The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has given two different messages when it comes to Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party).On Sept. 30, 2012, Egypt’s president and a Brotherhood leader, Dr. Mohammed Morsi, attended the AK Party congress and stated in front of the Turkish delegates the importance of Turkey and the vitality of its position under the successful leadership of the AK Party.
This was a huge development in the Brotherhood’s rhetoric for those who follow closely the Brotherhood’s literature on the AK Party. This includes Morsi himself, who wrote in 2007 that “the Brotherhood did not and will never change its principles. A complete Islamic method is our hope … and the AK Party accepts Westernized secularism, which is very different from our main principle, which is to have an Islamic state.”
He added that Turkey was “keen to become European” even though there are huge differences between “the Muslim Turkish people and the secular European people in their ways of thinking and behaving.” He added that the value systems of the two — Turks and Europeans — are different, with “righteousness and justice” on top in the Islamic value system but not found in the European value system.
Another Brotherhood leader, Gomaa Ameen Abdul Aziz, voiced strong opinions about the AK Party in the past. Abdul Aziz listed four main reasons why the AK Party’s experience cannot be replicated by the Brotherhood in Egypt. The first is “[Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s commitment to the political system in Turkey and the acknowledgement of its secularism.” He added that this kind of secularism, which the AK Party chose “to accept and preserve,” is something that the Brotherhood can neither accept nor tolerate. The second vital difference is the role of the AK Party in Turkey’s relationship with the West. He highlighted that the AK Party recognizes Israel and that this is something the Brotherhood will never do. The third difference is that Turkey is part of NATO, which “attacks Muslims in Afghanistan and conspires against the Muslim world.”
He then discussed a fourth notion, to be thoroughly discussed in my next article, which is the difference between the AK Party and Hamas (the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine). He perceived Hamas to be an uncompromising Islamic group rejected by the West because it stands for its principles, while the AK Party, on the other hand, is accepted because it compromises itself in this regard.
That same year, Brotherhood leader Ali Abdel Fattah made rather extreme statements about the AK Party. The first regarded the relationship between Hamas and the AK Party on one hand, and with “Zionist Israel” on the other. He stated that Hamas perceives Israel to be an enemy on the basis of Islamic belief, while the AK Party does not, instead actually enjoying a relationship with the Zionist state.
The second was that Turkey is secular and the AK Party does not want to change that. He brought up President Abdullah Gül’s famous words in which he said that mistakes happen in politics and Islam should therefore not bare these mistakes, meaning that politics should be separated from religion. Abdel Fattah criticized Gül’s stance, describing it as something that could only be uttered by “secularists.”
He described Hamas, on the other hand, as an organization that bears Islam by the sword and the Quran and sees no distinction between religion and government, which he describes as “the right path.” He closed his remarks with the very strong statement that Islamic movements can take only two paths. The first is to join the “free path of resistance” and the other is to follow the path of the US and Zionist Israel with their leader, George W. Bush Jr., leaving the reader to fit each party into the camp in which they believe it belongs.
However, we find that this rhetoric evolved between 2007 and 2012. This, I believe, is for four main reasons. The first is the undeniable success of the AK Party’s leadership and the Egyptian admiration of the Turkish experience. The second is the role of Prime Minister Erdoğan in explaining to the world that Islam is bigger than Islamism and that secularism and Islam can be reconciled, just as religion and secularism are in the American example, which differs from both France’s aggressive secularism and Iran’s Islamic theocracy. The third happened in 2009, when Erdoğan stormed off the stage at Davos and became a celebrated icon among the Arab world. The fourth is the Egyptian revolution and its people’s aspiration to be like Turkey. In Egypt, liberals and centrists perceive the AK Party to be a model, something that the Brotherhood knows quite well. As many Egyptians want their own AK Party and their own Erdoğan, the Brotherhood does not have an option but to evolve, especially considering that there are other parties that would like to take on this role.
*Ahmed M. Abou Hussein is an MPPA policy analyst with the Egyptian Decentralization Initiative (EDI).
(Today’s Zaman)
