MashedUK

On 6 October 1981, as Egyptian Air Force Mirage jets flew overhead and Egyptian Army soldiers and troop trucks passed by at the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal, an Army Lieutenant, Khalid Islambouli, approached President Sadat. Within minutes three grenades had been thrown followed by a hail of automatic fire from assault rifles. President Sadat lay dead from bullet wounds to his aorta, intestine and

The Birth of Islamism

neck wounds.

Why and how did this assasination happen and what relevance does it lend to the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt?

To answer these questions we have to go back to a transitional period in Arabian politics that occurred in the 1950′s. Anybody following the recent events on TV must, by now, be aware of an organisation called The Muslim Brotherhood?

The Muslim Brotherhood grew rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s as it picked up support from those disillusioned by the compromises of the nationalist Wafd with the British. It was further aided by the gyrations of the Communist left under Stalin’s influence, which went so far as to support the establishment of Israel. By recruiting volunteers to fight in Palestine and against the British occupation of the Egyptian Canal Zone, the Brotherhood could seem to support the anti-imperialist struggle. But just as the Brotherhood reached its peak of support, it began to run into troubles. Its leadership based themselves on a coalition of forces – recruitment of a mass of youth, links with the palace, deals with the right wing of the Wafd, plots with junior armed forces officers – which were themselves moving in different directions. As strikes, demonstrations, assassinations, military defeat in Palestine, and guerrilla warfare in the Canal Zone tore Egyptian society apart, so the Brotherhood itself was in danger of disintegrating.

The seizure of power by the military under Nasser in 1952-4 produced a fundamental divide between those who supported the coup and those who opposed it until finally rival groups within the Brotherhood ended up physically battling for control of its offices.  An all-important loss of confidence in the leadership enabled Nasser eventually to crush what had once been a massively powerful organisation.

This is why many commentators continue to stress the importance of this organisation as a possible power-base to establish a new regime.

The reconstituted Muslim Brotherhood began operating semi-legally around the magazine al-Dawa in the late 1960s. Rejecting ideas of overthrowing the government the Brotherhood sought concession with Sadat and looked to reforming Egyptian society through the preaching of ‘purer’ Islamic values and morals. Sadat courted the Brotherhood

Nasser

and the Islamists purged the University campuses of anything ‘communist’ or Nasser leanings.

However, dissent was growing, particularly with the price of bread and consumables, and in January 1977, 13 of Egypt’s main cities rioted and demonstrated against the state. The Brotherhood stood fast and condemned the riots calling them ‘a communist conspiracy.’

For such Islamist ‘reformism’ what matters is changing the morals of society, rather than changing society itself. The stress is not on the reconstitution of the Islamic community (umma) by a transformation of society, but on enforcing certain sorts of behaviour within existing society. And the enemy is not the state or the internal ‘oppressors’, but external forces seen as undermining religious observance – in the case of al-Dawa ‘Jewry’, ‘the crusade’ (meaning Christians, including the Copts), ‘communism’ and ‘secularism’. The fight to deal with these involves a struggle to impose the sharia (the legal system codified by Islamic jurists from the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition). It is a battle to get the existing state to impose a certain sort of culture on society, rather than a battle to overthrow the state.

So, prior to these latest uprisings in both Tunisia and Egypt we were all witness to an escalation in attacks on the Coptic churches. For as the ‘Islamist Reformism’ states, ‘the enemy is not the state or the internal ‘oppressors’, but external forces seen as undermining religious observance’ , including those of the ‘Crusaders.’

However, the youth or the impoverished masses are easily drawn to much more radical interpretations of what the ‘return to the Qur’an’ means. Interpretations which attack not just extraneous influences in the existing Islamic states, but those states themselves.

Islamists in Egypt closely follow the book Signposts, written by one of the Muslim Brothers hanged by Nasser in 1966, Sayyid Qutb. This text does not merely denounce the bankruptcies of the Western and Stalinist ideologies, but also

Signposts

insists that a state can call itself Islamic and still be based on anti-Islamic barbarism (jahiliyya, the name given by Muslims to the pre-Islamic society in Arabia).

To accomplish this  ‘a vanguard of the umma‘ will carry through a revolution by following the example of the ‘first Qur’anic generation’ – that is, one which withdraws from existing society as Mohammed did when he left Mecca in order to build up a force capable of overthrowing it ie separatist.

In the mid-1970s one group, al Taktir Wal Higra, whose leader, Shukri Mustafa, was executed for kidnapping a high religious functionary in 1977, rejected as ‘non-Islamic’ all existing society,  mosques,  religious leaders and even the neo-Muslim Brotherhood associated with Dawa. Its attitude was that its members alone were genuine Muslims and that they had to break with existing society, living as communities apart and treating everyone else as infidels. Sounding familiar?

When Sadat began the ‘peace process’ with Israel late in 1977 his days were numbered. A fatw? approving the

Dead Man Walking

assassination had been obtained from Omar Abdel-Rahman, a cleric later convicted in the US for his role in the 1993World Trade Center bombing. Soon many of the university activists were embracing ideas in some ways more radical than Shukri’s.

Not only did they turn aside from existing society, they began organising to overthrow it, as with the assassination of Sadat by Abd al-Salam Faraj’s Jihad group in October 1981.

Faraj spelt out his harsh criticisms of the strategies of the different parts of the Islamic movement. Those sections who restricted themselves to working for Islamic charities, those (the neo-Muslim Brotherhood) who try to create an Islamic party which can only give legitimacy to the existing state, those who base themselves on ‘preaching’ and so avoid jihad, those who advocate withdrawal from society on the lines of Shukri’s group, and those who saw the priority as fighting against the external enemies of Islam (in Palestine or Afghanistan). Against all of them, he insisted immediate armed struggle, ‘jihad against the iniquitous prince’, was the duty of all Muslims.

Unfortunately, there were significant differences within his own group between the Cairo section, built round the prime objective of destroying the infidel state, and the other section in the middle Egyptian city of Asyut, who ‘considered Christian proselytism the main obstacle to the propagation of Islam’ in other words the Christian (Crusader) Coptic Church.

In the wake of Sadats assassination Farajs Asyut group (jihad) failed to rein in the Cairo group whose single act was not enough to create the uprising of the Islamic population of Cairo. In the midst of the confusion the state pulled together and subjected the Islamists to brutal treatment. Many were executed whilst activists were rounded up and tortured. Repression significantly weakened the movement. However, the causes which had led so many young people to turn to the Islamists did not disappear.

Then in 1992 the state launched a new and unprecedented campaign of repression. Slum areas in Cairo, such as Imbaba, were occupied by 20,000 troops with tanks and armoured cars. Tens of thousands were arrested and death squads set out to kill those activists who escaped. The main mosques used by the radical Islamists were blocked with concrete. Parents, children and wives of activists were arrested and tortured.

Islamism the New Fascism

Under the repressive regime that followed the Islamist movement was not able to mobilise or demonstrate and so it moved to a totally terrorist strategy.

What followed was an all out war on Western Civilisation.

Those that embraced the teachings of Qutb, Shukri,  Faraj and others under the Islamism banner included:

the 19 highjackers of United Airlines on 11th September 2001 https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2002/DCI_18_June_testimony_new.pdf

and the 4 London Bombers http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4676861.stm

Islamism as you have read contains all the characteristics of the most basic form of Fascism.

• oppression or organised attacks on ethnic minorities
• oppression or organised attacks on religious minorities
• outlawing of drugs and alcohol
• outlawing of Homosexuality and Lesbianism
• attacks on left wingers
• cultural imperialism

Islamism-The New Nazism; A Warning from History