Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Last week, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, Muhammad Mursi, visited Saudi Arabia seeking a rapprochement under the combination of economic and US pressure.  Welcomed in the West, the signs of Mursi’s willingness to court Saudi Arabia were less well received in Egypt.  Saudi Arabia has been hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), concerned about the contagious effects of the Arab Spring, and suspicious of hints at better relations between an MB-ruled Egypt and Iran.

Mohammad Baraka, writing in the 13 July Egyptian daily al-Yawm as-Sabi, claimed to see insults and humiliation in the coverage of Mursi’s visit provided by Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper.  He was particularly incensed by an old photograph of the founder of the MB, Hassan al-Banna, bowing and kissing the hand of Saudi King Abdelaziz Al Saud in 1936.  The publication of the photograph was seen as a deliberate insult to Mursi.

Moderate Egyptian Islamist Fahmi Houeidi, writing in the Qatari daily Asharq, argued that Mursi’s visit was humiliating given the general antipathy in the Gulf to the Muslim Brotherhood and particularly after the comments by Dubai Police Commander Dahi Khalfan that the Egyptian president “will come to the Gulf on his knees” because of Egypt’s economic weakness.

He went further still in the Cairo daily Ashuruq, expressing particular alarm at a reported statement by Mursi that “Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the protectors of moderate Islam”.  Houeidi reminded his readers that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is not hostile to Shia Islam and argued that Egypt must not be drawn into forming a “counter-coalition” to the perceived threat of an Iranian-led Shia crescent.

Referring to al-Azhar, the leading Egyptian Sunni centre of Islamic learning, Houedi warned: “Dr Mursi’s statements describing Egypt as a protector of moderate Sunni Islam to the exclusion of other schools amounts to a violation of al-Azhar’s traditional position and squanders that institution’s rich history in this regard...What the president has said is a step backward and not forward.”

As for the question of Iran, Houeidi said: “Political relations between Cairo and Tehran...remain hostage to the views of the old regime that managed these relations from the perspective of US interests.  And that requires these relations to change after revolutionary Egypt has tried to liberate Egypt’s will from any traces of US and Israeli hegemony.”  He added: “Shiite Iran is the major backer of Sunni Hamas, which is only described as extremist in the Israeli and American media.  This is just one item of evidence against using confessional considerations in political discourse.”