Damascus: The Muslim Brotherhood threat of today did not begin with the Arab spring but from the years of 1968 to 1974, following the failure of pan-Arab nationalism, especially after the Arabs’ loss of territories to the Israelis in the 1967 war.
This is when the Brotherhood came to the Gulf — whether by plan or accident — and found fertile territory to indoctrinate and brainwash, using Qatari funds and political guidance.
According to the British National Archives released in 1970, “the first tangible achievement for the Muslim Brothers in Dubai” was an NGO called Al Islah Association, established in 1974.
“Al Islah was a thin veil for the Muslim Brotherhood. An Egyptian cleric, Abdul Badih Sakr, and his comrades applied for a NGO license after they tried, in vain, to obtain a license to open an official branch for the Muslim Brotherhood in the Emirates.”
It doesn’t say who applied and from where they received an official rejection, only noting that it was backed by the Emir of Qatar. The Al Islah Association, which rose to fame in later years managed to infiltrate Dubai’s Ministry of Education in the 1980s, incubating an entire generation of Islamists. It was officially outlawed in 1994.
This is where all reference to the Muslim Brotherhood in the UAE comes to an end. Perhaps because of that concealed history, nobody took the Muslim Brotherhood threat seriously, until its dangerous results began to show over the past ten years, and more specifically, after the start of the Arab Spring in 2011. In 2013, 63 Islamists were tried and convicted in the UAE for plotting to overthrow the government.
While the archives document the group’s activities in the Gulf, there is not a single file dedicated solely to Qatar’s history with the Islamists — all documents related to its rise and expansion in Doha remain classified.
This is strange no doubt, since such records are usually made public every 30 to 50 years.
Those related to Qatar’s relationship with the Brotherhood should have been released back in 1998. They first come up in a 1968 report from Doha and are last mentioned in 1974, when their affiliate organisation, Al Islah, was founded in Dubai. From there, all reference to Doha’s sinister relationship with the Brotherhood comes to an abrupt halt.
One report, dated April 6, 1968, says that the Muslim Brotherhood started infiltrating Gulf states through Qatari assistance, in three different stages.
The first was after the 1954 assassination attempt on President Jamal Abdul Nasser’s life in Alexandria.
The second was in 1958, months after creation of the Syrian-Egyptian Union.
The third was in 1964, after the Brotherhood tried and failed to topple the Baath regime in Damascus. As a result, scores of Syrian, Palestinian, and Egyptian members or affiliates of the Brotherhood began immigrating to the Gulf in large numbers, “… where border security was lax, and where governments are less repressive than in other Arab cities.”
In one dispatch, the British consul in Doha estimated that “200 members of the disbanded Egyptian Brethren have found their way to streets of Qatar, Kuwait, and Dubai between the years 1954-1960.
“Here they have established new lives with their families and new careers, and are free to express their Islamic views, with no restrictions.”
The report adds: “None of them have any military experience or were involved in any of the militias that operated in Gaza.”
Mention of the Brotherhood émigrés appears in one out of 10 consecutive reports sent to the Foreign Office from Doha; clearly aimed at downplaying their danger and distancing the Qatari Government from their clandestine activities. Surely the Qataris knew everything about these dark figures — that they were anything but good law-abiding citizens, and were bound to create trouble in their host countries.
They knew that Brotherhood members were involved in conspiracy and espionage, and that many had blood on their hands.
They were behind the 1948 murder of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Fihmi Al Nokrashi Pasha, one of the founders of the Arab League, and had tried and failed to kill Nasser himself.
The man who killed Al Nokrashi Pasha was a student at the University of King Fouad I — who led a normal life during the day, and at night, worked in the Brotherhood underground.
His profile was identical to that of the Brotherhood members of different nationalities who were now finding their way into the Gulf states, disguised mainly as students or schoolteachers.
A person who commits crime in his own country would not think twice before trying such acts of terrorism on foreign soil.
In every single Doha report where Brotherhood members are mentioned, these immigrants are hailed as potential nation-builders rather than future troublemakers.
On November 29, 1968, British diplomat J. Clark wrote a 19-page report to the Foreign Office entitled “Islam in the Gulf.”
He spoke of how the Brotherhood and its Qatari backers took advantage of how desperately in need Gulf countries were for young and fresh talent to help run the state and civil administration, mistakenly thinking that they had found their target in the educated youth of the Brotherhood, who all hailed from urban backgrounds and had university degrees from top Middle East universities.
Their university degrees were automatically authenticated by education authorities in Dubai and they were automatically hired as schoolteachers, who took them at face value — seeing no malice in Qatar’s push for these newcomers.
Al Qaradawi and Sakr
In the early 1960s, two educators were nudged to come to Dubai at the urging of Qatar emir Shaikh Ahmad Bin Ali Al Thani, says one report from 1968. It was composed of two clerics who had a “profound influence” on the emir of Qatar, Abdul Badih Sakr and Yousuf Al Qaradawi.
Sakr, aged 53 at the time, was a former student of the Brotherhood founder Imam Hassan Al Banna who set up base in Doha in 1954, while Al Qaradawi was an Al Azhar-educated “wolfish scholar who hails from poor family in the Nile Delta.”
He came to Qatar in 1961 to head the Qatari Secondary School Institute of Religions.
“Their word is final and ultimate on the Emir of Qatar,” reports J. Clark from the British Consulate in Doha.
“They can perform magic at the pulpit,” he added.
Soon the two men teamed up with yet another member of the Brotherhood, the Dubai-based Ezz Al Deen Ebrahim, a friend of the Qataris and protégé of Imam Al Banna who deputised for him at his weekly sermons in Cairo. Ebrahim studied Arabic literature at the King Fouad University and then obtained a degree in psychology from Ain Shams University. Egyptian authorities ordered his arrest after the assassination of Al Nokrashi Pasha in 1948. In prison, Ebrahim became good friends with his fellow inmate, Yousuf Al Qaradawi. Upon their release, they fled Egypt through the desert to Libya, where they set up the Libyan-branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ebrahim eventually returned to Egypt after the revolution of 1952 but was forced to flee in 1954.
He travelled to Syria to preach at mosques in Damascus and married into a prominent family — he later travelled to Dubai with her in the late 1960s, where he eventually cofounded and became president of the United Arab Emirates University in 1976.
