Trump’s anti-Brotherhood bill is another Muslim ban in all but name

In the current political climate, the moves under way in the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation are unsurprising. On his way to the White House, President Donald Trump has given a powerful voice to anti-democratic elements within America; people whose view of the world in general, and Islam and Muslims in particular, is constructed largely from fake-news and baseless conspiracy theories.

Alarming as this may sound, it is quite easy to underestimate the consequences of the marriage between minds unhinged by misinformation and US executive power. The Iraq War, lest we forget, was the tragic consequence of fake news and conspiracy repeated ad nauseam by neoconservatives about Saddam’s (actually non-existent) connection with Al-Qaeda and thus, by implication, with 9/11.

The world view espoused by those raised to the top by the Trumpian tide is absurd by any reasonable standards and collapses upon rational scrutiny. However, the new USA under Trump has dignified and extolled the ugliness of America’s past over the promises of the “American dream”.

Never before has a US president spoken of torture in such glowing terms, or implemented a policy that is best described as a ban on Muslims in all but name. The constancy and consistency with which this new administration undermines the founding values of the United States and principles of democracy itself prompt a challenging question: is the US still a liberal democracy or is it more accurate to call it a non-liberal democracy? If it is the latter, then America can be said to have more in common with the tyrants and despots of this world than it does with the liberal democracies among which it is supposed to be the shining light.

Trump is dragging America into a dark place and the malignant consequences of this will surface in many forms. The Muslim ban is the most obvious to-date, as is a bill to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood. If the US State Department endorses the proposed legislation introduced by a man who has done more than most in mainstreaming extreme anti-Muslim propagandists in US politics; whose foreign policy team includes people who have called for all mosques to be shut down across America; and has claimed that the US is being subverted by the Muslim Brotherhood as well as decrying all followers of Islamist politics as jihadists, then it will join an exclusive club of tyrants alongside Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

The proposed ban on the Brotherhood, like the Muslim travel ban, is incoherent and counterproductive. The phenomenon of global terrorism cannot seriously be said to be limited to a few specific countries; terrorists have no nation. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood is not the sharp end of political Islam and nor is membership of the Islamist movement an obvious stepping stone to extremism, let alone violent extremism.

Convoluted thinking born out of the “war on terror” has dominated US and western policy towards Muslims. Without doubt, the demonisation and vilification of Muslims and Islam is the toxic fuel polluting the current political landscape. How else could governments driven by the military-industrial complex manage to bomb, destroy and kill for nearly two decades without the endless propaganda of such a fiery cocktail. It was only through the dehumanisation of Muslims that successive US administrations have been able to maintain the so-called war on terror.

It would seem that the original sin in what is a litany of mistakes is a deeply misguided and erroneous understanding of political Islam itself. It’s become commonplace to speak of Islamism, political Islam and Islamists in ways that have all but rendered public discourse meaningless. The problem, as it is presented by successive governments in the West, is political Islam. Without any clarification about what this actually means, the US and a number of its Western allies have sought to confront this undefined “threat” armed with nothing but a scatter gun. The result hasn’t just been endless wars and conflict in the Middle East but also the undermining of the very basis and principals upon which the US was founded.

Is there a compelling argument to say that there needs to be a complete overhaul in the way governments deal with political Islam? Most certainly. What does political Islam even mean? Ask its proponents. Judging by the nature of relations between Western governments and Middle Eastern states, there seems to be a great deal of confusion as well as contradiction. It’s a matter of fact that Muslim majority countries that are ostensibly secular still maintain some reference to Islam and the Qur’an in their constitutions. Even Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi justifies his behaviour through references to Islam, but it is clear that the West has no problem with this kind of “political Islam” when it serves its interests.

If the fight is to defeat political Islam per se, as is so often claimed, then what about the countries that are more typically “Islamic” in their make-up, like Saudi Arabia and Iran? Many countries are, of course, governed by Islamist parties such as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and its Moroccan namesake, and Ennahda in Tunisia until 2014. Let’s not forget that exponents of political Islam won a majority in the Kuwaiti parliament as well, while the major Shia parties forming the government in Baghdad, a key ally of the US in taking down Daesh, are all devotees too. There are also many key non-state actors supported by the US which are also deeply-rooted in so-called Islamism.

There is an inherent contradiction in the way subsequent governments have set out to defeat political Islam. Simple observation leads to the obvious conclusion that its defeat has never been the defining feature of US policies in the Middle East. Why then single out the Muslim Brotherhood? It would seem that this move makes as much sense as banning Muslims from Iran and Syria but not Egypt and Saudi Arabia from travelling to America.

There seems to be an ongoing refusal to accept reality when it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, we see conspiracy-fuelled narratives being used to criminalise not only the movement itself but also political activism of Muslims in the US. We probably know more about the Brotherhood than any other political movement in the Middle East, and yet its commitment to democratic elections and non-violence is simply going to be disregarded by Washington.

However, Trump’s administration isn’t the first to view the Brotherhood with deep suspicion. Following the 9/11 attacks, George W Bush also launched an investigation into the movement and related Islamist groups. After years of investigations, however, the US and other governments, including neutral Switzerland, removed most of the leaders of the movement from the sanctions lists because there was nothing to back the allegation that they supported terrorism.

Mostly recently, the British government commissioned two separate reviews of the Brotherhood, one by former ambassador Sir John Jenkins and the other by the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC). While the Jenkins Report commissioned by the then Prime Minister David Cameron stopped short of labelling the movement as a terrorist organisation, it’s worth noting that the report itself was criticised strongly by the FAC, which suggested that it lacked transparency and may have been politically compromised. The committee, which is both powerful and respected within the House of Commons, said in its review that terms like political Islam are neither practical nor useful as definitions to relate with the Muslim world. It recognised that, “Political Islamists self-identifying as democrats have embraced elections as a mechanism for contesting and winning power and such groups should be allowed to freely participate in democratic processes, and the British government should use the ability of political Islamists to take part as one of the key criteria for defining free elections in the MENA region.”

The FAC advised the British government to clarify what it stands for and not just what it opposes. It believes that Britain should have standardised values, principles and benchmarks — including participation in and the preservation of democracy, and non-violence as a fundamental and unambiguous commitment — by which to judge the behaviour of Islamist groups like the Brotherhood and the behaviour of heads of state and government authorities. It criticised the application of different standards, which has led to a perverse situation whereby Western governments remain virtually silent when atrocities are carried out against the Brotherhood (by the likes of the Western-backed Sisi government in Egypt, for example) but are quick to condemn when liberal values are undermined by the movement.

According to the FAC, it is inappropriate to place the Muslim Brotherhood and Daesh within the same category, and it cited experts to support this view: “There is little evidence that the Morsi-government, despite its many short-comings, showed any intention to turn Egypt into an Islamic republic.” While acknowledging that critics of the Brotherhood claim that the organisation acts like a “conveyor belt” to extremism it was clear that this is far from reality. In fact, political-Islamist groups tend to act as a “firewall” against extremism. Experts interviewed for the review told the committee that very few Brotherhood members had left the organisation to join jihadist groups, and that authoritarian governance in the Middle East is to blame for terrorism.

As others have also pointed out, organisations like the Brotherhood should be viewed not as uniquely ideological actors but as rational political movements. They will continue to play an important role in the politics of most Arab states, despite the pressures they have faced in recent years. The default antagonism within the West towards the Muslim Brotherhood has not only been shown to be ineffective and impractical, but also undermines the core values and principals at the heart of the West itself.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.