Saudi Arabia was once a haven for Muslim Brotherhood leaders who fled persecution in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. Now the Saudis are pouring money into Sisi’s regime in order to destroy them.
Hamas…is caught between the hammer of Sisi…and the anvil of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. This is one of the main factors behind Hamas’ search for ways to go back to cooperating with the PLO.
When the revolt against Mubarak broke out towards the end of January 2011, it was expected that the Muslim Brotherhood would gain control of Egypt. The Saudis did not hesitate to express their opposition to this possible outcome. In June 2012, when Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammed Morsi became the president of Egypt, he tried to calm the Saudis, but to no avail, and they supported General Sisi when he deposed Morsi in July 2013.
Since Morsi’s fall from power, Saudi Arabia has granted Sisi billions of dollars to support him in preventing Morsi from returning to the presidential office. Saudi Arabia has also come out publicly against the position of the US which called for Sisi to reinstate Morsi.
Saudi opposition to the “Brothers” can be seen in its willingness to hand over members of the movement who escaped to Saudi Arabia after Morsi was deposed, when the Egyptian regime began to search out Muslim Brotherhood activists after defining the movement as a terrorist organization. The obvious question is why the Saudis hate the Muslim Brotherhood so much, even though both groups are devout Sunnis, and why it chooses to help the secular Sisi supporters.
This question becomes even more acute considering past relations between the Saudis and the “Brothers”. Once Saudi Arabia was a safe haven for many of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who fled persecution in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq.
There are several answers to this question that, together, form a synergetic whole.
1. The name “al-Ikhw?n” – “the Brothers” – was, at the start of the 20th century, the name of the militia of Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi Arabian dynasty. This was a cruel militia that sowed panic among the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and ended the rule of Sherif Hussein Bin Ali, King of the Hejaz. When Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, he took the name of Ibn Saud’s militia and added the adjective “Muslim”, to emphasize that the Egyptian members of the organization were truly Muslim, as opposed to Ibn Saud’s army.
Ibn Saud did not forgive this treachery to his dying day in 1953.
2. Saudi Arabia is a tribal country, where religion makes the tribal cohesion even stronger, through laws, rules and tradition, whereas the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood believes that religion takes the place of tribal-family loyalties which should disappear from politics entirely. The Muslim Brotherhood’s policy allows it to enlist people from all sectors and turn members into a developing civilian society that is culturally self-sufficient, while the Saudi model depends on a closed family group which cannot absorb people from outside its framework.
3. The organizational model of the “Brothers” allows them to expand their activities and influence to other countries, including those without a Muslim majority, such as Israel, Europe and the USA. In contrast, the family organizational model of the Saudis is limited to Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, and its influence can only reach outside those countries by buying supporters and involving itself financially in efforts to spread Islam.
The fact that the “Brothers” can expand their influence and presence to new communities causes the Saudis and the Emirates to feel that they are losing the contest for supremacy.
4. The Saudi approach to Islam is “Salafist”, which sanctifies the original, glorious past of Islam as a religion whose states are ruled by uncompromising religious tenets. The Saudis view the “Brothers” as a modern political movement that has transformed Islam into a pragmatic ideology willing to reach compromises with other prevalent civilian ideologies, even those that oppose Islam or do not hold its beliefs. The official positive attitude of the “Brothers’ to the Egyptian Copts, for example, infuriates the Saudis.
The lslamic legal system prevalent in Egypt is the Hanfit system, whereas the one prevalent in Saudi Arabia is the fundamentalist and extreme version of the Hanbal system, known as Wahhabism. Since the Hanfit system is less stringent than Wahhabism, the “Brothers” are seen by the Saudis as lacking respect for Islam. Wahhabists, for example, force a woman to cover her face with a niqab when going outside in public, forbid her from going out without a male family member as escort, prevent her from driving and working in most professions. The Hanfists, on the other hand, allow a woman to go out by herself, uncover her face, drive and work in any respectable field. The Audis have no religious expectations from the Egyptian military, but the irreverent attitude of the “Brothers” angers them.
5. In Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates there are quite a few people who are not connected to the tribal system and the ruling families, so that the “Brother’s” ideology is suited to their way of life and thinking. They would like to see the Saud famiy ruling the country and the ruling families in the Emirates exchanged for a non-family-tribal cadre. The rise of the “Brothers” to the position of Egyptian president encouraged this trend and spread suspicion among the ruling families who fear that the “Brother’s” ideology may threaten the stability of their regimes. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, the head of the Dubai police, said that the danger the “Brothers” pose to the Emirates is greater than that posed by Iran.
During the twentieth century, an economic rift developed between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates on the one hand, and the poor populations of Egypt and other Arab countries, people who are the natural breeding ground for the “Brothers”. The stark contrast between the wealth of the Arabian Peninsula and the poverty, neglect, backwardness, diseases and ignorance in the other Arab lands created envy, hate, suspicion and intrigues between the two sides.
6. The Peninsula countries have had a symbiotic relationship with the West for decades. They supply the West with oil and gas, while the West protects them from external threats, such as Russia, Arab nationalism of the Gamal Abdul Nasser kind and Iran. To the Muslim Brotherhood, the West is the main enemy of the Middle Eastern nations: the British conquest of Egypt in the last quarter of the 19th century, the British and French conquest of the Levant after WWI, the establishment of the State of Israel, materialism, theft of natural resources, political hegemony and permissiveness that pervade the western media and reach every home in the Middle east are viewed by the “Brothers” as a Western attack on Islamic culture, policies and economic interests.
The contrast between Muslim Brotherhood’s attitude towards the United States and that of the Arabian Peninsula exacerbated the tension between the two sides.
Egypt has Salafist groups and they are growing and spreading; their Islamic practice and way of life is becoming similar to that of the the Saudis. They oppose the “Brothers” and cooperate with Sisi and his security forces against the “Brothers”. Thus, the “Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt and the Hamas, its cohort in Gaza, find themselves caught between the hammer of Sisi and his security forces and the anvil of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. This is one of the main factors behind Hamas’ search for ways to go back to cooperating with the PLO.
The abyss separating the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, except for Qatar, and the “Muslim Brotherhood” is wide and deep, and the developments of the past three years in the Middle East have only served to make it wider and deeper.
Such a rapprochement could endanger Israel
You make it look so simple. You apply the “salami technique” that slices up islam to make it look more palatable for the western world. In essence, and you don’t say it, radical islam, fundamentalist islam, brothers, cousins are all reading the same Koran and they all want the same thing: a world ruled by islam and its jurisprudence named sharia. They all want an universal caliphate. Various organizations within the ummah are all various expressions of various degrees of the same policy of deceit – taqyia – sanctioned by the Koran. IMHO learned from reading many sources.