Mohammed Badie

 JPOST… Last Saturday in Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood announced that it had elected Muhammad Badee as its new supreme leader, a succession which comes at a critical time. A few months ago, Muhammad Mahdi Akef – who had ruled the organization for the past six years – stated that he would not seek another mandate, thus sparking a crisis of major proportions.

But the trouble had already been brewing for a while.

Akef has continually fomented outrage in Egypt with extremist pronouncements. Not only does he overtly support Hamas and Iran, a year ago he proclaimed that he would rather see a Malaysian Muslim as president of Egypt than an Egyptian Copt.

Furthermore, an increasingly large number of Brothers are clamoring for reforms within the group. When the old leader came to the conclusion that he could not bridge the gap between the hard-liners and the reformers, he decided it was finally time to step down.

The younger generation of members are yearning to shake the yoke of the old guard and democratize the movement, and have thus become increasingly restive. They had pinned their hopes on Akef’s second in command, Muhammad Elsayed Habib, but he resigned in protest at the Akef’s policies and subsequently lost his seat on the Guidance Council (the governing body) in December.

Their discontent was only aggravated during the subsequent elections. The elections themselves – both for the seats in the Guidance Council and for the post of supreme leader -stirred anger, as many believed that they had been rigged. However, since the Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Egypt, the vote was held in secrecy and was therefore not monitored. What is known is that Badee was elected by a two-thirds majority of the advisory council, and that his ascension spells trouble for reformists.

THE BROTHERHOOD is far from a democratic movement open to pluralistic views. It has remained faithful to the extremist religious doctrine of the man who founded it in Egypt in 1928, Hassan el-Banna, and of its greatest theologian, Sayed Qotob.

Qotob was far more controversial than Banna. He radicalized Banna’s doctrine – which called for the restoration of the caliphate and the creation of one single nation for all Muslims under the sovereignty of Allah, with the Koran as the constitution and Shari’a as the legal system – by declaring that all Arab societies lived in jahalia (ignorance of the true Islam) as before the coming of Muhammad, and were therefore “infidels.” The meaning of his statement was clear: that it was legitimate to fight such Arab societies in order to form the new caliphate. To make matters worse, he also formed the religious basis that justified attacking non-Muslim states to bring them into the fold of Islam.

This doctrine has been adopted today by all jihadist movements – al-Qaida included – and gives them the legitimacy they need to kill innocent civilians, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Continue Reading →