The Muslim Brotherhood and the West

by Martyn Frampton

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West is the first comprehensive history of the relationship between the world’s largest Islamist movement and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East for the past century: Britain and the United States. Martyn Frampton reveals the history of this complex and charged relationship down to the eve of the Arab Spring. Drawing on extensive archival research in London and Washington and the Brotherhood’s writings in Arabic and English, he provides the most authoritative assessment to date of a relationship that is both vital in itself and crucial to navigating one of the world’s most turbulent regions.

In the summer of 2013, Egyptian protestors took to the streets to voice their opposition to Muhammad Morsi, their country’s first democratically elected president and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. After massive demonstrations, the army intervened to remove Morsi from power. In the months leading up to that dramatic denouement, Egypt’s president, and the movement to which he belonged, had been subject to widespread criticism. Many of the most poisonous accusations leveled against Morsi concerned the alleged relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the West.

One striking poster that appeared at anti-Morsi rallies, for example, referenced the title of a Hollywood movie, with the words “We know what you did last summer” superimposed over a picture of the American ambassador to Cairo, Anne Patterson, shaking hands with the leader of the Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi‘e. The implication was clear: that Morsi had been elevated to power in 2012 mainly because of pressure and interference from the United States. Other, less imaginative banners included one that decried President Barack Obama for supporting a “fascist regime”; another that featured the composite image of “Obama bin Laden”; and a third, which carried Patterson’s picture under the caustic headline “Kick This Bitch Out of Egypt.” Such images and insults expressed the widespread belief that Washington had decisively embraced Morsi and the Brotherhood. This idea had gained widespread currency over the previous two years among opponents of the Brothers. As early as July 2011, just a few months after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, the American Embassy in Cairo reported that activists in the city’s Tahrir Square believed the United States was “supporting the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and wished to see a religious state in Egypt.” Despite American protestations that this was not the case, officials remarked that the notion of a “special relationship” between the United States and the Brotherhood had become ingrained in certain quarters.

Among the more voluble advocates of this idea was the vehemently anti-Brotherhood journalist-turned-politician Mustafa Bakri. In his book The Army and the Ikhwan, for instance, Bakri claimed that the United States had originally conspired with the Brotherhood to secure the downfall of Mubarak via secret meetings held in Qatar and Istanbul from 2002 onward. On Bakri’s account, a deal was done by which the United States agreed to support the Brotherhood’s ascent to power in return for a promise that the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty would be respected. Further, Washington’s decision to back the Brotherhood was said to be the first stage in a wider US plan to build a “new Middle East,” in which existing states like Saudi Arabia, Syria, and of course Egypt would be broken up (Egypt into four parts). This would, it was said, allow the triumph of the Greater Israeli Zionist dream, in line with a secret plan that had been formulated by the academic Bernard Lewis and accepted by the US Congress in 1983.

As conspiracies go, Bakri’s ruminations painted quite a picture. But as outlandish as they may seem, such thinking was not uncommon. It found parallel in the writings of people like Tawhid Magdi, whose sensationalist tome Conspiracies of the Brotherhood: From the Files of the CIA and MI6 — Top Secret included everything from claims of a Brotherhood alliance with Adolf Hitler to the suggestion that the group was a tool of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The July 2013 ouster of Morsi did nothing to lessen the pervasiveness of such theories. In December of that year, the secular liberal newspaper al-Dustur carried the front-page headline, “The Conspiracies of Washington with the Group of Treachery [the Brotherhood] to Assassinate al-Sissi [Morsi’s successor as president].” The same month, the British Embassy was forced to issue a statement denying that they were funding Brotherhood activists in the Nile Delta provinces of Menufiya and Sharqiya. And at his retrial in August 2014, former Egyptian interior minister Habib el-Adly alleged that the United States had given training to the Brotherhood and other opposition groups in an effort to foment revolution as part of a “new Middle East plan.”

Clearly, the idea of secret ties between the Brotherhood and the Western powers has proven an enduring leitmotif of Egyptian politics. In part, this is because it taps into a vein of suspicion about Western intentions that has a long provenance within Arab nationalist discourse — although it might be added too that there is nothing exclusively Egyptian about this belief. A glance at the outpourings of right-wing commentators like Frank Gaffney and websites like Frontpagemag and Breitbart demonstrates that similar assertions about the connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Obama administration enjoyed a constituency across the Atlantic. It was one element within broader conspiracy theories about Obama that flourished on the alt-right and to some extent fueled the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

The irony, meanwhile, is that Egypt’s Islamists themselves adhere to a conspiracy-minded critique of US policy in the Middle East. Washington’s support for both Israel and various authoritarian governments (not least in Cairo) has long been portrayed as part of a plot to control the region. After the overthrow of Morsi, it became an article of faith inside the Brotherhood that the United States had abandoned his “legitimate” government in favor of an accommodation with autocracy. Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2013 comments that the Egyptian army had been “restoring democracy” when it opted to remove Morsi were seen as particularly telling in this regard. In one of its weekly bulletins to supporters, the Brotherhood condemned Western “hypocrisy” and “complicity” in the crackdown against the group. In November 2013, ‘Amr Darrag, one of the few leaders of the group to have avoided arrest, offered a withering assessment of Kerry and American policy more generally, declaring that it had become “absolutely clear” that Washington had “supported the coup from the first moment” and was “behind the attempts to abort the Arab Spring in all countries that have gone that route.” As can be seen, the US government has frequently found itself damned on all sides.

Accounts like these are invariably long on lurid assertion and somewhat shorter on hard evidence. Yet, as with many conspiracy theories, they are built on certain kernels of truth: past moments when there have been contacts between the West and the Muslim Brothers. Most of these encounters took place behind closed doors, away from public view. Inevitably, this encouraged distortion, exaggeration, and outright falsification. The truth of the actual relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the West has been obscured. It is against this backdrop that this book offers the first sustained and comprehensive academic analysis of that relationship, charting its evolution from the founding of the group in 1928 to the eve of the revolt against Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

To be clear, this is not an account of Egypt’s experience of the Arab Spring, nor of the ties between the Brotherhood and the Western powers after 2011. Instead, the aim here is to historicize more contemporary debates: to examine the trajectory of a relationship that has existed, for the most part, in the shadows.

Not only is this story crucial for understanding recent developments in Egypt but also it sheds new light on the broader history of Western engagement with the Middle East during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Furthermore, this subject is crucial for understanding the history of the Brotherhood itself and the way in which the group views the world. Over the last ninety years, the West — both as a concept and as a political reality — has been a critical point of reference for the Brotherhood and its leaders. It is no exaggeration to say that absent the West, the group would not exist. As the essential Other, it has defined the Brotherhood and the way in which it has understood its sociopolitical mission. The idea of the West and a vision of what it represents sit at the very center of the group’s ideology. Consequently, changes and continuities in the Brotherhood’s thinking on this issue reveal much about the broader evolution of the group.

Despite its importance, the history of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the West has received only marginal attention from scholars. Elements have been touched on — yet they comprise only fragments and are scattered across a range of historiographical fields.13 The foremost academic treatments of the Brotherhood by scholars like Brynjar Lia, Richard P. Mitchell, Carrie Wickham, Hazem Kandil, and Alison Pargeter reflect on the issue only in passing. Others have alluded to the Brotherhood’s contacts with the West within studies that consider ties between the Western governments and Islamism more broadly. In particular, there has been some focus on the extent to which the British and the Americans considered allying with the advocates of conservative Islamic ideals (including the Muslim Brotherhood), either to preserve national interests or during the Cold War. Few doubt that the apotheosis of this outlook came after 1979, with the decision of the United States to offer covert support to the “mujahideen” against the Soviet Union in the wake of the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan. The course of what followed is now well-known (and is a story invariably told to emphasize the dangers of shortsighted political expediency and its potential for blowback). Western policy toward Afghanistan during the 1980s is seen as symptomatic of wider efforts to promote militant forms of Islam as an alternative to communism.