How Frightening Is the Muslim Brotherhood?

How Frightening Is the Muslim Brotherhood?

Feisal G. Mohamed: How Frightening Is the Muslim Brotherhood?

Just how frightening is Egypt?s Muslim Brotherhood? Hard to tell, at this point. I worried about them at the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution, before the full extent of the secular democratic movement was clear, and even made the comparison to the Iranian Revolution that has become a shibboleth of half-knowing opinion. It does seem overly fearful now to expect the Brotherhood to produce its own Ayatollah. But when I hear John Kerry sound unconcerned on his recent visit to Egypt about the group?s growing political influence, I wonder if he is not being fearful enough.

Unfolding events in Egypt have been complicated. It is clear first of all that the April 6 and January 25 youth organizations are formidable and are committed to human rights, in which they are joined by remnants of Egypt?s center and left political parties. It is also clear that the nation?s judiciary has retained some independence after a half century of authoritarian government, coming to the fore of efforts to reform the constitution and to bring Mubarak?s inner circle to justice. And all of the parties of reform seem to be willing to work with certain elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, partly as a concession to the reality of its influence and partly out of common concern over the corruption of the ruling elite and the crushing poverty that a majority of citizens endure.

One challenge in mapping Egypt?s new political landscape is determining how united the Brotherhood remains in the wake of the revolution. News agencies in the West, such as the New York Times and Reuters, tend to speak of the Brotherhood as a single entity. The pages of Egypt?s independent daily, al-Masry al-Youm, suggest otherwise. Now that government repression has lifted, so too has the group?s sense of common cause and identity, and its ideological divisions are pleasingly breaking it apart into more manageable pieces. Older and more conservative leaders have been rather too eager to play along with the now-ruling military council, leading to suspicions of a secret agreement between the two. And the military council has shown that it values stability more than reform: it has tried violently to repress lingering protests in Tahrir Square (using the basement of the adjacent national museum for detention and torture, by some reports) and has recently outlawed protests and strikes altogether?though in one encouraging sign, it has pledged to lift the emergency law before parliamentary elections in the fall.

The Brotherhood?s conservative leadership broke ranks with the various parties of reform in strongly urging a ?yes? vote in the recent constitutional referendum, on which Todd Gitlin reported, showing along the way some ugly if effective organizational talents. Brotherhood leaflets declared a ?yes? vote to be a religious duty, clerics sympathetic to the group promoted a ?yes? vote at Friday prayers, sacks of sugar and other staples were used to buy votes, and groups of Brothers made themselves an intimidating presence at polling stations. This old guard has declared that it will run in coming elections as the ?Freedom and Justice Party?; we should always be skeptical of political parties cloaking themselves in lofty abstract absolutes. But among the most religiously conservative elements in Egyptian society, they will have to compete with Salafis and the likes of the Gama?a al-Islamiya, outfits that make the Brotherhood seem as menacing a fundamentalist organization as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Salafis have recently taken to attacking Sufi mosques in Alexandria that have shrines to the dead and have declared democracy to be antithetical to Islam. Breaking from the Brotherhood after it renounced violence, and long suspected of involvement in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, the Gama?a al-Islamiya has declared its intention to form a political party and promotes the establishment of a religious police force; since the fall of Mubarak, three thousand members of this and like-minded groups are thought to be seeking a return to Egypt from exile abroad.

The conservative old guard also faces challenges from moderates spurning the Freedom and Justice Party who have been alarmed by the leadership?s complicity with the military council?s suppression of dissent. Especially galling was a statement made by Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie that no member of the Brotherhood would be permitted to join a political party other than the Freedom and Justice Party, which foreclosed what many Brothers deemed to be a question requiring ongoing dialogue: the new relationship between the group?s religious and political missions.

Such resentment has led to the defection of high-profile moderates aligning themselves with the youth branch of the Brotherhood. A new, and already officially recognized, party called Al Wassat has stated a commitment to equal rights for Muslims and non-Muslims. Ibrahim al-Zafaarani, a former member of the Brotherhood?s Legislative Council and husband of the Brotherhood?s first female political candidate, Jihan al-Halafawi, officially resigned from the Brotherhood last week. He has declared that he will either join Al Wassat or form a new party with his twenty-two-year-old son Gafar, to be called the Nahda, or ?Renaissance.? He has stated a commitment to a liberal Islamism grounded in certain ?principles of citizenship? and rejected outright the Brotherhood?s declaration that Copts and women should not be eligible to serve as president of Egypt. Also resigning last week was Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a leader popular among the Brotherhood Youth, who are more sympathetic to the principles of the revolution and who, in the face of objections from the Brotherhood leadership, held an independent meeting on March 26 producing a communiqué urging open political discussion. The conference criticized the formation of a single Brotherhood political party and advocated separation of the group?s religious and political roles. Such elements are much more committed to rebuilding Egypt?s leftist political parties and may in fact join those parties in producing a single progressive candidate list. They point to Turkey?s Justice and Development Party as a model of liberal Islamism, recognize the need to address such issues as poverty and corruption, and show no desire to transform the cultural heart of the Arab world into a fundamentalist caliphate.

As Gilles Kepel recently observed, we can no longer speak of a single Brotherhood, and the political success of the various political parties arising from the movement will be determined in the long run by their ability to offer solutions to Egypt?s social and economic challenges. The platitude ?Islam is the solution? will not long persuade those waiting in line for bread. Speaking with more optimism on political Islam than many of us can muster, former Brotherhood member and now leader of the Reform Front Ibrahim El Houdaiby has said that such divisions will create ?more sophisticated forms of Islamism.? That may be true, but the experiments along the way could be more than a little unkind to women and to religious minorities like Coptic Christians. What seems most certain is that the time in which we live demands that the world come to a more sophisticated understanding of political Islam: neither a paranoid fear that every long beard hides a Khomeini or a bin Laden, nor an unthinking relativism deeming any party garnering votes to be legitimate.

This comes close to Alan Johnson?s argument in his recent exchange with Michael Walzer that the Left must ?do? theology?a point already implicit, I would argue, in Walzer?s 2006 book Politics and Passion?though only when that theology promises to explode the anti-humane inequalities of neoliberalism. (As an aside, I would dispute Walzer?s reading of England?s seventeenth-century history in that exchange: Cromwell was relatively conservative in his religion and politics; the most religiously radical elements of that moment were also the most democratic and socially progressive ones. We should recall such groups as the Levellers, who advocated legal reform and broad male suffrage, and whose leader John Lilburne was imprisoned by Cromwell; and the Diggers, whose charismatic leader Gerrard Winstanley anticipated Marx in describing moveable capital as Satanic and who founded a farming commune on the commons of St. George?s Hill in Surrey.)

Those of us who wish very much to see Egypt become a pacific democracy committed to human rights will continue to have real fears about the Muslim Brotherhood. But its fractures make it slightly less worrisome and may yet produce political parties much more socially progressive than the sweepings of Mubarak?s deeply corrupt National Democratic Party, a heap of detritus presently gathering itself to stuff parliament once more.