Ikhwanweb :: The Muslim Brotherhood Official English Website

Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh is a genial, energetic man who looks to be about 60 years old.  The thick, dish-like lenses of his eye-glasses magnify his eyes and give him a vulnerable, owlish look.  To see him at his office in the gracious old building that houses both the Egyptian Medical Society and the Arab Medical Union, you have to make the appointment well in advance.  When you arrive a tall, well-organized young man who glides around the building with a bundle of files in his hand takes you to Dr. Abul-Futouh’s office. We greet each other, and the doctor immediately lays out the terms of engagement for the interview.  "Ask anything!  How long do you need?  Is thirty minutes enough?"  I ask for forty, and am granted them.

Did I mention that, in addition to being the General Secretary of the Arab Medical Union, Dr. Abul-Futouh is also a member of the Guidance Council of the Muslim Brotherhood?

The most interesting part of the interview came when I pressed him to explain his view on Israel.

"We as the Muslim Brotherhood know that the Jews in Israel are human beings," he said,

He sought to illustrate his argument about why the Jewish people of Israel should not be killed by describing an Arab custom whereby a person who is born as a result of a rape should not face any punishment or stigma on account of that fact.  "That person’s existence may be the result of a fault, but the fault was not his," he said.  "What fault has he committed?"

He continued,

I asked him, did he really say a "secular, democratic state"?  This seemed ground-breaking given the MB’s traditional opposition to the idea of secular rule, and I wanted to confirm that he really intended to say it that way-- in Arabic, "dawla dimuqratiyya ’ulmaniyya".  He confirmed that he did mean that.

I had started the interview by asking how he saw the situation in Egypt, whre the MB has been the subject of a governmental crackdown that has grown increasingly harsh over the past year.

He said,

Even inside the Muslim Brotherhood, I wondered?

He was adamant.  "No, not inside the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Brotherhood strategically chose nonviolence in 1984, and it was after that that we entered Parliament and the unoions and so on."  Indeed it was at that point that, in return for the pledge of nonviolence, the Mubarak regime gave the movement some leeway to enter public political life.  The MB has never been legalized as a political party-- a process that is extremely tightly controlled by the ruling National Democratic Party.  But ever since the Egyptian elections of 1984, known MB candidates have run either through a coalition deal with another party or as independents.  That year, eight MB candidates won seats in the 444-member Parliament.  The number rose steadily until in the elections of fall 2005, 88 MB candidates won.  Meanwhile, they have also emerged as a powerful and generally permitted force within many of the country’s professional unions-- a fact which partially explains why both Abul-Futouh and Dr. Issam el-Arian, a prominent informal spokesman for the movement, have executive jobs here in the physicians’ union.

"You Americans," Abul-Futouh continued,

He talked a little about two or three visits he has made to the US, and how warm and welcoming he had found the people there. "There are many areas of agreement between us and Americans.  We ask, what is the difference between mainstream Islam and American democracy?"

Their views on the trreatment and role of women, I suggested?

He replied,

He also said that inequalities between men and women regarding inheritance could be explained by the fact that those same "cultural factors" imposed more financial responsibilities on men, in some cases.

So how about the Brotherhood’s stated desire to restore the Islamic Caliphate, I asked?  Shouldn’t we in the West be concerned about that?

"If different Islamic states want to come together and make a political union, why shouldn’t they?" he replied.  "If it’s okay for the Europeans to come together, and before that, the various north American states came together and made a union-- why shouldn’t the Islamic states do it, too?"

But maybe you’ll want to come and extend your Caliphate over our countries, as well, I said.

We then had the short discussion on Israel, described above.  At the end of that, he spoke briefly but passionately on the vast amount of resources that the US has wasted on wars and killing...  "But in contrast, Islam respects life so much!"  He described an Islamic story about a woman who went to hell for harming a cat.  "We say if you kill one person, you are killing the whole world."

So how about Hamas, I asked, pointing out that even if the main Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood had renounced violence in 1984 and had more or less kept to that pledge ever since, still, its offshoot in Palestine had founded Hamas three years later and Hamas had gone on to undertake many acts of violence--

As the 40 minutes drew to their close we returned to the topic we had started with: the MB’s position inside Egypt.

It was an interesting interview.  Abul-Futouh is reputed to be from the "liberal" wing of the MB, so I was curious to find out what kind of positions he would espouse and what arguments he would make.  I certainly had not been expecting the support he expressed for a single, secular democratic state within all the area of Mandate Palestine.  That had, of course, been the position the PLO espoused between 1968 and 1974 (before it moved over into supporting the idea of two states living side-by-side there.)   And back then as I recall it, the MB opposed the idea, mainly because of its opposition to secular rule anywhere within the historic lands of Islam.

The MB is still closely linked to Hamas.  I did not have the time to probe the current status of those links more closely during this interview, though I was able to, a little, during the interview I conducted some ten days earlier with Abul-Futouh’s MB colleague Dr. Issam el-Arian. I should imagine, however, that the positions espoused by the MB leaders here in Cairo on matters Palestinian have at least some effect on the positions followed by the Hamas people in Palestine.  In that regard, it was significant that Abul-Futouh said that either a two-state outcome or a South-Africa-style one-state outcome would possible and-- from his perspective-- permissible, though he did express a preference for the one-state version.

Anyway, that’s all I have time for now. I’m actually finishing writing this post from Jordan, where I arrived yesterday...