Qutb Praised by Contender for MB’s “Supreme Guide” Role

Hard on the heels of the recent internal coup-d’etat inside Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood comes the division of the spoils. The hard-liners, having rigged the elections to MB’s leading Guidance Bureau, have now to decide amongst themselves which one of them will be MB’s new Supreme Guide.

Leading contenders include Hussein Ibrahim (head of the MB parliamentary bloc), or one of his fellow hardliners, Mahmoud Ezzat, Gomaa Amin, Abdel Rahman Al Bar or Mohamed Badee’a. Outside runners include the deputy chairman of MB (recently removed from the Guidance Council in the rigged elections of December), Mohamed Habib – although the likelihood of Habib winning the post is remote in the extreme given the hard-liners complete grip on the reins of power inside MB.

Without a hint of irony, one new Guidance Council member, Saad El-Katatney, told Egypt’s Daily News:

We are a powerful group that is getting more powerful, these elections proved that the highest authority is well aware of the group’s welfare, therefore they have elected members for the new Guidance Office to lead in the coming four years… I can see a bright future for the Muslim Brotherhood with this harmonious group.

Not the sort of “bright future” many beyond the Brotherhood would want, one would wager.

One of the contenders, Mohamed Badee’a, has already set out his ideological stall, eager to attract the attention of fellow clerical fascists in the Guidance Bureau as they mull over who should be declared Supreme Guide on January 15th.

In a deranged article in the Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb, Dr. Badee’a seeks to impress his fellow Islamists with the assertion that the late Sayed Qutb was not (as is widely understood) a radical Islamist, wedded to a jihadist model of clerical fascism. Oh deary me, no! In fact (he claims), Qutb was a peaceful reformist. Badee’a asserts Qutb had:

won the respect of many including  Eugene Rogan author of “The Arab”. He continued that numerous theses studied and doctorates discussed were based on Qutb’s writings where he was in fact referred to as a ‘reformist’.

One might kindly suggest that Badee’a actually read Rogan’s highly acclaimed work before he asserts something that was very far from Rogan’s mind as the latter wrote of Qutb’s radical, innovatory reform of Islam’s traditions.

Declaring that Qutb sought to reform Islam is not necessarily a promotion or endorsement of Qutb’s ideas – it is a statement of fact. Islamism seeks to re-form Islam, not to the better – but as a clerical fascist political ideology determined to win power by any means necessary. Turning Islam into a vicious, violent, negative, ideology of narrow-minded bigotry and intolerance is the essence of Qutb’s reforms.

However, such is the nature of the disingenuous, truly Orwellian double-speak of the Brotherhood, so one should not be surprised to discover such a complete distortion of reality slips easily from the lips of one of MB’s leaders.

That a leading contender to MB’s supreme leadership should now seek to openly promote  Qutb, ideological forefather of al-Qaida and every violent jihadi group worldwide, speaks volumes.