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Middle East Quarterly: Raymond Ibrahim Reviews Beth Baron’s The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood

Apr 2, 2015 7:42 am By Raymond Ibrahim

hasan-al-bannaIn 1933, Turkiya Hassan, an orphaned Egyptian, Muslim girl, was beaten by a matron at a Swedish missionary school. School authorities later contended that the “rude and aggressive” 15-year-old was ordered “into a room for private chastisement” at which time the girl “showed fight and seized the cane” from the matron who soon “regained mastery of the situation and … considerably roused, hit the girl with the stick where she could.” The girl, however, claimed that she was beaten for refusing to convert to Christianity—a story sensationalized by a nascent Muslim Brotherhood in order to foment anger and distrust for missionaries in Egypt while aggrandizing itself as a substitute.

Baron of City College of New York takes this minor incident and magnifies it in such a way as to portray the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood as a complete byproduct of aggressive missionary schools in Egypt. The problem is that the evidence she marshals for this claim is flimsy at best.

The book suffers from three main flaws. The first is myopia: If the incident is such a cause célèbre for the rise of the Ikhwan, why do modern Islamists, who habitually claim historic grievances against the West, never mention it? (Though they likely will now with the publication of this book.) One searches the Arabic-language Internet in vain for “Turkiya Hassan.”

Second, Baron is guilty of indulging in anachronistic moralizing.  Emotive language proliferates about the whipping of the “rude and aggressive” teenage girl—in a nation and in an era where such disciplining was the norm—as a traumatizing event for Egypt…. Keep reading

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Filed Under: academia, Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood, Useful idiots Tagged With: Ruth Baron, Turkiya Hassan


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Comments

  1. Max Publius says

    Apr 2, 2015 at 8:21 am

    Wow, what a fiend Beth Baron must be to pen this book. While the event itself is interesting and worth an article, given the Islamic terrorist-drenched times we live in and the obvious mischaracterization by Baron of the event in question, to slant it pro-Muslim Brotherhood and demonize the missionaries is truly the work of a disgusting person.

    Outside the fact that Christianity isn’t by nature a “forced” religion in the way that Islam most certainly is, the idea that Swedes were forcing religion on anyone in the 1930’s is laughable. They were already overwhelmingly a secular socialist society by then.

  2. Baucent says

    Apr 2, 2015 at 9:01 am

    Never heard of this author and I won’t be reading her book. But based on the review it seems like she is making a mountain out of a molehill with regards the disciplining of one girl, whatever the rights or wrongs were.

    She would be better served by studying the fascination the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood had with the Fascist parties of 1930’s Europe.

  3. Max Publius says

    Apr 2, 2015 at 9:06 am

    This event reminds me of Kristallnacht, where the Nazis used the assassination of a Nazi official by an impoverished Jewish kid as the pretext to attack Jewish businesses all over Germany. So we have the Muslim Brotherhood, founded several years before, use a minor “caning” as pretext to promote Islamic supremacism against easy targets such as foreign missionaries.

    Bet Baron never thought of it in those terms. She should have, but then she probably wouldn’t be a professor at the once proud but now notoriously bigoted and intellectually bankrupt City College of NY.

    • Dr John says

      Apr 2, 2015 at 9:37 am

      The Enemy Within.

      No Muslim Brotherhood.
      No Sharia.
      No Jihad.
      No Islam
      No Surrender.

      • Omar Beddali says

        Apr 2, 2015 at 1:50 pm

        Surrender ? We are not at this level yet!

  4. sheik yer'mami says

    Apr 2, 2015 at 9:25 am

    The dumbest thing a dhimmi media can ever do is to manufacture and deliver the excuses for the jihad. Our worst enemy is among us.

  5. mortimer says

    Apr 2, 2015 at 10:03 am

    A Muslim hitting or even killing a Muslim girl would still today cause little or no outrage, but a dirty kafir hitting a Muslim girl would be an outrage to Muslims, because their ethics are dualistic.

    The Muslim Brotherhood was the political application of Wahhabism and no amount of fiddling with ancient news stories will change that. The MB is the rediscovery of foundational Islam combined with the inspiring political organization of Italian and German fascism…Islamo-fascism.

  6. gravenimage says

    Apr 2, 2015 at 12:15 pm

    Middle East Quarterly: Raymond Ibrahim Reviews Beth Baron’s The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood
    …………………………

    This is just ridiculous. I am no fan of corporal punishment, but it was pretty much the norm eighty years ago. And the idea that Christians are—or were—*more* apt to beat children is absolute crap.

    The fact is that beating girls—and wives—is absolutely codified in Islam. This is not true at all of Christianity.

    And the reason that there *were* Christian-run schools for orphans in Egypt—including for girls—shows that it was Christians who were tending to these abandoned children, *not* Muslims. This is still very often the case.

    As for the charge of attempted forced conversion—this seems unlikely. Christians regularly taught Muslim children in these schools, and while they welcomed converts, it clearly was not a requirement for them to receive car and an education.

    And the idea that it was this minor incident that led to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, nothing could be more absurd.

    The fact is that the Muslim Brotherhood was founded right after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, with the express purpose of reestablishing the Caliphate.

    I have heard a great deal of rhetoric from the Muslim Brotherhood over the past ten years—I have never once heard mention of this incident. In fact, the few references I can find now to Turkiya Hassan all refer to Baron’s book. This would hardly be the case if her caning was a huge rallying cry for the Muslim Brotherhood. This is just ludicrous.

    So—what is Beth Baron’s agenda here?

    This, from a year ago:

    “Baron had a mission to deconstruct the Western view of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.”

    “Baron believes the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization, and the British and Americans should be looking at their connections with it.”

    http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/13644

    Note—she isn’t saying that they didn’t start out as a terrorist organization, but that they are *not one now*—and moreover that it is our fault that they exist at all.

    Just more blatant whitewash of Islam, which is so common in what passes for academia these days.

    • Kepha says

      Apr 2, 2015 at 8:29 pm

      The great Leftist excuse industry strikes again.

      Back when I was young, it was said that a young Vietnamese pastry cook working in New York was so traumatized by American racism that he grew up to be the Communist Ho Chi Minh–a man whose own countrymen habitually refer to Degar mountain people of the Central Highlands as “Moi” (“Savages”), and who had no compunction of drastically reducing the numbers of such people following the Communist victory in 1975. I’ll add as well that the treatment the “liberated” Vietnamese meted out to the children of black American servicemen and grandchildren of Senegalese strongly suggests that Uncle Ho’s revulsion towards American racism didn’t trickle down to the common people of his own country.

      My own guess about the motivations of people like Hassan al-Banana and Seiyyid Ququtb is that they were downright livid at seeing “the best of peoples” being dictated to by the “Franks” (who were supposedly “Christians” at that).

      Your point about Bana’s interest in European fascism (and the openly fascist model followed by the Ba’ath) is a very important one. That Western Leftists such as Baron refuse to see it is just one more reason why I think that the Western Left is in fact nihilist.

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