Kicking the Muslim Brotherhood to the curb – the New Middle Eastern Order

Kicking the Muslim Brotherhood to the curb – the New Middle Eastern Order

12.10.2014
Author: Catherine Shakdam

If the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood from Qatar has gone mostly unnoticed amid reports that a coalition of the willing has declared war on ISIL and its affiliates in Syria and Iraq, the disappearing of the organization needs to be understood as a crucial development, a game-changer for not only the region but ultimately the Islamic world.

The very pan-Arab nature of the Muslim Brotherhood entails that its disintegration will impact the socio-political and religious make-up of the Middle East and prompt an inevitable shift in power, alliances and allegiances in the region. Moreover, as the Brotherhood loses its last bastion in the Arab world, Qatar, the last pillar of this house of cards, remains but an open gap which will require filling.

Even though Brotherhood leaders have played down their fall from grace, arguing that their departure from Qatar is voluntary; the leadership’ sudden leave was very much perceived as an imposed exile, a final rejection of political Sunni Islam as a potent paradigm, whether or not moderate.

“We wanted to avoid embarrassing Qatar,” said Muslim Brotherhood leader Amr Darrag to the press quickly adding, “Some figureheads of the Freedom and Justice Party [the MB’s electoral arm in Egypt] and the Muslim Brotherhood who have been requested to relocate their headquarters outside of Qatar have agreed.”

This last coup de grace against this political Sunni institution is unlikely “voluntary” and most evidently came about following extraordinary political pressure on the State of Qatar by its GCC neighbours. If not for Saudi Arabia and the UAE relentless crusade against the group since the summer of 2013 the Brotherhood would probably have not become the hunted pariah it is today. Arguably the Middle East would look very different indeed from a political and institutional standpoint should now-deposed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi had been allowed to fulfil his popular mandate.

So what now? Or rather, how will the political void left by the MB come to translate on the ground at a time when radicalism seems poised to engulf under its black banner the whole of the MENA region?

However once choses to look at developments in the Middle East, the war on Syria and Iraq, or as we might want to rebrand it the fight for the greater Levant (after all IS aka ISIL or whatever other acronyms terror radicals choose to call themselves those days, have already picked and pricked at Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, pushing further into Arab defences) one cannot deny that just as the Brotherhood crumbles into dust, terror militants of the likes the world has never encountered before have come to rise. Where the MB lay, an Islamic abomination, an aberration which knows only hate and blood has come in its stead.

If the world was taught to fear the Brotherhood then what of the monsters of IS and co? Speaking of teaching, many analysts, among whom Finian Cunningham have actually argued that western powers and their allies in the ME’ sudden distaste for the Muslim Brotherhood was brought about by a fear its leadership would come to eclipse monarchies and economic monopolies, thus upsetting an established oligarchy, rather than concerns its leaders harboured friendships with Al Qaeda.

American thinker Fukuyama formulated this visceral fear of Islam as a political model when he suggested that a war be waged within Islam to make it accept Western modernity, secularism and the Christian doctrine or principle: “Give what is Caesar’s to Caesar and what is God’s to God”.

As he noted, the West’s current conflict against all things political Islam is not simply in opposition of terrorism, but instead the fundamentalist Islamic faith which it feels stands against Western modernity and its secular political model. Fukuyama likened political Islam to communism, stressing that the “ideology” represents a greater threat to western thinking and way of life than red Russia ever did.

Read more here: [link to journal-neo.org]