The emerging conflict in both Egypt and Syria between two Sunni - TopicsExpress



          

The emerging conflict in both Egypt and Syria between two Sunni state alliances (Saudi Arabia plus United Arab Emirates versus Qatar plus Turkey) is accurately traced in this New York Times story to conflicting attitudes towards the Muslim Brotherhood (MB): “Qatar, in alliance with Turkey, has given strong financial and diplomatic support to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also to other Islamists operating on the battlefields of Syria and, before that, Libya. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, by comparison, have sought to restore the old, authoritarian order, fearful that Islamist movements and calls for democracy would destabilize their own nations.” Meanwhile Robert Dreyfuss reports in the Nation that “Twenty-two journalists who worked for Al Jazeera quit in protest after being told by their Qatari masters to support Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood” (thenation/blog/175179/al-jazeeras-muslim-brotherhood-problem#). But in Qatar too there were concerns about Morsi’s energetic Islamicization of the Egyptian bureaucracy: Jasim Sultan (a representative of Qatar’s working alliance with the MB and a former MB member) wrote, last August, “an article asking Egyptian Islamists to change their discourse and move towards ‘partnership thought’ instead of concentrating on ‘infiltrating the society to control it’” (thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/qatars-ties-with-the-muslim-brotherhood-affect-entire-region). Tariq Ramadan, MB spokesman to the west, spoke a year ago about these two choices represented inside the Egyptian MB itself (guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/apr/09/tariq-ramadan-muslim-brotherhood-video). The MB is clearly not monolithic. But it also has been denied government experience for decades before the Arab Spring, and it would appear that in Egypt (as opposed to Tunisia) this inexperience led to fatal missteps. A major concern now is that the Egyptian Army, after ousting a democratically elected Morsi, not overreact in the opposite direction.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 15:19:28 +0000

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