Jay Winter : The birth of the Muslim Brotherhood
[Jay Winter is a professor of history at Yale University and the author, with Blaine Baggett, of "The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century."]
To understand the Muslim Brotherhood, and to assess its role today in a shifting Middle East, it is necessary to first examine the forces that led to the organization's birth. And that takes us back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
The Ottoman Empire had been, before World War I, the strongest and most visible face of Islam in the world. At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, it controlled a vast swath of territory that extended from southeastern Europe into Asia and northern Africa. Its territory was greatly diminished by the 20th century, but it was the empire's alliance with Germany in the war that led to its final destruction.
In the aftermath of the war, the remains of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned by the victors, which gave the Western powers far more influence in the Middle East and created enormous tension in Islamic populations.
In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (later given the last name Ataturk, or father of the Turks) eventually ascended to power. The hero of Gallipoli, who blunted and then defeated the British-French invasion at the straits of the Dardanelles in 1915, Kemal was also the man who thwarted Western plans to partition Turkey into imperial holdings and who rallied the Turkish army to defeat a Greek invasion. The result was a Turkified nation, one in which religion was separated from power. Ataturk's Turkey was committed under his leadership to joining the Western world — in language, in dress, in its commitment to development and to military power. And in this project, Ataturk by and large succeeded. Turkey today is his greatest achievement.
But Ataturk's insistence on a largely secular government also sparked a counter-movement of Muslims who wished to save Islam from the polluting contact with the West. In Egypt, this led to the Muslim Brotherhood...
Read entire article at LA Times
To understand the Muslim Brotherhood, and to assess its role today in a shifting Middle East, it is necessary to first examine the forces that led to the organization's birth. And that takes us back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
The Ottoman Empire had been, before World War I, the strongest and most visible face of Islam in the world. At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, it controlled a vast swath of territory that extended from southeastern Europe into Asia and northern Africa. Its territory was greatly diminished by the 20th century, but it was the empire's alliance with Germany in the war that led to its final destruction.
In the aftermath of the war, the remains of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned by the victors, which gave the Western powers far more influence in the Middle East and created enormous tension in Islamic populations.
In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (later given the last name Ataturk, or father of the Turks) eventually ascended to power. The hero of Gallipoli, who blunted and then defeated the British-French invasion at the straits of the Dardanelles in 1915, Kemal was also the man who thwarted Western plans to partition Turkey into imperial holdings and who rallied the Turkish army to defeat a Greek invasion. The result was a Turkified nation, one in which religion was separated from power. Ataturk's Turkey was committed under his leadership to joining the Western world — in language, in dress, in its commitment to development and to military power. And in this project, Ataturk by and large succeeded. Turkey today is his greatest achievement.
But Ataturk's insistence on a largely secular government also sparked a counter-movement of Muslims who wished to save Islam from the polluting contact with the West. In Egypt, this led to the Muslim Brotherhood...