Читать книгу Inside the Muslim Brotherhood - The Truth About The World's Most Powerful Political Movement - Youssef Nada - Страница 7

‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.’

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

He is an acrobat with thought and languages, and in a world engulfed by ambiguities we can all benefit from interpreters. The enlightened message from Youssef Nada at its simplest – and most provocatively – is to live and let live. He is for overall justice and democracy and has risked his life in the struggle for it.

An exiled Egyptian, Youssef Nada tells everyone he has been honoured to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen) for more than 60 years. It is the most controversial, influential and potent of all Islamist ‘organisations’ throughout the world. Many nations feared that, as despotic regimes toppled like dominoes, there would be an Islamic mirror of Iran throughout the Middle East. As the Shah of Iran’s departure in 1979 led to the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini and a huge backlash against the West, it was argued events heralded a much bigger twenty-first-century Islamist revolution. And world turmoil.

In America on 30 January 2011, one-time US Republican party presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee told his nation: ‘If, in fact, the Muslim Brotherhood is underneath much of the unrest, every person who breathes ought to be concerned.’

No one publicly questioned that statement. Of course, much of the world did not know who or what the Muslim Brotherhood was. Newt Gingrich, American Presidential contender in 2012 and the former US House Speaker, presumably did. On 6 February 2011, he told the CNN television network that reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood to help resolve the Egyptian crisis was a bad idea: ‘The Muslim Brotherhood is a mortal enemy of our civilisation, they say so openly, their way is Jihad, their method is death.’

Youssef Nada, unsurprisingly, has a more even-minded view of things, although to some Islamists his thoughts will be revolutionary, possibly heretic. His mission is for Sunni and Shia, Muslim, Christian and Jew, West and East, man and woman, to live alongside each other in peace. He has a vision of a Mediterranean pact whereby Europe and the Arab world can build a future together: his ‘Marco Polo Solution’. He has an understanding of what’s turned the world into an arena of often heart-stopping brinkmanship; of the round-the-clock apprehension about who’ll blink first.

Youssef Nada and I began talking about this book a long time before the stirrings of what became known as ‘The Arab Spring’. I had spent two years compiling an investigative dossier for a prominent family in the region, and became intrigued by the Muslim Brotherhood and the story of their away-from-the-spotlight international negotiator – the enigmatic Youssef Nada.

Until now he had been the mystery inside the heart of the Middle East mystery; the part of the puzzle no one could place; that final part of the jigsaw, out of reach like a wisp of smoke on the horizon. He liked it that way. It was safer. Events, as you will quickly realise, changed his profile. The timing was perfect for our collaboration, and following private introductions and many meetings in which we tested our motives and suitability for working together, we began.

Neither of us realised how events would interrupt and inform us. At times it was exasperating but it was always exciting. I sat with Youssef Nada as he was consulted on revolution in Egypt, the end of Gadaffi, and continually in the desperate search for an answer to the massacres in Syria. Problems in other areas – Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Iran and Iraq – surfaced every day. It was an astonishing lesson in diplomacy and world politics. If Youssef Nada has one guiding mantra it is that the participation of political Islam in the running of the Arab nations was the only way forward to establish legitimacy and democracy.

Youssef Nada had lost his freedom of self-will and exiled himself from Egypt half-a-dozen years after the establishment in 1952 of the nationalism regime of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and a return to Pharaonic culture. Nasser and the clones that followed – Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak – behaved like Pharaohs and expected to be treated as deities. With numbered overseas bank accounts.

The distinguished and readable Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature and author of the books which comprise the Cairo Trilogy, said that Nasser’s ousting of King Farouk had stolen the ‘the property of the few and the liberty of all’.

Indeed, for more than 60 years of rampant corruption a military cabal has in every sense plundered all around the banks of the Nile. It’s taken a painfully slow time, but the people of Egypt, the standard bearer in Arab politics, began fighting to get that liberty. The young of Egypt and throughout the Middle East have no interest in a stability simply to accommodate America’s interests. The aspirations of an increasingly educated Arab world require new and delicate handling.

Youssef Nada has a hard, clear, lucid, vision. He cannot promise answers, yet he would offer possible solutions through the ideas and philosophy he has lived to all his life as an ambassador of reason, a peacemaker. And also as the de facto foreign minister for a quarter of a century of the Muslim Brotherhood group, whose membership thrives not only in the Middle East and Far East but with pivotal positions in America, the UK, and throughout continental Europe.

He maintains almost all that is written or broadcast about the Muslim Brotherhood is not correct, causing resentment and trouble. He found that out abruptly after the 9/11 attacks on America when he was trapped in the spotlight: this man who’d controlled a business empire worth billions of US dollars was branded a global financial terrorist and listed as such by America and the United Nations Security Council.

President George W Bush named him as ‘Al Qaeda’s banker’. He, it was said publicly, was ‘the godfather of all evil’. He remained blacklisted by America in 2012, though delisted by the United Nations Security Council. He has never been charged with anything, anywhere. What had gone before him prepared him for this personal catastrophe. It is a unique, fascinating life he talks about and one which points to some solutions for the world’s future.

During three years of investigations and many, many months of face-to-face conversations, Youssef Nada has never avoided a question or given a less than frank answer. From this we can tell his story in his own words as well as from the events which so reluctantly forced him from the shadows into the spotlight.

There are those who will not believe what he says or will twist his words. I have approached this book as an open and fair-minded reporter rather than a commentator or author operating with an agenda – I’ve read many of the dozens of such books which exist and much of the endless electronic essays and statements – from one side of the fence or another. I’ve talked to many people, some of whom believe the Muslim Brotherhood wants to murder all of us in our beds and others who believe they are the acceptable face of Islam. Almost all endorse the selflessness of Youssef Nada in his life’s work. I have one caveat for my own impartiality.

As he insists, we are all human and as such I admit I believe him to be a good and honest man. I have let Youssef Nada explain his life and philosophy as much as possible in his own words, for they dramatically reflect his life’s determination. Some of it is trenchant: Palestine and Israel cannot exist as two states; Muslim religious scholars have not used their brains since the 12th century; ruling Muslim states – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and others – by family inheritance is a betrayal of Islam and Muslims; Muslim women can discard the burqa and still be decent – and go into politics.

He believes those following the rigid Salafist interpretation of Islam cannot survive in the 21st century; extremists have hijacked Sharia law; and, vitally, Muslims must negotiate and avoid violence. They must live as well as die in the way of God.

Youssef Nada is a man who will never give up. He’s a man who’d look the Devil in the eye until the Devil blinked – no matter what guise Satan took.

Douglas Thompson, Cairo, 2012