An ‘Islamic Revival’

The July 2010 issue of Al-Qaeda’s slick online magazine, Inspire called on the Muslim Brotherhood to turn the page, as it were, from Mecca to Medina. It meant that it was time to end the gradual practice of working to install Islamic power and law from inside Arab governmental systems and time to move to outright revolution.

Al-Qaeda (AQ) was telling Muslim brothers everywhere that they should get with the violent jihad program and begin to overturn local Arab dictatorships...which the Brothers promptly began doing in early 2011—or at least they (and their AQ allies) moved smoothly after the fact into the power vacuums created by the falling dominoes: Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi. Western, especially American, assistance proved instrumental in ensuring the success of these opportunities for the jihadis-in-waiting.

Tunisia’s October 2011 elections, as expected, have handed a parliamentary plurality of around 40% to ‘Ennahda*,’ the country’s Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. As is becoming rather tiresomely predictable by now, clueless Westerners immediately began crowing mindlessly about ‘Arab democracy’ and ‘Islamist moderates,’ both oxymorons of the first order.

Elections in Tunisia

Tunisia’s Ennahda Party is headed by Rachid Gannouchi, an American-hating jihadist who spent the last 22 years in exile in Britain, because the recently-ousted former ruler, Ben Ali, had the good sense to keep him out of the country. Now, he’s back, like revolutionary ‘spiritual leaders’ Yousef al-Qaradawi in Egypt and Ali Salabi in Libya. And just like al-Qaradawi and Salabi, Gannouchi is hailed as a ‘moderate,’ although how such an appellation is applied to shariah-supporting, death-seeking Muslim Brothers is anybody’s guess.

Rachid Gannouchi

In spite of al-Qaeda’s call to action, then, in each of these three North African countries, the Islamic forces of shariah, having ousted the former dictators with more or less violence, now cautiously work somewhat stealthily within a framework which only in the loosest sense can be described as ‘democratic.’ Lack of any of the pre-requisite institutes of civil society apparently poses no obstacle to the general euphoria with which willing Westerners greet every taqiyya**-laced utterance from the victorious revolutionaries.

Even after Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the Libyan National Transitional Council and de facto president, asserted that Libyan laws in the future will use shariah as the source of all legislation, the American president commented hopefully about “the beginning of a new era of promise.” Who’d ever have thought the leader of the free world would hail an antisemitic, misogynistic, supremacist belief system as ushering in anything but trouble?

No matter that neither the United States (U.S.) nor its Western European allies seem able to distinguish a jihadi from a pumpkin, the Ikhwan and their al-Qaeda partners cannot quite believe their luck and still have a hard time accepting that the Western kuffar***could possibly be this oblivious to what is happening in front of their eyes. So they continue to tread carefully, taking over countries and institutions step-by-methodical-step, just as Qutb taught them, lest the unpredictable Westerners wake up.

Little do they realize how deep the coma really is. So, hand-chopping, homosexual hanging, and apostate executing will be postponed until they are sure of having consolidated their power. Their model is Turkey, where Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) patiently have worked for more than ten years to undo Kemal Ataturk’s secularization reforms.

The Tunisian Brothers have just put forward their Secretary General, Hamadi Jebali, as the next prime minister and are expected to form a new government by December 2011. Jebali wears a Western-style suit and speaks softly in terms the gullible Westerners like to hear: “Equality.” “Dignity.” “Stability.” “Justice.” He knows perfectly well the Americans have no idea that, in Islam, these things are just for Muslims, not kuffar. They’ll never catch on until it’s too late.

Hamadi Jebali

This is Ennahda, to be sure: the Ennahda of the Islamic Caliphate and restoration of the rule of Shariah. Emerging queasiness about “unpredictable phenomena,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton termed the entirely predictable outcome of her administration’s ham-handed empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East (not to mention at home), doesn’t look likely to morph into effective leadership in defense of genuine democracy any time soon…at least not until she and the rest of America’s top leaders replace their fear-driven political correctness about Islam with a candid study of this legal-military-political ideology that has motivated Islamic jihad against non-Muslims since the 7th century.

Glossary of Terms

*Ennadha: Name of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood political party

**Taqiyya: Deceit or dissimulation sanctioned in Islam to protect the faith or individual believer but also a common tactic to mislead infidels as well.

***Kuffar: (kafir singular): infidel(s), non-believers, non-Muslims

by: Clare M. Lopez
Clare M. Lopez,  is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on Middle East, national defense, and counterterrorism issues.