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Authors: Erick Stakelbeck

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The Muslim Brotherhood a “terrorist group”? Hassan al-Banna a “terrorist leader”? Muslim Brotherhood “fanatics” and “suicide squadrons”? Could this really be the same
New York Times
that doggedly served as the Brotherhood’s most reliable media defender during the so-called Arab Spring, culminating in this gem by the paper’s Cairo bureau chief, David K. Kirkpatrick, in December 2012?
[The Muslim Brothers] are not violent by nature, and they have over the last couple of decades evolved more and more into a moderate—conservative but religious, but moderate—regular old political force. I find that a lot of the liberal fears of the Brotherhood are somewhat outside. That said, you know, you don’t know what their ultimate vision of what the good life looks like. But in the short term, I think they just want to win elections.
31
 
Yes, a “regular old political force,” a bit lively but perfectly reasonable, like the Whigs or the Tories. Your average Muslim Brother just wants “the good life,” you see, and if that involves chopping hands, oppressing women, and subjugating Christians and Jews under sharia, who are we to judge? Kirkpatrick’s assessment is even more galling considering that it came in the midst of a virtual coup d’etat by Mohammed Morsi and the Brotherhood, complete with reports of Ikhwan thugs raping women in Cairo and setting up torture chambers to brutalize political opponents. The good life, indeed. Contrary to the verbal bouquets thrown around by the
Times
’ man in Cairo, the violent spasms and power grabs of the past few years have shown that the Muslim Brotherhood of today differs little from the openly jihadist outfit of yesteryear.
One major difference, however, is that the Brotherhood has learned the art of extreme caution, patiently gauging conditions on the ground and rarely, if ever, overplaying its hand and moving too soon. Yes, Mohammed Morsi’s decree in November 2012 granting himself nearly absolute power, followed by his helping Egypt’s Islamist-led parliament ram through a new sharia-based constitution, sparked massive protests and running street battles. But Morsi knew the Brotherhood had the numbers, the muscle, and the silent complicity of the Obama administration and would, as a result, win out in the end. He was also fresh off helping to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that saw him hailed as a pragmatist and statesman by President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. With the region a tinderbox and Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel hanging by a thread, Morsi realized the feckless Obama administration was invested in his success and wouldn’t dare cut its billions of dollars of funding to his regime. Perhaps most important, the budding jihadist knew he had the Egyptian military’s backing.
That wasn’t the case in 1952, when, after supporting a military coup that overthrew the Egyptian monarchy, the Brotherhood expected a major role in the new government and pushed hard for Egypt to become an Islamic state governed by sharia law. The military junta, after early attempts to appease the Ikhwan, soon realized it was dealing with an implacable foe, as coup leader Gamal Abdel Nasser noted at the time:
I have met several times with the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, who overwhelmed me with his demands. The thing he first asked for was for the government to ordain that women be veiled. Subsequently he made other demands, such as closing the cinemas and the theatres and other things as well that would make life gloomy and sinister. It was, of course, impossible to do such things.
32
 
Who says history doesn’t repeat itself? Nasser’s remarks about the Brotherhood circa 1954 sound eerily like those of an analyst surveying the situation in Egypt today. Yet, while Morsi and the Brothers have been successful in their drive for absolute power, their predecessors had no such luck. The friction between the Ikhwan and Nasser’s Free Officers reached a boiling point in October 1954, when a member of the Brotherhood’s Secret Apparatus fired eight shots at Nasser while the latter was giving a speech in Alexandria. The assassination attempt failed and Nasser moved quickly to crush the Brotherhood, dissolving the organization and burning its headquarters to the ground. Thousands of its members—including chief propagandist Sayyid Qutb—were rounded up and arrested. Six were hanged.
33
The Brotherhood would be severely repressed in Egypt for most of the next five decades, its members frequently arrested, tortured, and executed. As a result, the movement went underground. Its leaders were patient, and worked insidiously to undermine the regime. And the slow-and-steady model, a phased strategy for weakening secular governments, soon became the norm for most Ikhwan satellites throughout the world.
One notable exception was the Brotherhood’s Syrian branch, which spearheaded a violent insurrection in the late 1970s and early 1980s that ended in disaster for the Ikhwan in that country. As Islamism expert Hassan Mneimneh recounts:
The confrontation escalated in March 1980 into uprisings in virtually all Syrian cities, with the open participation of numerous opposition groups. Though the [Hafez] Assad regime responded decisively over the next two years with spectacular acts of brutality and collective punishment, the Muslim Brotherhood remained an existential threat to the regime until February 1982, when it took over the city of Hama. This prompted Assad to dispatch his brother Rifat at the helm of “defense brigades” to squash the rebellion. Rifat accomplished his mission by steadily bombarding the city and killing an estimated 20,000 of its inhabitants.
34
 
The Hama massacre signaled the neutralization of the Syrian Brotherhood—banned and largely ineffective until finding new life in Syria’s recent civil war—and proved a cautionary lesson for the global Ikhwan on the virtue of patience, particularly in countries where military dictatorships unhesitant to employ brutal violence hold sway. Lesson learned: the fact that the Brotherhood is helping lead another insurrection today in Syria, some thirty years after its crushing defeat at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, shows the remarkable resilience and staying power of the movement and its message. Like their Egyptian counterparts, the Syrian Brothers have been able to outlast some of the Arab world’s most repressive strongmen. That’s no coincidence. Hassan al-Banna’s message of jihad and martyrdom, of anti-Semitic and anti-Western animus, struck a deep chord throughout the Muslim world and spawned generations of committed, fanatical Islamists bent on establishing a global caliphate.
Yet, for some, al-Banna didn’t go far enough and slow-and-steady just wouldn’t do. While still revering al-Banna as the godfather of modern jihad, these unholy warriors took their cues from a different Brotherhood icon, Sayyid Qutb—and changed the course of world history in the process.
CHAPTER FOUR
 
ACCESSORY TO AL-QAEDA
 
“Y
ou are the first person I’ve given an interview to in a long time.
The media, they tell lies about me.”
Sheikh Abu Adam spoke in an almost mournful tone as he led my cameraman and me down a dimly lit hallway in his Munich flat. His burly bodyguards, both dressed in similar al-Qaeda–like garb, flanked us on either side, as they would throughout the next three hours. Our destination was a small back room of the apartment where a Middle Eastern–style spread of chicken, rice, and pita bread awaited us.
This was Germany but it could have easily passed for Gaza—a fitting atmosphere for the Sheikh, an Egyptian native of Palestinian origin whose real name is Hesham Sheshaa. At the time of our meeting, his three wives and ten of his twelve (some say he has more) children lived with him in the cramped flat. The sound of a baby wailing and small children screaming from the next room cascaded off the walls around us as we sat to eat, but the Sheikh—who bears an uncanny facial resemblance to Osama bin Laden—appeared unfazed. He stroked his long beard and adjusted his Islamic headdress before joining his bodyguards in devouring large helpings of chicken and rice.
“Before we do the interview, we must eat,” he said between chomps. “There is much to discuss.”
It was June 2012 and Germany’s Salafist movement, of which Sheikh Abu Adam is a prominent voice, had increasingly come under the microscope of German intelligence as a major national security threat. Just two weeks before my interview with the Sheikh, one thousand German police fanned out across the country and raided the homes, schools, and mosques of Salafi Muslims suspected of terrorism-related activities.
Salafism is considered the most extreme interpretation of Islam—no small feat—and is the brand of choice for al-Qaeda and other Sunni Muslim terror groups. In dress, speech, and mannerisms, Salafists model themselves after Islam’s prophet Mohammed and his earliest followers in the seventh century Arabian desert (the term
salaf
means “predecessors”). Long beards, flowing
dishdasha
robes, and pants worn above the ankle are some of their defining physical characteristics. They strictly adhere to every facet of Islamic sharia law and are openly, often violently, hostile to any society that does not follow suit, including Germany.
The Salafists, close cousins of the notorious Saudi Wahhabis, reject Germany’s secular, democratic constitution and seek to make the Koran the ultimate authority over any manmade laws. If you think this sounds an awful lot like the Muslim Brotherhood, you’re absolutely right. In fact, as recently as 2008, the “About Us” section of the Brotherhood’s official website self-identified the MB as Salafi.
1
Indeed, the two movements share the exact same ideology and goals, and the Brotherhood’s roots are indisputably in Salafism. But as we’ll see shortly, there are some distinctions—mostly tactical—that have developed between the MB and hardcore Salafists like Egypt’s Gamaa Islamiya in the years since the death of their mutual hero Sayyid Qutb in 1966. For instance, the Brotherhood’s gradualist strategy and willingness to engage in electoral politics has been a sore point with Salafists—although that may very well be changing, if the thrust into Egyptian politics by Gamaa Islamiya and other Salafist groups in recent years is any indication.
As for Sheikh Abu Adam’s home base of Germany, security officials there estimate that only about five thousand of the country’s 4.3 million Muslims are Salafists. But these jihadists-in-waiting are Germany’s fastest growing Muslim sect and are known for being verbally and physically confrontational toward non-Muslims.
A Palestinian Salafi imam named Ibrahim Abou Nagie created a firestorm during the first half of 2012 when he and his group Die Wahre Religion (The True Religion) led a drive to place a Koran in every German home. Abou Nagie’s disciples set up stands in major German cities where they handed out thousands of free Korans, with non-Muslims the intended target. The goal, he said, was “to bring Allah’s word to every household” in Germany.
2
Abou Nagie—who for years received welfare benefits from the German government—is just one of many high-profile Salafi preachers to draw law enforcement scrutiny for their role in radicalizing young German Muslims.
Several of these Salafi firebrands are based in and around the Rhineland cities of Cologne and Bonn in western Germany. I visited both cities and was struck by the number of Salafis I saw walking the streets, including a number of white Muslim converts. The ethnic mix was actually not surprising—there have long been reports of German jihad colonies in Pakistan’s tribal regions, where German expats, including white converts, have devoted their lives to jihad and the al-Qaeda/Taliban cause.
3
“We can see that a lot of jihadis with Salafist backgrounds are going to Afghanistan and to training camps, to Pakistan into training camps,” German journalist Franz Feyder told me. “And what we can see as well is that a lot of jihadis are passing through the Horn of Africa. And they’re going to fight in Somalia, going to fight in Yemen, going to fight in Kenya.”
Feyder, an expert on Germany’s Salafi scene, summarized German intelligence officials’ view on the matter: “The Salafi movement in Germany is creating an environment for violence and radicalization. Not every Salafist is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Salafist.”
4
The growing strength and confidence of the movement was on full display in May 2012, when hundreds of Salafists stormed a small anti-Islam rally in Bonn and attacked German police who were on the scene. Twenty-nine officers were injured as a result of the onslaught—including two seriously from knife wounds—and over a hundred Salafists were arrested.
5
A few months later, two Somali-born Salafists were jailed after attempting to bomb Bonn’s central train station.
6
That incident wasn’t Germany’s first brush with Islamic terror, however. Dozens of German citizens have been arrested on terrorism-related charges since 9/11, including the gunman who murdered two U.S. airmen and injured two more in a jihadi attack at Frankfurt Airport in 2011 while yelling, “Allahu Akhbar.”
7
The forerunner to these recent incidents was the infamous Hamburg Cell, consisting of a group of al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers—including Mohammed Atta and two other 9/11 hijackers—that gathered in Hamburg in the late 1990s.
It is no doubt particularly disheartening for older Germans who suffered through Nazism and communism to see yet another anti-democratic, totalitarian ideology take root on German soil. Even more so because the German government—like virtually all of its counterparts in Western Europe—has exacerbated the problem over several decades with lax immigration laws, suicidal multicultural policies, and draconian political correctness. Simply put, the rise of German Islamism is an overwhelmingly self-inflicted wound. And it will surely come as no surprise to American readers to learn that the staunchly leftist German media has succeeded in branding anyone who voices concern over this troubling trend a “racist,” “Islamophobe,”or worse, a “Nazi.” When I interviewed courageous German anti-jihad activists, their most common complaint was about the bias and hostility of the left-wing German media.

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