The methods the Muslim Brotherhood employs to attract and recruit the young may not always be clear to outsiders. But if we are ever going to understand the violent tendencies of political Islam, we must look closely into such matters. Since its inception, the Muslim Brotherhood has been a secretive, hierarchical, ironclad group that looks down on outsiders and, if necessary, abrogates the rights of anyone who doesn't join its ranks. It doesn't matter if you're a fellow citizen or even a fellow Muslim. Unless you are part of their group, you are viewed with suspicion, denied the right to equal treatment, bullied as an atheist and denounced as a peril. For the Muslim Brotherhood, every outsider is inferior. People who work for the government are misguided because all governments are ungodly. People who work for Al-Azhar, including eminent Muslim scholars, are particularly targeted for attack because they don't bow to the group's narrow interpretation of the Muslim faith. One would have thought that such narrow-mindedness would deter recruits, that such supremacist ideas so abhorrent to mainstream Muslims would discourage followers. But this, unfortunately, has not been the case. Occupying the far-right fringe hasn't proved as distasteful to the young as one would have expected. And that's something for which the Muslim Brotherhood is not to blame but rather, the rest of society. When the Muslim Brotherhood takes such a hold, as evidenced by the events of the past few years, on the minds of university students, then one has to question the basics of our education system. Universities should have been our line of defence against the lunatic fringe, not our fifth column. We've been asking ourselves the wrong questions. We've been wondering what's wrong with people who join such extremist groups. But what we should have been asking is: Where did we go wrong? How did we produce a type of person who prefers fanaticism and violence to moderation and normalcy? Let's admit it. Muslim Brotherhood supporters have no use for the institutions of this country, for its traditions or for its values of tolerance and coexistence. Infused with the bigoted ideas of their group, Muslim Brotherhood followers have developed an intense repugnance not only for the government but also for fellow citizens. And they are acting on their hate, bombing indiscriminately, disrupting normal life, blowing up power stations and anything else they consider of purpose to their fellow citizens. This is not to say that every act of terror is carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood. But every act of terror owes its inception to the ideology of that group, an ideology that now inspires not only its members but also a wide range of lone wolves, nihilistic saboteurs and global jihadists here and elsewhere. We've lived with Muslim Brotherhood-inspired violence for decades but what we see today is unprecedented. This unbridled desire to undermine the state and its institutions, to stop the economy in its tracks, to hurt and maim the public, outpaces everything we've seen in the past. From the Mediterranean coast in the north to Aswan in the south, no one is safe. Metro stations, railways, electricity pylons, tourist destinations all are targets for senseless violence. Not to mention police and army personnel, whom the Muslim Brotherhood and its like-minded friends resent for trying to keep the country together. By Muslim Brotherhood standards, anyone who wants to keep the country together is an atheist, deserving punishment not in the afterlife but immediately. Anyone working for the government is a criminal; anyone protecting the nation is a murderer. This may seem unconscionable for a group that, when allowed to take office, wasted no time in alienating the majority of the population, so much so that within six months a million people were protesting at the Ittihadiya Palace. Within a year of Mohamed Morsi being sworn in as president, millions more marched to demand an end to his rule. On 30 June 2013, Egypt turned a new leaf. But the Muslim Brotherhood wasn't going to allow the country to get away with this affront against it. Self-appointed as guardians of the faith, self-anointed as missionaries of Sharia, the Muslim Brotherhood swore to strike back. The terror we see in North Sinai today may not be all of the Muslim Brotherhood's doing, but it has drawn on the group's example and inspiration. Other jihadists are involved too ones that draw help from the Gaza-based Hamas movement, itself a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot. So it wasn't enough for Hamas to undermine Palestinian unity, or misrule in Gaza. Now it's time to take a swipe at Egypt too. The irony of this situation is that these violent tactics actually work young men volunteer to be part of this nihilistic quest, whether propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood or by its offshoots or by third- and fourth-generation jihadists. A young man who goes and plants a bomb under an electricity pylon, what is he thinking about? A student who departs from his studies in science or the humanities to embrace instead the supremacist ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood and its friends, what is he hoping to achieve? It is no longer a war on terror, as people have imagined. It is no longer an attempt to catch every perpetrator and bring them to justice, although this obviously has to be done. The issue is much deeper than that. The issue is that we haven't immunised the young against the jihadist virus, against the nihilistic microbe, against the fanaticism of religious supremacists of multiple and ever-evolving strains. To stop the malaise we need to think back a step or two. To keep the young from being brainwashed, we have to offer them a model of contentment they can aspire to. It is not easy to fight off terrorists, but it may be even harder to keep the young from joining their ranks. This is the real battle, and it is one that families and schools, society and government have to fight together. If we are reaping terror now it is because we have sowed the wrong seeds in the past. So let's take responsibility now. Let's remove the seeds of hatred and racism from the minds of the young. Let's teach them how to love life and respect it. Let's teach them how to honour, how to appreciate and how to question. The writer is managing editor of the quarterly journal Al-Demoqrateya published by Al-Ahram.
