Jordanians show the 'Rabia sign' during a rally organized by the Muslim Brotherhood to support its Egyptian counterpart on October 25, 2013 in Amman, Jordan. (Shadi Alnsoor/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)[/caption]Caution has been the preeminent feature of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s response to Saudi Arabia’s announcement that it had classified the organization a terrorist group. Perhaps they are gambling on there being opportunities to reconcile or alter the situation in the future. Maybe they don’t think the announcement is actually about them, but is instead mainly about the Brotherhood in Egypt.
Thus far, the Jordanian government has said it will not follow Saudi Arabia’s example by banning the group. Minister of Political Affairs Khaled Al-Kalaldeh told a local news outlet: “The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan is a licensed group, and it will be dealt with in accordance with the law.” Some of the Brotherhood’s leaders have spoken, but mostly to support the government stance that the ban would not be extended to Jordan.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s operations and its relationship to government have long differed from one country to another. For example, the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood fragmented into Sunni Arab and Kurdish branches that have differing relations with central governance and diverse views on Iraqi Kurdistan.
Nonetheless, whether or not the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood considers itself separate from the Brotherhood in Egypt and the wider umbrella group, it will be deeply affected by Saudi Arabia’s announcement. The transformations the group has been through over the years reveal it is a very different organization from the group the movement’s founder, Hassan Al-Banna, envisaged, but one that is still vulnerable to the tendencies of its past.
In 1992, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood launched its political arm, the Islamic Action Front. Despite this new guise, it didn’t manage to fully reorganize itself according to the laws on political parties. To this day, it is accused of being a secretive and obscure organization, of not disclosing its aims, the identity of its members, its sources of finance or what it spends its money on. People also argue that the Muslim Brotherhood refuses to be subject to the judiciary and the state.
A second issue that embroils the Muslim Brotherhood is that of religious authority: the Jordanian government (like the governments of many other Arab nations) considers itself to be a religious authority and therefore allies itself with religious figures and organizations that serve the state’s aims and policies.
This is generally based on the idea that religion serves the unity, cohesion and public values of the state and society—and to that end, the Jordanian government has worked with the Muslim Brotherhood. But like any other nation, Jordan does not accept any religious authority not derived from the state.
At its core, this is a political issue. Some even say it is a question of sovereignty, but it is certainly not a religious or intellectual issue. All over the Middle East, religious work remains the privilege of the state.
There have been many cases where the Muslim Brotherhood’s conflict over this issue with states and governments has pushed them into politics. No government would allow religion to be used as a tool of division and conflict, or at least they would not allow it to be a tool in the hands of political opposition. In essence, religion is seen as an arm of the state like the army or the judiciary, and if it proves to be a source of legitimacy then it is the source of legitimacy for the state, not for the Brotherhood and not for any other political party.
In the face of the Saudi proclamation, the Muslim Brotherhood will come under considerable political and social pressure—some wonder whether it will retreat into operating secretly, becoming more closed off and more extreme, or if it will gradually change its ideas and positions, slowly reinventing itself once again. In the end, it is unlikely that a group as large as the Brotherhood would be able to operate secretly, and it is unlikely to want to face detentions, arrests and prosecutions.
Organizations of any kind rarely stick to a single vision. Instead, they are constantly trying to adapt and respond to new conditions and new environments. While they sometimes fail to do so, in this case it seems unlikely that the Jordanian government will want to force the Muslim Brotherhood underground and into the hands of extremists, but equally it does not want to welcome the group into full participation in government.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
