Review: A Mosque in Munich

My review of Ian Johnson's recent book A Mosque in Munich is out in The National's Review. I enjoyed the book's multi-tiered history, notably its starting point among Central Asian Muslims who joined Nazi Germany to fight against the Soviet Union and the background of some of the characters who would later dominate the Munich Islamic Center who were closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. These include Said Ramadan, father of Tariq, and the famous MB financier Youssef Nada (who we learn has an amusing obsession with processed cheese, which he exported from Europe to Libya in the 1970s with the winning argument that it was less messy than oily canned tuna and thus idea to help students keep their textbooks clean.)

For these reasons alone it's worth a read, which is why it's disappointing that Johnson's view of Islamism is rather skewed and appears chiefly informed by right-wing sources, which cause him to over-emphasize the "Islamofascist" view of things. Here's the last part of my review:

As interesting as this all is, a major flaw of A Mosque in Munich lies in its superficial treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism in general. The ideological convergence between the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is overstated, notably in their hostility to Jews. It is true that Nazi anti-Semitism found a willing audience among the Brothers and that Germany in the 1930s and 1940s played an important role in disseminating European anti-Semitism in Egypt. But the Brothers were not the only group that lent a willing ear; one of their rivals at the time was the Misr al-Fatah (Young Egypt) group, which like fascist sympathisers in Europe and the Americas found much to admire in Hitler’s movement. The Brothers’ anti-Semitism certainly existed, but it was hardly the group’s top ideological priority, alongside anti-colonialism, as Johnson suggests: surely their project for a Muslim renewal came before that.

There is a similar lack of nuance in Johnson’s understanding of Islamism – which he defines early on as “not the ancient religion of Islam but a highly politicised and violent system of ideas that creates the milieu for terrorism.” Just as Central Asian refugees’ nationalism embraced Islam as a cultural marker of identity, groups like the Muslim Brothers have been marked as much by nationalism as much as theology. Furthermore, they have not been intellectually static, having for instance abandoned founder Hassan al-Banna’s rejection of partisan life and embraced electoral, rather than vanguard, politics. To paint the Brotherhood merely as a precursor of al Qa’eda, an argument usually made by those with an ideological axe to grind, is profoundly misleading, no matter how unpleasant some of its views may be.

One argument that runs through much of the book is a warning against Western engagement of Islamists, an idea popularised in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks as a way to recruit “moderate” Islamists against the nihilism of salafist jihadist groups like al Qa’eda. The Brothers have actually needed no such encouragement to have a public tiff with al Qa’eda’s Ayman Zawahri, who hates the Brothers as much he does the “Crusaders”. But if Johnson makes a good point in cautioning against paying undue attention to the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe – where it is after all a vanguard group that is not necessarily representative of the European Muslim experience – he often does so for the wrong reason. A more compelling reason for governments and spies to steer clear of the manipulation of religious groups is that, as the West has learned at a great cost, it can so often backfire.

Comments

[KNS]

You should've been at the event for this book at the Hudson Institute on May 17th. Rather awful. Johnson seems to have either no understanding, or simply doesn't care, that there are intellectual and operational differences in the world of political Islam and amongst these groups. Hillel Fradkin actually said during the discussion portion (he was the moderator) that bin Laden used to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was trained/educated by them. How does he reach this conclusion? He stated it was because he was taught by someone with loose ties to the MB in Egypt.

I'm just thankful that I didn't purchase the book ahead of time. After that waste of 2+ hours at Hudson, I wasn't about to shell out $20-$30 for even more nonsense.

Also worth noting - the discussion portion was roughly an hour, possibly more. Over half of the audience outright left within the first 20 minutes of it. Those that were left included a few right wing nuts (one asked why we shouldn't just take over/colonize the entire Middle East), Bob Leiken, and a smattering of others.

[SP]

Great review, thanks. Shame that it took an unnuanced rightwinger to write this history but glad someone did. I wonder if the Islamofascism-touting crowd are aware that there were many alliances of convenience with fascism in the now postcolonial world - one of the great Indian nationalist heroes, Subhash Chandra Bose, hooked up with the Japanese and German fascists, and created a good deal of controversy because of this. But most people see his choices as flawed ones enabled by the historical and regional circumstances. Of course had he been Arab and Muslim the right-nutters would be all over him, and probably all over Gandhi and the Congress for working with him at all.

[KL]

The review criticizes several aspects of the book but fails to note that these are not core arguments. The book spends about three pages on the Brotherhood in Egypt, but this figures prominently in the critique. Indeed, the book is not about events in the Arab world at all, or ideological/political splits among Islamist groups, but about misguided debates in western countries over how to instrumentalize Islam. It might be natural for a blog devoted to Arab politics and culture to focus on the parts of the book that intersect with its interests, but it's also only fair to judge a book on what it sets out to do.
Strangely, too, Johnson is also criticized for not making the argument that "A more compelling reason for governments and spies to steer clear of the manipulation of religious groups is that, as the West has learned at a great cost, it can so often backfire." Yet this is explicitly the one, central point of the book and one Johnson made at the Hudson event, as well as at the New America Foundation the next day.

[Issandr El Amrani]

KL - I agree that the central part of the book is simply a history of the Munich Islamic Center and the various personalities in it. I dedicate the first half of the review to it. But when it comes to Islamism, which is not incidental to the book but a central part of it, Johnson just gets things spectacularly wrong. I would have readily ignored an attitude hostile to Islamism but he actually makes huge factual and analytical mistakes. I double-checked them with specialists on the issue and the "bible" on the MB, Mitchell's book. I can't review a book and let these things slip, they're just too huge. I think I made it pretty clear I enjoyed the book otherwise.

As for the last paragraph of my review, I argue that Johnson makes a good point about instrumentalization but for the wrong reasons: throughout the book he argues that the danger is that Islamism is an evil ideology. Instead he should have focused on unintended consequences (I thought the last line was a pretty transparent reference to 9/11 and the Afghan Arabs).

I have no idea about Johnson's politics — but I got the impression his views on Islamism were just influenced by the wrong sort of people.