Since Clapper is America’s top intelligence official, you’d assume that he was aware of the very un-secular comments that had been emanating from Brotherhood leaders in the months and years prior to his testimony. That includes a notorious 2010 sermon by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s current overall leader and Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, in which he predicted the imminent “demise” of the United States, called for the rise of a “jihadi generation,” and encouraged Arabs and Muslims to resist “Zio-American arrogance and tyranny.” Badie’s rant was delivered just five months prior to Clapper’s congressional testimony extolling the Brotherhood’s altruism and moderation. So did Clapper know about it? That’s an open question. Clearly, for America’s top intelligence official to be unaware of a virtual call to arms against the United States—issued by the world’s most influential Islamist organization—would be nothing less than dereliction of duty.
Similarly, you have to wonder if Clapper was aware that Badie’s predecessor as MB Supreme Guide, Mahdi Akef, published a 2004 open letter in which he called for jihad against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Islam considers the resistance to be Jihad for the sake of Allah and this is a commandment, a personal obligation incumbent on all of the residents of the occupied countries,” Akef wrote. “[This commandment] takes precedence over all other [religious] duties. Even a woman is obligated to go to war, [even] without her husband’s permission, and youth are permitted to go out and fight.”
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Akef repeated his calls to jihad against U.S. troops in a 2007 sermon, adding a broadside against the enemy “concealed in Jerusalem” for good measure.
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Because no Brotherhood sermon is truly complete without at least one viciously anti-Semitic statement.
By the way, does this sound like an organization that has “eschewed violence” and can be counted on to respect American interests in the Middle East and around the world?
Also in 2004, the Brotherhood’s top spiritual leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was one of ninety-three Islamic scholars—including several others from the Brotherhood—to sign a communiqué declaring that it was a “Shari’a duty” for all Muslims worldwide to aid in the “resistance” against Coalition forces in Iraq. The fatwa also forbids Muslims to help American or British troops there in any form.
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Does this sound like an organization that believes al-Qaeda—which has murdered an untold number of U.S. troops using the same “resistance” tactics the Brotherhood endorses—is “a perversion of Islam?”
The Brotherhood differs with al-Qaeda on means, but certainly not ends. Worldwide sharia law and the reestablishment of the caliphate are the order of the day for both organizations. Whereas the Brotherhood follows a patient strategy of gradualism to achieve those goals, al-Qaeda wants to set the world on fire and violently impose the sharia system on Muslim and non-Muslim alike
right now
. The MB’s view is that al-Qaeda, while its heart is in the right place, is too rash, too impatient—lacking in tact as well as strategic vision and sophistication. In my interviews with MB-connected figures, I’ve sensed their occasional annoyance with hardcore Salafists like al-Qaeda who refuse to take part in the political process and favor an “all jihad, all the time” strategy. The Brothers are far too savvy to fall into that dead end. They learned the hard way in their early years in Egypt that jihad cannot be rushed and can only come when conditions are ripe. If only al-Qaeda were a bit more flexible and forward thinking, the Brothers would argue, AQ could have everything it desires without all the sticky mess of drone strikes against its mountain hideouts. Yes, the granddaddy of all modern Islamic terror groups still has more than a few things to teach the young upstarts.
If there were a jihadi superpower summit, the Ikhwan, wily as always, would say to their al-Qaeda brethren, “My dear brothers, we stand with you in your struggle. But patience must be the order of the day. Why rush into jihad now when we Muslims are overmatched militarily against the West? Any short-term gains you accomplish will be negated when your actions bring the infidels’ wrath down upon all of our heads. Your martyrdom operations against the Americans and Europeans are blessed in the eyes of Allah. But they are not necessary at the moment and are counterproductive to the cause. Just think: we are accomplishing the very things you yearn for without firing a shot or sacrificing any of our mujahideen. Yes, it may take years, even decades. But
inshallah
, it will happen. Patience, brothers. Patience.”
A version of the hypothetical scenario I just outlined actually occurred in April 2012 in Tunisia, when Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of that country’s ruling Ennahda Party (the Tunisian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) was captured on video meeting with a group of young Salafist leaders. According to Magharebia, a comprehensive website covering North Africa and sponsored by the United States Africa Command:
. . . Ghannouchi said, “The secularists are still controlling the media, economy and administration. Therefore, controlling them would require more time.” He added that “the police and army’s support for Islamists is not guaranteed, and controlling them would also require more time.”
“I tell our young salafists to be patient ... Why hurry? Take your time to consolidate what you have gained,” Ghannouchi said before advising them to “create television channels, radio stations, schools and universities” to push their agenda.
The Ennahda leader said, “We’ve met with Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the salafists, including Sheikh Abou Iyadh and Sheikh al-Idrissi.”
Abou Iyadh, also known as Seif Allah Ben Hassine, is currently wanted by Tunisian police in connection with the September 14
th
[2012] attack on the US embassy.
In the video, Ghannouchi said he was “not afraid” to include an article in the new constitution on Sharia law. He went on to mock secularists who accept Islam and fear Sharia. “They are like those who accepted content but rejected the name itself,” he said.
He also told the salafists about achievements that were made for them after Ennahda came to office. “The government is now at the hands of Islamists, the mosques are ours now, and we’ve become the most important entity in the country,” he said.
“The Islamists must fill the country with associations, establish Qur’anic schools everywhere, and invite religious preachers because people are still ignorant of Islam,” Ghannouchi continued. In his first reaction to the leaking of the video, Ghannouchi said that his words were “taken out of context,” adding that the secularism he denounced was “the radical and extreme secularism.”
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Hassan al-Banna himself could not have said it better.
Ghannouchi, by the way, is a big deal in the MB universe; the Brothers I’ve interviewed speak about him in reverent terms. In public, he dutifully plays the role of “moderate” for secular Tunisians and his Western admirers, even condemning Salafists for their role in the September 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tunis. But with his private statements to the Salafists—statements he claimed were “misunderstood” after the video came to light—the mask slipped and his double game was exposed. In the video, Ghannouchi even brags of meeting with the leader of the same embassy attacks that he later condemned, showing, yet again, that while the tactics differ for the MB and AQ, their endgame is the same. As Middle East authority Daniel Pipes puts it, “Their differences are real. But they are also secondary, for all Islamists pull in the same direction, toward the full and severe application of Islamic law (the sharia), and they often cooperate toward this end, sometimes covertly.”
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Indeed, the inherent superiority of the MB’s slow burn strategy over al-Qaeda’s uncompromising, “kill ’em all” methods has been on full display for all to see. In a span of under two years, the Brotherhood scored (mostly) bloodless electoral triumphs in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. It could very well be looking at similar victories in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Jordan in the not-so-distant future. And the Brotherhood’s stock has risen in Western capitals to the point where an Egyptian MB delegation visited the Obama White House in April 2012 and Egypt’s Ikhwan president, Mohammed Morsi, was hailed by the Obama administration as a peacemaking pragmatist for his role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas later that year.
Conversely, since 9/11, al-Qaeda affiliates have seized tenuous control of broad swaths of northern Mali and Somalia—two chaotic, medieval backwaters—plus small chunks of southern Yemen, parts of Pakistan’s prehistoric tribal regions, and a small portion of pre-Surge Iraq. All the while, AQ operatives have been relentlessly targeted by Western militaries and intelligence services, taking heavy manpower losses as a result. If you’re a sharia-breathing Islamist, whose track record would you rather have? The results don’t lie. Incrementalism works—in large part because, using tools of stealth and subterfuge, it seeks to slowly dominate a culture, which makes its political gains more powerful and lasting.
The Brotherhood’s strategic documents, as we saw in Chapter Two, lay out the gradualist approach favored by Rachid Ghannouchi—one of the modern Brotherhood’s most revered thinkers—in painstaking detail, offering the MB blueprint for victory over the West. The differences between the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are merely tactical, not ideological.
For instance, following the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALs, the Egyptian Brotherhood released a statement referring to the 9/11 mastermind in reverent tones as “sheikh” and condemning his “assassination.” The statement also doubled down on the Brotherhood’s support for “resistance” against U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Mind you, this is the same Muslim Brotherhood to which the Obama administration has committed billions of dollars in Egypt. Move over, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: there’s a new untrustworthy, hostile Islamist “ally” on the block!
Not long before bin Laden’s death, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, who served as the Ikhwan’s Supreme Guide until 2010, praised bin Laden as a “mujahid,” or holy warrior, in an interview with an Arabic news service:
Interviewer:
As we talk about resistance and jihad, do you consider Usama Bin Ladin a terrorist or an Islamic Mujahid?
Akef:
Most certainly he is a Mujahid. I do not doubt his sincerity in resisting occupation for the sake of God Almighty.
Interviewer:
Does this not contradict your previous description of Al-Qa’ida as US-made?
Akef:
The name is US-made, but Al-Qa’ida as an ideology and organization came as a result of injustice and corruption.
Interviewer:
Then, do you support the activities of Al-Qa’ida, and to what extent?
Akef:
Yes, I support its activities against the occupier, but not against the people.
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The Brotherhood quickly issued a clarification on Akef’s comments, distancing itself from al-Qaeda but reaffirming its support for so-called “resistance against occupation.” Always shrewd operators, the Brothers realize the best way to fool naïve Westerners into believing that you are a peace-loving pragmatist is to distance yourself from the ultimate modern-day symbol of Islamic terrorism, al-Qaeda. By employing this strategy, the Brotherhood has successfully positioned itself to Western governments as the sane, reasonable Islamist alternative to those crazy cave dwellers who are blowing stuff up. Yet as Akef’s comments and the ensuing clarification showed, the MB and AQ do indeed agree fervently when it comes to defensive jihad, or as they call it, resistance against illegal occupation. That means blowing folks up in Israel—an imperialist, occupying power in the Islamists’ view—is just fine. Same with infidel U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or anywhere else where they are desecrating Muslim soil and cruelly oppressing the ummah.
Defensive jihad is the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. government’s Muslim outreach mavens may be shocked to learn that the “moderate” Ikhwan and extremist al-Qaeda actually agree on many things. Granted, some of their differences, like al-Qaeda’s refusal to participate in politics, are significant. But there’s a reason that several top al-Qaeda leaders belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood before AQ and it isn’t because the Ikhwan is warm and fuzzy about freedom and democracy. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ian Johnson told me in a 2012 interview:
The Brotherhood is not al-Qaeda. They’re not piloting the airplanes. But they’re creating the ideological mindset that turns people into terrorists. It’s true that not all Muslim Brotherhood [members] are terrorists, but all terrorists pretty much started by reading the works of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s the gateway drug, if you will, that leads to radicalism.
Johnson’s book,
A Mosque in Munich
, gives a definitive historical account of the Brotherhood’s infiltration of the West. His assessment of the group vis-à-vis al-Qaeda is echoed by Alain Chouet, former head of the security intelligence service of the French Directorate-General for External Security, who warned in 2004 that, “Al Qaeda is only a brief episode and an expedient instrument in the century-old existence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The true danger is in the expansion of the Brotherhood, an increase in its audience.”
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