All Hail, Muslim Brotherhood!

There were two kinds of struggle for Allah, and the first effort was the jihad within ourselves; submission of our will. We must think about Allah's will in every gesture of every day and choose to lay ourselves down before Him.
Sister Aziza told us about the Jews. She described them in such a way that I imagined them as physically monstrous: they had horns on their heads, and noses so large they stuck right out of their faces like great beaks. Devils and djinns literally flew out of their heads to mislead Muslims and spread evil. Everything that went wrong was the fault of the Jews. The Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, who had attacked the Islamic Revolution in Iran, was a Jew. the Americans, who were giving money to Saddam, were controlled by the Jews. The Jews controlled the world, and that was why we had to be pure: to resist this evil influence. Islam was under attack, and we should step forward and fight the Jews, for only if all Jews were destroyed would peace come for Muslims.

A new kind of Islam was on the march. It was much deeper, much clearer and stronger - much closer to the source of the religion - than the old kind of Islam. It was not like the Islam in the mosques, where imams mostly recited by memory old sermons written by long-dead scholars, in an Arabic that barely anyone could understand. It was not a passive, mostly ignorant, acceptance of the rules: Insh'Allah, "God wills it". It was about studying the Quran, really learning about it, getting to the heart of the nature of the Prophet's message. It was a huge evangelical sect backed massively by Saudi Arabian oil wealth and Iranian martyr propaganda. It was militant, and it was growing.
More and more young men of the Muslim Brotherhood, dressed in ankle-length white robes and red-and-white checked shawls, were striding through the streets. People who converted to their cause started to collect money from family; some women gave their dowries, and all kinds of donations came in. By 1987 the first Muslim Brotherhood mosque was built in Eastleigh, and Boqol Sawm came out of hiding to preach there every Friday, screaming at the top of his lungs through the loudspeakers behind the white minaret topped with a green crescent and a single star. Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel

The Muslim Brotherhood, a movement to be reckoned with. From 1928 to the present. It took a while, did it not? Patience was certainly a virtue for the Muslim Brotherhood, in its inception in Egypt, and with one of its original adherents falling from grace by signing a peace agreement with Israel, thereby meriting his assassination.

The Egyptian military kept its heavy thumb on the Brotherhood for a half-century before it became an almost-accepted presence.

With its branches all over the Middle East, in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Syria. And its tentacles do not end there; they have stretched out into Africa, into the world of the West, in Europe and in North America. From Hassan al-Banna, to Sayyid Qutub, from underground, secretive and violent cells to Yasser Arafat, Fatah and Hamas.

Cleverly pioneering the manner in which Hamas and Hezbollah gained the trust of the downtrodden Arabs of each country they infiltrated; setting up reliable, corruption-free financial systems, health groups, social assistance bodies; their 'charitable' wing, as disassociated from their political wing; their religious wing spreading the concept of jihad and the faith of martyrdom.

Now, thanks to the idealistic yearning of Egyptian youth who, having experienced the liberality of democratic countries in the West through studies or through the more ethereal yet very real associations of the Internet, a wedge was created to allow the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabist Salafists entry into the future of governing the largest of the Arab states.

Democracy! They have swept the polls, created a majority structure in governance for themselves, and strict Sharia law is yawning in the face of those who envisioned a vastly different kind of Egypt for their futures. So long kept under wraps by brutal regimes that maintained order and victimized their people and who were allies of the West, that time has ebbed away.

They stand now very well prepared over the the decades thanks to careful organization and planning most successful, to take their inheritance. The 600,000 members of the Brotherhood have portrayed themselves as reasonable moderates - as though the term 'moderate' had any real meaning within Islamism - and who is there who will convincingly charge otherwise, for the people have spoken.

It has always been thought that education is a panacea for the disasters that ignorance brings upon us. The Brotherhood has among its leaders and its faithful followers, the very well educated, middle-class professionals, the doctors, lawyers,engineers, academics, business types. And are they moderate if they are enmeshed deeply within the Muslim Brotherhood?