Muslim Brotherhood Role in Creating Societal Division

14 April، 2021

This study deals with the societal division that Islamists have introduced to the region, starting with the role of the MB movement, up to the stage of the Islamic awakening that began in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since 1979.

This is the stage that led to a dangerous societal division in the Arab world and resulted in the birth of the extremism phenomenon, starting from Al Qaeda and its affiliates to ISIS, which devastated the region and reached its dangers to the European depth.

The idea of awakening was born as an alliance of two ideas: the Salafi ideology and Muslim Brotherhood ideology, which were based on the role and support of power. They are two eras of attendance because of supportive authority that exploited all its elements to take a cultural space in society, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in China during the era of Mao.

The spark of extremism began with the thought of the MB, especially what was launched by Sayed Qutb, the famous Brotherhood thinker. Where he established the idea of extremism as he proposed the idea of dividing the Islamic world into two parts, through his ideas and the ideology that he put forward in which he described Muslims without his movement as belonging to the world of ignorance.

When trying to create a new culture in any people, the first result is a serious societal division, and an open phase of conflict. The Soviet Union, with its might, did not succeed in comprehensive change. China is divided into China and Taiwan, and is now between the crisis of Hong Kong, the Uighurs and other nationalities, North and South Korea, and North Vietnam and South Vietnam. So communism in North Vietnam, which triumphed over the South, is now South in the soul. As for South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, they all survived the ax-and-sickle-carved culture.

Re-education of the individual is an integral part of the Brotherhood’s culture component. Therefore, the MB’s primary concern remained the field of education, as they played an important role in this field in Saudi Arabia, especially after the educational policy that was approved in the Kingdom since 1970.

The Islamic awakening did not come as a stimulating phenomenon for different societal activity, nor did it come to turn against reality in order to renew it with a better reality. Rather, it was the beginning with the intention of targeting the new younger generations and spreading despair in them.

The religious education of the Brotherhood goes beyond the idea of guidance and direction known in the Islamic world, towards a culture based on changing the culture of a society and establishing a traditional religious culture. Thus, the era of awakening was a comprehensive process of change to reproduce a new society, with the intention of re-forming a new Islamic nation, in order to establish the united Islamic state.

The Awakening period worked to spread religious lectures through recorded tape, and it was required to reach all segments of society. Promoting these tapes was not an individual act, but an organized act, aiming at spreading the idea of despair from the world, and amplifying the guilt complex in the minds, through a style of speech that addresses the inner conscience and works to control it. It is known that the guilt complex is a combination of abnormal destructive feelings revolving around the self and accusing it of everything that deserves blame and punishment.

The most dangerous thing produced by the awakening is the attempt to Islamize a Muslim generation in the first place, to extract it from the center of society, and to push this generation towards a vision that divides society into a committed Muslim and another non-committed.

This comes according to a new vision, which was not originally present. After bringing young men and women to despair from the world, these young men should be advocates who practice their field work directly by focusing on the idea of dress and isolating women from men, for these formal appearances are not absurd. As they came with the intention of creating differentiation in society through clothes and the release of beards . Although the advocates of the awakening previously denied the issue of the societal division caused by the awakening.

But Aidh Al-Qarni, one of the most prominent leaders of the awakening, decided the matter, acknowledging that “The awakening divided society and extracted the smile and the spirit of joy from the community and transformed the occasions and wedding parties into crying and wailing. and replaced the chants and preachers with hadiths about the torment of the grave and sermons about the fire of Hell.”

On the academic side, in his book “the Jahalia of the Twentieth Century”, you find that Muhammad Qutb is the brother of Sayyid Qutb, the author of the first pre-Islamic idea, and he expanded the idea of jahiliyyah to include civilizations that have ceased to exist. How can this Quranic designation be removed from the Romans and then from the Europeans, and they are called the Jahiliyyah, even though they are all by the Islamic name, they are the People of the Book? Is it reasonable to set up a court for the old and new worlds and to pass judgment on them in this way?

The second issue: what is all this hostility to the world, and how these terrifying names are distributed in this way, and did this description contribute to the birth of the extremist generation from al-Qaeda to Zarqawi into the era of the extremist organization. Then comes the traditional question, about the negative perception of Muslims by many peoples of the world.

How much have these texts contributed to restricting the lives of Muslims who live and belong to non-Muslim countries, and whose difficult reality can be seen in more than one country without the need to the details, then how does a person who thinks according to this hostile approach get a royal prize?

Consequently, another collapse may occur in some Arab countries, and there may be a more dangerous role for Islamists, whether in their whereabouts or in a new geography that may be imposed by political changes. The ideas presented and the most widespread about the Enlightenment that it targets religion and morals, as Dr. Safar Al-Hawali, one of the most prominent leaders of the Awakening, describes that the Arab Enlighteners are the most dangerous enemies of Islam.

The Arab situation has reached what it is, and the state of division has appeared clear and unambiguous. The first victim today under the guillotine of Islamists is the elite of the Arab Enlighteners, as it is unfortunate that the available media space available to Islamists is not available to advocates of enlightenment. At a time when there is no real international effort to sponsor Arab enlightenment institutions and deal with them as partners and not as institutions that need financial aid alone. The issue is not creating formal jobs for the Enlightenment elites as much as it is a need for a partnership to ward off the dangers of the current situation.

While we have shared common destinies with the West, opening horizons for Arab enlightenment eases future shocks and contributes to the restoration of current gaps and relatively isolates the dominance of Islamists and naked them in front of their audiences. This needs Arabic-speaking media platforms run by Arabs who understand their societies and their peoples and can emulate them.

For example, Radio London in the 1960s and 1970s and then; Monte Carlo in the eighties, when it got a wide Arab audience, it greatly benefited from it, but today, there are various methods available, through the support of studies and research centers, which have become direct contact with the general community through the Internet, and these centers are no longer restricted to accessing academics only.

Arab intellectuals need a partnership in their work and not aid similar to that gives to the refugees.