The Muslim Brotherhood's Big Lie
By Douglas Farah
Almost since the beginning of the current debate over the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and engagement vs. confrontation policy with the "moderate" group, one theme has been repeated by those who favor dialogue with the group. Unfortunately, the central argument is a fabrication, spun by the Muslim Brothers seeking to blunt the history of its support for violent jihad.
The campaign to portray the Brotherhood as a moderate, non-violent political force is predicated on the notion that the Brotherhood has turned away from the radical teaching of Sayyid Qutb and embraced a more moderate theology that now supposedly holds sway. Unfortunately, this line, while demonstrably untrue, has been seized on by academics and policy makers anxious for some type of engagement with the "moderate" Muslim world.
In a nutshell, the argument, put forth by Leiken and Brooke in their controversial Foreign Affairs piece, as well as James Traub in the New York Times Magazine and others is this: That the radical tract Milestones, written from prison by Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb calling for violent jihad against non-Muslims, particularly the West, and apostate Muslim regimes, has been repudiated, at least tacitly, by the current Brotherhood.
Replacing Milestones, the argument goes, was a book written by a fellow prisoner named Hassan al-Hudaybi called Preachers, Not Judges. My full blog is here.
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