Correct on the Muj/AQ being a US creation. Not online Al Nusra / IS.
I'm curious to do some of the mason association re Muslim Brotherhood. There was an Egyptian who came to the US in the 20s or 30s who was pretty influential in this... Do you have some links or places to start on this?
Among English language authors, John Coleman covered the Muslim Brotherhood, documenting their ties to British intelligence.
Sayyid Kutb was a freemason:
The Egyptian historian, Helmi Nimnim has just published a new biography of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). Qutb theorized jihad as interpreted by the Muslim Brotherhood. In this book, the historian reproduces an article that Qutb had written, entitled “Why I became a freemason” published in the...
www.voltairenet.org
Also Canadian blogger David Livingstone, here is a long passage on the MB from his blog below. He's not always right about every subject he covers, but his analysis of the MB is pretty close to those of Coleman and several solid French historians and political analysts:
ordoabchao.ca
Muslim Brotherhood
Al-Banna (third from left) with Aziz Ali al-Misri (fourth from right), Mohamed Ali Eltaher (second from the right) and Egyptian, Palestinian and Algerian political and religious figures at a reception in Cairo (1947)
Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865 – 1935)
Afghani and Abduh had long supported the plan of the British to create an Arab Caliphate to replace the Ottoman one. Rashid Rida, another Freemason who after the death of Afghani in 1897, and Abduh in 1905, assumed the leadership of the movement, had also supported the plot. Therefore, after a visit to the newly conquered Arabian Peninsula, Rida did his part to legitimize Ibn Saud’s criminal usurpation of power in the eyes of the world’s Muslims, by publishing a work praising Ibn Saud as the “savior” of the Holy sites, a practitioner of “authentic” Islamic rule and two years later produced an anthology of Wahhabi treatises. This, it was through Rida that the Salafis and the Wahhabis became aligned from that point forward. Rida also became seriously involved in the editing and publication of the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, and achieved far-reaching influence in the Muslim world through his monthly periodical,
al Manar (“The Lighthouse”), which was first published in 1898 and continued until his death in 1935.
The organization primarily responsible for the perpetration of most acts of terrorism in the name of Islam in the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood, or
Ikhwan al Muslimeen, was created in 1928 by Hassan al Banna, a student of Abduh’s pupil, Rashid Rida, in reaction to the 1924 abolition of the caliphate. As discovered by John Loftus, former US government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer, when he was allowed to peruse CIA archives, al Banna had been recruited in the 1930s by Hitler to establish an arm of German intelligence in Egypt.
[76] In effect, the Brotherhood would form an international financial network, closely tied to Western intelligence agencies, through which to finance acts terrorism falsely characterized as “
Jihad,” perpetrated by agent-provocateurs, to serve as false-flag operations and to provide pretexts for expanded colonization of subject territories. As Robert Dreyfuss explained, the Muslim Brotherhood was a creation of the Oxford Movement and the Round Table:
The Muslim Brotherhood could not exist today were it not for the fact that the more backward elements of Muslim culture were observed, taken note of, and then carefully cultivated by Orientalists of the British Oxford and Cambridge universities. The
Ikhwan is the result of the patient organizing of London’s agents in the Islamic world, men such as the famous T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), Wilfred Scawen Blunt, E. G. Browne, Harry St. J. B. Philby, Arnold Toynbee, and Bertrand Russell.
[77]
Though ostensibly founded for the defense of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood inherited the Salafi tradition of Jamal Afghani through Rashid Rida. Representing the growing alliance between Salafism and Saudi Arabia, which Rida had established, Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood, or
Ikhwan al Muslimeen, were patterned on the violent Wahhabi henchmen of Ibn Saud, the
Ikhwan. Banna’s Brotherhood was also established with a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company in 1928, and over the following quarter century would be at the disposal of British diplomats and MI6 as a tool of British policy.
[78] To get the Brotherhood started, the Suez Canal Company helped Banna build a mosque in Ismaillia, that would serve as its headquarters and base of operations, according to Richard Mitchell’s
The Society of the Muslim Brothers. The Suez Canal was pivotal to the British as the route to its prized colony, India, and in 1928 Ismailia also housed not only the company’s offices but a major British military base built during WWI.
Al Banna defined his movement as “a Salafiyya message, a Sunni way and a Sufi truth.”
[79] Inheriting the esoteric tradition of Jamal Afghani, the Muslim Brotherhood therefore secretly represented the occult tradition of Ismailism.
The Muslim Brotherhood would follow a similar practice of progressive indoctrination as devised by the Ismaili leader, Abdullah ibn Maymun, where he would successfully transform a devout Muslim through progressive stages towards ultimately accepting occult doctrines, and rejecting all religion as a sham. Nevertheless, they would hold to the belief in the need to adhere outwardly to their chosen religion, in order to deceive others into carrying out their subversive objectives. This is how the Muslim Brotherhood, while at its lower levels is presumed by its followers to be a truly Islamic organization, at its higher echelons is in league with the Western powers though a shared devotion to the ancient occult tradition, which is believed to be the true doctrine of all exoteric faiths. As Robert Dreyfuss described:
The Muslim Brotherhood is a London creation, forged as the standard-bearer of an ancient, antireligious (pagan) heresy that has plagued Islam since the establishment of the Islamic community (
umma) by the Prophet Mohammed in the seventh century.
…The real story of the Muslim Brotherhood is more fantastic than the mere imagination of the authors of espionage novels could create. It functions as a conspiracy; its members exchange coded greetings and secret passwords; although no formal membership list exists, its members are organized into hierarchical cells or “lodges” like the European freemason societies and orders. The Muslim Brotherhood does not respect national frontiers; it spans the entire Islamic world. Some of its members are government officials, diplomats, and military men; others are street gangsters and fanatics. While the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are at home in plush-carpeted paneled board rooms of top financial institutions, at the lower levels the Muslim Brotherhood is a paramilitary army of thugs and assassins.
At its highest level, the Muslim Brotherhood is not Muslim. Nor is it Christian, Jewish, or part of any religion. In the innermost council are men who change their religion as easily as other men might change their shirts.
Taken together, the generic Muslim Brotherhood does not belong to Islam, but to the pre-Islamic barbarian cults of mother-goddess worship that prevailed in ancient Arabia. As much as the peddlers of mythology might want us to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood and Ayatollah Khomeini represent a legitimate expression of a deeply rooted “sociological phenomenon,” it is not the case.
[80]
Abdel Halim Mahmoud (1910 – 1978)
Though the Wahhabis vehemently oppose it, the Muslim Brotherhood embraces Sufism. From early on, al Banna was a member of the Hasafiyya Brothers, a sub-branch of the Shadhiliyya, founded by Hassanayn al-Hasafi, a scholar of al Azhar.
[81] Many of the head lecturers of al Azhar University in Cairo have also been followers of the Shadhili. Prominent among them was Abdel Halim Mahmoud became an important source of inspiration for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who eventually served as Grand Imam of Al Azhar, and who became an important source of inspiration for members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his articles were published in their magazines. First educated at Al Azhar, Mahmoud had also received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in France. Mahmood was known for his modernizing approach to teaching at Al Azhar, preaching moderation and embracing modern science as a religious duty. During his tenure as Grand Imam, Al Azhar witnessed unprecedented reform and revival, including the introduction of new faculties, teaching methods and management style.
In 1930, Guénon moved to Egypt permanently, choosing Islam as his outward religion and joined the Hamidiya Shadhili Sufi order. While in Egypt, other than al Kabir, Guénon had little contact with actual Muslim scholars, with the exception of Abdel Halim Mahmoud. Mahmoud met Guénon in 1940 and wrote, much later described him as “He who knows through God.”
[82] Mahmoud taught Guénon’s work at al-Azhar University and attended his funeral ceremony in 1951. Having also been a disciple of the Shadhili, and a devotee of Ibn Arabi, Mahmoud is remembered for reviving Sufism through his prolific writings and lectures on the subject. Mahmoud is referred to by an honorific title of “al-Ghazali, in 14th Century AH,” accorded to him because of his purported attempt, mirroring the teachings of Guénon, to integrate the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of Islam.
[83]
www.telegraph.co.uk
