The Muslim Brotherhood in the West: Wolves or sheep?

Two books with a very different approach

The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West. By Lorenzo Vidino. Columbia University Press; 326 pages; $29.50 and £19.50. Buy from Amazon.com, buy from Amazon.co.uk

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition. By Alison Pargeter. Saqi; 248 pages; £20. Published in America by Saqi in January 2011; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, buy from Amazon.co.uk

WHICH Muslims should Western governments engage with, and which should they shun? Since the bombings in New York and Washington on September 11th 2001, and the later attacks in Madrid and London, few questions have been so urgent or have generated such fevered debate. Some experts and government officials—Lorenzo Vidino, in the first of these books, calls them the optimists—argue for dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement born in Egypt in the 1920s which now has a worldwide network of followers and institutions. A countervailing school—the pessimists, to whom Mr Vidino is closer—suggests that the Brothers are wolves in sheep’s clothing, sharing much of the militants’ agenda but hiding behind a mask of doublespeak.

Mr Vidino, who recently joined the RAND Corporation, a research outfit in Washington, DC, has in the past prophesied, in sometimes strident tones, that the Brotherhood’s ultimate goal is to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and America. He has berated those who fail to see the danger as hopelessly naive. His book is more restrained. He allows the “optimists” their say and acknowledges that the West faces a genuine dilemma in forming a judgment about such a big, baggy movement which speaks with many voices.

Though he remains a sceptic, he provides a wealth of information to let the rest of us make up our minds. He explains how in the 1950s a small, tightly knit band of Brothers successfully transplanted the movement to Europe. Led by Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s Egyptian founder, these pioneers turned Geneva and Munich into the hubs of a network of mosques and institutions lubricated with Saudi funding.

A similar process was at work in the United States, and here Mr Vidino’s charge-sheet may give even optimists pause. He makes extensive use of court documents from the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based Muslim charity convicted in 2008 of channelling money to the Palestinian group, Hamas. Mr Vidino believes the documents reveal the existence of a wide and hitherto secret Brotherhood network with links to two of America’s best-known Muslim organisations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America. Both groups deny having such links, and have long condemned terrorism in unequivocal terms.

As for his bolder claim—that the movement aims at nothing less than the spread of Islamic law through Europe and America—Alison Pargeter, a Cambridge scholar and author of the second of these books, considers this scaremongering. Her book is shorter and more measured than Mr Vidino’s, and she has a surer grasp of the political dynamics of the Middle East, the soil from which the Brotherhood sprang. As her subtitle suggests, she regards it as an essentially reactionary movement unable to break with its past. Its hallmarks are pragmatism, opportunism and an ambivalent attitude towards the uses of violence.

The difference in the two authors’ approach is exemplified by their treatment of a document found by the Swiss authorities in 2001 at the home of a senior Brotherhood financier. The Arabic document, dated December 1982 and widely known as “The Project”, sets out what Mr Vidino regards as the movement’s strategy for global dominion. Ms Pargeter sees it as a “fairly mundane wish list”. The portrait of the Brotherhood that emerges from her book is scarcely attractive but it is a weaker, more fractured thing than the sleekly dangerous creature depicted by Mr Vidino.

Should the West engage with the Brothers? On this, perhaps surprisingly, the two authors agree. The Islamists have become “part of the furniture”, as Ms Pargeter puts it; besides, there are few credible alternatives. It is better to talk to them, carefully and without illusions.