The Muslim Brotherhood (14 page)

However, the Brotherhood’s declarations of moderation have not convinced everyone, including some members of the SNC. Some elements within the 310 seat council, a quarter of which is dominated by the Brotherhood, criticised the movement for its excessive influence over decision making within the body. This includes the Kurds, who have deep reservations about the Brotherhood, not least because of its resistance to Kurdish demands for federalism or for Kurdish autonomy within Syria. Accusations were levelled at the Brotherhood to the effect that it was trying to control the SNC through its influence over independent Islamist members of the council and that it was channelling funds to favoured groups inside Syria in a bid to build its presence in the country.
⁹⁴
This lingering suspicion of the movement and its real intentions prompted some more secular elements to object to the SNC’s being absorbed into the Syrian National Coalition, a body established in November 2012 to try to unify the opposition. For all its efforts to present a more moderate face to the world, therefore, the Syrian brothers clearly still have a long way to go to convince everyone.

It is still too early to ascertain what will unfold in Syria. What is certain, however, is that when the al-Assad regime finally goes, the Brotherhood will make sure it is there to play a part in whatever comes next. It goes without saying that doing so will not be easy. The movement’s long absence from the country means that it will be competing with a host of other Islamist forces and currents, many of which are likely to have a stronger local following. Whether in the face of such competition the Brotherhood will stick to its more moderate stance or whether it will feel compelled to retract down a more conservative line of thinking has yet to be seen. However, given the mood of the region, all the indications would suggest that the Brotherhood will once again become a force to be reckoned with in the Syrian context.

One of the most contentious issues that has haunted the Muslim Brotherhood in recent decades has been its so-called
Tanzeem al-Dawli
(international organisation). Much of the controversy has arisen on account of the secrecy that has surrounded this organisation since its inception in the 1970s. There even seems to be confusion within the Brotherhood itself as to what exactly the international
tanzeem
is and what role it plays. Whilst some Ikhwani talk about it as if it were an active component of the Brotherhood, part of its transnational identity that is actively directed from Cairo, others dismiss it as little more than a co-ordinating body, with no significant function. Egyptian brother Dr Kamal Helbawy, for example, has described the international
tanzeem
as no more than ‘international co-ordination’.
¹
Similarly, the Syrian brother, the late Dr Hassan al-Huwaidi, who was a Deputy to the Supreme Guide in the international organisation until his death in March 2009, referred to it as ‘an advisory body that has no executive power’.
²

Some Ikhwani are so sensitive about the subject that questions about it sometimes engender irritation. In 2006 the Guide of the
Jordanian Ikhwan, Abd al-Majid al-Dhunaybat, asserted: ‘The so-called international organisation is a wrong name and a term used by adversaries to refer to the brothers in various countries and who try to standardise the understanding, ideology and positions of the groups regarding world events.’
³
Guidance Office member Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh claimed that the international
tanzeem
was something that existed primarily in the minds of those in the West, angrily complaining, ‘You find that a lot with the westerners!’
⁴
Egyptian Ikhwani Youssef Nada, who ran the Al Taqwa Bank, explicitly stated, ‘As far as I know this so-called international
tanzeem
never existed.’
⁵

There is also a strong divergence of opinion among commentators. According to some detractors, the international
tanzeem
, along with the various plans and documents that have been ascribed to it, is an elaborate network set up by the Brotherhood to infiltrate Europe with its dangerous and fundamentalist ideology.
⁶
The Egyptian state also sought to portray the organisation as a sinister entity, poised to topple regimes throughout the world. Former Egyptian Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi described it as ‘the base from the cloaks of which have emerged all these [extremist] organisations which betray their religion and their countries’.
⁷
For others, however, the international
tanzeem
is nothing more than a ‘loose and feeble coalition scarcely able to convene its own members’.
⁸
Some commentators have gone even further, suggesting that the organisation is completely irrelevant and incompetent. Abu Ala Madhi, who broke away from the Brotherhood in 1996 to form the Al-Wasat party in Egypt, has described the international movement as a fantasy, a failure that is incapable of carrying out any objective.
⁹

To add to the confusion, whilst some have suggested that the Ikhwani are deliberately evasive when talking about the international
tanzeem
in order to make themselves appear more powerful than they actually are, others have accused them of downplaying the organisation so as to detract attention from it. It is true that after
9/11 the Brotherhood was especially concerned about being branded as an international terrorist organisation and there appeared to be a concerted effort to refute the suggestion that the mother branch in Egypt might be directing the policies of Ikhwani groups elsewhere. Rather they were keen to promote the idea that the local branches are independent and are not obliged by decisions made in Cairo. As Mohamed Habib, the former Deputy of the Brotherhood in Egypt, explained:

There is an international organisation, but the groups within it operate in a decentralised way, giving it flexibility … what is more important is that the aims of the international tanzeem are one and it has one methodology so all the branches aim for the same things but within the framework of the legislation of their own countries.
¹⁰

Given the tense security situation that existed in Egypt prior to the Arab Spring and the pressures that the Egyptian Brotherhood was under, this decentralised scenario would certainly seem to be the most likely way in which the transnational movement operated in the years leading up to the 2011 revolution. It would seem far-fetched to imagine that the leadership in Cairo could have been in any position to run a fully functioning international organisation. Yet at the same time it was difficult to ignore the
Tanzeem al-Dawli
completely, not least because it continued to have an international Guidance Office headquartered in Cairo. Furthermore, for all that it might have been organisationally weak, the international
tanzeem
represented an important feature in the Brotherhood’s history and has played a key role in the movement’s evolution. Its fortunes have ebbed and flowed according to the personalities who have been at the helm of the movement and it has been as wrought with internal division as each of the individual branches themselves. On occasion, such as in 1990–1
during the Gulf war crisis, these divisions threatened to rupture the entire Brotherhood. The story of the international
tanzeem
therefore highlights the Ikhwan’s never-ending difficulties in reconciling being both a local organisation with national branches and priorities and an international body and school of thought.

The fact that the Brotherhood set up an international organisation is hardly surprising. The movement’s internationalist outlook was established from its very inception, thanks to the vision of its founder Hassan al-Banna. The Ikhwan was formed largely in response to the fall of the last caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, and the movement stressed the universal nature of Islam and the
umma
(one Muslim nation). Moreover, although al-Banna’s main focus was on local issues, he also sought to spread his ideology and his movement beyond the confines of Egypt. To this end, he sent members of the Brotherhood abroad to spread
dawa
and to expand the movement in other Arab states.

However, for al-Banna, Egypt was always the centre and he considered it to be the true heart and soul of the movement. The fact that the Brotherhood was founded in Egypt, al-Banna’s birthplace, has always given Cairo a certain moral authority, so much so that the Murshid of the Egyptian branch has always been the supreme leader and spiritual reference of the entire movement. As Syrian Ikhwani Adnan Saad Eddine said, ‘The Murshid has [overall] moral responsibility.’
¹¹

The importance of Egypt notwithstanding, the Brotherhood has not been averse to trying to create alternative centres of power whenever Cairo has found itself under extreme pressure. In 1954, for example, after the Nasser regime clamped down particularly hard on the Ikhwan, arresting most of its leadership, the then Murshid Hassan al-Hodeibi
held meetings with Ikhwani leaders in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon to develop plans to set up an executive office for the Arab world.
¹²
According to Issam al-Attar, after al-Hodeibi returned to Egypt he became busy with local issues once again and the idea of the regional office slipped down the agenda.

The idea was resurrected in the early 1960s and during the Haj of 1963 a number of Ikhwani from Arab states held a conference, during which they elected al-Attar as the head of an Arab executive bureau to be known as the
Maktab al-Amm
(General Office). The main function of this office, aside from acting as a focal point for the Ikhwan outside Egypt, was to collect funds and donations for the Brotherhood and to promote
dawa
.
¹³
There was no direct obligation to Cairo within this set-up; according to Sudanese Ikhwani Dr Hassan al-Turabi, it worked on the basis of voluntary co-ordination.
¹⁴
Yet due to the ongoing restrictions on the Egyptians, this office remained largely the domain of the Syrians, who were experiencing a more flexible domestic situation at that time. It was never able to really develop, not least because al-Attar himself was forced into exile in 1964 but also because once the Egyptians had no immediate need or interest for it, it was left to wither away.

As the Ikhwan continued to develop internationally, with branches springing up across the Islamic world, Cairo came to act as a natural arbiter and leader and it intervened to resolve issues in local branches where it saw fit. For example, in the late 1960s the Guidance Office in Egypt stepped in to sort out the conflict that had built up between the Aleppo and Damascus wings of the Syrian Ikhwan. Cairo organised an election for a new Shura Council for the Syrian branch. Therefore, although it had no formal role in this respect, there was a general assumption that the Guidance Office in Egypt had a natural responsibility to solve problems that occurred in other parts of the movement. However, as the Sudanese Ikhwani leader has described, the relationships between Cairo and other branches at this time
were largely spontaneous and done without any real organisational formality.
¹⁵

Whilst Cairo had always had this informal moral authority over other branches, it was in the early 1970s that a hawkish group of Egyptian Ikhwani sought to amplify Cairo’s role and to use the movement’s international dimensions to their advantage. This group, which included Mustafa Mashour, Ahmed al-Malat and Kamel Sananiri, were all members of the Nizam al-Khass and were released from prison shortly after President Sadat came to power in 1970. As explained in
Chapter One
, immediately after their release this group sought to wrest control of the Egyptian Ikhwan away from the Murshid and to reinvigorate the movement, which had dwindled significantly since the heady days of the early 1950s. Yet their ambitions for the Ikhwan went beyond Egypt, and they were to become the real driving force behind the international
tanzeem
.

The group’s bid to make use of the movement’s international aspect was partly driven by the fact that once they left prison they discovered that other Ikhwani branches around the world had flourished whilst their own had withered. The brothers in Jordan had gained much popularity and had a good connection to the monarchy, which like the Gulf states viewed the Ikhwan as a useful bulwark against nationalist or leftist forces. The realisation that other branches had become stronger than the mother group provoked a ‘big organisational crisis’ within the Egyptian Ikhwan.
¹⁶
They could see that whilst they were being stifled by the Egyptian regime, the international environment offered distinct opportunities that they could use not only to strengthen their influence within the movement as a whole, but also to increase the authority of their own particular clique within the Egyptian branch. As such they took steps to begin bringing the other branches under their control.

Whilst the other Ikhwani branches had always given their loyalty to the Murshid as a matter of tradition, this group placed a new
insistence on the obedience that other parts of the Ikhwan should display towards the Murshid. Following Hassan al-Hodeibi’s death in 1973 the group, who had by then appointed themselves as members of the Guidance Office, decided to select a new Murshid whom they could control from behind the scenes. However, this Murshid, who had agreed to take on the position very reluctantly, did not want his identity to be disclosed and became known as the Secret Murshid. Once they had appointed him, the group then demanded that the leaders of the various national Ikhwani branches come to Cairo to swear
baya
to the new guide, even though his identity was a secret.
¹⁷
Adnan Saad Eddine has described how after he had been elected as the new General Guide of the Syrian Ikhwan in 1975 he was obliged to go through this process: ‘Omar al-Tilimsani called on me to go to Cairo to give
baya
to the Murshid in the name of the Syrian
tanzeem
… I went to Cairo to Dr Ahmed al-Malat who took me to a Cairo suburb to visit al-Murshid and I performed
baya
after I promised that I would not reveal or mention his name.’
¹⁸