Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (7 page)

It scarcely comes as a surprise, then, that, armed with such "clear perception," certain Brothers should have called for an armed jihad once they realized that victory by propaganda alone was not to be theirs. The death of alBanna served to make them even more radical. He was shot dead on February 12, 1949, coming out of the headquarters of the Association of Young Muslims, where he had just taken part in a "reconciliation meeting" with the
government in power-that is to say, the throne. The Brothers immediately
denounced it as a political murder. Tariq Ramadan even takes it a step further: "The assassination of Hassan al-Banna was planned jointly by the British, the French, and the Americans."', It is hard to imagine the three powers reaching a common agreement on this assassination at a time when the
independence movements and the communists were of far greater concern
to the Americans and the British than the Islamic movements, but Ramadan's version has the advantage of making al-Banna a martyr not only in
the struggle against the colonizers, but in the struggle against all Western
powers. In Egypt, the death of al-Banna was taken as proof of the fact that
coming to power via the institutional route was impossible. It was therefore
necessary to advance to the next stage. Shortly before death put an end to
his career, al-Banna himself had predicted that the Brothers were going to
have to enter this second, far more radical phase. Every time Tariq Ramadan
evokes al-Banna's speech, which his father had heard with his own ears, his
voice cracks. He quotes al-Banna almost word for word in his lecture: "I want
to read this passage to you, it will take up some of our time, but you must listen to it because he [al-Banna] has a clear premonition of what will happen
after his death." In his speech, the Guide warns his companions: once their
true objectives are revealed, they must be prepared to withstand the counterattack. "I want to be honest with you; your message is not widely known,
but once it becomes known, once they realize what your objectives and your
aims are, then you will encounter determined opposition and they will be
relentless in their efforts to stop you." The rest is incredible. Hassan al-Banna
gives a list of the misfortunes that await the Muslim Brotherhood-a list that
amounts to a litany of the injustices and slanders to come:

Governments will rise up against you and attempt to confine your sphere of action
by blocking you in any way they can. Usurpers will stop at nothing to keep you from
growing stronger and will seek to extinguish the light that your call sends out. To do
so they will utilize ineffectual governments and will promote immorality; they will put these impotent governments under intense pressure and submit you to humiliation and hardship. They will contaminate your message by spreading infamous
rumors and unjust suspicions, and make use ofyour slightest failing to portray you
in despicable terms, relying on their superior power, their money, and their influence. No doubt you will then be caught up in the cycle of experience and adversity.
You will be arrested, imprisoned, deported, and tortured.,

The most surprising thing is not that Hassan al-Banna was able to predict
that his plan to subjugate the world under Islamist totalitarianism was going
to provoke adverse reactions, but that his grandson should consider these
reactions to be profoundly unjust! Tariq Ramadan, who claims to be non-violent and who denies having any connection with the Brotherhood, makes
use of al-Banna's speech in the courses he gives for his followers as if it were
an arcane last will and testament, proving that his grandfather knew, through
divine intuition, of all the misfortunes that were-most unjustly-to strike
him and his brothers.

Those close to him, and in particular my father, were in the habit of saying: "But
what was wrong with what we were doing? I didn't understand what he [al-Banna]
was getting at-we were calling for reform, we were doing social work and he was
talking to us about the gallows" .... In fact, he knew that his non-violence and his
pursuit of deep-rooted reform were more dangerous than any kind of radicalism or
revolution.63

One thing is certain: alBanna could continue with his deadly, fundamentalist liberty-denying work without having to call openly for a jihad. On the
other hand, one is left speechless when Tariq Ramadan asserts that the Muslim Brotherhood did nothing to provoke a crackdown. In his eyes, the Brotherhood's turn to radicalism was not the consequence of their ideology, but
was due solely to the fact that they encountered resistance: "The radicalization of segments of the Muslim Brotherhood was the consequence and not
the cause of Nasser's repression," he explained to the press.64 It is time to take
a closer look at the historical record.

Al-Banna's death left the Muslim Brotherhood disorganized and divided. Some were in favor of continuing at the same pace, others wanted to speed
things up. The Secret Organization was supposed to have been dissolved.
In actual fact, it continued to exist and even served as a back-up force for the
military putsch launched on July 23, 1952 by army officers headed by General Neguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. One ofthe officers' emissaries, Anwar
Sadat, met frequently with al-Banna to try to reach an agreement on a joint
program, but without success. The officers were mistrustful, and suspected
that the Muslim Brotherhood was playing a double game with the king.65
Contact was re-established only after al-Banna's death. From then on, Sadat
and other members ofthe Revolutionary Command Committee (RCC) developed close links with the Brotherhood. It was even rumored that Nasser himself had been one of their militants. One thing is certain: both Nasser and the
officers sought the support of all the mass movements-be they communist
or the Muslim Brotherhood-that could help in organizing a popular uprising that would legitimate their seizure of power. The Islamists, therefore,
joined in with the growing number of Cairo students who were staging demonstrations in support of the general's coup d'etat. But straight away things
broke down. The Brothers wanted to be rewarded for their contribution: they
asked the officers to set up a judicial system based entirely on the sharia, intimating, with their habitual rhetorical skill, that this would be the sole means
of creating a fair balance between the benefits and penalties promised by
Islam. Nasser was disconcerted by their demands. For a while, he tried to go
along with them by appointing a number of their leaders to key posts; but
they were never satisfied. Sayyid Qutb, in charge of the Brotherhood's propaganda, refused, in particular, to back the "Rally," the alliance that was to serve
as Nasser's single party. Not that Qutb objected to a single-party system,
which al-Banna himself had approved of, simply, he accepted the idea of a
single party if-and only if-it served an Islamist government. Nasser thus
found himself in the very same position as the Arab governments which,
years later, were unsure how to stem the rise of the Islamists. After having
made a good number of concessions, he concluded that it was not possible to negotiate with the fundamentalists. As early as 1954, he explained: "I
have met several times with the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, who overwhelmed me with his demands. The thing he first asked for was for the
government to ordain that women be veiled. Subsequently he made other
demands, such as closing the cinemas and the theaters and other things as
well that would make life gloomy and sinister. It was, of course, impossible
to do such things."66 Other evidence, emanating from the Brothers themselves, points to the same conclusion: the Brothers wanted to establish an
Islamist regime. Nothing else would do. Nasser was prepared to make use of
Islam in order to consolidate his power base, but his social project was nonetheless far more modern. On the other hand, he can hardly be described as
an outstanding democrat. After having survived a period of intense colonialism, Egypt saw its future played out in an aggressive confrontation between
nationalist dictators and fanatics. The nationalists were to win the first battle. Eight days after the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty that the Muslim
Brotherhood's Guide had denounced, a Brother fired eight shots at Nasser,
who survived unscathed. The Brotherhood claimed that it was a set-up. At
any rate, the failed assassination attempt resulted in the dissolution of the
movement on October 29, 1954. From then on, Nasser embarked on a policy of bloody repression that made of the Brothers "an army of martyrs" in
Olivier Carre's terms. Between 1954 and 1970, several thousand Muslim
Brothers were arrested, imprisoned, tortured and, in certain cases, executed.
They were not the only ones. Nasser's repression was also to take a heavy toll
of the communists, the socialists, and the Wafdists, but the Brothers were
the only ones to make use of their martyrdom as a posteriori justification of
their own violence. Among them, Sayyid Qutb, the second prominent leader
of the movement after al-Banna, called openly for an armed jihad and for the
assassination of the "apostate tyrants."

Sayyid Qutb is the theoretician that most Islamists engaged in terrorist acts
consider their mentor. His career parallels that of al-Banna: he was born in
the same year and also studied to be a schoolteacher. His hatred of what was
modern stemmed not from experience with city life, but from an encounter
with American society: he spent two and a half years in the United States as a trainee teacher. Before that, he published several books in which he tried to
reconcile socialism and Islam, books such as La justice en Islam [Islamic Justice]. On his return, he published a book that was decidedly more Islamist and
anti-capitalist than his previous works: Le Combat entre l'Islam et le capitalisme
[The Struggle between Islam and Capitalism]: "Let us not be dupes of the struggle between the East and the West, which gives every appearance of being
hard-fought and bitter. Both of them have in common a materialistic philosophy of life .... The real struggle is between Islam on the one hand, and the
East plus the West on the other. 1167

Qutb joined the Brotherhood movement in 1951, and quickly rose in
the hierarchy until he was put in charge of propaganda. He became one
of the most prominent leaders after al-Banna's death, and therefore one of
the first to be imprisoned when Nasser unleashed his repressive campaign
against the Brothers. It was from prison that his influence was to spread
more than ever. He was released and re-imprisoned several times. Each
time, despite being tortured, he vehemently denied intending to conspire
against Nasser. Once back in his cell, however, he set to work on another
book, Signes de pistes [Trail Markers], in which he called in no uncertain
terms for Nasser-whom he called an apostate-to be overthrown: "The
present governments of the Muslims are in a state of apostasy. They feed at
the table set out for them by the imperialists, be they Crusaders, Communists or Zionists .... Apostasy must be eliminated even if it is not strong
enough to wage war."68 Qutb described Egyptian society as living in a state
of jahiliyya, the term used in the Koran to describe polytheist and pre-Islamic barbarity. The cult of Nasser was, according to him, but a new form
of idolatry. He incited the Brothers to resort to any means in order to put an
end to such decadence: "The establishment of an Islamic state is a categorical obligation." And he added: "If such a state can only be established by
means of war, then war becomes our duty."69

Qutb was hanged on August 26, 1966, thus becoming the second martyr of the Brotherhood. His political testament spread like wildfire. A series
of murders followed. The two most important, those that have changed the
course of history and for which we are still paying the price today, were the assassination of the Algerian President Boudiaf on June 29, 1992 and the
assassination of Anwar Sadat in October 1981. In both cases, the killers
claimed to have been inspired by Qutb. Sadat had, however, established a
truce with the Muslim Brotherhood and released most of them from prison,
but he made the mistake of establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. One
of the members of the group that had plotted Sadat's execution, an Islamist
engineer, had brought out a book in which he called for the execution of "the
apostates of Islam, who have fed at the table set out by the Zionists and the
imperialists." 7°

It is evident, then, that bringing up Qutb's name today is a delicate matter, even for the Muslim Brothers, among whom the more moderate consider that "he went too far"-without, however, questioning their own views.
At first sight, Ramadan would appear to belong to this group. In On the Origins of the Muslim Renaissance, he explained that Qutb initiated "a perceptible shift, but one that was particularly important in relation to Hassan alBanna," without coming out clearly against this "shift." 7' He is content to
preserve intact his grandfather's philosophy by describing Qutb's interpretation as "perceptibly" different. A shift that he accounts for by pointing to the
fact that Qutb had lived in the West and had developed a form of thought that
was "reactive" and "strained," and motivated by hatred of the West. As if alBanna himself had never developed a "reactive" and rigid view of the West!
It is typical of Ramadan s approach that he refuses to admit that the intent to
return to an Islam "purified" of all outside influences is itself "reactive," preferring to think of it as an attempt to recover the purely positive aspects of the
past. This can only be a form of blindness or else simply propaganda.

He also attributes the "shift" initiated by Qutb to the influence ofthinkers
such as Mawdudi, the famous theoretician of the Islamic state and founder
of the Jama'at-i-Islami, a Pakistani movement similar to the Muslim Brotherhood. As if Qutb could not have found in al-Banna's philosophy reason
enough to found an Islamic state. It is clear that he borrowed from Mawdudi
the contemporary use of the term jahiliyya, but the idea of a defensive jihad
that could be revived in case of adversity was already foreseen by al-Banna
and was there, ready to be reactivated.