The Muslim Brotherhood (15 page)

Some Ikhwani rejected the idea of giving allegiance to a Murshid they did not know, forcing the Egyptian group to come to a compromise. In 1977 they brought in Omar al-Tilimsani as the new Supreme Guide. However, the incident reflects the sense among this group of Egyptians that they were at the top of the Ikhwan’s international hierarchy. As Issam al-Attar has explained, ‘They imagined themselves as the real leaders of all the Ikhwan in the Arab world because Egypt for them was the real leadership of the movement as a whole. They wanted to make the Murshid everything in the movement.’
¹⁹

As well as strengthening their control over existing branches in the Arab world, the group also sought to harness opportunities on offer in other parts of the world where the Ikhwan had a presence. Many of these openings were in Europe. The seeds of the Brotherhood had been planted in Europe in the 1950s by a number of Ikhwani who had sought refuge on the continent, such as Said Ramadan, the son-in-law
of Hassan al-Banna. Ramadan, who had always had international ambitions, arrived in Europe in 1958. There, according to his son, Tariq, he was generally considered to be in charge of the Ikhwan abroad.
²⁰
He settled in Geneva, where he began publishing Islamist literature and set up the Islamic Centre of Geneva. Keen to expand his influence further, Ramadan also opened a centre in Munich and another in London in 1964.

Although Ramadan had left the Ikhwan by the end of the 1970s, his presence in Europe and the opening of his Islamic centres were to lay the Ikhwan’s foundations on the continent. These centres became key hubs for other influential Ikhwani who had settled in Europe, including Issam al-Attar, Youssef Nada, and later the Lebanese scholar Sheikh Faisal al-Mawlawi. These individuals, along with Ramadan, found an environment where they could operate with a relative degree of freedom and where they could take advantage of the media opportunities that were on offer to promote their cause. As one commentator explained, ‘Leaders of the Ikhwan organisations were surprised by the Western openness to Islam and the facilities that were given to fugitive Islamic leaders.’
²¹
Indeed, this group of highly ambitious and hawkish Ikhwani saw possibilities in Europe that they could not even dream of inside Egypt.

Much of the spread of this Ikhwani activism in Europe was thanks to the large sums of money that the Saudis had been prepared to direct into the continent to support their activities. As such, Saudi Arabia offered another opportunity for this group of Egyptians. The Saudis had built strong relations with the Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Kingdom had become the most important place of refuge for the Egyptian Ikhwani facing persecution at the hands of the Nasser regime. The Saudi monarchy welcomed the Ikhwan, partly as a means to shore itself up against the nationalist regimes that were spreading in the region, but also as an opportunity for the Saudis to use the Brotherhood to fill the gaps in their own society and institutions.
The Saudis offered the Ikhwani, who were generally members of the educated intelligentsia, posts within the administration and government, enabling the Ikhwan to penetrate the Saudi establishment to the highest level.
²²
At the same time the Saudis gave the Ikhwani key posts in many of their charitable organisations including those in Europe. As the former Murshid Mehdi Akef, who himself worked as a consultant for the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) in Riyadh in the 1970s and also spent several years at the Islamic centre in Munich, commented, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood is like a beauty spot on the face of Saudi Arabia because of what it provided the country.’
²³

However, the Ikhwan’s links into the Gulf did not rest solely with Saudi Arabia. They also developed a presence in other Gulf countries including Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and the richness of these branches was an appealing prospect for the struggling Egyptian Ikhwan, whose finances had been strangled by the state. The new leaders in Cairo realised that there were established networks operating outside Egypt unburdened by the kinds of restrictions they were facing at home and with a ready supply of petrodollars. They therefore set about trying to develop a way to bring all of this activism, not to mention the supply of resources, under their control.

Much of this push to harness these opportunities was driven by Mustafa Mashour, who seems to have taken on establishing the international
tanzeem
as his personal project. The highly ambitious Mashour, who one Sudanese brother described as a ‘very centralised man’,
²⁴
seems to have had an almost romantic vision about what such an organisation could achieve and he invested a huge amount of time and effort in trying to turn his vision into a reality. During the 1970s he began making regular visits to Europe, consulting with different
figures within the Ikhwan and trying to persuade them of the benefits of restructuring the movement in a way that would bring it under a single united leadership. He even courted figures who had moved away from the Ikhwan, including Issam al-Attar. Al-Attar recounted that Mashour, accompanied by Ahmed al-Malat, visited him in his home in Aachen, where they tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to return to the Ikhwan.
²⁵
However, Mashour was more successful with other parts of the Ikhwan. The Jordanian Ikhwan, for example, was quick to support Mashour, which accounts for the important role that the Jordanian General Guide Mohamed Abdelrahman Khalifa came to play within the Brotherhood’s international structures.

By the early 1980s the pressure to activate some kind of international body had become even greater. Whilst there had been some room for manoeuvre during most of the 1970s, in 1981 President Sadat decided that it was time to clamp down on growing Islamist activism and embarked upon a major sweep of arrests that included large numbers of Ikhwani. Mustafa Mashour discovered that he was about to be detained and fled to Kuwait just four days before the arrests began. From Kuwait he moved between Germany and the Gulf, doing his utmost to push this new international system, something that was even more urgent now that the Ikhwan had such limited room to manoeuvre inside Egypt. After Sadat was killed in October 1981, his successor, Mubarak, continued with this repressive policy, preventing the Ikhwan from having any real space to develop inside the country.

However, the freedom that Mashour had found abroad was to consolidate his power and influence within the movement. Dr Kamal Helbawy has observed of this period that ‘Mustafa Mashour was busy supervising and running activities whilst the Murshid in Egypt was unable to move a lot.’
²⁶
Just as had occurred in earlier years, the Egyptians once again focused their efforts on alternative centres that could sustain them whilst they weathered a particularly difficult period in Egypt. This time, however, the efforts were much more sustained and developed.

In July 1982 the Ikhwan produced a document titled
La Iha al-Dakhiliya
(
The Internal Statute
). This was the culmination of the meetings that Mashour had been holding across Europe and elsewhere. This document, which is widely considered to mark the official establishment of the international
tanzeem
, reads very much like a constitution and lays out the new internal structure for the Ikhwan that had been approved by the Murshid in 1978. The document essentially formalised the existing relationships between Cairo and the Ikhwan’s other branches into one official system. As such, it was a way for the Egyptian Ikhwan to bring an unwieldy movement of disparate parts spread far and wide across the globe into one formalised body.

The document made provision for new international leadership structures comprising a General Guidance Office and a General Shura Council. The General Guidance Office was to consist of thirteen members, eight of whom must be from ‘the region in which the Supreme Guide resides’, with another five being chosen ‘in accordance with regional representation’. Under the Guidance Office was the General Shura Council, comprising at least thirty members who represented Brotherhood organisations in different countries and further including three ‘specialised and experienced members who are nominated by the Guidance Office’. At the top of this new hierarchy, heading both the General Guidance Office and the General Shura Council, was of course the Murshid. He was formally tasked not only with representing the movement, but also with supervising all departments and summoning the general guides of different countries to meetings when necessary. Somewhat surprisingly, the document did not specify that the Murshid should be Egyptian. Instead he was to be nominated by the General Guidance Office from among the most popular candidates in the various national branches and elected by the General Shura Council, where he had to receive at least three quarters of the votes. Hence in theory a Murshid could be chosen from any of the national branches.

In many ways therefore this was a compromise document, allowing other branches to take part in the leadership structures and in theory enabling non-Egyptians to have a shot at taking on the role of Murshid. However, the weighting of the new bodies, and of the General Guidance Office in particular, clearly enabled the Egyptians to dominate. Moreover, in spite of the elaborate structure put in place to choose the new Murshid, the rules were not followed in subsequent years. As former Egyptian Ikhwan Abu Ala Madhi has described, ‘The first test for the new system was in 1986 when Omar al-Tilimsani died. However, the Ikhwan chose Mohamed Hamed Abu Nasser without going through the stages.’
²⁷
Nor was the new system followed when Mohamed Abu Nasser died in 1996 and Maimoun al-Hodeibi appointed Mustafa Mashour as the next Murshid in the famous graveside pledge described in
Chapter One
. Clearly this document was something that the Egyptians believed they could pick and choose from, using its rules and regulations only when expedient.

As well as consolidating the Egyptian presence in the new leadership structure, the document also put in place a system whereby the national branches were formally bound by decisions made by the centre. The leaders of national branches were obliged to ‘commit to the decisions of the general leadership represented by the Supreme Guide, the Guidance Office and the General Shura Council’; to adhere to the ‘policies and positions of the Muslim Brotherhood towards public issues as determined by the General Guidance Office and the General Shura Council’; and to commit to ‘obtaining the approval of the Guidance Bureau before making any important political decisions’.

The leaders of national branches were also required to consult and receive the approval of the Murshid or the Guidance Office before they adopted resolutions, and to inform the Guidance Office of their political stances towards local issues. In addition, they were expected to set their own local statutes, which must be approved by the General Guidance Office before they could become effective. Each local branch had to pay
an annual subscription for
dawa
work. The document also ruled that Ikhwani residing outside of their own countries should ‘comply with the leadership of the movement in the country in which they reside’.

As such, the new system was very much a way of controlling the activities of the various national branches, which had until then been able to operate as largely independent bodies with informal ties to the mother branch. Egyptian intellectual and well-known critic of the Brotherhood Dr Rifat Said explained this new relationship between the mother branch and the other national branches: ‘Every national branch has the right to do what he wants under the banner of the Ikhwan but it should be linked to the centre by money and by following instructions such as “You should change your attitude towards this or that.”’
²⁸
Although this comment is somewhat of a harsh oversimplification, it certainly captures the essence of what this group envisaged the international
tanzeem
to be. Former Ikhwani and highly respected Kuwaiti scholar Sheikh Abdullah Nafisi was heavily critical of this internal restructuring, observing that all the articles related to membership ‘emphasise the member’s duty, from the giving of
baya
to membership payments and even to punishment procedures that the
tanzeem
should adopt against those members who are not fulfilling their duties. Yet we can’t find any article that gives the members the right to complain.’
²⁹
He added that this system ‘opened the door for the leadership to expel, make exempt or freeze members who differ with them in one thing or another regarding the group’s affairs’.
³⁰
Similarly one Egyptian Islamist complained: ‘Despite the fact that a great number of those who have talent and intellectual expertise are outside Egypt, we find a tendency in the general system and more importantly in practice towards confirming the Egyptian leadership and orientation.’
³¹

Abdullah Nafisi did not restrict his criticisms to the centre’s attempt to consolidate power; he also complained that the Gulf countries were given a far greater weighting in this new system than that afforded to those Ikhwani in ‘more important’ Arab countries such as Syria and
Algeria. He asserted that this unfair weighting enabled the Ikhwan from the Gulf to ‘manipulate the political and social path of al-jama’a and to shape its ‘social and political stances according to their own way of thinking’. Nafisi put the reason for this over representation of those from the Gulf down to the international
tanzeem
’s need for money. It is true that the financial opportunities provided by the Gulf states were always a driving factor in Mashour’s bid to develop an international organisation. As Ibrahim Ghuraiyba has commented, ‘The Egyptians were the most interested party in the international
tanzeem
in order to get donations.’
³²
As such Nafisi’s argument would appear to hold water.

What appeared on paper to be a relatively equitable way to bring the Ikhwan’s different branches into one unified system was, in fact, a means to create a highly centralised system that gave an ambitious group access to control and to finances that would feed both their local and international ambitions.