>Have you or Doug read anything by or about women activists of the
>Muslim Brotherhood? For instance, try Zainab Al Ghazali's prison
>memoir, _Return of the Pharaoh: Memoir in Nasir's Prison_.
I might read that because I read every prison memoir I can get my hands on. As for the Muslim Brotherhood, and the whole question of Islamic anti-imperialism, I trust Tariq Ali on that more than I do your new found interest:
From a May 2003 interview by Harry Kreisler at the Institute of International Studies, Berkeley
>You write about the Muslim Brotherhood and its founder, "What Hasan
>al-Banna, the Brothers and their numerous successors today can never
>accept is materialism: not as a school of thought or a doctrine in
>the narrow sense of the word, nor even as a chance occurrence, but
>as an undeniable reality. Something that cannot be altered
>regardless of who rules the state... Thinking people search for
>truth in matter because they are aware that there is nowhere else
>for them to search." Comment on what you said there. Is there
>anything you would add to that?
>
>What can one add? For me, it's so obvious as a lifelong materialist
>that that's how to understand the origins of life, the origins of
>the planet, the origins of the universe; there's no other
>explanation for it. You can totally understand the ancients trying
>to create their own image in the gods they believed in, and then the
>emergence of the monotheisms, in order to find in those times some
>other explanation which easily explained the world. The sort of
>beliefs I was most sympathetic to -- I mean, at least I understood
>them -- were those who tried to worship nature, because that was
>all-powerful: the sun, when it came out; the moon, what it did to
>the tides; trees on which food grew. That sort of worship you
>understand because that's what keeps you living.
>
>But then with the arrival of the big three monotheisms -- Judaism,
>Christianity, and Islam -- that all began to change, and you began a
>totally different structure. The needs for these monotheisms were
>different: they were political needs, in my opinion. But the fact
>that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have people who
>believe in creationism in this country -- ! This is probably the
>most religious country in the advanced capitalist world; more people
>here declare a belief in the supreme being than anywhere in Europe
>or in the Muslim world. I find it incomprehensible that we are still
>at that stage where they still believe in [creationism]. Materialism
>is so evident to me; how can they not believe it? It's beyond
>reason. It's such a violation of reason. In many parts of the Muslim
>world, that's what holds them back. Biology can't be taught in many
>Muslim countries, because to teach it means you give people other
>ideas. When I was growing up, the one subject we were not taught,
>even in those missionary schools, was biology.
>
>So in the end, is it really this inability to separate religion from
>the state in the Islamic world that is the key problem? Or is the
>problem of the Muslim world's relation to the Western empire more important?
>
>It's a combination of both. The critique, therefore, has to be a
>dual critique, both of the empire, but also of the failure of these
>regimes in [the Islamic] world to sort out their own problems. You
>can't blame everything, after all, on Western intervention. There's
>a whole period in that world where they could have gone on their
>own. It's true the empire intervened to stop them, but if they had
>behaved in a different way, they would have won. I'll give you one
>concrete example.
>
>In the late fifties, there was a wave of nationalist revolutions in
>the Arab world -- Egypt, Iraq -- and there was a real possibility of
>creating a single Arab entity, or a dominant Arab entity, the "Arab
>Nation," which was the dream of the all the Arabs and their poets.
>There was first a union between Egypt and Syria in which the
>Egyptians should have shared more power with the Syrians instead of
>treating them as they did, seeing themselves as the dominant nation.
>Then you had a revolution in Iraq in 1958, and the new ruler of
>Iraq, Abdel Kerim Kassem, was a nationalist. Radio Cairo, Baghdad,
>and Damascus were [all] preaching nationalist revolutions. The Saudi
>regime was trembling. The Iraqis proposed one Arab nation with three
>concurrent capitals -- Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus -- run as one
>entity, to be funded by Iraqi oil. Now, to my mind, if that had
>happened, it would have taken that world onto a different level
>altogether in terms of modernization, education of the population, etc., etc.
>
>Why didn't it happen? People say, "Ah, the Americans used Israel to
>hit the nations in '67." That is true, but that was already when the
>attempt to create a single Arab entity had been defeated. So between
>'58 and '67, there were real possibilities in that world which they
>didn't take for foolish reasons, for reasons of political pride,
>narcissism, factionalism, stupidity. And we now pay the price for that.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Elberg/Ali/ali-con4.html