Briefings
The Muslim Brotherhood in flux
As Egypt's vote nears, the largest opposition group has ignored allies' boycott
calls and will run candidates.
Evan Hill Last Modified: 21 Nov 2010 13:43 GMT
Under new leader Mohammed Badie, centre, the Muslim Brotherhood has not shied
from political participation, partnering with other groups under slogans such
as 'Preventing Fraud is a National Duty' [AFP]
Egypt is on the cusp of dramatic change. For the first time in three decades,
the country will soon have a new president, either through election in 2011 -
which would be unprecedented in Egyptian history - or through the death of the
ailing 82-year-old president Hosni Mubarak, an event that has the potential to
set off the most significant civil unrest in the Middle East since the 1979
revolution in Iran.
The Egyptian government reportedly has a detailed plan to shut down the country
if Mubarak dies, including such details as the "mournful Quranic verses" that
will play on state television. The black-clothed and plain-clothed security
forces, well experienced in using their batons to squelch dissent, would be
mobilised en masse.
Still, it is impossible to predict what would happen if, despite Egyptians'
reputation for political lethargy, opposition groups managed to put tens of
thousands of followers into the streets of Cairo to protest what many expect
will be an attempted handover of power to Mubarak's son, Gamal.
The key to any roadblock on the path to such "republarchy" lies with the Muslim
Brotherhood, the world's most influential Islamist movement and far and away
the largest and best-organised counterweight to Mubarak's National Democratic
Party (NDP). Change in Egypt, for better or worse, does not materialise without
the Brothers.
When former International Atomic Energy Agency chief and Nobel Prize winner
Mohamed ElBaradei - the great hope of Egypt's secular leftists - returned home
this year and launched a petition drive to demand the government lift its most
onerous national security laws and reform electoral practices, his National
Association for Change gathered 106,661 signatures in support by early
September. The Muslim Brotherhood came up with more than 650,000.
The Brotherhood has 88 seats in parliament, compared to the 34 politicians
representing all other non-NDP parties.
Protest groups such as the Egyptian Movement for Change, or Kifaya, which
became a Western media darling during the 2005 election, rely on the
Brotherhood to put thousands of supporters into the streets.
Yet with Egypt's November 28 parliamentary elections approaching, the
Brotherhood finds itself in flux.
Long repressed by authorities and still technically outlawed, the group is
coming off a landmark five-year term in which it served as the largest-ever
minority bloc in Egypt's short multi-party political history and the loudest
critic of Mubarak's 30-year authoritarian rule.
But the Brothers have bucked their best allies in the opposition by refusing
calls for an election boycott, which some say is the most effective way to
counter Egypt's gerrymandered electoral system. This, even as the Brotherhood
itself believes it is about to suffer a rigged defeat at the polls that will
reduce its representation in parliament by more than half.
Some Brotherhood members have said publicly that the choice to participate is a
mistake, with others calling it a missed opportunity that reflects the group's
internal strife and indicates the dearth of creative strategic thinkers in the
conservative, 82-year-old organisation.
Others see the practical advantage to be had by holding even a slimmed
parliamentary presence, while the group's leadership insists that their course
is set by broad consensus and does not shift with the political winds.
As the Brotherhood is pulled inexorably toward a post-Mubarak world in which it
figures to be a major player, nobody knows quite where it is headed.
The Brotherhood, five years on
Essam al-Arian, a member of the Brotherhood's cabinet and its unofficial
spokesman, is a wanted man. On a recent night in Cairo, he was juggling calls
from multiple journalists on his mobile phone, dealing with Egyptian television
networks hungry for the group's opinion in the run-up to the election.
Even with many predicting the Brotherhood will win only 20 or 30 seats and be
overtaken by the liberal but regime-friendly Wafd party, Arian said the
Brotherhood is prepared to press forward.
"It is clear to all observers that we are going on [with] our strategy to
participate politically," he told Al Jazeera. "Some people want us to be out of
the seats, but ... we struggle [against] any attempt to exclude us from the
political scene."
The Brotherhood, he said, is satisfied with its performance in parliament over
the past five years, despite the suffocating effect of the NDP's majority hold
on government.
In 2005, with the Bush administration publicly pressuring Mubarak to hold free
and fair elections, the Brotherhood swept into parliament, winning nearly 20
per cent of the 444 seats up for the vote (10 deputies are appointed directly
by Mubarak).
The Brotherhood's 88 victorious politicians officially ran as independents,
since religious political parties are banned in Egypt, but their real
affiliation was well known, and their campaign posters featured the group's
slogan: "Islam is the solution."
Despite the tagline, the Brotherhood operated along straightforward reformist
lines in parliament.
In a 2006 paper, Samer Shehata and Joshua Stacher examined the Brotherhood's
new political life and noted several achievements: mobilising politicians to
oppose the renewal of emergency laws in place since the assassination of Anwar
al-Sadat and vowing to publish the names of those who voted in favour;
protesting and calling for a no-confidence vote against Mahmoud Abu al-Layl,
the justice minister many held responsible for allowing fraud in the 2005 vote;
and raising awareness about and criticising the government's response to the
H5N1 or "bird flu" virus.
Predictably, though, the Brotherhood's practical efforts to actually write,
change or annul laws have been stifled.
"Of course we are now lacking freedom, we are lacking democracy, we are now
suffering a lot from restrictions on the media," Arian said. "The regime is
more old, more rigid, more [of a] dictatorship. All of this is changed
backwards, not forwards."
Still on the scene
Since the election, the regime has cracked down. According to the Brotherhood,
around 600 of its members have been arrested since the announcement in October
that the group would participate in the 2010 vote but challenge only 30 per
cent of the seats.
The government has struck at the Brotherhood's finances as well: in 2007,
Khairat al-Shater and Hassan Malik, two Brotherhood members said to play
prominent roles funding the group, were tried and convicted on money laundering
and terrorism charges in a military court along with 25 other members.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brotherhood
will field only 107 candidates for the upcoming vote, even as parliament has
increased to 508 seats with the addition of 64 spots reserved for women. The
Brotherhood at first put forward 135 candidates - a drop from the 160 they
nominated in 2005 - but government officials disqualified 28.
Some outside observers have speculated that the result of a Brotherhood
internal cabinet election last year signalled a power shift from so-called
"moderates" like Arian, who reportedly favour challenging the regime at the
ballot box, to "conservative" leaders, including current leader Mohammed Badie,
who reportedly want to put more emphasis on the Brotherhood's traditional and
quieter areas of expertise: social work and proselytising.
The December election for the 16-member executive bureau, called the Guide's
Office, saw defeats for leading Brotherhood reformists such as Abdelmonem
Abulfotouh and deputy general guide Mohammed Habib, though Arian retained his
seat. The following month, Badie was elected the new General Guide - the
Brotherhood's top leadership position.
Marc Lynch, an associate professor at George Washington University and an Egypt
watcher, wrote on the Foreign Policy website after the cabinet vote that it
"likely signals both a withdrawal from political engagement and possibly some
serious internal splits".
"Such an internal retreat from democratic engagement has seemed increasingly
likely ... as regime repression and political manipulation slammed the door in
the face of [Brotherhood] efforts to be democrats," he wrote.
But Arian claimed that analysis missed the mark. The Brotherhood remains eager
to use the political arena to promote its Islamist solutions to Egypt's
quagmire, he said.
"That is our duty now, to make the link between the social and economic
problems and the ultimate political reform," he said. "To explain such issues
to the people and to create the link in their minds between poverty,
unemployment, the constitutional crisis and the political situation."
Dissent in the ranks
But Abdelrahman Ayyash, a 21-year-old Brotherhood blogger, said that choosing
to participate in the election this year was a mistake that has created a
schism between the Brotherhood and reform leaders such as ElBaradei and Ayman
Nour, the former presidential candidate for the secular Ghad party who was
imprisoned and reportedly mistreated during the 2005 election.
Ayyash, a computer engineering student who said he sees a role for "liberal
Islamists" in reforming Arab societies, faulted the Brotherhood's new
conservative leadership for trying to "build a bridge" to the regime and said
that reformist voices were being excluded.
"The Muslim Brotherhood now has no strategic point of view, in my opinion," he
said.
Although Badie claimed that a survey of the group's parliament, or Shura
Council, yielded 98 per cent support for participating in the election, Ayyash
pointed to statements made by Hamid Ghazali, a Cairo University professor and
former advisor to previous general guide Mohammed Akef, who said that no more
than 52 per cent of the council agreed.
"The organisation will benefit a little from participating in the election, but
what I'm worried about is the loss of the other parties, or of the other
Egyptian activists or politicians, who will lose a lot," he said. "What we can
make or gain by boycotting the election will be more" than what the Brotherhood
can achieve in parliament.
'The opposition lost an opportunity'
The Brotherhood's decision to run may spring mostly from a simple desire to
ensure its immediate survival, said Michele Dunne, a senior associate at the
Carnegie Endowment and former US government Middle East analyst.
"As a banned organisation that's constantly under the threat of being closed
down ... I think they feel that having deputies in the assembly who have
parliamentary immunity and who have a public platform to criticise any measures
taken against the Brotherhood and who are in the media day in and day out, this
is of some value for them," Dunne said.
Earlier this year, a group of Egypt's secular minority parties, including the
Wafd, socialist Tagammu, liberal Democratic Front, and the nationalist
Nasserists, put together a list of demands that they presented to the
government. They asked for some electoral reforms - "simple stuff," Dunne said
- and threatened a boycott if their demands were not honoured.
"They were stiffed, 100 per cent," she said. The Democratic Front party and
Nour's Ghad party are the only groups that have followed through on boycotts.
But the Democratic Front is a new party and holds no seats in parliament, and
other opposition groups, such as Baradei's National Association for Change and
the April 6 Movement, are not parties and have nothing to lose when they make
passionate calls for boycotts, Dunne said.
Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brookings Institution's branch in
Qatar and a close observer of the Muslim Brotherhood, said he understood the
Brotherhood's rationale but still disagreed with their decision.
"This was the time to boycott," he said. "The opposition really lost an
opportunity."
Hamid, who has written recently about free but "meaningless" elections in the
Arab world, sees little actual progress for opposition groups when regimes find
ways to exclude candidates on technicalities and maintain upper houses of
parliament with veto power over lower houses.
In a mostly overlooked June election for Egypt's upper house, the Shura
Council, which was marred by reported vote-buying, police interference and
violent clashes, the Muslim Brotherhood won no seats, while the NDP won 80 of
88.
Regimes like Egypt's rely on the facade of democratic freedom to appease their
allies and sponsors in the West, Hamid said, and a full opposition boycott
would have undermined this claim.
But the Brotherhood continues to preach patience, looking at their decades of
work and seeing history on their side. "What makes sense for the Brotherhood
might not make sense for the future of Egypt's democracy," Hamid said.
Built for the long haul
If the Brotherhood's behaviour toward Egypt's progressives seems questionable,
it is worth remembering that the group is not really a political party, and
that it has deep roots as a religious and social movement that many join simply
to become better Muslims.
Even Hamid acknowledges that with at least 300,000 dedicated members, a
"massive bureaucracy," and a constituency that is more conservative than its
leadership, the Brotherhood should not be expected to make fast political
adjustments.
"We have solidarity, not individuality," Arian said.
But that might be a problem if rifts in the group become serious, said Andrew
Albertson, the executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy.
"There aren't a lot of high-level leaders who everyone respects," he said. "If
you don't have someone who everyone commonly respects, it's hard to defuse the
tension in a movement like this."
Working in the Brotherhood's favour, however, are its structure and elections
system, which are arguably more democratic than Egypt's own.
As Hamid describes it, each member belongs to a local osra, or family. With
around 10 to 20 other members, they meet every week and share an Islamic
educational curriculum. Fifty families make up a sha'aba, or branch, and 10
branches make up a district. Multiple districts comprise governorates, which do
not necessarily correspond to the 29 that make up the official Egyptian state.
Since 2004, the Brotherhood has held leadership elections at every level of its
organisation, Hamid said.
The Brotherhood's parliament is similarly elected, though there have been
allegations that supposedly secret ballots were compromised when members have
visited others at home to apply pressure to vote a certain way. Egypt's
repressive security situation also means that not every member is able to cast
a vote, as reportedly occurred during the recent Guide's Office election.
Such measures have ensured the Brotherhood's survival, even its flourishing, in
a political environment that is, to say the least, a harsh place for opposition
elements to survive. Around two million Egyptians cast their vote for
Brotherhood candidates in 2005, Arian claimed.
Though Brotherhood candidates are almost assuredly going to fare poorly this
year, and the organisation will probably undergo an internal debate over its
ideology in the post-election shakeout, its participation and the sliver of
representation that will come from it grants the group a continued voice and
legitimacy. It also means they retain a rhetorical right to complain about
electoral procedures.
"Unless someone goes out and participates, it's going to be hard to point out
the flaws in the system," Albertson said.
By contrast, the Brotherhood's political party in Jordan - the Islamic Action
Front (IAF) - chose to sit out this year's parliamentary vote, anticipating -
as Hamid wrote - that even a multi-party, "fair" election for the lower house
would be meaningless and rigged. Hamid supported the boycott, but Albertson
said the IAF will probably regret being unable to participate in parliament.
Boycotting the vote is not likely to affect Jordanians' views of their
government's legitimacy one way or the other, he said.
'Liberal Islamists' in an age of Islamophobia
By holding on to seats in parliament, the Egyptian Brotherhood also knows that
its members will enjoy the general immunity from prosecution granted to elected
officials and will be able to participate in official government meetings with
representatives from the US, even if such contacts are not supposed to include
discussion of Brotherhood-specific issues.
US embassy personnel sometimes meet behind the scenes with Brotherhood members,
and there are no rules that say US diplomats cannot talk to the Brotherhood
when they happen to bump into members at international gatherings, Hamid said.
But whatever discussions the Brotherhood has had with the US do not seem to
have resulted in any payoff with the Obama administration.
In a speech delivered in Cairo in 2009, Obama vowed to support democracy and
the rule of law, calling them "human rights," but his effort on such issues in
Egypt has been tepid. The Bush administration, which eventually walked back
from its vigorous programme of democracy promotion after a Hamas victory in
Palestine, was more outspoken before the 2005 Egyptian election. Many believe
this led to the initial opening that allowed the Brotherhood to gain so many
seats in the first round of voting.
The Brotherhood is constantly insecure about its perception in the West, Hamid
said, fearing that in a post-September 11 age of Islamophobia, it will be
lumped in with al-Qaeda.
"We won't be another Iran," Ayyash insisted, adding that he believes Islamists
will support US national security interests. "The Islamists in general are
trying to find the way between the liberal values of equality and citizenship
and to put them in action, but from the Islamic aspect."
The role of women and members of other religions, especially whether a woman or
a Coptic Christian, for instance, should be allowed to assume an elected
position of power, remains a source of heated debate within the Brotherhood,
Dunne said. The same goes for homosexuality, sexual liberty and drug and
alcohol use. But the Brotherhood has reached general consensus on the principle
that the ultimate authority in Egyptian society should be derived from the
people, not religion, Dunne and others say.
"I believe that moderate Islamists will give the freedom for parties to form
even if these parties are fighting their ideology," Ayyash said. "If the people
say yes to homosexuality, for instance, if I were in power I think that I would
leave power ... and I'll be in the opposition to try to convince people that
this is wrong."
"But," he added, "I think Egyptians at this moment will refuse that because it
is against the Quran."
Obama lays low
Despite such paeans to democracy, the Brotherhood remains officially
unsupported and unprotected by the US.
Though the US state department did issue a statement about the upcoming
parliamentary vote this week, employing the familiar rhetoric of "free and
transparent" elections, Dunne said that the "few things" Obama officials have
tried so far to promote democracy in Egypt "have not been all that successful".
But the administration's comparative caution is an improvement, said Brian
Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Middle East
specialist.
"I don't think the Bush administration was all that smart in trying to advance
its freedom agenda," he said. "I don't think it led to any openings at all, and
in fact it elicited the sort of response that led to a retrenchment."
The Bush model involved sending secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to "scream
from the rooftops," Katulis said. (In 2005, Rice delivered a speech at the
American University in Cairo in which she said that "for 60 years, the United
States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East, and we
achieved neither".)
"What [the Obama administration is] trying to do is be much more effective at
figuring out what would create the space for those reformers who want to push
forward pragmatic change," Katulis said.
In his view, that should mean not picking favourites, whether they might be
ElBaradei or the Muslim Brotherhood.
"We always look for the Nelson Mandela-like figure," he said. "What's more
important than individual leaders is building a system that sustains itself."
By most accounts, Egyptians today are both discouraged and disengaged with
their country's political process. Even if one assumes the government's turnout
numbers are accurate, only around 9 per cent of the total population cast a
vote in the presidential race in 2005. And observers are nearly unanimous in
their belief that democratic evolution will not proceed in Egypt without the
Brotherhood.
"There was a certain group that we saw had a dominant voice under the Bush
administration - neoconservatives who felt that you could have democracy
without Islamists," Katulis said. "I think those people haven't spent much time
on the ground in places like Egypt."
To deny the Muslim Brotherhood a strong role in government, as Mubarak seems
intent on doing, means a huge swath of Egyptian society remains voiceless.
"It's hard to imagine a process of democratisation in Egypt that does not
involve the pious middle class, which the Muslim Brotherhood so ably
represents," Albertson said.
Obama should engage directly with the Brotherhood, said Hamid, adding that he
believes Gamal Mubarak would be even more hostile to them.
"Liberals and leftists unfortunately can't bring people to the streets in the
Arab world," Hamid said. Islamists have the benefit of an existing
infrastructure for disseminating their message - the mosque - and political
discourse in the region has historically circled around Islam, because "this is
the language that people have".
Or in Ayyash's words: "The Arab people are very emotional and a very religious
people, and they are more affected by the speech of the moderate Islamists than
the regimes."
Source:
Al Jazeera
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