Turkey hosts meeting between Mahathir Mohamad and Brotherhood’s hawks

Doaa Emam

Despite numerous of problem in turkey, the President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s first priority is hosting the leaders of the international organization and the Muslim Brotherhood observers in a number of countries on his soil. Those leaders organize conferences or forums aimed to mobilize and plan for more conspiracies on the regimes.

A few days ago, Erdoğan met Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in Ankara.

During a joint conference with Erdogan, Mahathir Mohamad said the cooperation between the two countries will help to relieve the Muslim Ummah from being subjugated.

Mahathir Mohammed was keen to meet with Abdel Razzaq Mekri, head of the Movement for a Peace Society (Hams) the political arm of the Brotherhood in Algeria, Azzam Al Ayoubi, general observer of the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, and Mohamed Hassan Ould Aldou, a member of the brotherhood in Mauritania.

The Brotherhood hawks justified their presence in Turkey as a participation in the so-called Kuala Lumpur Forum for Thought and Civilization.

Makri announced that the Malaysian prime minister would host a conference in December and invite a number of Islamists.

The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood from Arab countries also come to Ankara to conduct interviews with the terrorist group’s channels which they can incite the Arab regimes and send messages to the countries that utter them.

In this regard, Hisham al-Najjar, a researcher on Islamic groups, says that the successive delegations and events in which the scientific and jurisprudential references speak, and a number of former and current leaders, all raise Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the level of Muslim leader in the world, after the collapse of the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and ISIS in Iraq.

al-Najj explained that Erdogan has other goals in hosting the Brotherhood, by exploiting the crisis of the group and the frustrations of its young people in the Arab countries to blackmail the Western countries that oppose its policies.

The importance of the recent meeting between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Prime Minister of Malaysia can be seen by recalling the historical relationship of Brotherhood with Malaysia, as well as Mahathir Mohammed’s fluctuation in his personal and party relations with the Brotherhood and their fundamental party known as the Islamic Party.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with Malaysia dates back to the 1930s and 1940s, when Mohammed Abdul Raouf, the Brotherhood’s preacher, joined the group. He began to promote political Islam among millions of Malaysian Muslims and to contribute to the establishment of the Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur.

His son, Faisal Abdul Raouf, later became a Muslim Brotherhood leader in the United States, became the imam of the Al-Farah Mosque in New York, using his second marriage to a Malaysian girl to expand and document the Brotherhood’s program to penetrate Malaysian society and his political and women’s constituency. He was assisted by his third wife, Desi Khan, of Kashmiri origin in recruiting Malaysian civil society women in human rights formations such as the Cordoba Society, as an attractive address for polarization and political recruitment.

In the Malaysian documentation of the relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the period of the seventies and eighties of the last century is a pivotal stage, during which the Brotherhood was able to establish a series of youth organizations and women inspired by the structural configurations of the Muslim Brotherhood International.

In 1971, the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement emerged as an active social arm of the Malaysian Islamic Party, which was established by the Muslim Brotherhood early, and its financial and political sponsorship was in cooperation with Qatar.

Since Mahathir came to power, he has cooperated deeply with Brotherhood elements, claiming to be able to strengthen ties of solidarity with the Muslim world, in continuation of the approach established in the 1960s by the first post-independence prime minister, Tonko Abdul Rahman.

At the height of Qatari activity in mobilizing the Arab streets to change regimes, the relationship between Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar and Mahathir Mohamed is continued. Mahathir even met Mohamed Morsi and his deputy Khairat Al-Shater in Egypt.

He also held several conferences, including the moderation meeting headed by Reza Fahmi, and invited them to the Kuala Lumpur Forum as representatives of Egypt, including Amr Darraj, head of the Brotherhood’s political bureau, and Gamal Heshmat, head of the parallel Muslim parliament.