re: #95 marjoriemoon

I compared them before to the EDL. They can’t shake their skinhead, Nazi roots and neither will the Muslim Brotherhood shake their terrorist roots. Ever. In my mind. They are the reason Hamas even exists. Hamas is their legacy.

I don’t think the MB has terrorist roots. I think they have anti-colonialist roots which allowed them to justify violence as a political act. Big T terrorism wasn’t invented when the MB was founded. The ottoman empire was finally broken up around 1923, and all of the middle east (including the Egypt which wasn’t really part of the ottoman Empire) was placed under European colonial rule.

The ottoman empire had shariah law, in fact they considered Islamic law, as interpreted by Islamic judges(who were nominally independent), to be superior to the law as created by the sultan. When the Europeans took over they eliminated that whole tier of the legal system. The Muslim brotherhood was created partly as a response to that, as a way of working towards a resurgent Islamic political system. In many ways I think that they were trying to build a viable alternative to autocratic rule(which didn’t work).

At the time they were pretty much the only Islamic political force, since then other have split off, but they were pretty instrumental in framing what it meant to be “islamic” politically.