Muslims vs. the Muslim Brotherhood

I had the privilege -- and really, it was that -- of sitting on a panel today with Zeyno Baran and Husain Haqqani, two prominent Muslim scholars who warn against the role the Muslim Brotherhood is taking in the United States. (Why was I on the panel? Because I'd been invited to talk about why US journalists don't write about this story.) What follows comes from the extensive notes I took on their presentations.

Husain gave an overview of how the MB, which has a hand in nearly every major US Muslim organization, became so influential in America. Muslims began coming in significant numbers to the US in the 1950s and 1960s. They needed mosques and services. The MB, based in Egypt, saw opportunity. The Saudis did too, and provided the funding. Crucially, the US saw that it needed friends in the Arab Muslim world to counter the Soviets, and failed to appreciate the complexities of Muslim culture and thought. All the US cared about was that the Muslims were anti-communist. Our government helped them out.

One of the most important things the MB did in those early days, said Husain, was to pay for a massive translation project of key radical Islamic texts into 70 languages, and make them available to mosques and Muslim student centers all over America. Imagine, said Husain, that you're a young Muslim studying far away from home, and the foreignness of American life makes you want to draw close to your faith. So you go to a mosque or an Islamic center, and what you find is Islam presented solely from the radical Islamist perspective. (Husain says this is stil the case -- he paid a visit to a little mosque in Auburn, Ala., and found the bookshelves groaning with Islamist literature).

In the 1970s, he continued, the US government paid for some leading figures in world Islamism to tour the US as anti-communist speakers. They were in fact anti-communists. But on their tour, they all spoke to US Muslims about the coming clash between Islam and the West -- advocating a generation ago that Muslims prepare to fight the decadent West. On the US taxpayers' dime. This is what our ignorance and naivete did for us.

These decades of MB influence had four basic results for the American Muslim community, in Husain's view:

1. Today, most leading figures in the US Muslim community are either MB members or fellow travelers, because the MB had the money and the influence to make this happen. The Muslim community in this country as a whole is diverse, but its leadership is not.

2. Most mosques and Muslim organizations are controlled by the MB.

3. The broader Muslim agenda ended up being defined by the MB, which cast the religion as an intensely political ideology.

4. This ende dup marginalizing traditional Islam in American society.

This had significant impacts on the US mainstream too. For one, the American news media and American academia find it more convenient to approach Islam through the paradigm defined by the MB. This reinforces the MB worldview as normative for Islam. Moderate Muslims do not control the organizations that claim to speak on behalf of the US Muslim community. For another, new American converts to Islam are likely to be formed by radical Islamism -- to take it as normative. And third, even critics of radical Islam assume that the MB's version of Islam is standard.

Husain went on to say that with regard to learning how to deal with radical Islam, the US is at the same point it was early in the Cold War re: learning how to deal with the Soviets. We're making a lot of clumsy moves, coming from our lack of clarity about the nature of the threat, which prevents us from figuring out who our real allies are. He called on academics and the news media to have a fuller and more open discussion about Islamism than we're currently doing (N.B., I spoke later in the day to someone who was trained as an Arabist at an Ivy League school, who said they were forbidden to discuss Islamism on the grounds that it might offend Muslim students who were part of the program.)

For her part, Zeyno spoke critically of the US government for engaging Islamist organizations (CAIR, ISNA, et alia), saying that it legitimizes them in the eyes of other Muslims. This also sends a signal to non-Islamist Muslims in this country that if they want to be paid attention to, and want to have interlocutors with American officialdom, they had better get with the Islamist program. She rather boldly denounced the closet-Islamist groups as "a fifth column of activists working to undermine the foundation of America." Notice I didn't say that; a Muslim scholar did. She also said that Americans, especially in officialdom, don't tend to think past the next electio, but the MB Islamists are very patient, and are in it for the long haul.

Zeyno added that most people involved at the grassroots of CAIR, ISNA and the other groups probably don't realize that these organizations are Islamist. Their ignorance is taken advantage of by Islamists. She said that she once publicly challenged US Rep. Keith Ellison , the Minnesota Democrat and Muslim convert, about the difference between Islam and Islamism. She said he told her she must be an immigrant, because only immigrants care about that. She quoted him as saying that there's only one Islam, and that "we are all Islamists." Zeyno attributed that to his ignorance -- that is, that he may well be one of the misinformed and naive converts who genuinely believes what he's saying.

Zeyno later said that the Muslim Student Association exists on campus to radicalize Muslim students. She said that many Muslim families don't know enough particulars about Islam to answer their childrens' questions, leaving the kids vulnerable to Islamists when they go off to college. The MB's long term goal is to quietly Islamize (that is, to turn into political Muslims) the entire US Muslim community, starting with students. This could be dangerous in the long run, because it could lead to violence or serious social conflict. Non-Muslims, she advised, should not be afraid of causing offense to Muslims, and should challenge the Islamists publicly. She said they adopt a pose of victimization, but this is just an act, and the rest of us shouldn't fall for it.

In the Q&A period, Pentagon Joint Staff analyst Stephen Coughlin had a polite but pointed exchange with Husain Haqqani over whether or not there were resources within Islam to fight the Islamists. Husain said yes, there certainly were. Coughlin said that every time he's challenged an Islamist, the Islamist can show him chapter and verse from the Koran and the hadith to justify the extremist position. Husain said there's lots of Islamic tradition and theological argumentation to refute those positions. Coughlin argued back that he often hears it asserted that there is argumentation against the Islamists, but he never actually hears those arguments made. Husain said that he would give him the theological arguments, but it would take time we didn't have in this session. Later, I spoke to Coughlin at the coffee urn, and he said that in his experience, the Islamists get the best of these arguments, because the scriptural documentation for their position on this or that issue is clear and overwhelming.

It was an extremely informative conference, and I hope that in some way it will help wake up Americans -- especially in the news media -- to the very serious fifth column problem we have in this country. All praise to the Hudson Institute for organizing this critically important event.