Qatar: Exponent of Instability “Muslim Brotherhood Waves (2)”

Cairo – The 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.

In Qatar, the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a well-known religious organization, was founded by Sheikh Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who he himself was one of the Brotherhood’s self-exiled refugees to Qatar several decades ago. The IUMS, though religious, have always had a role in politics, and that contests its credibility and independence.

The IUMS has been founded with aims to lead and represent the Sunni Islam worldwide, to confront the tide of Shiite Islam, and to activate the interaction between European and American Islamic organizations. Therefore, the IUMS has come to the forefront as the Islamic authority in jurisprudence for Muslims in Europe and America. The very first signs of a paradigm shift that would reverse pattern of traditionalist jurisprudence to another jurisprudence underpinned on analogical reasoning, and subject to the requirements of the time and space, was when the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) issued a Fatwa (i.e. religious edict) that reads: “A Muslim woman can marry a Christian or Jew.”

According to the Fatwa, this legal ruling, however, is contingent on one condition, that is, “that Muslim woman should try to proselytize her non-Muslim husband whenever possible.”  The Fatwa was issued and signed by Sheikh Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi himself, in his capacity as the ECFR’s chairman.

The literal and traditionalist jurisprudence, as passed down from generation to generation, dictated that this marriage was haram i.e. prohibited.  According to traditionalist legal rulings: “No Muslim woman is to be a wife to a non-Muslim man,” because she will not be entitled to guardianship of children, while her husband will. Thus her children may grow up as non-Muslims.”

The (ECFR) was established in 1997, and constituted of self-selected clerics and scholars across Europe and is chaired by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The headquarters of the Council are in Dublin, with branch offices in the Middle East. The goal of the council is to supply interpretations of Islamic law tailored to Muslim minorities, (Fiqh al Akhaliyyat); it is considered one of the most representative bodies within this area.

As a purely Qatari initiative, the Qatari government established the “Renaissance or An-Nahda Project” for training, publishing, seminars and lectures, whose leadership was assigned to Professor Jassim Sultan, the general observer of the Muslim Brotherhood within Qatar itself.  This was after the Brotherhood decided to fully disband itself on the pretext that the sitting Qatari government, to all intents and purposes, was adopting and promoting the same program agenda as the Brotherhood, let alone its unwavering support to Dr. Sultan in this regard. The Brotherhood’s quest has been to promote its program agenda within all Islamic countries, through its various branches, typically spearheaded by its flagship group in Egypt.

Does anyone still remember “An-Nahda Project” that the Brotherhood was advertising in Egypt and served as central plank in their electoral campaign? Ironically, the Brotherhood later confessed that there was no such thing as “An-Nahda Project”!

The Jassim Sultan Center for Renaissance had received many Egyptian Brotherhood leaders in order to train them on how to work through democratic organizations, rather than passing through society for power or control.

The Center for Renaissance, in fact, has spawned several prominent Brotherhood figures, among them was Hisham Morsi, the pediatrician, the British national, and al-Qaradawi’s son-in-law. Dr. Morsi in turn had founded a center called the Academy of Change, through which he played a key role in January 2011 revolution after the Brotherhood decided to join it.  Similarly, Dr. Ali al-Salabi, was whom U.S-based Washington Post described as the real architect of Libya’s post-revolutionary government.  Al-Salabi lived in Qatar for several years and a disciple of Sheikh al-Qaradawi. He repeatedly admitted that he had sought Qatar’s help in the early days of the Libyan revolution.

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.