Op-Ed: Islamic Comrades No More

Vali R. Nasr

INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES: WASHINGTON — The coup last July in Egypt opened a new divide in the Middle East, alienating the Gulf monarchies from the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a momentous change in the region’s strategic landscape that promises to influence governments and regional alliances for years to come.

For six decades, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood were comrades in arms. Theirs was an Islamic alliance, formed in the 1950s to defend against the secular Arab nationalism that Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had unleashed. The alliance survived the end of that ideology, and since the 1980s it had defended the Sunni claim to Islamic leadership against the Shiite challenge from Iran.

Throughout, Saudi Arabia provided refuge and patronage to generations of Brotherhood activists from across the Arab world, glossing over ideological differences between the Saudis and the activists about popular rule and autocracy. Brotherhood intellectuals honed their ideology in Saudi Arabia and developed ties with like-minded Islamists from across the Muslim world. An exiled Syrian Brotherhood activist teaching in Jidda converted a teenage Osama bin Laden to Islamism. It was with Saudi blessing that Brotherhood fighters joined the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, and found their way to Al Qaeda.

The alliance buttressed the House of Saud’s Islamic legitimacy. It also brought greater influence over Arab politics. Saudi Arabia used its ties to the Brotherhood to help Egypt make the transition from Nasser to Anwar el-Sadat in 1970, brokering a deal that favored Sadat after Islamists engaged in street fights and back-room maneuvering against the remnants of Nasserism. That shift eliminated the kingdom’s strongest Arab adversary, ensuring Saudi pre-eminence in Arab politics for decades.

The alliance also ensured the longevity of the Saudi regime, buying it protection against a homegrown Islamist rejection of the modernity and opulence brought by oil wealth, as well as the House of Saud’s steady move into America’s orbit. With the Brotherhood as an underdog it patronized, Saudi Arabia could afford to be both Islamic and pro-West, and to support Islamic causes while backing secular regimes like that of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — even as he barred the Brotherhood from political power.

All of that changed when the Brotherhood took power in Egypt by winning the presidential election in 2012. » | Vali R. Nasr * | Monday, October 28, 2013

* Vali R. Nasr is the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.