The Muslim Brotherhood (26 page)

The Ikhwan was as ready as any other group to support the Afghan jihad. Members of the Egyptian Ikhwan had developed ties with Afghan leaders decades before the conflict. During the 1930s the
Afghan ambassador to Egypt entrusted the education of his children to the Ikhwan through the circles of Hassan al-Banna. One of the ambassador’s children, Sheikh Haroun al-Mujaddidi, became a well-known Muslim Brother who was imprisoned by Nasser in the 1954 clampdown.
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Relations between Egyptian brothers and Afghan leaders also developed during the 1960s and 1970s.

The brother who was to play perhaps the most crucial role in the Afghan jihad, however, was the Egyptian Kamel Sananiri, who was a key facilitator in the conflict despite being thrown into prison in 1981, where he is believed to have died under torture. A member of the Nizam-al-Khass, Sananiri was one of those who came out of prison in the early 1970s with great aspirations for the Brotherhood as an international movement. He went to Afghanistan shortly after the Soviet invasion with the aim of co-ordinating the various Islamic groups operating there, and spent his time shuttling between Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan to provide a huge logistical support network for the fighters. His role was so great that al-Qa‘ida ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri paid particular homage to him in his book
Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner
. Although generally dismissive of the Brotherhood, al-Zawahiri said:

We were preceded to Peshawar by Kamel al-Sananiri, may he rest in peace. We could see that he had left his mark wherever we went. He had played a pioneering role in establishing the hospital where we worked and whenever we met with mujahideen leaders, they would speak of his assistance to them and his efforts to unite them. Although I never met him, his actions and contributions demonstrated his generosity and beneficial services in the cause of God.
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It was Sananiri who first persuaded Sheikh Abdullah Azzam to join the jihad. Azzam had joined the Brotherhood in Palestine at a very
young age. After graduating from Sharia College in Damascus in 1966 he spent time in Amman but also in Cairo, where he studied at Al-Azhar and became close to the family of Sayyid Qutb.
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Sananiri met with Azzam in 1980 whilst he was in Saudi Arabia; according to Dr Kamal Helbawy, who was also there at that time, Sananiri asked Azzam what he was doing there.
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Azzam replied that he had been forced out of Jordan and had come to teach in the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Sananiri reportedly told him that rather than stay in Saudi Arabia he should go to work in a university in Pakistan and that whilst there he should give some of his time to the Afghans.

Azzam was clearly persuaded by the Egyptian brother, for he soon found a teaching post at the International Islamic University in Islamabad and began travelling regularly to Peshawar and on occasions into Afghanistan itself. He also began to receive people from the Islamic movement and embarked upon a series of tours to collect money for the cause, including in the US. In 1984 Azzam decided to dedicate all of his time to the Afghan jihad, quitting his post at the university and setting up the famous Maktab al-Khadamat that would provide logistical support for the mujahideen. Azzam would become one of the most iconic Afghan Arabs, dubbed the father of the jihad.

In spite of Azzam’s Brotherhood roots, it wasn’t long before he began to fall out with the Ikhwan. According to his son Hudaifa, the reason for the split was that whereas Azzam was keen to accept anyone who was prepared to volunteer into the mujahideen’s ranks, the Ikhwan wanted to restrict entry to those who were from the Brotherhood.
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Hudaifa Azzam has also said that by the mid-1980s the Ikhwan had built up its own organisation in Peshawar, aimed specifically at taking control of the jihad.
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This assertion is borne out by other veterans of the Afghan war. According to one Libyan Afghan veteran, in 1988 Mustafa Mashour and Mohamed Abu Nasser travelled to Afghanistan to ask Abdullah Azzam to close the Khalden camp because some of the Ikhwani recruits were returning to Egypt with a more militant ideology.
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When Azzam
refused, Mashour, reportedly under pressure from the Gulf states, which were becoming concerned at the ideas now doing the rounds in the camps, told Azzam that no one should be permitted to enter the camp without a reference from the Ikhwan.
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Azzam of course refused, asserting that the camp was open to all Muslims and not just those from the Ikhwan, but this incident reflects the extent to which Mashour sought to bring the Afghan jihad under his control.

Dr Helbawy, meanwhile, sees the disagreement somewhat differently; he thinks that the real problem was that Azzam wanted the brothers to be more involved in the fighting. Azzam was ‘going with a quicker step, a quicker pace than the Ikhwan’.
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It is true that the Ikhwani were generally reticent to get involved in the fighting in Afghanistan, doing everything they could to facilitate the struggle, but preferring to engage in humanitarian work instead. It was almost as if they supported the ideological cause but considered themselves to be above the messy business of fighting. This reluctance to take up arms may have been because the Ikhwan has tended to be an elitist, middle-class organisation and therefore less inclined to fight than those of tougher stock. Whatever the reason, the Brotherhood has been strongly criticised within Islamic circles for its limited action on the battlefield. The Egyptian militant group al-Jama’at al-Islamiya, who were publishing their
Al-Murabitoun
magazine out of Afghanistan at that time, roundly condemned the Ikhwani for their unwillingness to engage in the fighting.
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They were also criticised by those who went on to form al-Qa‘ida for opting for the easy life, enjoying the luxuries of living in villas whilst their fellow volunteers were giving up their lives. The Ikhwani attitude towards the Afghan jihad exemplifies why they are so despised by those of a more militant bent, who consider them to be opportunists, ultimately more concerned with their own comforts and interests than with the greater cause.

The brothers defend their unwillingness to fight by asserting that they believed themselves to be more useful in performing other sorts
of humanitarian duties. Kamal Helbawy, who was in charge of the Ikhwan’s activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1988 to 1994 and who was based in the Institute of Policy Studies in Pakistan during the conflict, asserts that he tried to convince Ikhwanis not to go and fight but rather to put their skills to better use. He explained:

My own advice was not to go to fight jihad because … many people can learn within three months how to fight and can go and fight, but a doctor who has been educated for twenty years, how can we train another doctor in his place? Or a nurse, or an engineer, or a teacher? … The atmosphere of war is attractive but I was asking, what does Afghanistan need from us, not what would we like to do. One day a medical doctor came to me and said, ‘I would like to go to fight.’ I asked him why. He said ‘because I want to fight jihad to go to paradise’. I said what you are doing can take you to paradise and all the work that we do is jihad … Someone who is not a doctor can go … Take others who are not needed here.
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However, some Ikhwani did get directly involved in the fighting. Helbawy has admitted, ‘If any Muslim brother decided to fight on his own, then no one would stop him.’
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Yet the idea that those Ikhwani fought as individuals rather than under the Muslim Brotherhood’s banner is not entirely confirmed; others have suggested that the Brotherhood did organise some military activities for its members. Hudaifa Azzam has stated that the Ikhwan had two camps for training its fighters, one at Khost and the other at Ghazni.
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According to him, these camps were top secret and only Ikhwani were allowed to enter, although they only held fifty volunteers each at maximum. Other sources have indicated that the Ikhwan did fight in Afghanistan. One website has posted what it claims is a question and answer session
with the Ikhwan. This has the Ikhwan declaring: ‘I don’t know why the Ikhwan is always accused of NOT participating in the jihad there [Afghanistan]! Where is the Ikhwan who went there from all over the world? … hundreds of the Ikhwan youth who participated as fighters, doctors, teachers …’
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It is impossible to verify this statement, given that it is not sourced and is not on any official Ikhwani website, yet it would appear that some members of the Brotherhood were more involved in the fighting than the movement often admits.

Fighting aside, the Ikhwan remains proud of the instrumental role it played in facilitating recruits from across the Middle East, for which it used its contacts with Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani Jama’at-e-Islami. The Ikhwan was one of the main linchpins in the jihad; as Olivier Roy describes it, the Afghan resistance was a ‘joint venture between the Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jama’at-e-Islami, put together by the ISI’.
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The Brotherhood’s role was multifaceted, and according to Helbawy, ‘One of the major responsibilities of the Ikhwan was to co-ordinate the efforts of the mujahideen leaders, encourage them to consult among themselves and train new individuals who were not exclusively affiliated to their tribes or political parties.’
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The Ikhwan used its skills and worldwide network of contacts to create a strong logistical support network for those doing the fighting. The importance of the conflict to the Brotherhood was such that key figures within the leadership regularly visited Afghanistan to give their backing to the mujahideen. Mustafa Mashour made many trips to Afghanistan to advise the fighters and to urge unity in their ranks.
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The Brotherhood in the Arab world also gave money to support the cause. The Ikhwani-dominated Egyptian Medical Syndicate organised and funded 95 per cent of the doctors working in Afghanistan, whether in relief agencies controlled by the Brotherhood or those independent of them.
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In addition, the Ikhwani used the freedom they had in Pakistan to publish tracts and literature to promote both
the cause of the Afghan jihad and their own ideology. Helbawy was in charge of producing a range of publications issued by the Institute of Policy Studies that was distributed across the Arab world. In Morocco, there was a system in place to reprint copies and to distribute them across the region.

In spite of the Ikhwan’s desire to distance itself from the fighting in Afghanistan and the differences that developed between it and Azzam, as with Sayyid Qutb the Brotherhood is still keen to claim the father of the Afghan Arabs as its own. Just as with Qutb, some brothers have asserted that just before he died, Azzam suddenly realised his mistakes, acknowledging that the Brotherhood had been correct in its more measured outlook. According to Helbawy, a few days before Azzam was assassinated he came to Helbawy’s house in Islamabad for breakfast with a number of other Islamist figures including the Yemeni Sheikh Abdulmajid Zidanai.
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Azzam allegedly told Helbawy that he wanted the Ikhwan to participate more in the jihad. When Helbawy asked him whether he had been able to reach any agreement with the other factions who had participated with him, Azzam acknowledged that he hadn’t, prompting him to declare, ‘I wish I had done like you.’
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Symbolically, Azzam then allegedly renewed his
baya
to the Brotherhood.

Such wistful stories read almost like the tales of the martyrs of the battlefield. Yet the Brotherhood’s desire to reclaim Azzam is part of its bid to maintain credibility with its constituencies, which view figures like him as the real heroes of the Islamist movement.

At the same time, in the interests of demonstrating that they are a moderate and peaceful organisation, the Ikhwan prefers to direct the spotlight on to its humanitarian rather than military efforts in the Afghan jihad. As such the whole Afghanistan experience demonstrates yet another of the fundamental contradictions within the movement.

Just as it supported the jihad in Afghanistan, the Ikhwan has supported fighting jihad in Palestine and more recently Iraq. Pronouncements by key Ikhwani leaders in support not only of the jihad but also of suicide operations have prompted much condemnation and accusations that they are supporting terrorism. Mehdi Akef is alleged to have stated in 2004:

The Muslim Brotherhood movement condemns all bombings in the independent Arab and Muslim countries. But the bombings in Palestine and Iraq are a [religious] obligation. This is because these two countries are occupied countries, and the occupier must be expelled in every way possible. Thus, the movement supports martyrdom operations in Palestine and Iraq in order to expel the Zionists and the Americans.
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Whilst the brothers in Europe have tended to be more circumspect about such issues due to the political sensitivities of their environment, some have not shied away from openly declaring their support for jihad. Palestinian and former MAB leader Azzam Tamimi has said of those volunteers who go to fight in Iraq: ‘They are responding to a duty because jihad for the sake of Allah is one of the main principles in our religion. Those who volunteer came from every part of the world and they are some of the goodness that the Prophet preached to us about when he said “the goodness in me and in my
umma
until the day of judgement”.’
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Similarly, Ahmed al-Rawi, former head of the FIOE, is reported to have stated: ‘My opinion on the occupation [of Iraq] is that it is illegal. I couldn’t call the resistance, even military resistance to the occupation, I couldn’t consider it criminal.’
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Moreover, one imam in the UK who followed the Ikhwan’s ideology admitted that he
would not try to dissuade anyone who came to him saying they wanted to go to fight in Iraq.
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