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AL-QAEDA BUILT ITS IDEOLOGICAL DOCTRINE LARGELY IN OPPOSITION to the Muslim Brotherhood's pervasive and once dominant approach to Islam's political revival. For many years, the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to ignore al-Qaeda's challenge and concentrated instead on beefing up its own organizational and ideological alternative to the ruling secular regimes in the Arab world and elsewhere. This pattern changed dramatically after September 11,2001, when it became more difficult for the Brotherhood to disregard al-Qaeda and the two movements began competing more openly for leadership of the overall Islamist movement.
At the core of the dispute between al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood lies a clash between two different conceptions of jihad and its purposes under contemporaiy circumstances. Al-Qaeda projects a global agenda, where every Muslim land-"from Granada to Kashgar," as Ayman al-Zawahiri has put it-needs to be "liberated" from non-Islamic rule. Jihad is conceived of as an individual duty that all Muslims must fulfil by struggling in word and deed against any representative of the "Jews and Crusaders," as well as against "apostate" Muslim governments. The Muslim Brotherhood, by contrast, has for reasons both ideological and tactical tended in recent decades to embrace a more limited conception of jihad combined with missionary activity and organized political struggle. The Brotherhood, for instance, has officially renounced the use of revolutionary^violence to overturn existing Muslim states. Moreover, while the movement has fervently supported armed struggle against non-Islamic forces in places like Iraq, they have also sought to offer an alternative jihadism to alQaeda's sectarianism, and the Brotherhood's Iraqi branch has come in recent years to embrace the U.S.-backed political system of post-Saddam Iraq. Likewise, the Brotherhood-offshoot Hamas, which since 2006 has officially ruled over the Gaza strip, is the first Palestinian militia to consistently limit its activities to the territory of pre1948 Palestine-meaning Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
In recent times, these two Islamist movements came to blows yet again after Hamas seized control of the Gaza strip and, in the process of consolidating its power, subsequently repressed Gaza's al-Qaeda-inspired groups. Nowadays, al-Qaeda's ongoing conflict with Hamas has become one of the main liabilities to al-Qaeda's propaganda and its efforts to establish itself as the leader of the worldwide jihadist movement. The outcome of this now generation-old intra-Islamist...