The Rotary Club and its surprising enemies…

For reasons too complex (or too dull) to explain here I found myself recently at a Rotary Club do. It was…well, what it was. A gathering of generally late middle aged, reasonably well intentioned well-to-do people who seem to enjoy chains of office perhaps a tad too much and a generate a curious mix of charity work about a range of issues with somewhat overlong speeches. I have no intention of joining. Ever (indeed a number of us who happened to be there as guests commented that badges along the lines of “Please do not invite us to join as a refusal may offend” might have been useful).

But be that as it may, and I’m not rushing to go to another such event anytime soon, there is one group of people who have a profound enmity towards the Rotary Club. And that would be….

Why none other than Islamists… As a piece in Slate magazine by Jonathan Schwarz noted:

Muslim fundamentalists aren’t shy about naming their enemies. They’ve identified Zionists and secularists as particular foes of Islam; picked out apostates, Americans, and Jews for scorn; disparaged “crusaders” and imperialists; and even—like conspiracists everywhere—warned against the Freemasons.

But Islamists have selected one enemy that’s entirely baffling: Rotary clubs.

For instance, this appears in Article 17 of the Hamas charter:

Therefore, you can see [the enemies] making consistent efforts by way of publicity and movies, curriculi of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like. All of them are nests of saboteurs and sabotage. (emphasis added)

Woah there guys. Now I’m not saying it didn’t put a dent in my weekend, but… ‘nests of saboteurs and sabotage’?

It doesn’t end there:

In 2000, British police discovered an al-Qaida manual titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants” in the home of a Bin Laden disciple. Its introduction learnedly explains:

After the fall of our orthodox caliphates on March 3, 1924. … Colonialism and its followers, the apostate rulers, then started to openly erect crusader centers, societies, and organizations like Masonic Lodges, Lions and Rotary Clubs. (emphasis added)

It must be admitted that wine and beer were available, and the proceedings started with a somewhat pro forma grace, but I didn’t see much of a ‘crusader’ complexion to the proceedings. Indeed the Middle East and Islam weren’t mentioned once. Nah, the focus of attention is Africa.

And the article picks up on the seemingly disproportionate concentration on what is essentially a rather mundane organisation:

For Americans, of course, this seems slightly comic. Rotary clubs? Aren’t they like the Elks, except less edgy? But the roots of the peculiar Islamist fixation on Rotary clubs are deep in the tangled history of Western influence in the Middle East. Our story begins with the formation of the first Rotary club in Chicago in 1905. Originally conceived as a social club for its four founding businessmen, the club soon expanded and became focused on community service. One of its initial projects was the construction of Chicago’s first public bathroom. The name came from the club’s practice of rotating meetings among members’ workplaces.

Now, let’s get this straight. The fact the founders were business people indicates why this is no hotbed of social revolution. Placid, charity oriented, speechifying, mind-bogglingly slow moving. Yes, all these, and… no overt ideological agenda, other perhaps than a validation of presently existing capitalism which remains unstated. Which is sort of tooth-grinding in the way that one wants to get away as soon as humanly possible… but one wishes to be polite so the grinding continues on the qt.

It is an assumed link with the Freemasons which is, perhaps inevitably, the Rotarians undoing. Simply put many suppose that it was an off-shoot of them. But, it wasn’t. Nothing so exciting in fact, although it led to the Rotary Clubs being essentially off-limits to the Catholic Church, as the following makes clear.

Similar views on masonry were held (in less virulent forms) by conservative elements of the Catholic Church. And as Rotary clubs spread, the church lumped them with the Masons. In 1928 several Spanish bishops declared that Rotary was “nothing else but a new satanic organization with the same background and teachings of masonry” and deemed it “a suspected organization” that “should be considered as execrable and perverse.” Soon afterward the Vatican decreed that Catholic priests could not join Rotary clubs.

This chill lasted for a surprisingly long time. Dan Mooers, former chairman of Rotary International’s Executive Committee, recalls Rotary being denounced from the pulpit as late as 1970. The relationship between Rotary and the church began to warm in 1979, when Pope John Paul II publicly endorsed Rotary’s humanitarian projects.

Still, the saying of grace might be a small clue that I wasn’t surrounded by the advance guard of secularism.

And as the Slate piece notes:

But what does this have to do with Islamic fundamentalism? The answer seems to be conspiracy gridlock: For years fundamentalist Islam has borrowed wholesale from European conspiracist cosmology. Ever since Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first translated into Arabic, it’s provided a handy explanation—Masons and all—for the Western menace to the Islamic community. (In Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr’s paper Al Hawza published a picture of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and explained that their hand gestures were a sign of the Zionist-Masonic conspiracy.) And, like the Catholic Church, Islamists lumped Rotarians in with the Masons and called both anathema.

But, unfortunately for the Rotarians,Freemasonry was involved in the colonialist waves across the Middle East, and supported that agenda quite explicitly.

Berkeley’s Hamid Algar, one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of Islamic history, explains that Freemasonry:

has generally functioned since its first appearance in the Muslim world in the late eighteenth century as a channel for the promotion of Western dominance, politically and ideologically; one Istanbul lodge in the mid-nineteenth century had the British ambassador as its grand master and the Ottoman chief vizier as one of his initiates. Visiting dignitaries from Iran and the Ottoman Empire would regularly be initiated by their hosts on their visits to London and Paris.

And, as is the way with such things this has led to an elision between the Masons (bad) and the Rotarians (not quite as bad, if you like that kind of thing, I suppose) amongst Islamists keen to remove any Western influence. And it’s not as if they weren’t speaking from experience. As Slate notes:

(A final bizarre and ironic twist is that the intellectual grandfather of today’s pan-Islamic fundamentalism is 19th-century thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Afghani’s figurative heirs would eventually found the Muslim Brotherhood. When Afghani lived in Egypt during 1870s, he was a Mason.)

And this has led to Rotary being simply not visible in many many parts of the Middle East, although in others it’s doing okay. I’m not entirely surprised by the latter. Commerce is central to the socio-political culture there (as indeed it is here) so one might expect that…

At the same time, Rotary is quietly thriving in parts of the Islamic world. There are about 100 chapters in Indonesia, more than 80 chapters in Turkey, 70 in Egypt, 20 in Lebanon, and even one in Dubai. Indeed, in some quarters Rotary is perceived just as it is here. As one youthful Cairo blogger reports: “They seem nice enough, but kind of boring.”

Too true, all too true… But they might well wish they had rather less boring enemies…