Talk:History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (1939–1954)

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I have posted an entirely new text for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hassan al Banna articles, as well as several new articles:

This amounts to over 12,000 words of text, and is the result of months of research, discussed in Talk:Muslim_Brotherhood, using reputable scholarly texts found at the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Every paragraph in the main articles is marked with page-number references to the work it is based on.

I am not an expert on this subject, and nothing in these articles is original; I have simply summarised the material in the sources listed. Some of the sources are more favourable to the Muslim Brotherhood; others are more critical. By attempting to represent accurately the accounts given in these sources, I hope to have produced a set of articles that members of the Brotherhood, as well as well-informed critics of the organisation, could see as fair and balanced. However, these articles may well contain errors; if you believe that anything in the text is inaccurate, please correct it, referencing your sources, and leave a note here about the change.

If you are new to this subject, as I was when I began this process, please be aware that a great deal of misinformation can be found on the Internet, and in the press, about the Muslim Brotherhood. In order to keep these articles reliable and neutral, I suggest that, as far as possible, like my humble contributions, all contributions should be based on reputable academic texts by specialists in the field; journalistic sources should only be used for current events, and only if they appear in major national or international news outlets, preferably when the same information is reported by several sources. It is my hope that this policy will enable Wikipedia to be a more reliable source of information about the Muslim Brotherhood than much of what can be found on the Internet.

A few words about my own motivations for doing this: I am not a Muslim, but I respect Islam and I am opposed to imperialism. Although I am certainly not very knowledgeable about Islam, it seems to me that Western misunderstandings about Islam and the Muslim world are contributing to tragic conflicts, and that people need knowledge and understanding of one another in order to live in harmony. I hope that Wikipedia can be a small contribution to that goal, and that people who know more about this subject than I do will improve on this work.

--Beroul 21:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is clearly not NPOV. The author accepts the canard that al-Bannah and the leadership had no idea that a secret society within their organization was committing murder and were powerless to stop it. This hoary lie has been used countless times over the years by Arab politicians and terrorists to deny anything and everything. Arafat, knew nothing of the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, etc. Al-Bannah was a ruthless ruler of his organization and fully capable of ordering people killed. ScottAdler 23:11, 7 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Although Beroul claims that he has made every possible effort "to keep these articles reliable and neutral," he has inexplicably neglected to include a large number of academic authorities that throw a less than positive light on the Muslim Brotherhood, most notably in relationship to their extreme antisemitism and their collaboration with the Nazis before and during World War II. I have entered a paragraph into the article which deals with these matters and cites some of the most recent publications of those authorities, all of them serious and acknowledged experts of high academic standard and published by respected publishers, academic and otherwise. Moreover, and as it happens, there are so many books documenting these matters, and drawing both from Muslim Brotherhood sources, contemporary memoirs and the governmental archives of Nazi Germany, Britain, the United States and others, that it is not necessary merely to refer to "journalistic sources," although some of these are certainly reliable and informative and are written by leading experts. Nevertheless, I have not cited any of these. One more comment: the give-away reference to Beroul's opposition to "imperialism" might be taken to express a clear POV, especially since he does not do justice to the Muslim Brotherhood's own often-expressed and even official goals to establish a world caliphate and to subjugate all peoples under their version of Islam.122.107.224.148 (talk) 06:52, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]