans, recognizing Farouk's
political weakness, soon began conspiring with Nasser
and his free officers (who, in turn, were working
closely with the Brotherhood) to overthrow the king. On
July 23, 1952, the deed was done and Newsweek marveled
that, "The most intriguing aspect [of] the revolt ...
was the role played in the coup by the large group of
German advisors serving with the Egyptian army ... The
young officers who did the actual planning consulted the
German advisors as to 'tactics' ... This accounted for
the smoothness of the operation."
And yet
another player fond of playing all sides against the
middle had entered the game prior to Farouk's ouster: In
1951, the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of president
Teddy, who in 1953 would organize the overthrow of
elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh and install
Reza Pahlavi as Shah) opened secret negotiations with
Nasser. Agreement was soon reached that the US,
post-coup, would assist in building up Egypt's
intelligence and security forces - in the obvious
manner, by reinforcing Nasser's existing Germans with
additional, "more capable", ones. For that, CIA head
Allen Dulles turned to Reinhard Gehlen, one-time head of
eastern front German military intelligence and by the
early 1950s in charge of developing a new German foreign
intelligence service. Gehlen hired the best man he knew
for the job - former SS colonel Otto Skorzeny, who at
the end of the war had organized the infamous ODESSA
network to facilitate the escape of high-ranking Nazis
to Latin America (mainly Peron's Argentina) and Egypt.
With Skorzeny now on the job of assisting Nasser, Egypt
became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals galore. The
CIA officer in charge of the Egypt assistance program
was Miles Copeland, soon a Nasser intimate.
And
then things got truly complicated and messy. Having
played a large role in Nasser's power grab, the Muslim
Brotherhood, after the 1949 assassination of Hassan
al-Banna by government agents [see part 1] under new
leadership and (since 1951) under the radical
ideological guidance of Sayyid Qutb, demanded its due -
imposition of Sharia (Islamic religious) law. When
Nasser demurred, he became a Brotherhood assassination
target, but with CIA and the German mercenaries' help he
prevailed. In February 1954, the Brotherhood was banned.
An October 1954 assassination attempt failed. Four
thousand brothers were arrested, six were executed, and
thousands fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Lebanon.
Within short order, things got more
tangled still: As Nasser in his brewing fight with
Britain and France over control of the Suez Canal turned
to the Soviet Union for assistance and arms purchases,
the CIA approached and began collaboration with the
Brotherhood against their ex-ally, the now pro-Soviet
Nasser.
We leave that twisted tale at this
stage. A leading Brotherhood member arrested in 1954 was
Sayyid Qutb. He spent the next 10 years in Jarah prison
near Cairo and there wrote the tracts that subsequently
became (and till this day remain) must-reading and
guidance for Islamists everywhere. (The main
translations into Farsi were made by the Rahbar of the
Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.) But
while brother number one went to jail, other leading
members who had escaped were given jobs in Saudi
universities and provided with royal funding. They
included Sayyid's brother Muhammad and Abdullah
al-Azzam, the radical Palestinian preacher (the "Emir of
Jihad") who later in Peshawar, Pakistan, founded the
Maktab al-Khidamat, or Office of Services, which became
the core of the al-Qaeda network. As a student at King
Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden, son of
Muhammad bin Laden, the kingdom's wealthiest contractor
and close friend of King Faisal, became a disciple of
Muhammad Qutb and al-Azzam.
Sayyid Qutb was born
in 1906 in a small village in Upper Egypt, was educated
at a secular college, and subsequently worked as an
inspector of schools for the ministry of education. In
the 1930s and 1940s, nothing pointed to his later role.
He wrote literary criticism, hung out in coffee houses,
and published a novel which flopped. His conversion to
radical Islam came during two-and-a-half years of
graduate studies in education in the United States
(1948-51). He came to hate everything American,
described churches as "entertainment centers and sexual
playgrounds", was shocked by the freedom allowed to
women, and immediately upon his return to Egypt joined
the Muslim Brotherhood and assumed the position of
editor-in-chief of the organization's newspaper.
While in jail, Qutb wrote a 30-volume (!)
commentary on the Koran; but his most influential book,
published in 1965 after his 1964 release from prison for
health reasons, was Ma'alim fi'l-tariq
("Signposts on the Road", also translated as
"Milestones"). In it, he revised Hassan al-Banna's
concept of establishing an Islamic state in Egypt after
the nation was thoroughly Islamized, advocating instead
- fascist or Bolshevik-style - that a revolutionary
vanguard should first seize state power and then impose
Islamization from above. Trouble is, this recipe went
against the unambiguous Muslim prohibition against
overthrowing a Muslim ruler.
Qutb found his clue
to resolving the dilemma in the writings of his
Pakistani contemporary, Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi
(1903-79), founder in 1941 of the Jamaat-i-Islami, who
had denounced the existing political order in Muslim
societies as partial jahiliyyah - resembling the
state of unenlightened savagery, ignorance and idolatry
of pre-Islamic Arab societies. There was nothing
"partial" about the jahiliyyah of the existing
order, nothing that could be redeemed, pronounced Qutb:
"... a society whose legislation does not rest on divine
law ... is not Muslim, however ardently its individuals
may proclaim themselves Muslim, even if they pray, fast
and make the pilgrimage ... jahiliyyah ... takes
the form of claiming the right to create values, to
legislate rules of collective behavior and to choose any
way of life that rests with me, without regard to what
God has prescribed."
Only uncompromising
restoration of the ideal of the union of religion and
state as evidenced during the 7th century reign of the
"righteous caliphs" would do. Islam was a complete
system of life not in need of man-made additions. Any
ruler, Muslim or otherwise, standing in the way could be
justifiably removed - by any means.
This,
naturally, applied to Nasser, and another attempt on his
life was made in 1965. Qutb was rearrested, tortured and
tried for treason. On August 29, 1966, he was hanged.
The charge against him of plotting to establish a
Marxist regime in Egypt was ludicrous. Nasser and his
minions knew full well that the real danger to the
regime stemmed from Qutb's denunciation of it as
jahiliyyah, and not from those clauses of his
Ma'alim fi'l-tariq which speak of a classless
society in which the "selfish individual" and the
"exploitation of man by man" would be abolished, which
the prosecution cited as evidence against him.
The martyred Qutb's writings rapidly acquired
wide acceptance in the Arab world, especially after the
ignominious defeat of the Arabs in the June 1967 "Six
Day War" with Israel, taken as proof of the depth of
depravity to which the regimes in the Muslim realm had
sunk.
To come: Islamism,
fascism and terrorism (Part 4)
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