The Muslim Brotherhood as it is known is a fundamentalist Islamist organization that first appeared in Egypt in 1928. It began as a Pan-Islamic, religious and social movement with the aim of "re-establishing Islam".
It developed charitable action, activist ideology, organizational structure, social services, hospitals, sports clubs, schools, mosques, Islamic centers. At this point it is similar in its action to Lebanon's Hezbollah, while it maintains a very powerful armed body in Palestine.
The ideology of the "Muslim Brotherhood"
The organization has the following fundamental principles:
Allah is the ultimate goal, the Qur'an is as valid as the Constitution, Prophet Muhammad is the Leader, Jihad is the Way,
death for the sake of Allah is the ultimate desire of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Since the Arab Spring, the Middle East, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean have entered a period of instability. In the above geographical areas are Sunni Arab Countries, with special weight, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Arab Spring was followed by the Islamic Winter with consecutive civil wars (Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Bahrain, Somalia). In this instability the Muslim Brotherhood played a key role.
Turkey, Qatar, and Pakistan proved to be the Muslim Brotherhood's supporting states. After all, Erdogan himself is a member of the Brotherhood. To this instability we must add Turkey's destabilizing policy (in Kurdish, the interventions in Afrin, Idlib, Jarablus, Northern Syria, Libya), where they created even greater geopolitical imbalances in the wider Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean.
The Egypt-Turkey rivalry
In 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded and elected Morsi in Egypt. It initially promised a moderate Islamist agenda with respect for human rights, but then the group's intentions began to be revealed. The Brotherhood promised an "Egyptian Renaissance with Islamic foundations," which meant unlimited powers and extreme pro-Islam politics.
Their action in Egypt was suppressed by Sisi, who imprisoned their leader Morsi, where the latter died in prison on June 19, 2019.
It is an indisputable fact that the poor Turkish-Egyptian relations are due in large part to the fact that the Egyptian military overthrew former Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi following popular protests against his rule in 2012-13.
In November 2013, both Egypt and Turkey withdrew their ambassadors and froze relations.
Since then, Cairo and Ankara have been locked in a dispute that has turned into a wider regional struggle over political Islam.
Authorities in Egypt have labeled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, while Turkey has given shelter to hundreds of the group's members and leaders who fled Cairo with the support of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Islamic Justice and Development Party.
The US-EU take a similar stance towards the "Muslim Brotherhood".
The mutual support of Muslim Brotherhood-Erdogan after the earthquakes
However, in Turkey at the present stage, after the earthquakes and in the middle of the pre-election period, it seems that the mutual support and cooperation of the "Muslim Brotherhood" and the Erdoğan regime is at its peak, showing the US, NATO and EU countries, the contempt of the Turkish President towards the West and its entanglement with the Islamists.
"The Muslim Brotherhood sees the earthquake relief funds as a means to promote its ideology in Turkey", reports, among others, International reputable media.
In particular, we recently had visits to the earthquake-affected areas and meetings with high-ranking Turkish officials, representing the "Muslim Brotherhood" (MB), in order for the latter to allocate millions of dollars for their reconstruction, including outside the houses, Islamic center, mosques, schools.
In this way, on the one hand, the (MB) will promote their ideology in the earthquake-prone areas, on the other hand, they will help Erdogan to win his voters again.
Turkish President Erdogan could, until before the earthquakes, count on strong voter support in villages and towns across southeastern Turkey.
However, the slow rescue response combined with the thousands of victims has made this support very uncertain, since there is intense resentment against Erdogan and his cabinet ministers.
The AKP has ruled Turkey with little serious electoral challenge since 2002, party officials said in a statement, while acknowledging anger among their voter base in southeastern Turkey, which they believe will not translate into a negative vote. mainly due to the rapid reconstruction of the area that will take place.
The region voted 65% or more for the AKP and its nationalist ally the MHP in the last election in 2018, and now Turkish citizens say they would vote for someone from the opposition if he had nationalist roots, such as Ankara Mayor Yavas, who will notably be one of Kilinjaroglou's Vice Presidents if he wins.
But the most recent survey by private polling firm ORC Research revealed that Kilicdaroglu is ahead of Erdogan, having received 56.8% of the support of survey participants, while Erdogan received just 43.2%.
For his part, Erdogan has described the May 14 election as crucial not only for Muslims in Turkey, but for Muslims everywhere, while his campaign staff often portrays him as a leader of the entire Ummah who challenges the West and other major forces in the name of Islam.
Erdogan's Islamic dreams
Turkish foreign policy can be characterized with three words, contradictory, contradictory and oversized.
Strange because it has confused the desirable with the realistic. So while it wishes to play the role of a leading power in the region, it lacks the capability and background to achieve this on its own. It thus tries to draw power from other Muslim states, creating for example mercenaries which it uses to its advantage in Libya, Syria, Nagorno Karabakh and even in N. Iraq.
Also, playing the role of the protector of the Palestinians, he tries to rally the Muslim Arab countries, the Turkophile countries of Central Asia and in general the member states of the Islamic conference, against Israel and the West.
Erdogan dreams of a unified Muslim army that would liberate Jerusalem from Israel and revive the Ottoman Empire.
Of course, this belongs to the realm of science fiction, since we are not living in 1100 but in 2021.
After all this, one can easily perceive that Erdogan's Turkey, only theoretically based on the Treaties he had signed in the past, belongs to the West-NATO and is an "ally" with the USA.
