The Muslim Brotherhood’s Discontents

[Valin]

Pajamas Media:

Michael J. Totten
8/11/11

Is Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood moderate? That’s what everyone wants to know now that Hosni Mubarak is out of power and the Islamists are flexing their muscles, not only against the military junta’s transition authorities, but also against the liberal activists who brought the autocratic president down.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s spokesmen have been waging a PR campaign in the West for many years. They know exactly what to say and what not to say. They tell Western reporters that they’re activists for democracy and civil society. They don’t say they want to ban alcohol, force women to wear headscarves or veils, or further restrict the rights of religious minorities.

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It hardly matters at all that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate compared with mass-murdering totalitarians whose weapon of choice is the suicide bomber. (Besides, its leadership supports the suicide bombers of Hamas, which ought to go without saying since Hamas is the organization’s Palestinian branch.) The only question that matters is: what does the Muslim Brotherhood actually stand for? What do they say when Western reporters aren’t in the room? The only way a Western reporter like me can know, short of bugging their offices, is to interview former Muslim Brotherhood members who will tell it to me straight. So that’s what I did.

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Abdul-Jalil al-Sharnouby also quit the Muslim Brotherhood recently, and I had a lot more time to sit down and talk to him than I had with Mohammad Adel.

Before he resigned he was the editor-in-chief of the Brotherhood’s Web site, Ikhwan Online. He even got some serious attention in Western media for his high profile job before he walked out. The Daily Beast described him as “radical Islam’s tech guru,” but he’s not a radical Islamist anymore. He is a man in transition with one part of his heart and his mind in his old ideology and another part of his heart and his mind in something more liberal and open. And the truth is he’s been in transition for a while now and was very nearly ready to bolt at the time the Daily Beast interviewed him, though no one had any idea at the time. He wasn’t even yet ready to admit it to himself, but that would start changing — and fast — as soon as the revolution in Egypt was on.

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My colleague Armin Rosen and I interviewed Esam El-Erian, one of the Brotherhood’s senior officials, the day before. It was the strangest interview I have ever conducted. El-Erian yelled at us for an hour. He said he hopes the Saudis stop selling us oil so we will learn to respect the Arabs. He said the United States is against the revolution in Libya, even though American planes are bombing Qaddafi on behalf of the rebels. He says the United States is against the revolution in Syria, even though Washington is ratcheting up sanctions on Bashar al-Assad and mumbling about war crimes indictments. He not so coyly suggests that the United States government, rather than Osama bin Laden, is guilty of the crimes on September 11. And he proudly supports suicide bombers in the West Bank and Gaza. He’s an unapologetic ally of mass-murderers and terrorists.

And it was this man, Esam El-Erian, who finally drove Abdul-Jalil al-Sharnouby to resign from the Brotherhood.

“Esam El-Erian said the reason people were angry at the Brotherhood was the way the protests were covered on the Web site,” he said, though it was, of course, El-Erian and his colleagues in the leadership, not al-Sharnouby or anyone else at the Web site, who denounced Egyptians for daring the demonstrate in Tahrir. “When that happened,” he continued, “I realized the Muslim Brotherhood was not going to change, and I submitted my resignation.”

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