Brotherhood and caliphate … Tactics and strategies

Ahmed Ban

Those reading the literature of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928, can easily know that establishing an Islamic caliphate is a goal of the sixth stage of the Brotherhood project.

According to Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Bana, the first phase of the Brotherhood project aims to build the personality of the Muslim Brother. A Muslim Brother, he says in the Brotherhood manifesto, must be an honest person.

The project then, he adds, aims to build a Muslim home and then guide society on the road to liberating the whole country.

According to al-Bana, the project will then seek to reform the government to turn it into an Islamic one. These are important steps, he says, on the road to reviving the glories of the Muslim nation and uniting it. This, he adds, will bring the Islamic caliphate back to life.

The final stage of the Brotherhood project, al-Bana says in the manifesto, is for the Brotherhood to become the master of the world. This will happen, according to him, by spreading Islam in all four corners of the universe.

In this, the Brotherhood believes it is sent by God to this world to convert it to the version of Islam it believes in.

This movement’s understanding of the Islamic religion is that it has to fill people with its own ideology. Brotherhood ideology-filled individuals then should give people three options to choose from: convert to Islam, pay Jizya (a tax paid by non-Muslims in return for getting protection in a majority Muslim society), or accept war.

This is exactly why terrorist groups like the Brotherhood and Daesh tend to describe Prophet Muhammad in their statements as a man who always smiled, even as he was always ready to kill. This is not surprising for or foreign to the thinking of groups which believe that Islam is only about forcing people to convert to it, pay Jizya or be killed.

The Brotherhood believes that all the citizens of their state have to follow the same religion, namely Islam. It does not believe in diversity. It does not believe in national borders either.

In the same manifesto, al-Bana says that Muslims have freedom to live within the boundaries of the Islamic world.

The Muslims’ homeland in the Brotherhood’s ideology can be divided as follows:

1 – Individual Islamic states

2 – All Islamic states

3 – The Islamic empire, namely all the countries where Muslims had presence in the past. The Brotherhood believes that Muslims have the responsibility of bringing these states back to Muslim control.

4 – The Muslims have to expand the territory under their control to include all four corners of the universe.

These are basic ideas in the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood, ones showing the importance of establishing the caliphate as an objective for this movement. The movement believes that a Muslim state has to expand its influence and then control the whole world.

Now and as it tries to shatter some ideas about it, the Brotherhood avoids talking about these issues. It now tends to talk about the national state.

This is part of the Brotherhood’s policy of hiding some of the facts about it in order to avoid provoking others and making them feel afraid of it.

Al-Bana used to say that once others know the real objectives of the Brotherhood, they will start turning against it. This is exactly why the Brotherhood cherishes acting in the dark and hiding its real objectives.

The Brotherhood paid a heavy price for acting openly. Al-Bana’s murder in 1949 was the highest price paid by the group. This happened only when the objectives of the movement became known to everybody.

Soon after the death of Egypt’s late revolutionary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Brotherhood pretended that it took sides with Western values. This was done in the hope of having its own space on the political stage and then controlling the whole state, a point at which it can show its real nature and objectives.

The Brotherhood implemented its plan by taking root in the universities. It fielded candidates in the university student union elections. It also fielded candidates in the elections of the professional unions and then the parliamentary elections.

When the 2011 revolution erupted, the Brotherhood founded a political party. It also introduced itself as a social and political group that accepts diversity and believes in tolerance.

The fact is, however, that this group had never known tolerance either toward its opponents or its own members.