http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DK08Ak03.html
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 2)
By Marc Erikson
Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 1) (Nov 5, '02)
Osama bin Laden has the money, proven organizational skills, combat
experience, and the charisma that can confer the air of wisdom and
profundity even on inchoate or trivial utterances and let what's
unfathomable appear to be deep in the eyes of his followers. But he's no
intellectual. The brains of al-Qaeda and its chief ideologue by most
accounts is Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, 51, the organization's
number two man and former head of the Egyptian al-Jihad, which was merged
with bin Laden's outfit in February 1998 to form the "International Front
for Fighting Jews and Crusaders".
Al-Zawahiri hails from an elite Egyptian family. His father was a professor
at Cairo University's medical school from which Ayman graduated in 1974. His
paternal grandfather was the Grand Imam at the al-Azhar Institute, Sunni
Islam's paramount seat of learning. His great-uncle, Abdel-Rahman Azzam, was
the first secretary-general of the Arab League.
Such family background notwithstanding, perhaps because of it, al-Zawahiri
joined the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) as a
young boy and was for the first time arrested in 1966 at age 15, when the
secular government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser rounded up thousands of
al-Ikhwan members and executed its top leaders in retribution for repeated
assassination attempts on the president. One of those executed by hanging
was chief ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Al-Zawahiri is Qutb's intellectual heir; he
has further developed his message, and is putting it into practise.
But without Qutb, present-day Islamism as a noxious amalgam of fascist
totalitarianism and extremes of Islamic fundamentalism would not exist. His
principal "accomplishment" was to articulate the social and political
practices of the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1930s through the 1950s -
including collaboration with fascist regimes and organizations, involvement
in anti-colonial, anti-Western and anti-Israeli actions, and the struggle
for state power in Egypt - in demagogically persuasive fashion, buttressed
by tendentious references to Islamic law and scriptures to deceive the
faithful. Qutb, a one-time literary critic, was not a religious
fundamentalist, but a Goebbels-style propagandist for a new totalitarianism
to stand side-by-side with fascism and communism.
Hitler's early 1933 accession to power in Germany was widely cheered by
Arabs of all different political persuasions. When the "Third Reich" spook
and horrors were over 12 years later, a favorite excuse among those who felt
the need for one was that the Nazis had been allies against the colonial
oppressors and "Zionist intruders". Many felt no need for an excuse at all
and simply bemoaned the fact that the Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish
problem" had not proved final enough. But affinities with fascism on the
part of the Muslim Brotherhood and other segments of Arab and Muslim society
went much deeper than collaboration with the enemy of one's enemies, and
collaboration itself took some extreme forms.
Substitute religious for racial purity, the idealized ummah of the rule of
the four righteous caliphs of the mid-7th century for the mythical Aryan
"Volksgemeinschaft", and most ideological and organizational precepts of
Nazism laid out by chief theoretician Alfred Rosenberg in his work The Myth
of the 20th Century and by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, and later put into
practice, are in all essential respects identical to the precepts of the
Muslim Brotherhood after its initial phase as a group promoting spiritual
and moral reform. This ranges from radical rejection of "decadent" Western
political and economic liberalism (instead embracing the "leadership
principle" and corporatist organization of the economy) to endorsement of
the use of terror and assassinations to seize and hold state power, and all
the way to concoction of fantastical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
linking international plutocratic finance to Freemasonry, Zionism and
all-encompassing Jewish world control.
Not surprisingly then, as Italian and German fascism sought greater stakes
in the Middle East in the 1930s and '40s to counter British and French
controlling power, close collaboration between fascist agents and Islamist
leaders ensued. During the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,
head of German military intelligence, sent agents and money to support the
Palestine uprising against the British, as did Muslim Brotherhood founder
and "supreme guide" Hassan al-Banna. A key individual in the
fascist-Islamist nexus and go-between for the Nazis and al-Banna became the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini - incidentally the later
mentor (from 1946 onward) of a young firebrand by the name of Yasser Arafat.
Having fled from Palestine to Iraq, el-Husseini assisted there in the
short-lived April 1941 Nazi-inspired and financed anti-British coup. By June
1941, British forces had reasserted control in Baghdad and the mufti was on
the run again, this time via Tehran and Rome to Berlin, to a hero's welcome.
He remained in Germany as an honored guest and valuable intelligence and
propaganda asset through most of the war, met with Hitler on several
occasions, and personally recruited leading members of the Bosnian-Muslim
"Hanjar" (saber) division of the Waffen SS.
Another valued World War II Nazi collaborator was Youssef Nada, current
board chairman of al-Taqwa (Nada Management), the Lugano, Switzerland,
Liechtenstein, and Bahamas-based financial services outfit accused by the US
Treasury Department of money laundering for and financing of Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaeda. As a young man, he had joined the armed branch of the
"secret apparatus" (al-jihaz al-sirri) of the Muslim Brotherhood and then
was recruited by German military intelligence. When Grand Mufti el-Husseini
had to flee Germany in 1945 as the Nazi defeat loomed, Nada reportedly was
instrumental in arranging the escape via Switzerland back to Egypt and
eventually Palestine, where el-Husseini resurfaced in 1946.
(C2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
[EMAIL PROTECTED] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Next, Part 3: The Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser and Sadat, and the reshaping of
Brotherhood Islamism into its present form by Sayyid Qutb.
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