There is a common mistake in the West that holds that the Muslim Brotherhood was once an ally of the Arabian Gulf states, before relations between the two soured. But the Arab reader knows more about this issue than any "posh" academic, so the reason I write today about this topic is that this column is translated into English and is read abroad as well. I recently read an article in The New York Times by our brother Marwan Bishara titled, "Why Arabs Fear a U.S.-Iran Détente." I found his views to be nuanced, reflecting the author's experience. But on the following day, in the same paper, I read an article titled "Islamic Comrades No More," by Professor Vali Nasr, an Iranian American who is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I do not accuse Vali Nasr of anything more than ignorance of a specific topic, despite his academic credentials. I start with the first sentence in the first paragraph of his article, where he wrote, "The coup last July in Egypt opened a new divide in the Middle East, alienating the Gulf monarchies from the Muslim Brotherhood." First of all, it was not a coup. The number of those who took to the streets to protest against Mohamed Morsi was many times more the numbers of those who protested against Hosni Mubarak before, and the army intervened to prevent civil war. More importantly, the divide with the Muslim Brotherhood has existed since the group's inception. Although its members were treated well once or twice, they have proven every time that they are conspirators, and for this reason, they have been banned from engaging in any activity in the Gulf for decades. The second paragraph of the article begins by saying, "For six decades, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood were comrades in arms. Theirs was an Islamic alliance, formed in the 1950s to defend against the secular Arab nationalism that Egypt's leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had unleashed." If the author had been one of the American Likudniks, I would have said that he was lying. But he isn't, so I say he is grossly mistaken. He is even more mistaken in the third paragraph, where he claims that Saudi Arabia hosted and sponsored generations of the Muslim Brotherhood, and again in the fourth paragraph, which begins by stating, "The alliance buttressed the House of Saud's Islamic legitimacy." But this is inconsistent with history, religion, and even politics, because the Islamic legitimacy of the House of Saud predates the Muslim Brotherhood by more than a full century. The author's case is entirely incorrect, and what is truer is the following: - King Abdulaziz himself refused Hassan al-Banna's request to start a branch of the Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia, and told him: We are all Muslim Brothers. I heard these words from the sons of the kingdom's founder. - When the Muslim Brotherhood's members were persecuted in Egypt and then in Syria, Saudi Arabia took them in. Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, then-interior minister, and crown prince after that, and until his death may God rest his soul, told me in his office what I summarize as follows: We hosted the Muslim Brotherhood and gave their members salaries and housing, but they conspired against us with local clerics. He played to me some of their recordings, and I published this at the time as I heard it from the prince in 2000 and again in 2004, a month or two before he was chosen as the crown prince. I wrote about some of what I heard on small and green scraps of paper I took from the minister's desk with the inscriptions: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Ministry of Interior, Minister's Office. The significance of the above is that I had published what Prince Nayef told me in Al-Hayat when he was still alive, and if I had made a mistake, I would have had to issue a correction. What I directly know from the ruling class in the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, is that they do not trust the Muslim Brotherhood, and believe that the group has a negative influence on local Islamist groups. Another fact: All terrorist groups came from under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood, from the groups that engaged in the terrorism in the 1990s in Egypt, to Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda today. And since Vali Nadr refers to Anwar Sadat in his article, I would like to remind him that Sadat had released Muslim Brotherhood members from Nasser's prisons, only for them to plot against him. By the time he was assassinated, they had all returned to prison. This is the truth, and if Nasr's article had been published by any source other than The New York Times, I would not have responded to it. [email protected]
