Brotherhood and Salafists: finally one Islamic movement?

Brotherhood and Salafists: finally one Islamic movement?(AA).By Jamal Khashoggi.

I will not resist my desire to write -I have said this before- while watching the dramatic transformations taking place within the Salafist movement in Egypt. Indeed, I have already said this in an article that was published here several months ago. Back then, I predicted that the Salafists would split into three groups, after practicing democracy and vice versa. A group of them will join the Muslim Brotherhood, which has become now the ruling party (some Salafists are vulnerable to the obedience temptation of the governor). A second group will be tired of politics and will go back to prayers and mosques. A third group, which is the smallest, will remain against the Brotherhood, insisting that it still has a political role.

Few members of the first group will fuse in the body of the Brotherhood as active members; they will have the Muslim Brotherhood’s benefits and duties. Most probably, they will not be numerous since the “Brotherhood” does not like enlisting elderly members in their group, even if they seemed to be willing to share the governance. It has happened in the past and it could happen again.

Most of those who moved to the Brotherhood will be supporters, but the Muslim Brotherhood movement will not mind putting these new members in charge of some leadership responsibilities in the Freedom and Justice party or some authority positions. They will be able to keep their own Salafist intellectual opinions since there are many Salafist activists inside the Brotherhood, but they are controlled with the Brotherhood organizationally, because the latter does not have any jurisprudential or ideological preference. 

Even more, when the founder of the movement, Hassan al-Banna asked the group’s scholar at that time, Sheikh Sayed Sabek to classify and simplify a jurisprudence book, he insisted that the book should be about the four schools and rely on the strongest evidences, and this represents a Salafist approach. He wrote the most famous and widespread jurisprudence book, the “Sunni Jurisprudence” book.

The second group will be tired of politics and its members will return to their natural environment where they succeeded, namely, prayers and mosques. Some of them will consider politics as a disgrace that scratches the Muslim’s devoutness and forces him to lie and to be vicious. Some others will return to the former Salafist approach, and will support the new leader. If they were able to contain Mubarak, they will surely be able to support their “brother” president Mohamed Mursi. All of them approve that it is important to return to prayers, refute the fads and spread the true faith, especially after demising the restrictions that were imposed on them. Moreover the new government is ready to grant them some advantages, positions and financial resources. It will also maintain their mosques, and will even take into account their advocates in al-Azhar missions to Muslim countries. All this will happen as long as they are cooperating with the new “tutor,” and as long as they do not contradict or raise problems against the Copts and the Americans for example.

The last group is the quarreling one. It believes that it should be playing a political role, therefore some of its members will participate in the elections and compete with the Brotherhood in their constituencies, and then argue and oppose their politics, and I believe that these members can be handled by the brotherhood. As for the rest whose existence is no longer justified for the Brotherhood, such as the Jihadist Salafism members, the government –the Brotherhood – will deal with them by the law and perhaps even by force. They are the result of a former period when the state was illegitimate, so they allowed themselves to violate it, while Jihad was the legitimate privilege for the ruler alone, and it was included in their worst ruling where they did not recognize the legitimacy of the state and they were ready for jihad, or - at least - burning down embassies and clashing with the police, as did the jihadist Salafist group in Sinai, or those who attacked the U.S. Embassy amid the anti-Islam film.Read the full story here.