by Eli Lake
THE NEW YORK SUN

WASHINGTON — The Bush admin­is­tra­tion is qui­et­ly weigh­ing the prospect of reach­ing out to the par­ty that found­ed mod­ern polit­i­cal Islam, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.

Still in its ear­ly stages and below the radar, the cur­rent Amer­i­can delib­er­a­tions and diplo­ma­cy with the orga­ni­za­tion, known in Ara­bic as Ikhwan, take on new sig­nif­i­cance in light of Hamas’s suc­cess­ful coup in Gaza last week. The Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is wide­ly report­ed to have helped cre­ate Hamas in 1982.

Today the State Depart­men­t’s Bureau of Intel­li­gence and Research will host a meet­ing with oth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to dis­cuss open­ing more for­mal chan­nels to the broth­ers. Ear­li­er this year, the Nation­al Intel­li­gence Coun­cil received a paper it had com­mis­sioned on the his­to­ry of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood by a schol­ar at the Nixon Cen­ter, Robert Leiken, who is invit­ed to the State Depart­ment meet­ing today to present the case for engage­ment. On April 7, con­gres­sion­al lead­ers such as Rep. Ste­ny Hoy­er of Mary­land, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic whip, attend­ed a recep­tion where some rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the broth­ers were present. The recep­tion was host­ed at the res­i­dence in Cairo of the Amer­i­can ambas­sador to Egypt, Fran­cis Ric­cia­r­done, a deci­sion that indi­cates a change in pol­i­cy.

The Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil and State Depart­ment already meet indi­rect­ly with the Syr­i­an Mus­lim Broth­er­hood through dis­cus­sions with a new Syr­i­an oppo­si­tion group cre­at­ed in 2006 known as the Nation­al Sal­va­tion Front. Mean­while, Iraq’s vice pres­i­dent, Tariq al-Hashe­mi, is a leader of Iraq’s chap­ter of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. His par­ty, known as the Iraqi Islam­ic Par­ty, has played a role in the Iraqi gov­ern­ment since it was invit­ed to join the Iraqi Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil in 2003.

These devel­op­ments, in light of Hamas’s con­trol of Gaza, sug­gest that Pres­i­dent Bush — who has been care­ful to dis­tin­guish the war on ter­ror from a war on Islam — has done more than any of his pre­de­ces­sors to accept the move­ment fight­ing for the merg­er of mosque and state in the Mid­dle East.

Should Mr. Bush ask his diplo­mats to forge new chan­nels to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood it would also be a recog­ni­tion of the gains their par­ties have made in elec­tions in the last three years. In Egypt, Iraq, and the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries, Islamist par­ties trounced their sec­u­lar rivals. In part this was because these par­ties offered an uncor­rupt alter­na­tive to the more sec­u­lar par­ties in pow­er, but some advo­cates inside the admin­is­tra­tion also say it reflects a tan­gi­ble momen­tum for par­ties that seek to cre­ate Islam­ic republics. One State Depart­ment offi­cial yes­ter­day said, “Our pol­i­cy has to change from more democ­ra­cy, few­er head­scarves.”

Nonethe­less, admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials this week also stressed that no deci­sions have been made as to a new ini­tia­tive. One lead­ing Euro­pean Islamist, Tariq Ramadan, who is the grand­son of the founder of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, is being denied a visa to assume a pro­fes­sor­ship he has been offered at Notre Dame Uni­ver­si­ty. The pol­i­cy debate inside the admin­is­tra­tion is also con­tentious, with law enforce­ment agen­cies such as the FBI skep­ti­cal that the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is not clan­des­tine­ly more involved in sup­port­ing vio­lent jihad than the orga­ni­za­tion’s emis­saries let on.

A State Depart­ment spokesman for the Bureau of Near East Affairs, David Foley, con­firmed the meet­ing Wednes­day to dis­cuss a new approach to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. “We do these sem­i­nars, they help inform the pol­i­cy mak­ing process. I am not sug­gest­ing some­one would decide on a new pol­i­cy on the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood as a result of this,” he said. “This is the kind of con­sul­ta­tions we often do. When there are alter­na­tive views, let’s hear both sides. We are cer­tain­ly will­ing to lis­ten to voic­es from the out­side.”

Mak­ing the case today for out­reach is Mr. Leiken, who co-authored with Steve Brooke a paper for the March-April issue of For­eign Affairs titled, “The Mod­er­ate Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.” That paper argues that Ikhwan has drawn con­tempt from vio­lent Islamists such as Al Qae­da for its gen­er­al dis­avow­al of armed strug­gle. Trac­ing its his­to­ry to its found­ing, the paper says the group today, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Egypt, is gen­uine in its desire to par­tic­i­pate in demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics.

Mr. Leiken said yes­ter­day that there are two rea­sons why Amer­i­ca should begin to rethink its pro­hi­bi­tion of meet­ing with the broth­ers. “A new pol­i­cy begins to com­bat some of our iso­la­tion in the Mus­lim world. I see the Mus­lim broth­er­hood, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Egypt, as hav­ing what the com­mu­nists used to call a two-line strug­gle, between mod­er­ate and dog­mat­ic fac­tions. Our out­reach would help the mod­er­ates. That would strength­en those forces who are most will­ing to rec­og­nize the fact of Israel’s exis­tence and more demo­c­ra­t­ic.”

Mr. Leiken is a Har­vard grad­u­ate and long­time expert on Latin Amer­i­ca who broke with the hard left in the 1980s to oppose the San­din­istas in Nicaragua and who became asso­ci­at­ed with Social Democ­rats such as Penn Kem­ble and Joshua Muravchick. He said he thinks diplo­ma­cy with Ikhwan could help us help them to mod­er­ate Hamas. “It is con­ceiv­able that the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, aware Gaza could serve as an index, will try use its influ­ence to get Hamas to be con­struc­tive,” he said. The Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment has used the Mus­lim Broth­ers for at least 10 years as a back chan­nel to Hamas.

Mr. Leiken’s For­eign Affairs paper and clas­si­fied study for the Nation­al Intel­li­gence Coun­cil has got­ten the atten­tion of senior Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil offi­cials and Sec­re­tary of State Rice, accord­ing to two admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials.

“The NIC asked me to pro­vide an analy­sis of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and I was hap­py to oblige,” Mr. Leiken said.

Argu­ing against a new pol­i­cy on the broth­ers today will be a Hud­son Insti­tute expert on Islam, Hil­lel Frad­kin. Mr. Frad­kin declined to com­ment on his pre­sen­ta­tion ahead of the meet­ing. A col­league of his at the insti­tute who has also tak­en a skep­ti­cal view of the broth­ers, Zeyno Baran, did say she was wor­ried about a new direc­tion by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.

“The think­ing is that to deal with ter­ror­ism, we need to deal with Mus­lims who will take care of their com­mu­ni­ties so there will not be peo­ple here and there doing ter­ror­ism,” she said. “So we treat the broth­er­hood like an umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion, like the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can Islam­ic Rela­tions or the Islam­ic Soci­ety of North Amer­i­ca. You make them part­ners. They might Islamize the Mus­lims, but it’s okay because they can think or do what they want as long as they are not vio­lent. That is the mis­un­der­stand­ing and mis­take.”

The issue of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood has also come up in the pres­i­den­tial con­test for 2008. At the May 3 debate of Repub­li­can con­tenders for the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, a for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor, Mitt Rom­ney, includ­ed the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood as a com­po­nent of the “world­wide jihadist threat.”

“This is about Shia and Sun­ni. This is about Hezbol­lah and Hamas and Al Qae­da and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. This is the world­wide jihadist effort to try and cause the col­lapse of all mod­er­ate Islam­ic gov­ern­ments and replace them with a caliphate,” he said in response to a ques­tion about what he would do to cap­ture Osama bin Laden.

One of the more con­tentious issues with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is whether the group was con­nect­ed to the 1981 assas­si­na­tion of an Egypt­ian pres­i­dent, Anwar Sadat. This reporter was told by lead­ers of the group last year that the ex-pres­i­den­t’s killers were from a break­away fac­tion known as the Islam­ic Group and that his mur­der was not con­doned by Ikhwan. Sadat soft­ened the gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy against the broth­ers in the ear­ly 1970s, allow­ing them to orga­nize in uni­ver­si­ties, a deci­sion many of the Broth­er­hood lead­ers in Cairo cred­it with lay­ing the foun­da­tion for their gai
ns in the 2005 par­lia­men­tary elec­tions.