I am offering up this brief history of the MB, Nasser, Saudi Arabia to help explain the current situation with Qatar. I hope it helps. Some here didn't know that Nasser fell out with the MB and imprisoned thousands of them and why. By 1945 the Muslim Brotherhood born in Egypt , had branch organizations in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. In Egypt the brotherhood numbered around 500,000, many of them in the professions. And with the struggle of Palestinian Muslims against Jews in mind, Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the brotherhood back in 1929, now 39-years-old, created an Islamic military section within the brotherhood. With the end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler, Egypt's brotherhood hoped that Europe's Jews would be content to re-establish their lives in Europe. Brotherhood members were annoyed by Egypt's Jews helping to smuggle arms to Jews in Palestine. They asked their government to restrict the activities of Jews in Egypt. They complained about Jewish influence with Egyptian newspapers and magazines. They called for a boycott of Jewish products and anything promoting Zionism, and they claimed that no difference existed between Judaism and Zionism. In 1948, when Britain granted independence to Transjordan and pulled out of Palestine, Egypt's brotherhood was delighted. They sent thousands to fight against establishment of the Jewish state. So too did Egypt's government. Following Israel becoming a state, al-Banna became more outspokenly critical of the government. Tensions increased between Egyptian authorities and the brotherhood. Cairo's chief of police was assassinated. The government blamed the brotherhood, and on 8 December 1948 al-Banna was banished southward to Upper Egypt. Al-Banna expressed defiance. "When words are banned," he said, "hands make their move." On 28 December, Egypt's Prime Minister was assassinated, and blame al-Banna was blamed. In the months that followed, properties of the Muslim Brotherhood were confiscated and thousands of members were imprisoned. Al-Banna, now back in Cairo, was shot down on 12 February, and he was left to bleed to death on the floor of a hospital. The assassin was believed to have been a government agent, but nobody was ever charged with the crime. continued http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch28arab.html
In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood continued to flourish. They were members of the Armed forces, and in 1952 they joined in the overthrow of Egypt's monarch, Farouk. A honeymoon existed between the coup leaders and the Muslim Brotherhood. A decree in January 1953 that dissolved all political parties exempted the Brotherhood. The President of Egypt was General Muhammad Naguib and the Deputy Prime Minister was Colonel Gamel Abdul Nasser. Nasser was a force behind Egypt's far reaching land reform in late 1952. For Egypt's many small farmers and agricultural laborers it was a revolution. The size of land holdings was greatly reduced. Rent control, cooperatives government assistance and a minimum wage were established. The Brotherhood was looking upon Nasser and his supporters as insufficiently devout. Nasser' popularity moreover was stealing some of the thunder that had been theirs. Nasser responded to the hostilities of the Brotherhood by charging them with having set up an armed organization to seize power by force. On October 26, 1954, a gunman shot at Nasser as he delivered a speech in Alexandria. Nasser's government blamed the Brotherhood, and thousands of its members were rounded up. Of those put on trial, six were sentenced to death and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment. One of the many arrested and tortured was Yasser Arafat, age 25, who had grown up in Jerusalem. Arafat's father had worked in Cairo, where Arafat was born. Arafat's father and brother had been members of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1948, at 19, Arafat had left his studies in Egypt to fight against Israel in a military brigade that had been organized by the Brotherhood, and Arafat had participated in the Brotherhood's campaign of sabotage and ambush against the British along the Suez Canal. Nasser President Naguib had disagreements. Naguib was thought too close to the Brotherhood. Nasser's fellow army officers in November 1954 removed Nabuib from office and put him under house arrest, where he was to remain for eighteen years. Nasser took over presidential duties. In June 1956 a public referendum approved both a new constitution and Nasser as the new president. continued
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States in 1953 In 1953, Saudi Arabia had a new king, Saud, the eldest son of the previous king, Ibn Saud. And Saudi Arabia had Egypt as a hostile neighbor. Nasser of Egypt was not only a secularist Muslim, he was a socialist and allied with the Soviet Union, from whom he was acquiring aid, and he was leading other Arabs in the Middle East on a platform of anti-Americanism. Nasser looked upon the creation of Israel in 1948 as the culmination of colonialism. He was a pan-Arabist, wanting to unite the Arab world. With Saudi Arabia in mind he spoke against "reactionary forces." Nasser is said to have wanted Saudi oil under his control, claiming that it belonged to all Arabs. Egypt was the most populous of the so-called Arab states and stronger militarily. The Saudis feared Nasser and concerned with their security they embraced their ties with the United States -- the Saudis selling oil to the United States and the U.S. continuing to provide the Saudis with military security. And the Saudis appreciated the U.S. as a force opposed to Communism. They saw atheistic Communism as a greater threat than Zionism. Never under colonial domination, the Saudis were less concerned with their identity than were neighbors, such as Egypt, who had been colonized. The Saudis were able to do business and maintain cordial relations with the U.S. and other Western countries, but with continued dislike by some Islamists in the kingdom. Saudi security involved an age-old feud with the Yemenis, to the south of Saudi territory. And the Saud family was determined to keep the Yemenis disunited and weak. The threat from Nasser was mitigated by Nasser's distraction with Israel, but officers in the Saudi army and air force who were sympathetic with Nasser plotted to replace Saud rule with a republic. They were discovered, and waves of arrests followed....
Mawdudi and Qutb: two Anti-Western Intellectuals Abul A'la Maududi (1903-79) was a writer in Pakistan who had also been subjected to British colonialism. He believed that the British had no business ruling over Muslims. He was hostile toward colonialism and afraid of Western influence overwhelming Islam. He championed Islam and found remedy in his fellow Muslims joining together as a political force against secularism. He believed that humans exercised their will in a universe ruled over-ruled by God's will. People, he believed, were obliged to followed God's laws, not man's. As he saw it, people had no right to make their own laws. In other words, he favored following only Islamic law – the Sharia. He saw his view as a liberation ideology. Secular law that had developed with the Dutch, the British and the creation of the US Constitution were a part of the Western influence that Mawdudi wrote of a "...satanic flood of female liberty and licence which threatens to destroy human civilisation in the West." He denounced socialism as godless, redundant and unnecessary given what true Islam offered. He saw Islam as bigger than any secular state and for this reason was opposed to nationalism. He saw a political revolution as a remedy for the weakness from which Islam had suffered for centturies, but he spoke against grassroots politics. He warned against the emotionalism involved in street demonstrations, political speech-making or what today is called bumper-sticker slogans. He believed that societies were built, structured and controlled from the top down by conscious manipulation of those in power. note87 Maududi was considered an imam, a scholar and philosopher. His many works were in Arabic and translated into English, Tamil, Burmese and many other languages. Although a Sunni, Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is said to have met Maududi as early as 1963 and later to have translated his works into Persian. The rhetoric rising with Iran's 1979 revolution is said to have drawn on Maududi themes. An Egyptian influenced by Maududi was Sayyid Qutb (1906-66). In his youth, Qutb was attracted to Western literature. He studied in the United States from 1948 to 1950. But he became disillusioned, disliking what he saw as excessive materialism, violence as in boxing, emphasis on sexual pleasure, various superficialities and support for Israel. Qutb returned to Egypt, and in 1953 he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and editor-in-chief of ta Brotherhood weekly and soon the Brotherhood's propaganda chief and a member of it Guidance Council. in 1954, Nasser's regime had him sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. There Qutb became more vehement and resentful. He hated Nasser and Nasser's secularism. Good Muslims, Qutb concluded, could not live in peace in a society like Nasser's Egypt. The Islamic world, he believed, was riddled with evil. Humanity, he said, was living in a large brothel. Like Maududi, he wanted to turn back the rising tide of secularism. All the major religions had changed over time. Hinduism by the twentieth century, with all its diversity, was hardly an exact copy of the Hinduism of the early arrivals into the Indus Valley. Judaism had divided into schools of thought. So too had Christianity and Islam, which was an offshoot of these faiths. And with time Islam had its changes and divisions. But Qutb wanted nothing to do with the changes that came with human experiences. He wanted a return to the Islam created by the Prophet Muhammad. Sayyid Qutb in Egypt. He was more puritanical than John Calvin and devoted to faultlessness and intolerance. He believed that most Muslims had abandoned Islam. Nasser thought him unfit to live. He was viewed by others as a most accomplished intellectual. In his book Worlds at War, Anthony Pagden quotes Qutb acknowledging "Europe's genius ... marvelous works in sciences, culture, law and material productrion, due to which mankind has progressed to great heights of creativity and material comfort." The problem according to Qutb was that these were based on "man-made traditions" and "fundamentally at variance with Islam ... keeping us from living the sort of life which is demanded by the Creator." (Worlds at War, p 520) Qutb wanted to purge Muslims modernizing influences such as those intellectuals centuries before, Ibn Sind, among them, who had taught "nothing but a shallow version of Greek philosophy." Qutb called for a new Koranic generation who would gather up a pure understanding of Islam's original sources, to replicate the companions of the Prophet and rebuild Islam out of the ruins of Western natonalism, to declare the "supremacy of divine law alone and the cancellation of human laws. (p 521). About Jihad he wrote: Before a Muslim steps into the battlefield, he has already fought a great battle within himself against Satan, against his own desires and ambitions, his personal interests and inclinations, the interests of his own family and of his nation; against anything which is not from Islam; against every obstacle which comes into the way of worshipping Allah and the implementation of the Divine authority on earth, returning this authority to Allah and taking it away from the rebellious usurpers. About Jews he wrote: History has recorded the wicked opposition of the Jews to Islam right from its first day in Medina. Their scheming against Islam has continued since then to the present moment, and they continue to be its leaders, nursing their wicked grudges and always resorting to treacherous schemes to undermine Islam. Nasser's regime did not take to the idea of having their man-made laws abandoned and replaced. Qutb had become too much of a threat, and early on August 29, 1966, the regime hanged him. He went to his hanging with the words, "Thank God, I have performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martydom." (Pagden, p 521.) According to his admirers Qutb died smiling, "showing his conviction of the beautiful life to come in paradise." Sayyid Qutb's younger brother Muhammad Qutb was released from an Egyptian prison in 1972 and moved to Saudi Arabia. There he promoted his brother's ideas. He too wrote books, and he taught. One of Muhammad Qutb's students and followers was the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri, who became the mentor of Osama bin Laden of al-Qaeda fame.
And the Saudis appreciated the U.S. as a force opposed to Communism. They saw atheistic Communism as a greater threat than Zionism. Never under colonial domination, the Saudis were less concerned with their identity than were neighbors, such as Egypt, who had been colonized. The Saudis were able to do business and maintain cordial relations with the U.S. and other Western countries, but with continued dislike by some Islamists in the kingdom.
Why the Saudis have always rejected Baathism, Nasserism and the Muslim Brotherhood.. 1. KSA was never a colony. 2. Both are secular and socialist. 3. Both came under the Soviet sphere of influence which the Saudis rejected. 4. Nasser taught that Saudi oil belonged to all Arabs and he should control the oil. 5. The Saudis also rejected the Muslim Brotherhood. http://www.politicalforum.com/index...erhood-against-nasser.506609/#post-1067573929[/QUOTE]
AlBanna and Qtb, the one two punch of MB. Its not surprising at all the KSA rejected the MB as they viewed it as a direct threat to their dominion over mecca. And as for Panarabism, the king wasn't in any mood to cede any political power to Nasser the 'secularist/socialist". the baathists were just as bad if a tad more contained in their ambitions than Nasser et.al.
