There is nothing wrong with learning the right lessons, at least as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned. When in the aftermath of the 1952 Revolution in Egypt that eventually brought the late legendary Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser to power, leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood fled to Saudi Arabia and other Arabian Gulf countries, especially following the incarceration and execution of then chief Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayed Qutb, they were welcomed. Not so now. “The close ideological ties between the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the founder of contemporary Saudi Arabia, Abdel-Aziz Ibn Saud, were cemented in the 1960s, 1970s and the 1980s by their political heirs and ideological descendants. Today, Saudi authorities view the Muslim Brotherhood as a subversive movement, convinced that the Brotherhood in Egypt and its offshoots in the Arabian Peninsula are determined to undermine the very fabric of society in the oil-rich kingdom and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, to overthrow their ruling monarchies,” Nabil Abdel-Fattah of Al-Ahram Centre for Social and Historical Studies told Al-Ahram Weekly. This takes the famed traditional and conservative Saudi Arabian posture to bizarre — and to many Westerners, inexplicable — extremes. Saudi Arabia, one of the first countries to render support to the ouster of Mohamed Morsi from the Egyptian presidency, promptly announced that it would be granting Egypt $5 billion. Yet beyond the headlines, it is ironic that the first official presidential visit abroad by ousted president Morsi was to Saudi Arabia. The visit did manage to deflect attention from the deep political rift that was developing between the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Morsi and Saudi Arabia. The kingdom, nevertheless, understood that Morsi's meetings with world leaders were symbolic rituals that did not affect the Muslim Brotherhood agenda. Morsi had more success in Qatar and Turkey, two key benefactors of the Brotherhood that further aroused the indignation of the Saudis. The meeting between Morsi and King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia came to be seen not as a matter of solidarity and political principle, but just one diplomatic bargaining chip among many. In short, the Saudis were far from impressed by Morsi's political overtures. The most virulent adversary of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region, however, is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Even more so than the Saudis, the UAE sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a direct threat to its political stability and national sovereignty. So what is the principle governing such acrimonious animosity? Earlier this month, 94 suspects linked to local UAE Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group Al-Islah were charged with sedition. Al-Islah was formally established in Dubai in 1974 and was grudgingly tolerated as a legal organisation for decades before it ran afoul of the UAE political establishment in the past couple of years. Severe sentences against Al-Islah's cabal were a reflection of the UAE's genuine anxiety about the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian organisation and its Arabian offshoots. The suspects were promptly referred to the UAE's State Security Court, under prosecutor Ahmed Al-Dhanhani. Yet, for all that, the question transcends local UAE politics. An undisclosed number of Egyptian doctors, engineers and university professors, and other professionals belonging to Al-Islah were arrested between November 2012 and January 2013, according to Human Rights Watch. The presence of fugitive members of ex-president Hosni Mubarak's regime in the UAE, plus the detained Egyptians — including 13 women — in the UAE who were allegedly collaborating closely with a network of UAE Islamists, soured relations between Morsi's Egypt and the UAE further. The defendants went on trial for forming a “secret organisation plotting to overthrow the regime”. On the face of it, UAE support for post-Morsi Egypt is a question of rare urgency. It should be recalled that the UAE provided political asylum to 2012 presidential hopeful Ahmed Shafik who sought refuge in Dubai, the UAE's most cosmopolitan city and commercial and tourism hub, after he supposedly losing elections to Morsi (he contests this to this day). The UAE stands to gain from such an internationally publicised showdown. With Morsi's unceremonious ouster, the bullying of the Muslim Brotherhood by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as the discredited movement's advocates insist, reached the brink. The Morsi government came into office promising to extend a hand if the Saudis and their UAE allies unclenched their fists. That did not wash with Riyadh and its oil-rich allies in the GCC. Assertive Qatar had to be put in its place. More clarity and consistency in publicly bullying the Muslim Brotherhood was deemed the Saudi and Emirates best bet. The UAE authorities concluded that the Islamist cell in the oil-rich Emirates was part and parcel of the Egyptian Brotherhood's perceived drive for total power in Cairo and the entire Arab world. The UAE authorities made it crystal clear that the convicted defendants, local and Egyptian, were to be severely punished and made a public example of. The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, was not about to contemplate the perils of letting the Muslim Brotherhood dictate the terms of the Islamist discourse. It is against this backdrop that the UAE promptly donated $1 billion to post-Morsi Egypt and loan the country another $2 billion. However, the UAE did not stop there. In light of Egypt's fuel crisis, the UAE dispatched 30,000 tonnes of diesel fuel that immediately helped to reduce the pressure on Egyptian gas stations. In these tough times, it is almost impossible to overlook the pivotal importance to Egypt of the UAE's rescue package. It is even rumoured that the United States urged the UAE to go slow on its economic and political support of post-Morsi Egypt. The UAE took no notice of Washington's pleas. It argued that there are good reasons for doing so. The arrival in Cairo of UAE Foreign Minister Abdallah Bin Zayed at the head of a contingent of the country's key decision-makers only confirmed the UAE's keen interest in buttressing the post-Morsi transitional government headed by Interim President Adli Mansour. The arrest and detention of a group of 30 Egyptians and local UAE nationals charged by the UAE authorities with setting up an illegal branch of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood had confounded and enraged the Muslim Brotherhood, aggravating tensions between the UAE and its Islamist adversaries. The notorious Mabhouh assassination case, in which Israeli intelligence agencies allegedly assassinated a Hamas arms dealer in Dubai in 2010, was just the beginning of a persistent and determined UAE campaign to hound the Muslim Brotherhood and their regional allies. “Since today's Brotherhood is not a rational and pragmatic group, we don't expect it to return to power because it has lost its most politically competent leaders, like Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, and has become one that is run by leaders like Khairat Al-Shater, Mohamed Badie and Morsi,” extrapolated Abdel-Rahman Al-Rashed, general manager of the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya pan-Arab satellite television station, and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat. Scrutiny by the UAE authorities of Al-Islah's writings, video productions and social media highlight how members of Al-Islah fought alongside Al-Qaeda, anti-Bashar Al-Assad forces in Syria. Moreover, a new organisation known as Hizb Al-Umma (not to be confused with the Sudanese Umma Party headed by veteran politician and religious leader Sadig Al-Mahdi) was created in the UAE by an Al-Islah co-founder. Banned in the UAE, Hizb Al-Umma is publicly affiliated with two other parties of the same name, one in Saudi Arabia, where it is also illegal. Al-Islah's Kuwaiti flagship functions openly and is not banned by the authorities. Be that as it may, in the final analysis, a new post-Morsi regional axis is in the making that looks beyond the fads of Arab geopolitics. It groups Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait. It is pitted against Qatar primarily, and Turkey too.
