WeeklyWorker

07.12.2023
MAB placards are back on the streets alongside the placards of the left

ABCs of Muslim Brothers

Jack Conrad looks at MAB, its internal power struggles, its relationship to the British state and its encounters with the popular-frontist left. Last of three articles

Beginning in the late 1950s and early 60s, the Egyptian Brotherhood provided the wherewithal needed to seed the organisation among the growing migrant populations of Muslims in western Europe and north America. This was done in the main through student federations, Islamic schools, special cultural and women’s organisations and national associations. One of them, of course, being the Muslim Association of Britain, founded in November 1997, with Kamal El-Helbawy as its first president. He was, at the time, the London-based European spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Naturally, there have been divisions, even splits. We have already touched upon the departure and return of Anas Altikriti.1 Together pragmatists and traditionalists thought MAB had gone badly wrong with his overt support for Stop the War and Respect communists. Traditionalists saw a dangerous deviation from the path of Allah, while pragmatists saw the golden opportunity to gain real influence in the corridors of power being squandered. A majority coalesced around those who wanted to end cooperation with the left and instead cultivate friendly relations with the Labour government. Their argument: the StWC has failed to stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Respect has not broken the mould of British politics and New Labour offers grants, consultancies and access to ministers. Altikriti would have found himself on the defensive.

Doubtless this account involves a degree of conjecture - after all, MAB keeps its internal workings tightly under wraps and so we are reduced to reading the tealeaves. Nonetheless, it seems clear that, under the banner of concentrating on religious and cultural issues, a bitter power struggle was fought out.

Hence this August 2005 missive issued by Ahmed Sheikh Mohammed: “in accordance with its constitution, the official spokesperson of MAB is the president” and that “the statements of any other individual are to be seen always as personal”.2 Presumably, a parting shot. Whatever the exact truth, MAB became largely moribund apart from in Scotland, till 2008, when its website was revived and a new president, Ahmed Al-Rawi, elected. However, Altikriti had already founded the Cordoba Foundation: “an independent research and public relations organisation”, which promotes “co-existence and social dialogue”. Moreover, the innovators, led by Anas Altikriti, Muhammad Sawalha and Azzam Tamimi, took over sponsorship of anti-war demonstrations in the name of the newly established British Muslim Initiative - unmistakably a turf rival to MAB. Altikriti justified the decision to set up BMI with exquisite diplomacy:

It became apparent that politics (home and foreign) and media could not be dealt with on a part-time basis, as was the case with MAB, which as a voluntary grassroots organisation has more than eight bureaus, including youth, women, education, etc, with which politics and media had to share attention and resources; something which was found inappropriate in the light of rising challenges of the time.3

He insisted that BMI is “neither a split nor even an offshoot in the strict meaning of the word”. On the other hand, Altikriti did not find the description of BMI as a “parallel” organisation “would work” either.4 With that in mind, that explains why I have called BMI an external faction of MAB - a redoubt from where, it would appear, Altikriti staged his successful 2018 comeback operation.

Class and community

How to categorise MAB? Undoubtedly it is pan-Islamic. Though it is extraordinarily coy about being a national section of the Muslim Brotherhood, MAB does not deny that amongst its members “are those who, back in their original countries, were members of the Muslim Brotherhood”. MAB also says that it “enjoys good relation[s] with every mainstream Islamic organisation in the UK and abroad; among them is Muslim Brotherhood”.

According to MAB, the Brotherhood is “well respected” not only by the Arab street, but also by “politicians, intellectuals and opinion-makers in most Arab countries”. Again, according to MAB, the Brotherhood urges “dialogue” with others and respects “those who differ in views or opinions”. Moreover, MAB stresses that, while it is “proud of the humane notions and principles” of the Brotherhood, it also reserves the right “to disagree with or divert from the opinion and line of the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other organisation, Muslim or otherwise, on any issue at hand”.5

MAB is also an Islam of the transformation of culture in Britain. Its ‘aims and objectives’ include affirming “the principles of Muslim citizenship and the firm and undeniable roots of Islam and Muslims within British society and to establish a relationship of cooperation and coordination with the other institutions and organisations in any activity which does not contradict with the aims and objectives of MAB”. A notable feature of MAB is that it rejects isolation and consciously pursues engagement. Altikriti gushingly talks of MAB’s “brilliant friends” in the Labour Party, Liberal Democrats, the trade unions and the Conservatives.6

Migrant organisations often have a strong material incentive to oppose integration. Especially under New Labour, national and local government hand-outs went to those who displayed their separateness, their distinctiveness from others. One of the consequences of multiculturalism was to engender a splintering range of rival supplicants, each waving a kow-towing grant application form before the beneficent state.

MAB wants to integrate Muslims into a changed British society that preserves them not as Arabic, Pakistani, Turkish or Nigerian Muslims, but simply as Muslims. This is underlined by other similar formulations: eg, to “broaden the scope of dialogue between the different cultures and faiths in order to serve society and humanity”; to “improve the relationship between the Muslim community and the British institutions, on the one hand, and the Muslim world, on the other, so that their social, economic and political relationships shall be revived on a sound basis”.7

Is MAB soft on terrorism? Despite changing presidents, MAB has consistently disassociated itself from individual acts of terrorism: eg, al‑Qa’eda’s 9/11. Ironically, in the name of its version of anti-imperialism, the Socialist Workers Party steadfastly refused to use the ‘condemn’ word, even when confronted by atrocities such as 9/11, Bali, Madrid and the 7/7 London bombs. The only significant al-Qa’eda action MAB has not denounced, at least to my knowledge, is the 2003 bombing of Jewish-Israeli holidaymakers in Mombasa - an understandable attitude that is, sadly, shared by many Muslims and secular Palestinians. After all, Israeli Jews are drafted into the armed forces from the age of 18 and remain on the reserve list till 40 (for officers 45). Islamists and Palestinian nationalists alike therefore consider all adult Israeli Jews legitimate targets. Strategically myopic.

What of the hijab? Naturally, MAB is in favour of women covering hair, neck and ears with a headscarf. While the hijab is not considered a “pillar” of Islam, it is still viewed as a duty required of every adult Muslim female. Women should be free to wear a mini-skirt or a sleeveless dress, says MAB, yet as a concomitant there should also be the freedom to wear the veil. In short, MAB says that its struggle here in Britain today is not to “impose Islam”, but to have the “freedom to live according to its teachings without infringing on the rights of others”.8 Let us take them at their word. Muslim women should be free to wear what they like … and, of course, most leftwingers would urge Muslim women to reject and discard those dress codes which symbolise their age-old oppression and patriarchal domination by fathers and brothers.

There are undoubtedly student, working class and petty bourgeois members of MAB: mainly asylum-seekers or the sons and daughters of asylum-seekers with origins in the Arab world. But, from what I can gather, those who form MAB’s core leadership are jobbing academics, charity executives, members of the caring professions, property developers and merchant capitalists.

Like other such organisations based on a specific group of migrants, this MAB leadership must be seen to be useful to its claimed community. Typically such organisations lobby government departments and local councils, put on various educational courses, provide mentors, publish books and pamphlets, host inter-faith workshops, stage traditional celebrations and give a helping hand to those negotiating the labyrinthine complexities of the national and local bureaucracy.

With MAB we therefore have an organisation run by a bourgeois and middle class elite that delivers real benefits to its claimed community, reaches out to influence other British Muslims, lends support to co-thinkers in the Arab world, and fantasises about establishing an Islamic world state, but is also concerned with gaining the ear of and shaping the host society.

Extremism

Despite adhering to a mainstream version of Islam and wanting friendly relations with British governments, MAB fell foul of David Cameron’s insistence that only “moderates” who “reflect mainstream British values” would receive government endorsement. In other words, MAB found itself branded a “non-violent extremist organisation” under the provisions of the “updated” Prevent strategy9 - a bombshell which would have thrown MAB’s pragmatist camp into crisis.

Cameron’s government vigorously pursued the unevidenced logic that to fight terrorism the state had to identify and undermine extremist ideologies. So-called non-violent extremism being depicted as a conveyor belt which inexorably moved people along “into terrorist-related activity”.10 Prevent not only disproportionately effects Muslims, especially in schools and universities: it serves to criminalise thought itself. Individuals who adhere to so-called non-violent extremism are therefore cold-shouldered by government, reported to the police, put on danger lists and can easily find themselves facing criminal prosecution.

Despite advice given for Muslims to vote Liberal Democrat or Green in the 2010 general election, MAB was charged in the court of public opinion with being “sophisticated, soft-soap fundamentalists”. Behind its carefully constructed facade there lies a tightly knit group of fanatical Islamists who seek to impose clerical fascism - confirmation being found in expressions of sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers, phrases about “dismantling” the Zionist state, support for the hijab, website links to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the high regard for the writings of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, etc. Over the years the most influential advocates of this sort of clerical fascism line have been commentators such as Melanie Phillips, Nick Cohen, Andrew Gilligan and Peter Hitchens ... with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty providing a not so distant ‘leftwing’ echo.

There are passable similarities here to the stories we used to hear about Eurocommunism being a dastardly plot hatched in the Kremlin. Hence in 1977 Jacques Chirac warned that Eurocommunism was a “danger against which we must act”.11 Publicly at least, Henry Kissinger was of much the same opinion: he refused to believe that “communists ... through some magic ... have become democratic”.12 We all know now that the Eurocommunists proved to be more or less as they appeared - a bourgeois-socialist trend. In Britain they provided the ideological foundations for Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party and thus Blairism (mainly through the journal Marxism Today).

Nevertheless, while MAB is studiously liberal in Britain, the same cannot be said of the Muslim world. Azzam Tamimi, a Hebron-born academic, who has often spoken on behalf of MAB, innocuously fields the argument that “human experience has thus far shown that there can be no alternative to democracy other than revolutions, minority conspiracies and violence”. However, while favouring “giving everybody the freedom to choose, so that the majority elects those whom it deems fit and capable”, it is clear that “democracy” is not an “end in itself”. Instead, it is a “means” to what is the “most noble end, namely the implementation of Islam”. That is, “reaching the state of Islamic government”.13

What Islamic democracy turns out to be then is the kind of democracy practised in Iran. The logic is impeccable. The majority should decide. But, as the majority in Muslim countries are Muslims, it supposedly follows that there should be an “Islamic government”. The majority get to decide … but only once. After the majority has voted in a referendum to create an Islamic state - there was a 98.2% ‘yes’ vote in Iran - the law becomes the exclusive preserve of the theocrats. The power of parliament is severely limited. Though there might still be regular elections, it is the clerics who have the ultimate say. Eg, they choose who can stand as candidates. Voting therefore becomes solely about legitimising the religious elite. So, while MAB proclaims its support for a “democratic, parliamentary system”, this is understood to be merely one of “many steps” towards sharia law and a re-established “Islamic government”: ie, the caliphate.14

Popular sovereignty, is, in fact, philosophically alien to “Islamic government”. Saʽid Hawwa, a Syrian Brotherhood disciple of Qubt’s, explains:

Democracy is a Greek term which signifies sovereignty of the people; the people being the source of legitimacy. In other words, it is the people that legislate and rule. In Islam the people do not govern themselves by laws they make on their own, as in democracy. Rather, the people are governed by a regime and a set of laws imposed by god.15

Nonetheless, it is clear that Tamimi and other MAB innovators want to distance themselves from Qutb’s overt rejection of democracy. Within the Brotherhood internationally this is alternately regarded as a clever pose, a thoughtful correction or a scandalous heresy.

Israel and Zionism

Hence, MAB wants it known that, no matter how highly it regards Qutb as a thinker, he is not beyond criticism. He is not accorded the status of a prophet, that is for sure. Indeed amongst those who have disagreed with Qutb is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who took issue with him over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Whereas Qutb regarded it in essentially religious terms, Qaradawi saw things in terms of “oppressor against oppressed”, with little or nothing to do with either side’s faith.16 In other words, though al Qaradawi wants to dismantle the “Zionist entity” - ie, Israel as an expansionist, racist, colonial-settler state - this is no different, in the abstract, to the one-state ‘solution’ advocated by much of the left in Britain.

It is, incidentally, quite right to demand the end of Israel as a Zionist state. In essence, exactly the same as demanding the end of South Africa as an apartheid state. The idea, though, that the Palestinians can, through their own efforts, impose a one-state solution - in which Muslims and Jews enjoy equal religious, not national, rights - is illusory. The balance of forces simply do not allow for such an outcome. Inevitably, however, the Anglo-American establishment brands any call to dismantle the “Zionist entity” as anti-Semitic, abolishing Israel as a Zionist state being equated with removing - wiping out - the Jewish-Israeli population. Obviously, a nonsense that was not applied to apartheid South Africa (except by the far right, white supremacists, etc). Historically, it should be added that Jews lived side by side with Muslims in the Islamic-Arab world as dhimmi (‘people of the book’, who were legally protected, largely tolerated, but subject to additional taxation) for well over a thousand years.17

Either way, MAB is at pains to distinguish between Jews and Zionism and claims to hold the Jewish faith in high esteem - after all, both Judaism and Islam are Abrahamic religions, share similar ancestor myths and have much in common, when it comes to ritual purity, charity-giving and dietary taboos. MAB says it desires good relations with the Jewish community and Tamimi himself has shared platforms with Jewish intellectuals and figureheads. He urges them to disassociate themselves from Zionist Israel. However, he also forthrightly condemns as “racist, inhumane and, therefore, un-Islamic” those Muslims who insultingly describe Jews as “descendants of pigs and apes” - a common phrase on the Arab street (with origins in the Koran18). Moreover, surely in a spirit of atonement, Tamimi again and again insists that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a crude “fabrication” - though widely circulated and believed in the Arab world.

Hamas’s original 1988 covenant was, by way of contrast, definitely anti-Jewish: it even cites the Protocols as “proof” of Zionist plans not only to take the whole of Palestine, but their coveting expansion “from the Nile to the Euphrates”.19 Tamimi called for a rethink. It should be emphasised, therefore, that Hamas has indeed undergone change. Whereas it once advocated establishing an Islamic state, the 2017 covenant now places the stress on religious toleration and how Hamas is against the “Zionist project”, not Jews:

Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish, but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.20

One does not need to take such statements at face value. That would be naive. But there has undoubtedly been a rethink.

As for MAB, it hardly displays the features that one might expect from a clerical-fascist organisation. Plans for a global caliphate there undoubtedly are, but its leaders are perfectly aware that at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, that hardly amounts to realistic politics. Rather, what we have with MAB is surely something much more mundane - a pressure group which speaks in favour of Islamic universalism and yet practically seeks to advance its specific ethnic-class interests within British society.

Basically that is all MAB can do, and all it can really ever expect to do. The project of building a Muslim Brotherhood in Britain which can seriously contend for power is quite simply a non-starter. In that sense, MAB’s promotion of Banna and Qutb in their educational and historical material should be treated as akin to the sale of works by Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung by Stalinites in the Indian Workers Association (IWA). In each case, the social and economic conditions simply do not exist in Britain for anything like the full implementation of the political programmes that these figures advocated in their own particular countries. None of these programmes can seriously hope to win through and become a social reality in Britain. They have no possible traction, when it comes to conquering state power, because there is no possibility of such organisations contending for state power.

Should MAB’s ideas be described as progressive or treated as harmless or irrelevant? When we read in MAB’s paper Inspire, in an article on ‘Islam and human rights’, that apostasy from Islam is “a religious offence punishable by death”, it is definitely right to treat such backward-looking statements calmly and with a large pinch of salt.21 Not least given the growth of anti-Muslim bigotry, it would be grossly irresponsible to in any way suggest that in Britain MAB assassins are just about to be given orders to hunt down and eliminate secular Muslims. Does that mean that MAB’s ideology has no practical effect? Like the IWA, it certainly does - albeit to a very limited extent - for good and ill.

MAB, as should be clear, is a highly contradictory political formation. On the one hand, MAB marches with the left and calls for mutual toleration. On the other hand, MAB defends religious hatred laws and stands alongside Christian fundamentalists in opposing abortion, blasphemy and “age-inappropriate”, mainly LGBTQ-inclusive, sex education in schools. A censorious MAB welcomed the forced closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti by Birmingham Repertory in 2004.22 Likewise it demanded that BBC2 should cancel transmission of Jerry Springer - the opera. With good reason, it has been said that “between conservative Catholics, the expanding Muslim community and growing numbers of evangelical protestants, an alliance is being forged”.23 Here we have one of the negative outcomes of the doctrines of Banna and Qutb in Britain.

Put another way, MAB has two souls: one besieged, reactionary and fearful; the other liberal, flexible and ostensibly democratic. Yet these opposing souls inhabit a single body and have certainly exerted a palpable rightist pull on a cluster of leftwing individuals and revolutionary groups, most notably the SWP.

Respect

Unity with MAB encouraged, excused SWP fudging and outright betrayal of professed principles: republicanism, open borders, secularism, defending women and LGBTQ people. For example, desperation to get MAB on board the Respect project had Lindsey German saying that gay rights should not be treated as a “shibboleth”.24 And, lo and behold, Respect election manifestoes “failed to include” a commitment to LGBTQ liberation.25

As a result of this crass opportunism, the SWP’s number two theorist, Chris Harman, was made to look either like a Cliffite museum piece or a snivelling coward. Actually he was both. After all, in the name of an “independent, revolutionary socialist perspective”, he had explicitly stated that if socialists “find themselves on the same side as the Islamists” they would be obliged “to argue strongly with them, to challenge them - and not just on their organisations’ attitude to women and minorities, but also on the fundamental question of whether what is needed is charity work from the rich or an overthrow of existing class relations”.26

Finding themselves in Respect - that is, in the same party - as Islamists, the SWP dumped its professed “independent, revolutionary socialist perspective” and refused to challenge its MAB, Birmingham Central Mosque and British-Asian bourgeois and petty bourgeois allies on anything whatsoever. In fact accommodation ruled all along the line. Harman himself opted for a culpable silence - that or Aesopian polemics (usually in the form of book reviews).

When it came to Iran, the John Rees-Lindsey German SWP outdid the Islamists in Islamism. Eg, on StWC platforms praise was heaped on Iran’s theocratic regime by an SWP-promoted Somaye Zadeh.27 She lauded Iran’s “female race driver” and an “all-female fire brigade unit”, its “overwhelming popular support”, and, most bizarrely, the widespread provision of “sex changes”, “seven times” on a scale to “that of Europe” (to avoid execution on sodomy charges gay men ‘willingly’ take up the option of undergoing the surgeon’s knife and feminising hormone treatment).28 To criticise an Islamist organisation or an Islamist country was deemed tout court Islamophobic and therefore racist by the SWP. An utterly fallacious argument which served the SWP - with Andrew Murray of the Morning Star’s CPB doing the front work - in getting Hands Off the Peoples of Iran disaffiliated from StWC in 200729 - Hopi being opposed to both the theocracy and imperialism.

As for Respect, the SWP’s unpopular popular front, it inevitably spiralled into disaster. The last coda being when John Rees fell out with George Galloway and George Galloway not only took the name and a clear majority of Respect’s 20 councillors, but also took the SWP’s pro-Respect right wing of Rob Hoveman, Nick Wrack and Kevin Ovenden.30 Not that this saved his faction of Respect (it finally dissolved in 2016).

Within the SWP, understandably, John Rees got the blame. Rather than fight things out, however, which would have been the right and proper thing to do, even if he had to settle for being in a minority, he preferred to walk. Along with Lindsey German, Chris Nineham and Chris Bambery, he formed Counterfire. Soon afterwards the SWP split and split again over the Delta rape scandal: International Socialist Tendency, RS21, Salvage, etc, etc.

In short, unity with non-working class organisations on a temporary, contingent basis can be perfectly principled … as long as criticism is not suspended, not suppressed. However, unity with non-working class organisations which involves the suspension, the suppression of criticism, especially unity in a party project - ie, a proto-government - that is the road to disaster … even when played out on the diminutive scale of grant supplicants and small businessmen, a disorientated confessional sect and a flotsam and jetsam of so-called independent socialists.

  1. J Conrad ‘ABC, of Muslim Brothers’, part 1 Weekly Worker November 23 2023: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1468/abcs-of-muslim-brothers.↩︎

  2. web.archive.org/web/20060321053310/http://www.mabonline.info/english/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=464.↩︎

  3. Private communication with author.↩︎

  4. Ibid.↩︎

  5. web.archive.org/web/20050414151002/http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net:80/archives/2004/08/13/the_muslim_association_of_britain_responds.php.↩︎

  6. M Fisher ‘Rees comes out for Blair’s laws’ Weekly Worker November 24 2005: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/594/rees-comes-out-for-blairs-laws.↩︎

  7. web.archive.org/web/20050308063320/http://www.mabonline.net/about/mission.htm.↩︎

  8. Ibid.↩︎

  9. web.archive.org/web/20110805022458/http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/counter-terrorism/prevent/prevent-strategy.↩︎

  10. HM government Prevent strategy London 2011, p6. Available as assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a78966aed915d07d35b0dcc/prevent-strategy-review.pdf.↩︎

  11. Newsweek June 20 1977.↩︎

  12. Newsweek January 23 1978.↩︎

  13. A Tamimi ‘Democracy in Islamic thought’ - paper based on a talk given to the Belfast Mosque in October 1997.↩︎

  14. web.archive.org/web/20110518135145/http://www.msnbc.msn.com:80/id/43028312/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa.↩︎

  15. Quoted in A Tamimi ‘Democracy in Islamic thought’.↩︎

  16. SE Baroudi ‘Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi on international relations: the discourse of a leading Islamist scholar (1926-)’ Middle Eastern Studies Vol 50, No1, January 2014, pp2-26.↩︎

  17. See B Lewis The Jews of Islam Princeton NJ 1987.↩︎

  18. The background to this widespread taunt lies in Saura 7:163-166 and the story of Jewish fishermen setting their nets on Friday, before the Sabbath, and collecting the fish on Sunday. Allah cursed them as evil-doers: “Be you apes, miserably slinking!” Saura 5:61‑71 accuses most Jews of being ungodly. Adherents of the prophet’s party are told to reply to those “who take your religion in mockery” with the following rebuff: “Whomsoever god has cursed, and with who he is worth, and made some of them apes and swine, and worshipers of idols - they are worse situated, and have gone further astray from the right path” (AJ Arberry [ed and trans] The Koran Oxford 1998, pp163, 107-8).↩︎

  19. avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.↩︎

  20. web.archive.org/web/20170510123932/http://hamas.ps/en/post/678.↩︎

  21. Inspire was handed out by MAB on the September 28 2002 demonstration in London protesting against the impending Iraq invasion.↩︎

  22. Something the SWP disgracefully kept quiet on, till eventually it was forced to publish a desultory apology of an article - see Socialist Review February 5 2005.↩︎

  23. New Statesman November 15 2004.↩︎

  24. M Fisher ‘Rees comes out for Blair’s laws’ Weekly Worker November 24 2005: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/594/rees-comes-out-for-blairs-laws.↩︎

  25. PinkNews February 21 2006.↩︎

  26. C Harman ‘The prophet and the proletariat’ International Socialism No64, Autumn 1994, p58 (reissued unedited as a pamphlet under the same name in 1999).↩︎

  27. See www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=1Hq5hKzx6O0.↩︎

  28. See T Becker ‘Don’t confuse the poor workers’ Weekly Worker January 11 2007: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/695/dont-confuse-the-poor-workers.↩︎

  29. See J Taylor ‘Anti-war activists do battle over intervention in Iran’ The Independent November 8 2007.↩︎

  30. See M Fischer ‘Drawing the pro-Tehran line’ Weekly Worker October 17 2007: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/693/drawing-the-pro-tehran-line.↩︎