The Brothers are playing for keeps.
Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi
Text
As
Egypt under the heel of Mohamed Morsi unravels, here’s the
late-breaking news: The Muslim Brotherhood is the enemy of democracy.
Nor is it just the Left. Like the transnational progressives who hold sway in Democratic circles, many of the neoconservative thinkers who have captured Republican foreign-policy making encourage “outreach” to “moderate Islamists” — a ludicrously self-contradictory term. The idea is to collaborate in the construction of “Islamic democracies.” That’s another nonsensical term — to borrow Michael Rubin’s quote of a moderate Muslim academic piqued by the encroachments of Turkey’s ruling Islamists, “We are a democracy. Islam has nothing to do with it.” That is clearly right. Yet, to argue the chimerical folly of the sharia-democracy experiment is to be demagogued as an “isolationist.” It is as if the Right can no longer fathom an engaged foreign policy that concentrates solely on vital U.S. interests and treats America’s enemies as, well, enemies.
Of course, it is neither Islamophobic nor isolationist to observe
that Islamic supremacism is derived from literal Muslim scripture; that
it is a mainstream interpretation of Islam whose adherents, far from
being limited to a “violent extremist” fringe, number in the hundreds of
millions and include many of Islam’s most influential thinkers and
institutions. These are simply facts. Nor is it Islamophobic or
isolationist to contend that any sensible engagement with Islamic
supremacists — very much including the Muslim Brotherhood — ought to be
aimed at their marginalization and defeat, not their cultivation and
empowerment. This is not a popular view; opinions amply supported by
unpleasant facts are rarely popular. But following it would strengthen
pro-Western Muslims while promoting an American global engagement that
is essential, effective, and affordable. That is the very antithesis of
Islamophobia and isolationism.
The central contention here has been that the Muslim Brotherhood is
an innately, incorrigibly Islamic-supremacist outfit. Wherever it
establishes a presence, it seeks — as gradually as indigenous conditions
require, and as rapidly as they allow — to implement its repressive
construction of sharia. Wherever it gets the opportunity to rule, it
uses its power to impose this sharia, despite resistance from the
society’s non-Islamist factions.
This is not a mere theory. Egypt, the world’s most important Arab country, is violently convulsing before our eyes in direct reaction to the suffocation that is Islamist rule. So, will we finally take the lesson? Will we finally come to understand why democracy and Islamic supremacism cannot coexist?
Western democracy has Judeo-Christian underpinnings. At its core is the equal dignity of every person. This sacred commitment, ironically, enables our bedrock secular guarantee: freedom of conscience. It is anathema to the Brotherhood. As their guiding jurist, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, teaches: “Secularism can never enjoy general acceptance in an Islamic society.” This is because “the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of sharia.”
This is not a mere theory. Egypt, the world’s most important Arab country, is violently convulsing before our eyes in direct reaction to the suffocation that is Islamist rule. So, will we finally take the lesson? Will we finally come to understand why democracy and Islamic supremacism cannot coexist?
Western democracy has Judeo-Christian underpinnings. At its core is the equal dignity of every person. This sacred commitment, ironically, enables our bedrock secular guarantee: freedom of conscience. It is anathema to the Brotherhood. As their guiding jurist, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, teaches: “Secularism can never enjoy general acceptance in an Islamic society.” This is because “the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of sharia.”
