Full ~30 minute lecture and followup Q & A:
Brief video clip illustration (just below) of the fact that the “Muslim Brotherhood ideology” is indistinguishable from the mainstream authoritative Al-Azhar University “ideology” on jihadism & “sacralized” Islamic Jew-hatred. A full quote from Hasan al-Banna and Muslim Brotherhood scholar Charles Wendell–alluded to in the clip– concludes the blog demonstrating the Muslim Brotherhood’s essential Islamic–not “Islamist”–ideology rooted firmly in the traditional Middle Eastern Arab Islam of the classical legists and Muslim masses.
“Hasan al-Banna’s fundamental conviction that Islam does not accept, or even tolerate, a separation of ‘church’ and state, or of either from society, is as thoroughly Islamic as it can be. Any attempt to translate his movement into terms reducible to social, political, or religious factors exclusively simply misses the boat. The ‘totality’ created by the Prophet Muhammad in the Medinese state, the first Islamic state, was Hasan’s unwavering ideal, and the ideal of all Muslim thinkers before him, including the idle dreamers in the mosque. His ideology then, before it was Egyptian or Arab or whatever, was Islamic to the core. Since it embraced all aspects of human life and thought, it was at least as much religious as anything else. Practically all of his arguments are shored up by frequent quotations from the Qur’an and the Traditions, quite in the style of his medieval forbears. If one considers the public to whom his writings were addressed, it becomes instantly apparent that such arguments must still be the most compelling for the vast bulk of the Muslim populations of today. The nagging feeling that Islam must, and very quickly at that, catch up with the West, had even by his time filtered down from above to the masses after having been the watchword of the modernizing intellectual for almost a century. There was also the notion that all these Western sciences and techniques were originally adopted from Islamic culture, and were therefore merely ‘coming home’—a piece of self-conscious back-patting that was already a cliché of most Muslim political writing…To this [Islamic] revivalist mentality, nothing could be more hateful than further diminution of the lands traditionally dominated by Islam. I believe that much of the fury and unconcealed hatred of the Zionist state which is expressed by the majority of Arabs will become more comprehensible in light of what the Islamic domain as a concept really means to the Muslims, seen through the lens of Hasan’s exposition. Fascists were unable to endow their acts or beliefs with a religious dimension, except for the embarrassing juvenility of the Teutonic shrines reputedly raised in Germany. In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, however, they had, on the basis of indisputable historical facts and clear religious traditions, a ready-made program for a world crusade that required only actors and a leader.”
