A Century of the Muslim Brotherhood: Taking Stock

[Valin]

Middle East Forum

Daniel Pipes
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2022

In The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood's Industry of Death (New York: Bombardier, 2022), an ambitious and powerful book by Cynthia Farahat, she argues that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), founded nearly a century ago, presents a far greater threat than is usually perceived, being nothing less than "the world's incubator of modern Islamic terrorism" and "the world's most dangerous militant cult." She traces leading Egyptian groups such as al-Takfir wa'l-Hijra, al-Jamaʻa al-Islamiya, and Egyptian Islamic Jihad back to the MB, as well as non-Egyptian ones, including Ansar al-Shariʻa in Libya, Jamaʻat al-Tawhid wa'l-Jihad in Jordan, Talaiʻ al-Fateh in several countries, Hamas, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. With such an array of accomplishments, she concludes that the MB presents an "existential threat" to the United States. Those not alarmed by the MB, in brief, Farahat wants urgently to alarm.

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Three Deceptions

Farahat offers three key insights about MB methods to explain the institution's success, all based on deception.

The first concerns a deception based on a duality, namely the existence of a somewhat benign public face, the General Apparatus, and a demonic, covert militia, the Secret Apparatus. The organization has engaged in doublespeak about its two halves since 1951, with the one opportunistically spouting liberal democratic values and the other expressing "extremist and pro-terrorism rhetoric." At the same time, it has been clear that the leader of the Secret Apparatus, known as the Secret Guide, has since 1971 been the MB's ultimate leader; during this half-century, the General Guide merely "acts as a public relations figure." Those public relations duties have included persuasively to perpetuate "the myth that the Secret Apparatus is no longer operational" when in fact it very much is. Both the public and clandestine divisions operate on the basis of Banna's permanent jihad, thereby permitting all sorts of criminal and other illegal undertakings.

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U.S. Policy

Turning to U.S. policy, Farahat is dismayed to find that MB deceptions have succeeded: "veiled terminology was a contributing factor to the infiltration of the U.S. government, and led to policies that supported the Muslim Brotherhood." To help fix this problem, she offers a guide to MB use of language. Truth means the implementation of the Shariʻa. Freedom means the freedom from transgressions against the Shariʻa. Tyranny means opposing the Shariʻa. Justice means Shariʻa over every aspect of life. Peace means accepting the rule of Muslims. Islamic revival means the subjugation of all people on earth to God. This coded Islamist terminology, entwined with infiltration, she concludes, "has allowed the world's most violent jihadist group to gain power in America."

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The Secret Apparatus ends with these sobering words:

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Either you are with the overwhelming majority of Muslims, and every peaceful individual on earth, or you are with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Over two decades of research on the Muslim Brotherhood led Cynthia Farahat to a horrified appreciation of its achievement as "one of the world's most complex criminal enterprises." The book she wrote makes a compelling case to see the MB not as one of many contending Islamist organizations but as a historic trailblazer and the source of untold misery.