Sadat on the Muslim Brotherhood

See what the great Anwar Sadat, assassinated by radical Muslims 30 years ago, had to say about the Muslim Brotherhood, in a six minute segment from an undated speech (via Barry Rubin). He describes it as a totalitarian form of Islam which prohibits everything which is not itself—prohibits all forms of knowledge and study other than Islam, prohibits private property (because everything belongs to Allah), declares everything other than itself “pre-Islamic” (i.e. pagan), declares the right to kill devout Muslims who don’t subscribe to its precepts.

I have disagreed with the tendency of Islam critics to call Islam “totalitarian.” That’s not the right word, because totalitarianism means that one man or one body of men controls all aspects of society, as in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and Islam, notwithstanding the comprehensive sweep of sharia, does not have that kind of centralized control. However, some forms of Islam clearly are or aspire to be totalitarian.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 27, 2011 02:04 PM | Send