Campus Watch Fellow Andrew Harrod reports that Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, typically a bastion of pro-Islamist, anti-Western views, recently hosted Muslim Brotherhood (MB) researcher and critic Mohamed-Ali Adraoui. Adraoui’s presentation focused on the historical challenge faced by secular-minded American policymakers when encountering Islamist groups like Egypt’s MB.
Harrod’s report appears today at the Algemeiner:
Islamism is “extremely interesting” for Adraoui, because for “years this issue was almost inexistent [sic]” in American policy concerns. The first State Department report on the MB appeared in 1944 in response to an MB letter to the American embassy in Cairo urging American opposition to colonialism and Zionism in the Middle East. The report misidentified the MB’s founding year as 1938, not 1928, and the letter, written in Arabic, prompted the embassy to hire its first Arabic-speaker.
