I think a drink is in order. I raise a virtual flute of prosecco to the Muslim Brotherhood on the 80th anniversary of their founding. Happy Anniversary, er, enemy.
"As far as I remember," Hassan al-Banna writes in his memoirs, "it was the month of Ziqadah, 1347 and March 1928 when six friends... came to see me." Standing around a school house in the Egyptian city of Ismailiya, the six friends implore him to establish a group. "It is for you to guide us," he recalls them saying. He accepts their sincere offer and as he writes:
Consequently, the oath of allegiance was taken by all of us. We determined on solemn oath that we shall live as brethren; work for the glory of Islam and launch Jihad for it.
He goes on to lay out the foundational idea of the group,
"The basis of our unity and organization should be our ideology and faith. Our moral thinking and particular way of its implementation. We are united to serve the cause of Islam..."
They decided on a name: Al Ikhwanul Muslemoon.
"Thus with the co-operation of these six gentlemen, the first organization in the name of al Ikhwanul Muslemoon came into existence. Its emergence was sudden and simple and its aims and object were those defined above.
Eighty years later the grand children of the early Ikhwan are active across the globe. Considering the history of the group -- crackdowns, imprisonments, persecutions, exiles, and executions throughout the decades -- you have to give credit where it is due: they are resilient. Why? What makes the Ikhwan so formidable? Taking the group's history into account it may be possible to piece
together a Western answer.
Part of the answer lies in its history of
confrontation with tyrannical Arab regimes. Dictatorships are by their nature weak governments, with weak political and social institutions revolving around the personality and ego of a single man who will suffer no rivals. Throughout its history the Ikhwan has succeeded in confronting these regimes by slowly, strategically infiltrating the weak political institutions around them. In so doing they take root, like weeds in a sidewalk, in the weakest sections, and grow out through influence. This is why when the dictator comes around to "rooting out" the group, their efforts are so ugly, so brutal, and so all-encompassing.
When some Ikhwan members fled West, they encountered a different kind of tyranny in their eyes. The Christian character of the West is antithetical to Islam and its practice. Western secular governments may be indifferent to Ikhwan members as such, but the day-to-day lives of people are still informed by Christian sensibilities, and this is an assault to the fundamental practice of Ikhwan's Sunni brand of Islam. After all, if Christ is risen from the dead, then Islam is not possible.
Still, western secular governments generally have practiced benign indifference to Ikhwan activities. So what's a group born of confrontation to do when there's nothing to confront? They still need to survive and thrive, and so they've mastered another tactic, fitnah. The general definition is anarchy or strife, but it's also used to describe disagreement, schism, chaos, and civil war.
If their goal is survival and growth then there is no better way to do it then to identify the weakest parts of Western society and take root. For this, they have identified the most secular (and thus in their eyes the weakest) social institutions they can find -- academia, government, media, and even secularized forms of Christianity and Judaism -- and have stretched out their roots. And weak they are, after decades of post-modernism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Our political and social institutions have softened their once-powerful authoritative and intellectual foundations.
By establishing credentials and building relationships within perceived weakening systems of power, they can cause fitnah among their enemy when they need to. This is in part what we see when the occasional commentator or analyst has the temerity to speak up about the real motivating factors animating our enemy. The institutional leadership chastises, berates, even casts out, those who say something.
However from their perspective, Ikhwan members don't distinguish between leaders and followers both are the same enemy. Fitnah allows them to have the enemy do the fighting for them.
This may help explain why they have been so successful at drawing the analytical framework on which our government confronts the enemy. Just as their doctrine and practice are becoming apparent to us, the Ihkwan has moved to have the institutions themselves stifle any further inquiry. And they have been astonishingly successful in their efforts. In the face of mountains of facts and figures, dot-connecting that even a child could do, we see the leadership of political and social institutions simply ignore it all in an effort that is perplexing as it is depressing. Good guys: 0, Ikhwan: 5.
The problem of course is that they can only keep this up for so long. Eventually, the truth outs itself. This has become apparent in the Roman Catholic Church where the perceived secularizing weakness of the "spirit of Vatican II" was replaced with Pope Benedict's speech at Regensberg. The enemy's response? First, violence. That was unsuccessful. Now they are going to participate in a dialog on the Church's terms in the hopes, I guess, of finding some other crack in which to take root. Let's call this Trinitarian God: 1, Ikhwan: 0.
For those of us who get it to one degree or another, I can honestly say that we're losing. Badly. And so I think a drink is in order. To the enemy! May you not survive another year longer!
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Note: I made a few edits on 5/7
