4 Muslim Brotherhood wings exist in Jordan

Doaa Emam

The Muslim Brotherhood’s arms never stop incitement against the state institutions in Jordan. In May 2018, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) called for toppling the Hani Al Mulki-led government inciting the people to demonstrate against austerity economic measures taken by the cabinet. King Abdullah sacked Al Mulki and appointed Omar al-Razzaz as prime minister.

However, the Muslim Brotherhood has not stopped its attempts.

At crises, the roleplaying of the Brotherhood’s wings in Jordan is rather evident.  The Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, shows many faces: a pacifist, a revolutionary, and silent. Meanwhile, the banned Muslim Brotherhood group, Zamzam Initiative and Partnership and Rescue Party react differently.

However, these four Muslim Brotherhood entities have agreed regarding a teachers’ ‘strike in Jordan, which is continuing for the fourth week. Although the Jordanian government approved some of the teachers’ demands, the four Muslim Brotherhood entities called for continuing the strike.

Jordanian researcher Tareq Al Naimat said in a study that as of 2008 the Muslim Brotherhood has been divided into “doves”, who call for political openness, and “hawks”, who rejected openness. However, the hawks accepted political participation in the elections.

Although the Doves are usually perceived as politically inactive, in 2010 two moderate Dove leaders, Rahil Gharaibeh and Nabil Kofahi, proposed one of the boldest political initiatives in the history of the group, calling for the reduction of the powers of the Jordanian monarch in favor of parliament and government.

Meanwhile, the Hawks, usually characterized as isolationist and militant, engineered the National Alliance for Reform, a broad electoral coalition between Islamists and independent figures that first ran in the 2016 parliamentary elections, securing 15 out of 130 seats.

The Hawks’ attempt successfully built an alliance with former MB figures, including those who had gained tribal ties, such as Abdullah al-Akayla, and prominent independent trade unionists, such as former Jordanian Bar Association president Saleh al-Armouti.

Even as these differences grew, the leaders of the Doves further splintered. In 2013, some of them formed the Zamzam Initiative (which later obtained a political party license in 2016), for which its members were expelled from the core Muslim Brotherhood.

Then in February 2015 former Inspector-General Abdul Majid al-Thneibat filed a request to register a new offshoot called the Muslim Brotherhood Society, whose similar name to the parent organization enabled the state to withdraw the latter’s legal license.

Thneibat’s group was thus able to seize the most important offices of the MB and some of its financial assets, leading some among the Hawks to accuse him of working with the state for personal advantage. This partial legal ban on the core MB excluded their Hawk-affiliated political arm, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), which was the only legal political outlet for the group until Salim al-Falahat established the Partnership and Rescue Party, a political arm aligned with the Doves, in 2016.

The MB’s ambition to create an influential bloc that can pass laws have been replaced by their mere need to avoid falling into irrelevance.