MEDICINE MEN:

DANCING WITH THE DEVIL: Charting the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Der Spiegel, 7/03/07)

"We've freed the people from a corrupt regime," says Khalil Abu Leila. The 55-year-old with the speckled gray beard sits in the courtyard of an apartment building wearing a plain gray suit and leather sandals. On the table in front of him is a copy of the Koran.

Like many Hamas leaders, Abu Leila studied in Egypt. And like many Islamists, he chose to become a pharmacist because he wished to heal mankind's ills. While in Cairo he first came into contact with the Muslim Brotherhood. After returning to the Gaza Strip he opened a pharmacy in the Khan Yunis refugee camp and met Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a doctor. Together they created their own Gaza branch of the Brotherhood in the late 1970s. According to Abu Leila, they founded Hamas in 1987 as the military wing of the Brotherhood. It was the beginning of the First Intifada.

Abu Leila does his best to play down the violent reputation of the Muslim Brotherhood. "We want to bring peace and justice to the entire world," he says. Western society is sick, its families are falling apart and its children threatened by drugs. And most Arab countries are being destroyed by corruption. "We have the proper medicine against it all," he says pointing to the Koran. "Islam. We want to spread this medicine throughout the whole world."

For many Muslims, Hamas is the tip of the Brotherhood's spear, the polished diamond of political Islam. The neighboring secular Arab regimes see it as a threat to their very existence -- or in Syria's case -- as a means to an end in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

Both Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah moved quickly to support moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last week. Mubarak said Hamas had undertaken a "putsch" in Gaza. He sent his diplomats stationed there to Ramallah in the West Bank, where Abbas' Fatah party remains in control, and he closed the border crossing into Egypt at Rafah.

But Mubarak and Abdullah already seemed to be plagued by doubts at a summit at Sharm el-Sheik. The number two leader of the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaida, the Egyptian Ayman al Zawahiri, had called on all Muslims to support Hamas only a few hours earlier. Mubarak that evening quietly urged Fatah to negotiate with the new rulers in Gaza.

No other regime in the region is as concerned about the implications of the takeover by Hamas as Egypt is. The most populous Arab nation has good reasons to be so. The newspaper Al Ahram, which acts as an Egyptian government mouthpiece, commented that "the problem of Hamas isn't limited to Gaza. Here in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood does not recognize the legitimacy of the government, the constitution and the law. Whoever ignores that takes us to the gates of Hell, which Gaza has opened."

Duh? If the regime were legitimate it could hold and win open elections.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 4, 2007 11:26 AM