An Islamist wave coming from an alliance between Muslim Brothers, Salafists and Gulf emirs seems to be sweeping the Middle East. But Islam is not the key to deciphering the new political landscape.

Dubai’s chief of police, General Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim, claims that the Muslim Brotherhood is “a small group that has strayed from the true path.” He also says that the revolution in Egypt “would not have been possible without Iran’s support and is the prelude to a new Sykes-Picot agreement” (1). And that Mohammed Morsi’s election in Egypt was “an unfortunate choice.” Like many leading figures in the Arab world, Al-Tamin uses Twitter, where he has said: “If the Muslim Brotherhood threatens the Gulf’s security, the blood that flows will drown it.”

Throughout this summer, Al-Tamin criticised the Brotherhood, which he calls “a sinful gang whose demise is drawing near”, and called for their assets and bank accounts to be frozen (2). The authorities in the UAE, of which Dubai is a part, have brought around 60 of the Brothers to court, charged with plotting against the regime.

The pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat belongs to Saudi crown prince Salman’s family. Despite its reputation in the West, it has almost no autonomy in matters of Arab politics. The day after Mohammed Morsi’s swearing-in on 30 June, its editor, Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, asked some questions (really those of the Al-Saud family) (3). Would Egypt’s new head of state fight terrorism and oppose Al-Qaida? Would he continue Egypt’s mediating role over Palestine? Would he genuinely support the Syrian opposition, given his opposition to any foreign military intervention? Would he back Jordan’s king Abdullah against the challenge from the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood?

Al-Rashed wrote: “As Iran has long been a strong ally of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, will the new president decide to resume relations with Tehran under the pretext that Iran has embassies and ambassadors in the Gulf states?... Will he remain silent about Iran’s ideological and religious activities that have intensified ever since the ousting of Mubarak, as seen in Tehran’s support for local groups and attempts to spread Shia ideology among some Egyptian circles? This is something Al-Azhar [Sunni Islam’s leading institution based in Cairo] has already criticised, warning that Egypt could be threatened with sectarian conflict.”

By September, Al-Rashed was condemning Cairo’s willingness to include Tehran (along with Riyadh and Ankara) in a group formed to find a solution to the Syrian crisis (4). The Saudi foreign minister boycotted a meeting of this group in Cairo on 17 September.

These warnings, and many others in the Gulf press, have attracted little attention in the West, perhaps because they run counter to the prevailing view: that there is a broad alliance uniting the emirs of the Gulf and the Islamist movements in their wish to impose strict religious order and sharia, as though a shared conservative vision of Islam supersedes political considerations and diplomatic rivalries, national differences and divergent strategies.

No formal agreement

There are historical precedents for such a view, even if they are more a matter of politics than religion. In the 1950s and 1960s thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been persecuted in Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Iraq, settled in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia. But as an Egyptian with links to the Brotherhood points out: “There wasn’t a formal agreement. The organisation had been dismantled and had no leadership structure. But it’s true that the activists who settled in Saudi Arabia provided their new homeland with thousands of members who contributed to the fight against Arab nationalism, especially against the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and against the left.”

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1980 gave the alliance a fresh impetus in the name of the fight against communism. Thousands of volunteers flocked to fight the Red Army, mobilised by the different Islamist groups including Muslim Brotherhood networks (though the Egyptian branch mostly stayed in reserve (5)), supported by the US and the CIA and financed by the Gulf’s oil monarchies. Al-Qaida came out of this mobilisation to support Afghan “freedom fighters”.

The seductive hypothesis that the Arab Spring represents the third stage of this holy alliance obscures more complex realities of the post-cold war era. The first is the split between the Brotherhood and the Saudi monarchy in the early 1990s, after the invasion of Kuwait. Saudi’s then minister of the interior, the powerful Prince Nayef, wrote in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassah in 2002 (6): “The Muslim Brotherhood are the cause of most of the Arab world’s problems and have done vast amounts of damage in Saudi Arabia. We have given this group too much support. ... The Muslim Brotherhood have destroyed the Arab world.”

He reminded readers that during the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 he had received a delegation that included Rashid al-Ghannushi (Tunisia, current president of the Annahda party), Hassan al-Tourabi (Sudan), Abdul Majid al-Zindani (Yemen) and Necmettin Erbakan (Turkey), all linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. “We asked them whether they would accept the attack on Kuwait. They said they [had come] to collect opinions. But when they arrived in Iraq they surprised us by issuing statements backing Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.”

The prince did not mention another reason for his anger (a reason shared by other emirs in the region): the establishment of the Brotherhood in the Gulf states and its involvement in protests that have affected the kingdom since the first Gulf war. Their political vision — an Islamic state, but a democratically elected one — diverges from that of Saudi Arabia, which is founded on unquestioning loyalty to the royal family. The royal family has preferred instead to finance Salafist movements — divided and numerous — reassured by their refusal to interfere politically and their support for the powers that be, including the royal family and the Mubarak regime.

The divide between Riyadh and the Brotherhood widened in the 2000s, when the Brotherhood joined, through Hamas, the “axis of resistance”, along with Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hizbullah.

Arab Spring’s new cards

The Arab revolutions dealt fresh cards. Saudi Arabia and the emirates opposed the uprisings. They saw the successful experiments conducted by the Brotherhood in Egypt and Tunisia as anything but good news. Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi leaders, who had excellent relations with Hosni Mubarak and welcomed Ben Ali after he fled from Tunisia (they refused to extradite him at the request of Tunisia’s new leaders), resented the Brothers for toppling these dictators and the US for abandoning them. The monarchy set itself up as the centre of the counter-revolution and crushed the revolt in Bahrain in March 2011. Riyadh also supported King Abdullah against protests in Jordan, in which the Brotherhood took an active part (7).

Yet President Morsi’s first foreign visit, on 11 July 2012, was to Saudi Arabia, not out of “Islamist” solidarity, but for the sake of realpolitik. Egypt desperately needs Saudi money; it has received $1.5bn and has been promised a further $2.5bn (8). More than 1.5 million Egyptians work in Saudi Arabia, and the money they send home boosts the balance of payments. Equally, however much Saudi Arabia might wish to, it cannot cut itself off from the most important country in the Middle East.

“Morsi’s visit didn’t solve all the problems,” an Egyptian diplomat said euphemistically. Many sources of tension remain, including the treatment of Egyptians in Saudi Arabia and the fate of Saudi investments in Egypt. In April, the Saudi ambassador to Cairo was recalled after demonstrations against the arrest in Saudi Arabia of Ahmed al-Gizawy, a lawyer accused of drug possession. In August, Essam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Brotherhood who has become a presidential adviser, asked the Saudi ambassador on Twitter to “clarify the crime, penalty and circumstances of the arrest of the Egyptian citizen Najla Wafa,” a woman with two children held in the kingdom since 2009 and sentenced to five years in prison and 500 lashes after a financial disagreement with a Saudi prince (9).

The fate of Saudi investments in Egypt is a problem. In June 2011 a press release from the wealthy prince Walid bin Talal announced that he was “giving the Egyptian people” 75% of the 420 sq km of farmland he had bought for a bargain price under Mubarak’s corrupt regime (10). This avoided trouble with the Egyptian authorities. Other inquiries have been initiated by the Egyptian judiciary looking at Saudi interests, even though Cairo and Riyadh are trying to minimise the tensions and Egypt has set up a special bureau to try to settle financial disputes with Saudi Arabia (11).

Saudi fears

Saudi Arabia is not pleased by Cairo’s return to the diplomatic scene after a decade in which Egypt had been largely absent or content to follow the Wahhabi lead. Morsi’s travels, first to China — a sign that tête-à-têtes with the US were over — and then to Iran have confirmed Saudi fears. The Tehran visit won Morsi some credit with the Egyptian public, who were proud of him for having resisted US pressure, although they were barely aware of Gulf leaders’ anti-Iranian and anti-Shia rhetoric. To avoid conflict with Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian president had to pull off a tricky balancing act: he spent only a few hours in Tehran, didn’t meet Iran’s Supreme Guide as planned and refused to talk of resuming bilateral diplomatic relations. After paying homage to Nasser (astonishing, given that Nasser violently repressed the Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s) he called for the departure of Bashar al-Assad from Syria, while rejecting foreign intervention there, which Saudi Arabia has called for.

During his long exile, Ghannushi, leader of Tunisia’s Annahda, which is part of the Brotherhood, has lived in London, in preference to Riyadh. On a visit to the US in December 2011, he predicted that the Arab Spring would remove the emirs from the Gulf, and this prompted the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh (12) to ask whether that prediction included the emir of Qatar, a major supporter of Annahda.

Relations between Qatar (a Wahhabi state like Saudi Arabia, which adheres to a strict form of Islam that predominates throughout the Arabian peninsula) and the Brotherhood are solid. Qatar believes that in the Brotherhood it has found a conduit for its policies, since Qatar doesn’t have a big enough army or enough diplomats or spies to play an active regional role — its bottomless coffers are its only trump card. It has made use of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has been in Qatar since the 1970s and whose programme on Al-Jazeera, Sharia and Life, has made him one of the region’s most popular preachers. Qaradawi is a religious reference point for the Brotherhood, of which he is a former member, though he maintains his independence and has criticised the sectarianism of their Egyptian branch.

Qatar, which flirted for a time with Hizbullah, Syria and Iran, while maintaining solid relations with the US, has opted to back the Brotherhood since the Arab Spring. Al-Jazeera, a channel completely funded by Qatar, has lost much of its lustre — and some of its best journalists — as a result, and has become a mouthpiece for the Brotherhood, in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, in Tunisia. The emir of Qatar’s visit to Egypt this August in the middle of Ramadan and his $2bn deposit at Egypt’s central bank to help out its treasury is proof of the strength of the ties. But does it amount to a strategic alliance? The recent tensions between Annahda and Qatar, which has become concerned about the movement’s inability to stabilise Tunisia, suggests not.

General de Gaulle used to talk simplistically about the “the complicated East”, but it can be analysed using the same political concepts as the rest of the world. But the application of these concepts still has to win acceptance. The branches of the Brotherhood don’t follow a secret conductor in Mecca with a score based on the dogmas of Islam; their strategy often follows each country’s national interests, as Morsi’s policy over Israel or Gaza shows (a major disappointment to Hamas).

The Salafists’ political debut in Egypt and Tunisia brings new challenges (13): the rapprochement between Qatar and Saudi Arabia (Qatar has moved closer to Saudi Arabia while remaining distrustful of it, while the Wahhabi Saudi kingdom fears a successful democratic transition in the Arab world, even with the participation of the Brothers), and the threats to Jordan’s monarchy, which now refuses to coordinate its aid for the Syrian rebels with Qatar which it suspects of favouring the Brotherhood. It is hard to understand the regional Islamist landscape when it is viewed through a purely religious lens.