Time
To even approach Mohammed Abdel Rahman, you have to take off your shoes.
The son of the man Americans call “the blind sheik”—Omar Abdel Rahman,
who is now serving a life sentence for seditious conspiracy in a North
Carolina prison–spends part of each day at a make-shift open air sit-in
calling for his father’s release just outside the walls of the U.S.
embassy in Cairo. A collection of blue straw mats are spread across the
concrete ringed by about eight pairs of shoes along the edges. Several
times a day, the mats become their prayers rugs, so no shoes allowed.
I came looking for him to talk about the role of Salafis—the
controversial and conservative Islamists who are wielding new and often,
in the eyes of Westerners and secular Arabs, troubling political
influence–in the new Egypt and
in the Arab world after more than a year of uprisings. The interview
would be part of a major story by Bobby Ghosh in this week’s print
version of TIME magazine.
Sitting beneath multiple banners
displaying his father’s bearded visage, the 39-year-old Mohammed comes
across as genuinely placid and pleasant. He departed for Afghanistan in
1988 at age 16 to join up with the Mujahideen “Back then, all the
world was with us, especially the U.S., because we were hitting the
Soviet Union,” he says. He was captured by U.S.-led forces in 2003 and
says he spent a few months being interrogated at Bagram Airbase before
being rendered back to Egypt and spending several more years in jail. He
was released in the fall of 2010, a few months before the revolution
that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
Abdel Rahman says he personally participated in that uprising, but says
that the issue of joining in the protests was a controversial one within
Salafist circles. Salafist doctrine before the revolution strictly
forbade involvement in opposition politics. The common Arabic phrase is:
“la yagouz khurooj ala al hakim”
which loosely translates as “Don’t challenge those in power” Says
Mohammed Abdel Rahman: “Before the revolution, our sheiks would only
talk about politics in an indirect way. Most [Salafists]
didn’t get involved in the revolution—and then only near the end. And
there were many who said at the time that the revolution was a mistake.”
After the revolution, the Salafist shifted strategies, forming multiple
political parties. Their performance in parliamentary elections fall
2011—capturing 20% of the seats—was a genuine shock to most observers.
“Their popularity became evident in the elections,” says Abdel Rahman,
who insists he was not surprised. “I was expecting it because of what I
know of the Egyptian people. These have always been a religious people”
In addition, he says, the Salafists—unlike the outlawed Muslim
Brotherhood–benefitted from their lack of involvement in political and
pre-revolutionary focus on purely religious outreach. “We were
considered clean.”
I asked why American diplomats and
Egyptian security forces have allowed him and his followers to camp out
right outside the embassy for 13 months now. He laughs and says his
group might actually be enhancing embassy security by blocking one of
the roads, leading to the staff entrance of the embassy. “They leave us
because we’re not causing trouble,” he says. “The Americans do respect
the fact that we’re here non-violently—as opposed to those other
protests. Officials from the embassy sometimes stop by and chat with
us.”
He declares that he and his group were not behind the recent siege of
the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which was apparently triggered by the
controversial and until then little known film Innocence of Muslims.
On Sept. 11, 2012, he was at the embassy sit-in just as he almost
always is. Earlier in the day, he and his supporters had held a press
conference outside the embassy under the banner “Who are the real
terrorists”—arguing that his father was unjustly imprisoned and had no
involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks (indeed, his father
was convicted of conspiracy involving other plots.) Then around 5 p.m., a
big crowd of protestors descended on the embassy “It wasn’t just one
group and it wasn’t just Islamists,” Abdel Rahman recalls. “We asked
them to go around the corner. We didn’t want any problems here.”
Abdel Rahman says that he briefly joined the mass protests, but that he
didn’t like what he saw from the crowd and didn’t stay long. “I could
see it wasn’t very well-organized. There were people who wanted to scale
the walls and people who wanted to hold a sit-in. People were yelling
at each other and arguing. I and my people left and came back here.” The
rest was diplomatic catastrophe for the Morsy government and a debacle
for the Obama administration.
Nonetheless, the new Egyptian president has pledged to work for his
father’s freedom. “I wasn’t expecting it at all, but my mother wasn’t
surprised,” he says. “There has been an effort in Egypt to erase my
father’s name from the history books. So this was a victory for
reversing that effort” He says that since then, he has been in contact
with the presidential office—not Morsy himself, but Morsy’s
representatives have made similar pledges to lobby the Americans for his
fathers release.
Morsy’s move may have been political outreach but Abdel Rahman is very
certain about the differences between the President and the Muslim
Brotherhood, on the one hand, and himself and the Salafists on the
other. “For [the Brotherhood)],” he explains, “it’s optional whether to
grow your beard or not. For us there is no other option. For them, it’s
optional whether women should wear the niqab.
For us, there is no other option.” It’s clear that he regards all these
“options” in the Brotherhood camp as signs of their weakness and moral
flexibility. It all boils down to what the Salafists want. “It’s very
simple,” says Abdel Rahman. “We want shari’a. Sharia in economy, in
politics, in judiciary, in our borders and our foreign relations.The
internal debate among us is how quickly we want to implement it. Do we
do it all at once, or do we do it gradually so as not to shock people
too much.”
“Salafis are not monolithic,” says Khalil al-Anani,
a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the Durham School of
Government and International affairs. “They can be divided into:
Political Salafis, who adopt political ideology and seek to implement it
regardless other views or factions and the traditional Salafis who are
not interested in politics.
Political Salafis, on their side, can be divided into two main strands:
first is the extreme or radical and violent Salafis, e.g. Salafiyya
Jihadiyya in Sinai, Ansar-AlShari’a in Libya. The second is
the pragmatic and more domesticated (politicised) Salafis like Al-Nour
party and other Salafi parties.”
Most Salafis, says Anani, “treat democracy as
a mere tool to implement the Islamic law [Shari’a]. They tend to
acculturate religion and pull the societies towards what they believe
the ‘authentic’ Islam.” In that way, all Salafis, he says, “view
the Arab Spring as a golden opportunity to impose their ideology and
enforce their worldviews upon Arab societies. Moreover, they view
themselves a stakeholders of the new political environment which implies
that they should have a share in the fruits of the Arab Spring. Hence,
they tend not to compromise their religious ideology for the sake of
politics” And because of that rigidity, he says, “The relationship
between Salafis and the MB is complex and variant. I see them as
adversaries more than allies. Both compete over audience, influence, and
political interests. They occasionally co-operate, but only to hit
secular and liberals.”
The push-and-pull and compromises of politics may not suit the Salafists
at all. Abdel Rahman acknowledges that this first parliamentary result
may be the high water mark for the Salafists. He says it is very likely
that the numbers could drop in new parliamentary elections coming within
the next six months. He blames this on bad press from “liberals in the
media” who have painted the Salafists as both power-hungry and obsessed
with inserting religious minutia into the constitution while ignoring
the massive real-world problems facing the country.
But there is also the disunity among the various Salafists—and how
closely they will allow themselves to work with Morsy and the
Brotherhood. The al-Nour Party—the largest of the Salafist parties—is
essentially an umbrella for a loose collection of power centers based
around different sheiks with different agendas. “There are some internal
tensions” in the Nour party, Abdel Rahman says, refusing to elaborate
about an organization that he has ties to. “If there are any problems,
different groups could splinter and return to their individual sheiks.”
On Wednesday, the Nour Party’s supreme committee voted to oust the
party’s leader Emad Abdel Ghaffour, reportedly over a number of
internecine issues but including his recent appointment to a government
post by President Mohamed Morsy, who belongs to the MB’s ruling Freedom
and Justice Party.
Around 5 p.m. on the day I met Abdel Rahman, one of his half-dozen
followers gave the call to prayer over a loud-speaker. The group
assembled in a line on the mat to perform the prayers with Mohammed
Abdel Rahman leading. At the end, he offers off-the-cuff appeals to the
almighty for his father’s safety and freedom, and asks God’s protection
for “Mujahideen everywhere.” Tomorrow, he’ll be back to sit and pray
again.
Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/09/27/what-the-salafists-want-an-interview-with-the-blind-sheiks-son/#ixzz27gBjRDNR
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