Qatar: Exponent of Instability “Qatar and Muslim Brotherhood: Long-standing Relationship (3)”

Cairo –

The gulf state-let of Qatar (a small peninsula located in the middle of the west coast of the Arabian Gulf) was introduced to the Muslim Brotherhood at a very early stage. Historical annals attest that Qatar peninsula had welcomed the first wave of the Brotherhood immigrants from Egypt following clashes with the late President Jamal Abdel Nasser in 1954. In the aftermath of the Syrian massacre of Hama in 1982, Qatar received a second new wave of immigrants.  A third wave also hailed from North Africa (especially, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya) following a series of conflicts between these countries and the Islamists in the 1990s.  The Algerian army, for instance, overturned the landslide victory of the Islamic Salvation Front following an electoral process.

In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (ousted President of Tunisia) also unseated the then old al-Habib Bourguiba, though, not as bloody as the Algerian case. In Libya, Al-Gaddafi overthrew Islamists in 1969 with a coup d’état after the failure of his so-called project “The Islamic Legion in the Sahara,” (i.e. Gaddafi’s former Mercenaries). With the help of Libyan petro-dollars, Al-Gaddafi gained a considerable influence with presidents and tribal leaders in and outside of Libya.

The fourth wave of Islamists poured into Qatar directly from Saudi Arabia, which was intensely strangled after the 9/11 attacks in the United States and after the bombings that Saudi Arabia itself sustained in Khobar, Riyadh and Dammam, where most of the terrorists were identified as either Saudis or with links to Saudi entities.

The first step was the establishment of the Forum of American-Islamic Dialogue in 2004 under the auspices of the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Forum had become an annual season where American experts and officials would meet the political Islam spectrum so that they would be choosing which Islamist partner would be able to execute American strategy in due course.

Egyptian Journalist and Member of Parliament, Dr. Abdel Rehim Ali is an expert on Islamist Movements and political Islam. This essay is adapted from his upcoming book “Qatar: The Destabilizer of the Middle East: The Full Story of Grand Conspiracy,” which will be published later this month.