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The Muslim Brothers are at the root of a lot of our troubles," says Col. W. Patrick Lang, one of several US intelligence veterans iterviewed for this article. Formerly a high-ranking Middle East expert at the Defence Intelligence Agency, Lang considers al-Qaeda to be "a descenent of the Brotherhood."
For many years, the American espionge establishment had operated on the assumption that Islam was inherently anti-communist and therefore could be harnessed to facilitate US objectives. American officals viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as "a secret weapon" in the shadow war against the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA case officer who was right in the thick of things in the Middle East and Central Asia during his 21 year career as a spy. In Sleeping with the Devil, a book he wrote after quitting the CIA, Baer explains how the United States "made common cause witht the Brothers" and used them "to do our dirty work in Yemen, Afghanistan and plenty of other places." This covert relationship unraveled when the Cold War ended, whereupon, an Islamic Frankenstein named Osama bin Laden lurched into existence.
Described by ex-CIA analyst Graham Fuller as “the preeminent international Islamist organization,” the Muslim Brotherhood currently has a huge following, with autonomous branches, all in close contact, spread across the Arab world. But it is banned in several countries, including Egypt, its birthplace, for being an alleged front for terrorists – a claim its supporters adamantly deny even though bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders had close personal ties to the Brotherhood prior to September 11.
Exiled Ikhwani were also employed as teachers and imams in Saudi mosques, schools and government agencies, where they promoted the extremist doctrine of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood's leading scribe and theorist. Executed in 1966 after 10 years of confinement in Egyptian torture chambers, Qutb is arguably the most influential religious scholar in modern Islam. He fashioned a lethal variant of political Islam that provided a Koranic justification for violence as the only way to rid the Muslim world of corrupting Western influences. Qutb's hostility toward the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, was born during two years of study at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley in the late 1940's. He returned to Egypt mortified by decadent, sex-crazed America, which he likened to a brothel.
The Muslim Brotherhood underwent a significant shift with the radicalization of Qutb in prison. What had been essentially a reformist organization in its formative phase veered off in a dangerous new direction. In addition to intro ducting a harsh anti-American perspective to the Brethen, Qutb called for the formation of a revolutionary Islamic vanguard to spearhead the violent overthrow of secular Arab regimes. Qutb's martyrdom bestowed instant credibility upon his message, which posthumously filled the ideological void left by the huge Arab defeat in the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, a defeat that shamed Nasser and discredited the Arab nationalist cause.
Qutb's inflammatory writings would decisively influence a generation of young militants, including the future spear-carriers of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, the tall, handsome scion of a wealthy Persian Gulf family, was first exposed to Qutb's nostrums while attending King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah. One of bin Laden's instructors in religious studies was Egyptian Professor Muhammed Qutb, the exiled brother of Sayyid Qutb, who taught classes on the imperatives and nuances of Islamic jhad.
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