Salafi Islamic Terrorism in Imbaba, Giza Egypt

9th May 2011

Dear friends,

Greetings in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ!

Thank you very much for your messages and prayers for us as we go through this difficult time.

With great sadness, I would like to tell you about the tragic situation in Imbaba, Giza. Imbaba is a densely populated area, a few kilometres south of Cairo. Over the past two days, there have been clashes in this area between Christians and Muslims. The outcome ofthe clashes was the death of 12 people, and more than 232 injured. Moreover, several houses and shops were burnt, cars were destroyed, and the church of st. Mary, in the same area, was completely burnt.

The clashes started because of a rumour that a Christian woman who converted to Islam was being hidden by Mar Mina Coptic Orthodox Church. As a result of this rumour, a group of Muslim fundamentalists that belong to the Salafi sect gathered around the church, and wanted to go inside to search for this woman. Young people from the church prevented them from entering, because they were afraid that they may burn the church as it happened a few weeks ago in Sole, Giza.

As a result, more Muslim people came and after praying in the street, they started to shout "Islamic, Islamic." The Christians shouted back "with our spirit and blood, we are ready to defend the cross." There were attempts from moderate Muslims and the church priests to calm down the demonstrators on both sides, but these attempts failed.

Soon after this, some of the demonstrators started shooting and throwing Molotov cocktails. The army arrived and things became quieter. However, early the next morning, some extremist Muslims came and burned several blocks of flats and shops owned by Christians.

Yesterday, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar called for an emergency meeting of Beth EI-Eila (the House of the Family), a newly formed group which includes the heads of Christian denominations and several Muslim leaders and the Grand Imam.

We all agreed that this incident should be taken very seriously by the authorities, and that those who caused these destructive clashes must be brought to justice. It is worth mentioning that previous clashes between Christians and Muslims have always been solved through community reconciliation. The meeting also appointed a committee to go and visit Imbaba, and report back. I was one of this committee, and we spent eight hours today visiting and listening, and then writing a report to the wider committee.

The damage we saw was indescribable. The area looked as if it was a battlefield, because of the many tanks and soldiers. I was moved by the story of one of the guards of St. Mary's Church, who refused to denounce Jesus Christ and as a result, his throat was slit. This is at least the fifth tragic incident since the first day of the year, when a church was bombed in Alexandria. There is no doubt that inter-religious tension is growing in Egypt, and this needs a real strategic plan to combat it. This is what we are trying to do through Beth El-Eila.

I very much appreciate your prayers so that the Lord may transform this difficult situation.

We all hope that Egypt will be a safe place for all Egyptians.

May the Lord bless you!

Yours in Christ,

Author intentionally left blank

Ikhwan Thinking after the Arab Spring

The post-revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood is facing unprecedented challenges. The movement has been excluded from the legal polity for decades, and has been subject to cycles of partial toleration and periodic repression, causing both organisational and intellectual distortions.

It responded to repression through constructing a broad and vague intellectual formula that guaranteed wide social support, reflecting a decision to compromise ideological clarity for the sake of organizational existence.

Over the course of history, four different schools of thought came to coexist within the Muslim Brotherhood. First is the founder’s school; a relatively modernist school of thought that existed on the margins of Al-Azhar in the early 20th century and was championed by Muhammad Abduh. It rejects the authority of turath (accumulated heritage of Islamic sciences), and calls for the return to Quran and Sunnah and practicing ijtihad (innovation in Islamic jurisprudence) whilst being only guided by ideas in turath.

Second is the traditionalist school, championed by Al-Azhar’s long history of scholarship. It is characterised by heavy reliance on turath and acceptance of the full authenticity of the four main Sunni schools of jurisprudence. The school also promotes the notion of “balanced identity”, arguing that each individual belongs to different circles of affiliation, including mazhab (school of jurisprudence), tariqa (Sufi order), theological school, hometown, profession, guild, family and others. Sophisticated and interlinked affiliations created societal harmony and diversity, and led Islamists to seek gradual customisable reform that responds to societal diversity and does not provide a blueprint, one-size-fits-all manifesto for (re)Islamisation.

Named after the infamous Sayyid Qutb, Qutbism, the third school, is characterised by its highly politicised and revolutionary interpretation of Quran that divides peoples into those who belong to/support Islam/Islamism, and those who oppose it. It relies on historical incidents from the prophet’s biography (mainly conflicts between Muslims and pagans) to construct a framework for managing the relation between Islamists and their societal counterparts, and between the Muslim world and other civilisations. The school emphasises the necessity of developing a detached vanguard that focuses on recruitment and empowering the organisation while postponing all intellectual questions. While hardcore Qutbism opens doors for political violence, Muslim Brotherhood Qutbis follow a demilitarised version of the ideology, clearly distancing themselves from notions of takfir (disbelief) and violence.

The Salafi/Wahabi school made its way to the Muslim Brotherhood (and to the broader Egyptian society) in the 1970s. It is a modernist Islamist ideology that has minimal respect for turath, and is characterised by a conservative, rigid, and rather materialist understanding of Sharia law, low levels of tolerance and the focus on superficial/external components of religion.

Salafi and Qutbi acceptance of notions like democracy and diversity are minimal, and they believe in a strong, broad central state that plays a major role in public morality.

With a wide ideological formula, only four principles keep the Muslim Brotherhood united as an organisation; namely,

1. A belief that Islam is an all-encompassing system;
2. Rejecting violence as a means for political change;
3. Accepting democracy;
4. Accepting political pluralism. It is noteworthy that while accepted in principle, these notions mean different things for different members.[Editor's note: Taaqiyya Alert]

Organisationally, the Muslim Brotherhood responded to repression primarily through centralising decision-making and decentralising decision execution —both designed to sustain unity. The former component was intended to keep disputes contained in limited domains, and capitalise on leadership’s historical legacy to dictate compromises whenever necessary, while the latter was intended to overcome possible consequences of security crackdowns, to create a sense of belonging and empowerment amongst members, and to develop members’ executive capabilities.

As the revolution opened wide doors for the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood into the polity, the group will move from identity to reform politics. The construction of a political programme requires moving beyond areas of organisational consensus to others of diversity and dispute. With Islam being understood as a value system and a limited set of legislation pertaining to the public sphere, different political programmes could be drafted from the group’s ideology, with different tendencies and political orientations. Some Muslim Brotherhood members are starting to realise the inevitability of political disputes as a real polity emerges and serious political challenges arise.

The Brotherhood has already announced it will establish the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), a declaration met with scepticism from intellectuals and Brotherhood reformers alike. They argue that limiting the broad school of thought to a single political manifestation will inevitably fail, and is harmful for the religious cause the group was founded to serve. Instead, they call for the group’s retreat from the political to civic domain, and allowing the emergence of various political manifestations instead.

So far, the Muslim Brotherhood leadership is rejecting these calls. The group’s chief declared a ban on joining political parties other the FJP. Rather short sighted, the decision will fail to silence emerging diversities from within the group, as diversity is an essential product of freedom. Different organisational measures currently employed to discourage members from leaving the group are failing, as numerous dissidents are already challenging the leadership’s decision and joining other existing parties or establishing their own. As new political questions emerge, the numbers will inevitably increase, and it will be the leadership’s decision to either dismiss dissidents or accept political diversity. Either way, the FJP will cease to act as the sole manifestation of the Muslim Brotherhood, even if it retains monopoly over organisational representation.

With a legacy of diverse ideological orientations and strategic inconsistencies, the Muslim Brotherhood is currently faced by questions more threatening to its very existence than was oppression.

• The context of freedom will undermine dominant organisational rhetoric calling for unity at the cost of diversity.
• As the emergence of various political manifestations seems inevitable, the Brotherhood’s leadership will decide to either allow diversity through a flexible organisation, or disallow it though a rigid one, leading to numerous splits.
• Either way, continued political inclusion and freedom will lead to transcending the phenomenon of political Islamism as it currently exists, and its re-emergence in more sophisticated and more diverse forms.

The Rest @ Ahram Online

Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom

Naser Jason Abdo was arrested at America’s Best Value Inn on South Fort Hood Street in Killeen, TX only about 3 miles from the front gate at Foot Hood on an outstanding warrant for child pornography and for being AWOL (absent without leave) from Fort Campbell, Ky.

When his hotel room was searched police found a lot more than child porn. Fox News reported,

Authorities said they found two clocks, spools of auto wire, Winchester .40 caliber ammunition and a handgun in a backpack, according to court documents. They also discovered an article titled “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom,” the same title of a how-to article featured in Inspire, the English-language magazine by the terror group based in Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.