MB is Iranian Operation
Last updated
Last updated
The Muslim Brotherhood ideology inspired the Khomeinist movement in Iran, and Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential Brotherhood theorists, has always been popular among Iranian Islamists. Although Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, did not openly acknowledge the Brotherhood’s influence, it is true that the current Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has translated Qutb’s work into Farsi. According to Mohsen Kadivar, a prominent Iranian theologist, Qutb is Khamenei’s favorite writer.
The Muslim Brotherhood and the Khomeinist version of Islamism entertain an apocalyptic vision of the world. They are invested in the totalitarian ideology of Islamism, which holds that Islam is a total way of life that must supplant all other ways of life, including liberal democracy. The Islamic Republic and the Muslim Brotherhood detest and disregard the Westphalian order that is the basis of modern international law and seek to establish a pan-Islamic superstate through the conquest of the Middle East and, eventually, the rest of the world. They both share anti-Western, anti-Israeli, and anti-GCC sentiments.
The Iranian Islamists learned a lot from their Sunni brethren early on. They followed the Brotherhood’s model of infiltrating the West’s political, cultural, and academic institutions and guiding public opinion to legitimize their positions and gain leverage in the Middle East. In the U.S., the Shiite Student Islamic Association was founded as a splinter cell of the Brotherhood’s Muslim Students’ Association in North America in the 1960s.
The Islamic Center of Hamburg, the foremost Shiite institute of influence in the West at the time, closely followed in the Brotherhood’s footsteps when it implemented a sophisticated program of proselytization and engagement with European public intellectuals. That approach can still be seen in the lobbying practices of the institutions affiliated with the Iranian regime in the West.
The Muslim Brotherhood also taught the Iranian revolutionaries how to take up arms. During the 1960s and 1970s, many Iranian Islamists and radical Leftists were trained in guerrilla camps in Egypt and Syria under the auspices of Brotherhood-sympathetic army officers. They then relocated to Lebanon to establish the radical Shiite Amal Movement, the precursor of Hezbollah, to galvanize the Lebanese population against Israel and the West. Those same battle-hardened Iranian guerrillas would later topple the regime of the Shah and replace it with an Islamist regime in Iran.
