The Muslim Brotherhood (23 page)

The IGD has close ties to Millî Görüş, so much so that the two organisations share the same premises in Cologne. Millî Görüş’s General Secretary Oğuz Üçüncü has noted of the IGD, ‘We consider us as brother/sister organisations. We work very closely together … We
co-ordinate our work and the executive bodies of the IGD and Millî Görüş meet twice a year.’
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Such closeness is hardly surprising given that aside from the strong dose of nationalism that characterises the Turkish organisation, Millî Görüş broadly follows a similar ideology to that of the Brotherhood. But just as with the Jama’at-e-Islami and the MAB in Britain, the IGD and Millî Görüş have not sought to overcome their ethnic differences in order to join forces.

Ibrahim El-Zayat believes that the Turks need their own separate organisations because of the pervasive nationalism within the Turkish community and also because of language. ‘Many Turks don’t speak any language but Turkish – the first and second generation have no German. You will find very few who speak English. This limits the opportunities for mutual co-operation.’
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On sheer numbers alone, the IGD is completely dwarfed by its Turkish counterpart.

As to the relationship between the IGD and the Ikhwan, like its counterparts in other European countries, the IGD has sought to distance itself from any such connection and has focused on its German identity. As El-Zayat emphasises, ‘It is a German institution with German membership.’ However, El-Zayat also openly admits connections with Said Ramadan and has said of the early days of the organisation: ‘Naturally there were connections [with the Brotherhood]. It was an open body that was separate from what was called the movement body. At that time the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to work conspiratorially.’
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Ghaleb Himmat has also acknowledged the influence that the Brotherhood had on the organisation whilst he was in charge. With typical Ikhwani ambiguity, Himmat declared that his mosque was open to everyone but the Ikhwani came to dominate because they were the most active. ‘If the Muslim Brotherhood considers me one of them, it is an honour for me.’
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Looking at those individuals who have been involved in the organisation over the years, not to mention the links with Saudi Arabia, the IGD has certainly grown out of the Brotherhood tradition
and is typical of Ikhwani-oriented organisations in Europe.

The IGD acknowledges that it is part of the Ikhwan’s reformist ideological tradition, but denies any organisational linkage to the movement today. Although El-Zayat accepts that the Guidance Office in Cairo is considered to be one of the IGD’s spiritual references, he insists that no institutional ties exist between his organisation and Cairo or with the Brotherhood more broadly. His desire to be considered separate from the Ikhwan is so strong that he has stated categorically that he is not a member of the Brotherhood. In 2007 he published a statement on the Brotherhood’s English language website after it had had referred to him as a Muslim Brother: ‘Counterstatement: You wrote, “Eight Muslim Brotherhood members are scheduled to be tried in absentia in front of the military tribunal because five of them are living abroad” and then mentioned my name in a wrong spelling. I declare, that I am not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.’
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In spite of the repeated visits of Mashour and Akef to Germany in the early 1980s when the international
tanzeem
was being established, El-Zayat insists that the IGD was never a member of the Ikhwan’s international body. ‘I think there was never a working international
tanzeem
. I think it was more of an idea to have something which is an international body, but from very early on Europe didn’t understand itself as part of an organisation, but as a part of the thinking.’
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This fits with Helbawy’s explanation that the European branches had no formal role within the international Guidance Office, but reported to and consulted with the leadership indirectly. As El-Zayat also stated:

It is not an organisational link or a clear affiliation because a clear affiliation won’t work. If you bind a body that is working in Germany to a body in Egypt or Syria it won’t work because in the end the variety of challenges that we have here are not connected to what is happening there. They cannot give instructions or say ‘you have to do this or
you have to do that’. It could be not a working relationship if we were dependent on a movement in Egypt or Syria.
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However, El-Zayat does acknowledge that there are ‘personal relations’ with the Brotherhood, but he adds: ‘this is a completely different thing. There is no link and … no directing of actions whatsoever by Egypt or by any other international body.’
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El-Zayat clearly wants to maintain the IGD’s independence from any centre of power outside Germany. Touching on a very important point, he has also explained how Islamists in Europe are sometimes more progressive in their thinking than the Ikhwan in the Middle East:

I think that maybe Europe has gone even beyond what the Muslim Brotherhood is thinking now as solutions. Take for example the issue of women in Islam. I am President of the IGD and my Vice President is a woman – she is in charge of many men. It is a point which you wouldn’t find in the Muslim world at all. Even in Sudan. I don’t know any Jama’at who would put any woman even as a Vice President. When I presented her I was very strict and keen on having a woman.
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This may be more the thinking of the second generation than of Muslims in Germany more widely. As El-Zayat himself says, some members of the IGD had difficulties accepting the fact that he had chosen to have a woman as his Deputy.
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El-Zayat has also raised concerns about the Ikhwani-oriented European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), which was established in 1997 to provide fatwas specific to Muslims living in Europe as minority communities in secular societies. This council, headed by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is controversial: although it seeks to be relevant to the lives of Muslims in Europe, many council members reside
in the Middle East and have never lived in the continent. Moreover, even though the council includes scholars from other ethnic groups such as the South Asian community in Britain and the Turkish community in Germany, it remains predominantly Arab, with an overwhelmingly Ikhwani flavour. (Prominent Ikhwani or Ikhwani-linked individuals on the council include its Deputy, al-Mawlawi; Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi; Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Taweel in Spain; and Sheikh Mohamed al-Hawari in Germany.) It has also been contentious in so far as some of its fatwas do not sit comfortably with the concept of integrating into European society. Al-Hawari is reported to have written that adoption should be forbidden because a woman might be seen in a state of undress by a child other than her biological offspring.
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In another fatwa, which responded to a question about whether it was permissible for a Muslim to eat with non-Muslim people who are drinking wine, the ruling was that, ‘It is not permissible to sit with people who are drinking wine (alcohol), whether they are
kafirs
or Muslims.’
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What is notable here is not the ruling itself, but rather the use of the highly derogatory term
kafirs
(heathens) to describe non-Muslims.

It is this very sort of attitude that El-Zayat has found difficult to deal with. He says that the council

… had an old fatwa on the issue of Palestine. This is a real difficulty that we have. We have two different positions on that. For me for example I am not a scholar but I follow the position that if we open up this door for suicide attacks then we cannot close it and there are no limitations afterwards … The situation in Palestine for example is something where we should keep it clear what the Islamic framework is. But what people do afterwards may be different because I have never lived in one of the camps and … if you hear some of the stories … you understand why people are doing it but you also have to take a religious position on this.
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Al-Qaradawi has explicitly praised suicide operations in Palestine, which places those linked to the European Council or the European Islamist organisations that follow his Ikhwani school of thought in a somewhat difficult position. Although al-Qaradawi’s ideas on this very sensitive topic are more reflective of the wider Islamist community, these organisations have to take their relationship with the European states in which they are based into consideration. Once again, they have been forced to put politics before religion, potentially alienating themselves from their core constituencies.

Yet like its counterparts in France and the UK, the IGD has had to focus on issues of integration. El-Zayat claims to envisage a situation in Germany where ‘the Federal Chancellor in 2020 is a Muslim, born and raised in Germany, the Federal Supreme Court has a Muslim judge, and a Muslim representative will be on the Federal Radio/TV Council to secure Muslim citizens’ constitutionally guaranteed rights’.
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Such talk is clearly aimed at bolstering the IGD’s position and convincing the German authorities that it is a tolerant organisation that supports multiculturalism. However, this tolerance seems to have its limits. In a telling incident in 2006 the German state held its first Islamic Conference in Berlin to discuss issues including the teaching of Islam in state schools and the qualifying of German imams, as well as how to encourage the reading of Friday sermons in German. According to the German media, both the IGD and Millî Görüş objected to this conference, outraged because the German government had invited some secular Muslims and critics of Islam to the conference.
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Informed that a recent poll showed that a maximum of 15 per cent of Muslims participated in Islamic associations such as his and so the participation of secular elements in the conference was justified, El-Zayat retorted: ‘We can’t suppose that the current government doesn’t represent all Germans because some of them didn’t go to vote.’
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Some of this frustration may have been because the IGD has found it particularly difficult to act as an interlocutor between Muslim
communities and the government on account of the suspicion that the German state has towards it. The Interior Ministry of Bavaria, for example, openly branded the IGD as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and an extremist organisation.
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Moreover, the IGD has been plagued with scandal and investigations in recent years. The freezing of the assets of Ghaleb Himmat, who had been the face of the IGD for so many years, and the investigation into the Al-Taqwa Bank came as a major blow to the organisation’s credibility. It was further alleged that Himmat had ties to the Saudi Arabian International Islamic Charity Organisation (IICO), which was accused of having links to terrorism and of financing Hamas.
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To make matters worse, in 2002 the federal police launched an investigation into El-Zayat himself, who, it alleged, had transferred more than $2 million on behalf of WAMY. It was claimed that some of the money had been sent to the Albanian charity Taibah, whose Bosnian branch has been designated a terrorist organisation by the US.
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El-Zayat told the media that he had simply been acting as a member of the board of trustees of WAMY when he transferred the money.
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The IGD has also been investigated in relation to alleged financial irregularities. In 1999 it lost its non-profit status, reportedly as a result of sloppy bookkeeping.
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According to officials, the organisation failed to inform state education bodies that it had lost its non-profit status and continued to receive funding for its private school illegally whilst allowing donors to write off their contributions.
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By 2003 the IGD had handed over the running of the school to another body, the German–Islamic Educational Enterprise, which was especially created for the purpose. However, in 2004 local officials denied the school a licence because they believed that the new organisation was simply a front for the IGD. Thomas Huber, a spokesman for the district government of Upper Bavaria, explained: ‘We are afraid that the group running the school, which belongs to the Islamic Community of Germany, is using the school to spread Islamist ideology.’
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It is not clear whether these investigations were simply knee-jerk reactions on the part of the German state, but they have left the IGD more hemmed in than their counterparts in the UK or France, which are able to occupy a much greater political space. As such Germany has become a far less appealing centre for the Ikhwan in general. It would appear therefore that although Germany was an important Brotherhood centre during the 1970s and 1980s, today its importance has dwindled considerably. Even when the organisation was at its peak the Ikhwan was never able to command strong popular support and Germany was primarily a place to facilitate activities and act as a backstop to the Ikhwan in the Arab world.

Whilst these three countries offer very different pictures of the Ikhwan’s experience in Europe, what is common to them is that they were all born out of the Brotherhood but have sought to distance themselves from the movement. They have struggled hard to be seen as independent and primarily preoccupied with the role of Muslim communities in their respective European countries. However, their bid to represent these communities and to integrate fully into European society has been severely hampered by the fact that for the most part they are still essentially in the hands of the first generation of migrants or refugees. El-Zayat, as a member of the second generation, is the exception; the vast majority of the IGD’s leadership are still from the first generation. As of 2006 only four out of the group’s fifteen Shura Council members were from the second generation.
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El-Zayat is aware of this problem: ‘What I as a second-generation would want to achieve is support in the creation of a German Muslim identity … bridging the gap and leaving [behind] the immigrants of an Arabic basis and to concentrate much more on the second-generation.’
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Other Islamist leaders in Europe have bemoaned the lack of second-generation migrants in their structures.