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Speaker 2
First of all, Thomas, it wasn't just only the repression that they were subjected to in Egypt and Syria, which drove many of the Muslim Brotherhood professionals to migrate to the oil-rich Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and UAE and Qatar, but also the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood championed among their members the virtue and value of education. So many of them graduated as engineers, teachers, lawyers, writers, and therefore, they were able to find work in the new markets of the rich countries of the GCC. Now, the fact that they were there also enabled them to immediately have great access to infiltrate the education system, the legal system, the health system, and enabled them to reach people of power. And through their idea of what Shura is in Islam, they were able to whisper into the ears of many people within power, not just only in Saudi Arabia, but even in neighboring countries, such as we...
Speaker 1
There's nothing, I just want to point out, there's nothing essentially nefarious about this. This is how politics happens in a country like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a traditional patrimonial monarchy where power is invested wholly in the monarch, and then through a series of subsidiary princes and bodies ultimately answerable to the monarch, that power diffuses downwards. But ordinary people, non-royal people, do have power and influence in a country like the kingdom by becoming close to those with power. This is the classic monarchical way of doing business. If you're ambitious but you're not royal, well, you've got to get close to a royal. And many Muslim Brotherhood members or influenced people did get close to many Saudi royals in the 90s, the naudies, and
Speaker 2
the teens. Indeed, and that enabled them to lobby, to advocate their cause, and to advocate for a cooperative relationship between the Saudi state and the Muslim Brotherhood. And it was a bit attractive for the Saudi state at that time because communism was on the rise. These Muslim
Speaker 1
Brotherhood were anti-communists. The Iranian Revolution had occurred, which was threatening to the Saudi state's own self-understanding as a powerful Islamist or Islamic polity. Indeed, and
Speaker 2
already the Muslim Brotherhood globally were divided over the Iranian Revolution, whether they supported or not, despite the sectarian differences. And also at the same time, they were the issue of the Afghan Jihad and whether to support it or not. And of course, the Muslim Brotherhood in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the chapters there, especially the Afghan one led
Speaker 1
by none other than Ahmad Shamashar, who was a Muslim Brotherhood himself. Oh, the great lion of the Tajics. He was himself a Muslim brother?
Speaker 2
Yes, he was. In fact, he and his mentor, Burhanuddin Robani, who would become the president of Afghanistan later, were among the first to start the Mujahadi movement, because Badin Haqmachar himself was also a Muslim Brotherhood. So many of the Afghan Jihad leaders were Muslim Brotherhood. And this is why Abdullah Azan himself, you
Speaker 1
know, the Palestinian genius who conceived of the great Afghan Jihad.
Speaker 2
Indeed, was a Muslim Brotherhood from Jordan and Palestine, went there to fight the Jihad. So actually, you know, there was an alliance there between not only Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood, but also the White House of Reagan and the Muslim Brotherhood. Yeah,
Speaker 1
of course. Now this is getting us down that terrible rabbit hole of 1980s international politics. But back to Saudi Arabia, the fact remains that Saudi Arabia, the king of which is the custodian of the two holy mosques, and who especially in the 80s and 90s, was projecting itself as the foremost Islamic state of the world that was there to defend the interests of Muslims globally, tended to adopt a cooperative, sometimes a bit thorny, but a cooperative relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it believed to be more or less a moderate alternative to radical Islamist groups like Al-Qaeda. And together, Saudi with the Muslim Brotherhood, inflected kind of voices could continue to develop the kingdom and the Muslim world in a modern direction that remained true to the principles of Islam. That was the governing consensus of Saudi Arabia. Am I right? Yes.
Speaker 2
However, not everyone in the Saudi royal family agreed with this assessment, in fact, the majority so that the Muslim Brotherhood are snakes who would change their skin whenever that suits them. And as
Speaker 1
we've said before and conflicted, the context for this is the Arab Spring, during which the Muslim Brotherhood tended to back and advocate the more radical revolutionary Islamist actors in those different national revolutionary theaters, which was very threatening and worrying for Saudi Arabia. And so more and more voices inside the kingdom were turning against the Muslim Brotherhood. And as the Arab Spring unfolded, an attitude towards the Muslim Brotherhood were beginning to shift amongst certain power centers in Saudi Arabia with the accession of the new king in 2015, King Salman, the current king, the tensions within the royal family and the governing bodies that rule the kingdom, the tensions between voices that sought to continue to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood and louder voices that were saying, no, we must cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood came out in the open quite dramatically. Do
Speaker 2
you remember the listener that we talked about a man called Sadaljibri in the last episode, where we described him as someone who joined the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood through a organization called Al-Jawala, which is a Boy Scouts, when he was at King Fahad University for Petroleum and Minerals. This man would rise in the ranks of the Ministry of Interior until he not only became Assistant Minister of Interior to the new Crown Prince Mohammed Benayev, who was also the Minister of Interior responsible for security and counterterrorism, but also he became a Minister on his own within the cabinet responsible for security affairs in the kingdom. This is
Speaker 1
a Muslim brother now in the cabinet of Saudi Arabia. Absolutely.
Speaker 2
And from the beginning, neither the king nor his son, the future Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, the man in charge right now in Saudi Arabia, would trust Sadaljibri because they believe that his counterterrorism policy in Saudi Arabia relied heavily on empowering the so-called non-violent extremists in order to take on that violent extremist. So using a more cooperative wolfpack to chase away the more troublesome wolfpacks. So
Speaker 1
you see right there, the question is hanging in the air around the cabinet of the Saudi kingdom. Is the Muslim Brotherhood radical or moderate? Indeed. And in the end, by 2016,
Speaker 2
2017, the answer came very sharp. No, they are not moderate. They are absolutely radical. They were even designated as a terrorist organization. And that Minister Sadaljibri fled the country into exile, you know, with some clouds hanging over him that he stole some billions of dollars. But that's neither
Speaker 1
here or there. Yes. And then Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Nayaf was removed from his position and replaced by the current Crown Prince, MBS Mohammed Ben Salman, who runs the country. So there is an example of a debate occurring right at the heart of Saudi power. Is the Muslim Brotherhood radical or moderate? And the government there said it is radical and they totally cut off any cooperative ties with the Muslim Brotherhood ties that they had maintained for decades. Really, in a way, since that conversation in 1936 between Hassan al-Bana and King Abdulaziz. So in recent years, the Muslim Brotherhood has been increasingly seen by powerful actors as radical. Although the book I read in preparation for these episodes, Joass Wajemakers, the Muslim Brotherhood, ideology, history, descendants, which I recommend everyone read for a sweeping survey of the history and ideological underpinnings of the movement, that book, Wajemaker himself, clearly is arguing that this is not fair, that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a radical organization, that it is unfairly tarnished with the brush of radicalism that attaches to groups like Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and others. ISIS, of course. So scholars, thinkers, activists are divided about this question. And this is what we want to explore. And that question really came into the open, as we said, during the Arab Spring, because it was during the Arab Spring that the Muslim Brotherhood saw for the first time in a long time, a real opportunity to achieve its political goals, because so many Islamic or Arab states were being destabilized by the protests rocking those countries. And in 2012, this came to a head when, after elections, a political party attached to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt came to power there, and a Muslim brother, Muhammad Morsi, was declared president of the country. Almost immediately, Ayman, the Morsi administration, were being accused of pursuing a secret, Islamist and totalitarian objective, hiding behind a commitment to pluralist democratic politics. Immediately, people were like, we can't trust this guy and his political party,
Speaker 2
right? I remember I used to work for a global bank at the time, and I was asked to put together a report talking about the first hundred days of Morsi's government, and the first hundred days of the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt. The first time they have been in power in their birth nation ever, since they were established, 90 years prior. So I put together a report, and I still remember some of the sentences I used there. I said, it seems to me, after observing the first hundred days of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, that they are struggling to move from being a clandestine organization into a governing responsible party. The secretive nature of their meetings, the secretive nature of their communications, the fact of the matter that they are keeping the institutions of the Egyptian state in the dark about what they want to implement, and what plans that they have, even for things that need to be secret about what for an investment they want to bring, the negotiations with the IMF, and many other aspects, they were deliberately keeping stuff from the civil service in the dark about them. And this used to infuriate both the army and the civil service. So what the accusation that the Muslim Brotherhood had against the civil service, oh, you are the deep state, and you are conspiring to undermine us. And the civil service replied back and saying, well, how can we govern if you don't tell us what you want to do and how you want to do it? So this is why I said in that report, you know, talking about the first hundred days of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, that they are struggling to move from being a clandestine organization into a responsible governing party. But of course,
Speaker 1
it might just be in their DNA. I mean, you know, we talked about in the previous episode, the problem that Arab monarchs have with the Muslim Brotherhood, because any Muslim brother that swears allegiance to the monarch has also swared allegiance to the Murshul-Alam in Cairo, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, that was also true within Egypt itself when Muhammad Morsi became president, because Egyptians knew that he was not the head of the Muslim Brotherhood. Exactly. He had sworn allegiance to someone else who was above him. And the army especially must have been like, well, what the hell are we supposed to do about this? Because we are the protectors of the Egyptian state. We're meant to intervene when we feel that there's any seditious activity going on that's going to overthrow the state. And here we have as president of the state, a man who has sworn allegiance to the leader of a global organization that actually seeks to undermine the underpinnings of the secular state of Egypt. So what are they supposed to do, especially then at the same time, they felt that the mercy government and the Muslim Brotherhood in general were seeking to replace within the intelligence and security apparatus of Egypt, replace sitting members of that apparatus with Muslim Brotherhood members. So this was going to end in a clash and a mighty clash. It did end indeed. I mean, really a slaughter.

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