Abdullah to Obama, watch out for brother Mursi
KING Abdullah II of Jordan, a member of the dwindling band of Arab leaders who have somehow stayed in power despite the rise of what he calls a “Muslim Brotherhood crescent” across the Middle East, made an acute observation to me recently about the tactical immaturity of the Brotherhood’s leadership.
We were talking about the rise of political Islam in the region when the king made an unflattering comparison between Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist prime minister of Turkey, and Mohamed Mursi, the Muslim Brother who is president of Egypt. The Brotherhood is an international movement, but it was founded in Egypt, and its leader, the supreme guide, sits there today.
Abdullah made it clear that he doesn’t particularly like either Erdogan or Mursi but that he distrusts the Turk more because he is cannier. Both men seek absolute power, Abdullah believes, but Erdogan is taking a slower, more deliberate approach than Mursi. “Instead of the Turkish model, taking six or seven years — being an Erdogan — Mursi wanted to do it overnight,” he said.
The king, among other Arab leaders, is worried that the Obama administration has an overly naive view of the Brotherhood and of other Islamist leaders. This is one of the main subjects he will address when he has dinner tonight with U.S. President Barack Obama, who is visiting him in Amman, the Jordanian capital. (Another main issue, of course, is the disintegration of Syria, to Jordan’s north.) The king was careful not to criticize Obama to me, but he did lament that U.S. officials discount warnings about the Brothers as the empty complaints of Arab liberals or those vested in the status quo. Some Westerners, he said, argue that “the only way you can have democracy is through the Muslim Brotherhood.”
He made these comments to me a couple of months ago. But the truth of his argument about the Brotherhood’s extremism — and impatience — was borne out anew a week ago, when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt issued an extraordinary, and extraordinarily disturbing, rejoinder to the draft of a declaration calling for an end to violence against women that was eventually passed at the annual session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
In an official statement responding to the draft, the Brotherhood argued that, if approved, it would “lead to complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries, eliminating the moral specificity that helps preserve cohesion of Islamic societies.”
The Brotherhood’s objections to this anodyne document were many. Some of the criticisms could be understood within a broader Egyptian cultural framework: The UN document calls for equality in inheritance laws, and no political party in Egypt has argued that daughters should have parity of inheritance with sons.
Other criticisms seem more retrograde. Still others are flat-out brutal. The Muslim Brothers object to the idea of “granting girls full sexual freedom” and to raising the legal marriage age, which in some countries is as low as 15. They believe that providing contraceptives to adolescent girls is dangerous, and that granting “equal rights to adulterous wives and illegitimate sons resulting from adulterous relationships” is reprehensible.
They believe, of course, that granting “equal rights to homosexuals” and “providing protection and respect for prostitutes” are terrible ideas. They are shocked by the argument that wives should have the right to file legal complaints against husbands for rape.J