Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Remains a Force

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Muslim Brotherhood is a religious and political group founded on the belief that Islam is not simply a religion, but a way of life. 

It advocates a move away from secularism, and a return to the rules of the Qur’an as a basis for healthy families, communities, and states.

 

The movement officially rejects the use of violent means to secure its goals. However, offshoots of the group have been linked to attacks in the past, and critics blame the Brotherhood for sparking troubles elsewhere in the Middle East. 

Many consider it the forerunner of modern militant Islamism.

The tightly organized Brotherhood has maintained multiple roles, acting as a political party seeking electoral gains and as a charity organization promoting welfare programs and religious education.

 

It was formed in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. He and his followers were initially united by a desire to oust the British from control in Egypt, and to rid their country of what they saw as “corrupting” Western influences.

Banna himself was assassinated, and the movement went underground in the 1950s. Decades of oppression by successive Egyptian rulers, including Gamel Abdel Nasser, led many of the Brotherhood’s members to flee abroad, while others were jailed.

When Anwar al-Sadat came to power, following the death of Nasser in1970, he fired dozens of powerful Nasserist generals, and then agreed on a deal whereby the imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood members would be released and allowed to practice politics, in exchange for not publicly criticizing Sadat. 

Under President Hosni Mubarak’s repressive regime, which followed Sadat’s assassination in 1981, the Brotherhood continued to gain strength in opposition. 

In October 2007, it issued a detailed political platform. Amongst other things it demanded that a board of Muslim clerics oversee the government, and it also wanted to limit the office of the presidency to Muslim men.

While it called for “equality between men and women in terms of their human dignity,” the document warned against “burdening women with duties against their nature or role in the family.”

 

Until 2011, the Brotherhood was illegal under Egyptian law, as the state banned groups based on religion. But following the overthrow of President Mubarak in February 2011, the Brotherhood-led Freedom and Justice Party won about half of the parliamentary seats in parliamentary elections that took place later that year.

The group initially said it would not put forward a candidate for president, but eventually Mohammad Morsi ran and in June 2012, became Egypt’s first democratically-elected president.

However, Morsi was deposed by the military after mass protests in July 2013 and a crackdown ensued. Hundreds of members were killed, and many more, including Morsi and most of the Brotherhood’s leadership, were imprisoned. 

In September 2013, an Egyptian court banned the Brotherhood and its associations. Three months later the military-backed interim government declared the movement a terrorist group. 

So Morsi’s election as president was the high point of their power. But they had prepared well for it, according to Raymond Stock, who teaches Arabic at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

He lived in Cairo between 1990 and 2010 and has translated seven books by Egyptian Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

Stock, who was deported from Egypt by the Mubarak regime in December 2010 due to an article he published in Foreign Policy criticizing the government, told Coptic Solidarity’s ninth annual conference, held in Washington June 21-22, that the 2011 “Arab Spring” that overthrew President Mubarak has been misread. 

While it was begun by liberal Egyptians using social media, he explained, it was the Muslim Brotherhood, through their mosques, who mobilized the thousands of people, congregating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, who eventually made it a success.

After a few days, asserted Stock, “they completely owned the movement.” This is certainly a viewpoint that has rarely appeared in the mainstream media.