The Muslim Brotherhood, Part One

Hidden by Lame Stream and the un-elite political class, the polemics ignored or failed to grasp form the baseline for future problems as Puffins know full well. Where did the Muslim Brotherhood come from, who funds and uses it and why?

Generic Summary

In 1951, building on the foundations of the old organisation of the same name, the UK/US secret services put together a secret society called the Muslim Brotherhood. At first they used it to assassinate personalities who resisted them, and then, in 1979, as mercenaries against the Soviets. At the beginning of the 1990s, they incorporated the Brotherhood (and its associate arms) into NATO, in 2010, attempted to force it into power in Arab countries. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Sufi Order of the Naqshbandi were financed with at least US$80 billion by the ruling Saud family, making them one of the most powerful armies globally. All jihadist leaders, including Daesh, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra etc belong to this structure.

The Inception Stage: Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood

At the end of WW1, four empires disappeared – the German Reich, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Tsarist Holy Russian Empire and the Ottoman Sublime Porte. The victors, as subsequently seen in future years, utterly lacked any sense of reason on the conditions imposed on those defeated. In Europe, the Treaty of Versailles determined conditions unacceptable and unbearable for Germany. In the Orient, the carving up of the Ottoman Caliphate wasn’t going to plan. At the 1920 San Remo Conference, in accordance with the 1916 secret Sykes-Picot agreements, the UK was authorised to set up a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while France was allowed to colonise Syria (which included what is now Lebanon). However, in what was left of the Ottoman Empire, Mustapha Kemal led a revolt against both the Sultan (who’d lost WW1) and the Western powers, who were trying to take control of his country. At the 1920 Sèvres Conference, the Caliphate was chopped into little pieces in order to create a variety of new “states”, including a Kurdistan. 

Just as in Germany where Adolf Hitler was to contest his country’s lot, in the Near East, a man stood up against the new division of the region. An Egyptian schoolteacher founded a movement to re-establish the Caliphate which Westerners had defeated. The teacher was Hassan al-Banna and his organisation was the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).

In principle, the Caliph was a successor of the Prophet, to whom all owed obedience, therefore a coveted title. There had previously been several great lines of Caliphs in succession – the Omeyyads, the Abbassids, the Fatimids and the Ottomans.

The next Caliph to seize the title, was the “General Guide” of the Brotherhood, who was comfortable with the idea of becoming master of the Muslim world.

Muslim Brotherhood Founding Rules and Principles

The secret society rapidly spread. Its intention was to work from within the system in order to re-establish Islamic institutions. Applicants had to swear fealty to the founder not only upon the Qur’an, but also on a sabre or pistol.

The Core Tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood

The Brotherhood’s aims were purely political while expressing itself in religious terms. Hassan al-Banna and his successors never spoke about Islam as a religion, nor did they evoke Muslim spirituality. For them, Islam is no more than a dogma, a submission to God and the exercise of power. Obviously, Egyptians who supported the Brotherhood didn’t see it that way, they followed it because it claimed to follow God.

For Hassan al-Banna, the legitimacy of Government wasn’t to be measured by its representatives, the way it is in the West, but by its capacity to defend the “Islamic way of life”. In other words by the 19^th century Ottoman Egypt. The brotherhood never considered that Islam has a history, and the Muslim ways of life vary considerably according to region and era. Neither did it imagine that the Prophet had revolutionised the Bedouin society in which he lived, or that the way of life described in the Qur’an is no more than a stage meant for those particular men. For them the disciplinary rules of the Qur’an – Sharia do NOT respond to a given situation, but fix inalterable laws upon which power relies.

For the Brotherhood, the fact the Muslim way of life had often been imposed by the sword justified the use of force. The Brotherhood would never admit that Islam may have been spread by example. This did not prevent al-Banna and his “Brothers” from standing for election – and losing. If they condemned political parties, it wasn’t because of the opposition to the multi-party system, but because by separating religion from politics, they would succumb to corruption. The doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood was the ideology of “political Islam” – “Islamism” a word destined to become the rage.

In 1936 al-Banna wrote to the Egyptian PM Mostafa El-Nahas Pasha.

He demanded:

• Legislative reform, and the conformity of all tribunals with Sharia law
• Recruitment within the armies to create a volunteer force under the banner of jihad
• Connection between all Muslim countries, and the preparation of the restoration of the Caliphate, in realisation of the unity demanded by Islam

During WWII, the Brotherhood declared itself neutral. In reality, it had mutated into an Intelligence service for the 3^rd Reich. From the point at which the US entered the war, when the fortune of arms was changing sides, it played a double game and sold information about Germany to SIS (now MI6). In this way, the Brotherhood revealed its total absence of principles and pure political opportunism. During World War II, leading Muslim Brotherhood figures spent exile from British-controlled Egypt fleeing to Berlin where, among others, Al Banna’s close Muslim brotherhood ally, Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, worked intimately with the SS and Heinrich Himmler to create special Muslim Brotherhood terror units of the SS, so-called Handschar SS, to kill Soviet soldiers and Jews. In the 1950s the Cocaine Importation Agency discovered the Nazi Muslim Brotherhood recruits in exile in postwar Munich and decided they could be “useful.”

Next an approach that may appeal to some Puffins. On 24^th February 1945 the “Brothers” tried their luck and assassinated the Egyptian PM Ahmad Mahir Pasha in the middle of a parliamentary debate following his announcement that Egypt was declaring war on the Axis powers. This was followed by an escalation of violence – a movement of repression against the Brotherhood, and a series of further political assassinations. This went to the level of assassinating the new Egyptian PM Nokrashy Pasha

In retaliation on 12^th February 1949 Hassan al-Banna was assassinated by Egyptian Secret Services. Shortly afterwards a “Government” tribunal instituted by martial law condemned most of the Brotherhood to prison sentences and dissolved their association. Or so they imagined. The organisation was in reality no more than a band of assassins hoping to grab power by masking their ambition behind the Qur’an. The Brotherhood should have ended there, it didn’t.

Brotherhood reinstated by UK/US and formed separate peace with Israel

The capacity of the Brotherhood to mobilise people and turn them into assassins intrigued the major Western powers as to how it could be used to further their own geopolitical and economic interests. Two and half years after its “dissolution”, the UK/US formed a new organisation, re-using the name “Muslim Brotherhood”.

As all its historical leaders were incarcerated, in 1951, ex-judge Hassan al-Hudaybi was selected as General Guide.

Contrary to the then popular Western “belief” he represented no historical continuity between the old and new Brotherhood. It transpired as a unit of the old secret society, the “Secret Section”. Al-Banna had created a secret, hidden arm, of the Ikhwan in Egypt and later worldwide, known as the Special Section (al-nizam al-khass), or, as it was referred to by the British in Egypt, the Secret Apparatus (al-jihaz al-sirri). The “Secret Section”, was tasked by al-Banna to perpetrate attacks for which he (and those who followed in the future) denied all responsibility. The section within the organisation was so secret, it had not been affected by the Brotherhood dissolution, and was now available to his successor.

The General Guide Hudaybi decided to disown the “Secret Section”, and declared he only wanted to achieve his objectives by peaceful means. With UK records still withheld under the FOIA rule under the informal 30-year rule, what exactly happened between the UK/US who wanted to recreate the old MB society, and Guide Hudaybi, who believed he was simply reviving its audience from within the masses, isn’t known. But some educated guessing points the way chosen.

In addition to the survival of the “Secret Section”, the authority of Guide Hudaybi waned in favour of other Brotherhood leaders, triggering an internecine struggle (with UK/US pulling the strings of course). The Cocaine Importation Agency gave Sayyid Qutb a leadership position within the Brotherhood. Qutb, a freemason, was a theoretician of jihad, whom the Guide had condemned before his strings were pulled by Meddling Internationally 6.

The relations between the two men and degrees of hierarchy are opaque, on the one hand because each foreign branch enjoyed its own autonomy, and on the other, because the secret sections within the organisation no longer necessarily answered either to the local or General Guide, but directly to the Cocaine Importation Agency and Meddling Internationally 6.

Post WWII, the British attempted to reorganise the world, protecting what was left of its Empire and also to keep it out of Soviet hands. In September 1946 in Zurich, Churchill launched the idea of the United States of Europe. On the same principle, he also launched the Arab League. In both cases, the aim was to unify the regions without Russia. From the beginning of the Cold War, the Septics, for their part, simply created associations tasked with accompanying this movement for their own profit – the American Committee on United Europe and the American Friends of the Middle East.

As is now the norm, in the Arab World, the Cocaine Importation Agency organised two coups d’état, first of all in favour of General Hosni Zaim in Damascus (March 1949), then with the Free Officers of Cairo (July 1952). The goal, in both cases, was to support nationalists who were believed to be hostile to communists. As a result, in this mind state, Washington sent SS General Otto Skorzeny to Egypt and Nazi General Fazlollah Zahedi to Iran, accompanied by hundreds of formers Gestapo officers, with whom they hoped to direct anti-communist conflict as well as bring back under Western control Iran’s oil. Skorzeny schooled the Egyptian police in a tradition of violence. In 1963, he chose Mossad over Nasser. Zahedi created the Savak.

To follow, The next steps on the MB footpath.
 

© AW Kamau 2023