CAIRO--“There is no monolithism,” Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai once said to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after their historic visit to Beijing in 1972. He was referring to the uniquely American habit of reducing distinct, if not conflicting parties—in this case the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China—into a seamless confederation hostile to U.S. interests. snip
till, Washington blunders on. For the last decade, the White House in general and Congress in particular have insisted on treating the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamist movement based in Cairo, as both insoluble and adversarial. (Though it is not on the State Department’s list of terrorists organizations, U.S. officials are discouraged, if not banned outright, from meeting with its members.) It has been characterized as al Qaeda’s intellectual fountainhead, having counted as members Ayman Al-Zawahiri, successor to the recently deleted bin Laden, and Sayyid Qutb, a radical author and theorist whose attacks on secularism inspired both men. Widely overlooked, however, is that Al-Zawahiri and Qutb ultimately rebuked the Muslim Brotherhood as a lapdog to secular despots.
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