The Muslim Brotherhood (12 page)

The willingness of the Damascus wing to join with the Vanguard was particularly surprising given their more moderate stance and their earlier refusal to adopt the jihadist path. Yet once it looked as though revolution was possible, even they were quick to take part. Mohamed Hasnawi explained:

When the events of Hamah took place the Aleppo group were more engaged in the events but the battle brought all the Islamists together including the Damascenes. They took part in it and they have martyrs and people who were arrested. At the peak of the conflict the two wings unified and we became one group and the General Guide was Hassan al-Huwaidi who was from the Damascus wing.
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According to some sources even Issam al-Attar came back into the fold temporarily from his exile in Germany.
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However, he had withdrawn again by March 1982.

The readiness of the Damascus group to come on board can be explained by the fact that although they were perceptibly more moderate than their Aleppan counterparts, they had never been opposed to the principle of violence. In traditional Ikhwani fashion, they simply believed that violence should only be used when the time was right. As Barot has explained, ‘They didn’t refuse the principle of violent jihad strategically, but they sought to put the brakes on it tactically and temporarily. It was the growth of the jihadist currents among the young of al-Jama’a and their initiative to act that took the old al-Jama’a [the Damascus wing] … into the suicidal jihadist venture.’
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Therefore once it appeared that the more militant elements were gaining ground, the Damascus wing proved just as anxious to be part of the action as the more militant elements.

However, this new show of unity was to prove short lived, as once again events overtook the Ikhwan. By February 1982 things had become so tense that a populist uprising broke out in the city of Hamah. This uprising became a large popular insurrection. Many Ba’athists were attacked in their homes and killed and people began looting and burning, giving vent to their frustrations. The governor of Hamah, Mohamed Khalid Harbah, claimed afterwards that he had been woken up by the ‘sounds of the mosques’ loudspeakers
instigating people to fight’.
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The regime responded harshly, sending around 12,000 troops to the city, sealing it off and then pummelling it with heavy artillery, tanks and helicopter gunships. The whole city was razed to the ground. According to Amnesty International the number of citizens killed in this assault ranged between 10,000 to 25,000.
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Clearly the uprising in Hamah went far beyond the Muslim Brotherhood and represented a much wider general dissatisfaction with the ruling regime. However, it is obvious that when the time came the Ikhwani were willing to support the use of violence in order to achieve change. The Hamah events also demonstrated how far the Ikhwan had misjudged the situation. Carried away with their own sense of importance, the brothers clearly believed that they had the power to take the street with them and that the population would rise up behind them.

Yet with the passing of time, the Syrian Ikhwan has sought to rewrite its own history in relation to the Hamah crisis and has done its utmost to distance itself from the bloody events. Ali Saddredine al-Bayanouni has categorically stated that the Ikhwan was not responsible for the violence of that era:

I was the deputy leader at that time and I can tell you that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had no involvement in violent events whatsoever. Two influential people in particular reacted to Ba’athist repression in a violent manner; Adnan Aqla, who was dismissed from the Muslim Brotherhood five years before the outbreak of full-scale violence, and Ibrahim el-Youssef, who was an officer in the Syrian army and a Ba’athist with no relations to the Muslim Brotherhood whatsoever.
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Al-Bayanouni’s reference to Aqla is rather confusing given that he himself stated in an interview with Al-Jazeera that he had come together with Aqla and others from the Fighting Vanguard in the early 1980s.
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Moreover, it is clear that despite condemning the use of violence, the Ikhwan ultimately supported the uprising. As Hassan al-Huwaidi explained, ‘Enthusiasm overshadowed reason and the reins of power had disappeared.’
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Having unleashed the beast with their ill-sighted absences and weak leadership, the Ikhwan simply went with the flow when it seemed as though it had the chance to take power.

The events in Hamah would almost completely crush the Syrian Ikhwan. Those who managed to escape death or arrest fled the country and have remained in exile ever since. Some went to Iraq, where they sought protection from Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. They still held the vain hope that they could continue the struggle from the neighbouring country, where they set up training camps. However, they soon realised the impossibility of such a task. As Adnan Saad Eddine, who fled to Iraq, explained: ‘We formed groups to train and go to Syria … We weren’t able to achieve anything … We had a camp but we realised we were wasting our time. Even the Iraqi regime wasn’t really very keen.’
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Others settled in Jordan, which became the main centre of the Syrian Ikhwan abroad.

From its imposed exile, the Syrian Ikhwan had little to do other than reflect on the actions that had resulted in its own destruction. Unsurprisingly, the divisions soon resurfaced and there was much recrimination over who had been responsible for taking the Ikhwan down such a disastrous path. Adnan Saad Eddine describes it thus:

Hamah was like an earthquake for the Muslim Brotherhood. The differences among us surfaced and some of us started looking for scapegoats and a lot of people published memoirs about what happened. We thought that we should evaluate
what went wrong. We all supported that idea. The brothers in the leadership agreed to nominate some people but when someone was appointed to head the committee, others protested. This evaluation continued for twelve years.
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The attempt to engage in an internal assessment of what had happened proved to be as contentious as other parts of the Ikhwan’s history. They did succeed in producing an evaluation report. Yet this document remains a closely guarded secret and attempts to procure a copy are met with the answer that it is an internal document that is not for public consumption.
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According to some accounts, only forty brothers were permitted to see a copy and it was completely withheld from the organisation’s grass roots.
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Although not in the public domain, it appears that the thrust of this evaluation was to lay the blame for the Hamah events on certain individuals. The main casualty of this process was Adnan Saad Eddine – who himself struggled to get his hands on a copy of the report. As General Guide during the second half of the 1970s, he was blamed for the slide into violence despite the fact that by 1980 his role had been taken over by Hassan al-Huwaidi. Indeed, Adnan Saad Eddine appears to have become a convenient scapegoat for the whole of the movement’s going astray.

In response to these accusations Adnan Saad Eddine wrote a book outlining his own version of events and refuting some of the accusations made in the evaluation report.
Mesirat Jama’at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen fi Suria
(
The Journey of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood
) offers a number of insights into this highly secretive part of the Ikhwan’s history. According to the book, the evaluation report first blamed the shift to armed action on the ‘emotional mobilisation’ that had developed inside the Ikhwan because of its reliance on the ideology of Sayyid Qutb and the works of Said Hawa.
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The report then accused Adnan Saad Eddine of having created in 1977 a special
committee consisting of Ali Saddredinne al-Bayanouni, Abdullah Tantawi, Riyath Jamour, Adeeb Jaj and Mohamed Hasnawi to secretly co-ordinate with the Fighting Vanguard.
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It also detailed how Abdel Sattar al-Zaim, who was leading the Fighting Vanguard at the time, had promised to develop his group within the Ikhwan’s structures while the Ikhwan agreed to nominate its best jihadist elements to support his group and expand armed activity in order to establish active groups in all the country’s governates. Adnan Saad Eddine fiercely refutes these allegations and insists that its only support to Abdel Sattar Zaim was to provide him with financial assistance. However, he asserts that the stance of the leadership was ‘to support everyone without any distinction between members of the Vanguard and members of the Jama’a because the authorities were after all of us’.
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These allegations were extremely damning to Adnan Saad Eddine, not least because the Ikhwan expelled him from the movement on account of them. As such he has remained the main scapegoat for this period in the Syrian Ikhwan’s history. Other figures who were clearly deeply involved at the time and who are still in key leadership positions within the Ikhwan, such as al-Bayanouni, still refuse to acknowledge that they played any part in the tragedy. It seems that the Ikhwan has dealt with Hamah by blaming a handful of individuals and explaining events as a response to state repression, as if this were sufficient to exonerate it of all responsibility.

At the end of the 1990s the Syrian Ikhwan began another period of evolution that saw it come back full circle. In a bid to leave their past behind them the Syrian brothers once again took to advocating a more moderate approach that was far more in line with the spirit of Mustafa al-Sibai than Said Hawa. In many ways this more liberal stance
represented a maturing of the Ikhwani leadership, most notably of al-Bayanouni, who took over as General Guide in 1996 and who had been residing in the UK since 2000 when he was forced out of Jordan under pressure from the Syrian regime. A lawyer by profession, al-Bayanouni’s time in Europe seems to have mellowed him and he was the key driving force in this return to more moderate and progressive values.

Like their Egyptian counterparts, the Syrian Brotherhood began producing a number of reform platforms. In May 2001 they issued the National Honour Charter, a precursor to the Political Project of 2004 that outlined their future vision for Syria and which reads very much like a political manifesto. Crucially, this document is explicit in its condemnation of violence as a means to induce change. Of course, it asserts the importance of fighting jihad when Muslim lands are under occupation, yet it clearly rejects the idea of taking up arms against one’s own government. There is a special section in the document dedicated to explaining away their own past. In line with their revisionist approach, the document states that after coming under pressure from the increasingly brutal policies of the state, ‘our Group found itself caught up in a cycle of violence which it had no hand in creating or initiating’.
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As well as condemning violence, the document is littered with liberal notions such as tolerance, mutual co-existence, human rights and pluralism. It promotes the concept of the civil rather than the Islamic state, something that the Egyptian Ikhwan has also been keen to endorse in recent years. Of course, like the Egyptians they assert that this civil state will work within the framework of the Sharia. The opening lines read: ‘Our future vision for our Arab homeland of Syria stems from its belonging to the Arab and Islamic dimensions and from our firm belief in Islam as a code whose texts and scriptures interact with the realities and emerging challenges of life, all within the general framework of the main objectives of Sharia.’
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The document also
lauds the ballot box as ‘one of the practical means through which the objectives of Sharia and its general rules within the political system can be attained’.
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It further states: ‘We want Syria to be a country where all who live upon its lands enjoy life under the shade of the legislation of Allah Almighty, through the free and fair choosing of its people.’
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However, the Syrian project is as ambiguous as the Egyptian one over exactly how this interaction between Sharia and democracy will pan out. Moreover, in spite of its promotion of civil democracy it also stipulates that the group would seek to ‘Islamise the laws in a gradual manner, due to our belief that Sharia revealed by Allah is a source of mercy for all mankind and that it consists of the most humane, wise and prudent measures that are in the best interest of all people’.
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The document is also contradictory in its approach to minorities. On the one hand it is clear that it considers all citizens as equals and will not discriminate against non-Muslims. (Al-Bayanouni has been particularly keen to push this last point and at the meeting held in London in 2007 to discuss the Egyptian Ikhwan’s reformist programme, the Syrian leader was highly critical of its stipulation that the President could not be a woman or a Copt. He also censured the Egyptian proposal for an elected council of clerics who would determine whether or not legal rulings conform to Sharia.) Yet at the same time it states unequivocally that Islam should be the basis of the state and of Syrian identity. Furthermore, it views Syria as a specifically Arab state, ignoring not only the country’s Kurdish population but also other non-Arab minorities such as the Assyrians. Ironically, their talk of the
umma
notwithstanding, the Syrian Ikhwani have been unable it seems to free themselves from the Arab nationalism that was one of the driving ideologies behind the Ba’athist state. In addition, although it promotes freedom, the document displays the traditional Ikhwani concern with public morality and makes clear its desire to legislate for the private lives of its citizens. It bemoans the moral decline in Syrian society and determines to fight alcohol, drugs, gambling and
prostitution. It also aspires to ensure that the media supports and publishes ‘innocent entertainment’.
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