Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan

I cannot recall a moment happier than that when I became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement of Jordan at the age of 16.

Later, when I joined the University of Jordan as a student, the Islamic list overwhelmingly won the elections to the Students Union, followed by some other Islamic-oriented individual gains; the same happened at various syndicates.

Accordingly, we started having more confidence in our project, but vanity took over, making us push for more gains, more awakening and wider spread of the spirit of piety in the society.

The gains also made us believe fully in the inevitability of the victory and prevalence of our cause.

It is not easy to talk about the crisis in the Muslim Brotherhood Movement in a few lines; analysis of it needs in-depth studies.

However, I had the chance to have a look at some documents exchanged between two major streams in the movement, which gave me the opportunity to grasp some of their ideas, which I occasionally discussed with them.

I then realised that we had a deep political crisis in understanding our “project” and regarding the “approach” we believed we should take, which led to reciprocal mistrust and a major schism at all organisational levels.

Over time, this became a crisis, and mistrust and accusations started flowing. Presumably, one of the streams believes in the secularity of the state, while the other calls for a “caliphate “, and this led to a hidden full-fledged conflict all along. That, in turn, led to a crisis of unprecedented mistrust, which escalated over time.

Seemingly, different studies show that most of the Brotherhood crises stem, in the first place, from its leadership, not from the grassroots.

Actually, this is a reflection of the same problems in the society, where we lack real leaders.

Another problem is the Brotherhood’s inability to sustain the national project or to draft a real national project that can be embraced by all its members.

This is a drawback that can be reproached to every single leader the movement witnessed over the years.

There is an obvious flaw in regard to organising the movement’s relations locally, with the rest of the Muslim world and worldwide.

Fundamentally, the Islamic thought is not contradictory to the thought of the entire population. Nevertheless, the movement apparently failed to realise in time that it was far from a real national project and, accordingly, it started losing some of its best members, particularly because of this issue.

Again, negative criticism, scepticism, slander and stigmatisation started to appear inside the organisation as means to “fight” those who did not agree with what the leadership had to say about the “national project”.

The Arab Spring actually saved the Brotherhood in Jordan. And so, duly, during the Arab Spring, the movement shaped foundations for a national project that it lacked before.

Parallel to that, “seven points” appeared in the political speech of the movement lately; after being just a demand by the elite in the literature of the movement, they became a public rally demand.

But the Arab Spring also gave the Arab people the unprecedented possibility of voicing demands and criticism of governments, leaders of organisations and movements in general.

The Muslim Brotherhood was not spared. However, it is only fair to ask whether the dispute inside the Brotherhood movement in Jordan is personal.

Is it true, as some of the movement leaders and followers say, that the conflict is merely driven by thirst for power and personal gains?

Should members of the old generation of Brotherhood write their biographies — as some are doing right now — in order for all to have a look at the facts and core of the dispute?

Can we say that what has happened inside the movement is just a positive split which may lead to the birth of new political entities that will benefit from the mistakes of the movement and of other advanced political Islamic groups, and come up with a different model?

Has the Arab Spring come to save and awaken us from a lengthy hibernation?

These are questions that await answers, which only time will give.

The writer, [email protected], is former member of the Islamic Action Front. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.