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Muslim Brotherhood: The Unreliable Ally

(RealClearWorld) Jonathan Schanzer - The Muslim Brothers are notoriously bad political bedfellows. While the Brotherhood supported the secular 1952 coup known as the Free Officers Movement that gave rise to the current regime, the group overreached. It expanded power under then-Egyptian President Muhammad Naguib, and worked assiduously to spread its ideology among the ranks of the same military that had just granted the new regime its power. When Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew Naguib in 1954, Nasser cleaned house and banned the Brotherhood. When Anwar al-Sadat became president in 1970, he released many Brothers from jail in exchange for the group's renunciation of violence in Egypt. However, by the late 1970s, the Brotherhood spurned Sadat's peace overtures to Israel, and increasingly perceived him as insufficiently pious. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 at the hands of an Islamist gunman. Though the assassin, Khalid Islambouli, belonged to the group al-Jihad, the Brotherhood paid for his sins. The writer, a former intelligence analyst at the U.S. Treasury, is vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2011-02-11 00:00:00
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