Muslim Brotherhood behind Syrian unrest?

Syrian security forces, many of whom are actually Iranian, have been shooting demonstrators in the streets of cities there. Now Assad's regime claims that the Muslim Brotherhood is behind all the unrest.

Syrian presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban blamed a renowned Sunni Muslim cleric for the unrest in Latakia, saying Qatar-based Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi had incited Latakia's Sunnis to revolt with his sermon in Doha on Friday. Al-Qaradawi, who has millions of followers around the world and is seen as one of most influential voices in Sunni Islam; told his audience that, "Today the train of revolutions arrived at a station that was inevitable it would reach: the station of Syria."

"Syria is like the others — and it is more deserving than others of these revolutions," he said. "When there are those who are killed, know that the revolution has been victorious!"

Shabaan said those words were responsible for the unrest in Latakia.

"There was nothing (in Lattakia) before Qaradawi's sermon on Friday," she told reporters in Damascus. "Qaradawi's words were a clear and honest invitation for sectarian strife."

Egyptian al-Qaradawi is one of the top intellectuals of Islam whose theology is a guiding light of the original Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. He has an immense audience in the Arab world for his al-Jazeera regular broadcasts. Significantly, Qaradawi is Sunni Muslim while Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is Alawite Muslim, a small, mystical sect that is an offshoot of Shia Islam. If there is anything that Sunnis generally and the Brotherhood specifically despise, it's Shiites. So no wonder Qaradawi preached against Assad.

This is not to say that the demonstrators in Syria are all Brotherhood members or newrecruits to the Brotherhood. It is to say that the demonstrations there have a renewed religious, Islamist nature that is not captured by the usual Western drivel of describing them almost exclusively in political terms.