The longevity of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps the most successful high-wire act in a region all too familiar with lethal missteps. Founded eight decades ago in response to a Western imperial thrust across the Middle East, the worldwide Islamist group remains the most popular and viable political movement in the Arab world - despite government crackdowns, diplomatic isolation, and internal schisms. For pious Muslims, the Brotherhood – Ikhwan in Arabic – is an enclave of orthodox mores. Among the impoverished and disenfranchised of all faiths, it is a patronage system that delivers where state institutions have failed. For Syria, Egypt, Israel, and Israel’s allies in the US government, it is a lurking threat to be subdued or destroyed.
Often swept up by events beyond their control, Brotherhood members have endured long stretches of persecution and exile followed by interludes of political triumph. Despite attempts by its detractors and pro-Israel groups in Washington to tag it as a terrorist movement, established experts like Diaa Rashwan of Cairo’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies say the Brotherhood’s embrace of peaceful change is sincere. The Muslim Brotherhood, like Hamas, its loosely-affiliated chapter in Palestine, opposes Israel and the 1978 Camp David Peace accords, which earns it enmity and isolation from Washington. Indeed, members of Congress and the White House have all but ignored Cairo’s abysmal human rights record precisely because they regard Mubarak as a bulwark against the prospect of a Brotherhood-led, Islamist-controlled Egypt.
As a political group, the Muslim Brotherhood is officially banned but its members are allowed to campaign as independents. Just three years ago, the Ikhwan emerged from national elections in Egypt with 88 seats in Parliament, or about twenty percent of the legislature. Its success was followed by similar electoral victories by its subsidiaries from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. In April 2007, a leading US legislator met with a senior Brotherhood member at the home of the US ambassador to Cairo, which was interpreted as a sign that Washington was conceding Ikhwan’s centrality to the Arab world. However, the meeting yielded little in the way of a sustained dialogue, and it is unlikely US President Barack Obama will authorize a warming of ties with the group.
A battle for the very soul of the Ikhwan is raging within its ranks, triggered in part by a peaceful but pivotal leadership succession in Cairo at a time when the group is struggling to survive a war waged against them with US complicity by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. Geopolitical factors, meanwhile, are roiling the group’s affiliates in Jordan and Syria even as political Islam in general is on the defensive throughout much of the Middle East.
With much of the region in play – Obama’s speech in Cairo earlier this year only intensified events convulsing the region – the Ikhwan in Egypt finds itself at another of its many inflection points. Its Supreme Guide, the 80-year old Mohammed Mahdi Akef, has announced he will not seek a second term when his current one expires in January 2010, opening up the Brotherhood leadership to a younger generation of members and setting the stage for a floor fight over the movement’s future course. Meanwhile, Egypt is preparing for national elections in Fall 2010, which may or may not install Gamal Mubarak as scion to his father’s rule, a filial transition the Ikhwan has said it would oppose – at least until recently.
The Society of the Muslim Brothers, as it is formally known in English, has been a fixed, if at times shadowy coordinate in a region molten with change. It was founded in 1928 by Hasan Al Banna, the eldest of five sons who from an early age was devoutly Sufic and heavily involved in religious orders. After graduating from college he accepted a teacher’s position with the state school system in Isma’iliyya, a city near the British-controlled Canal Zone. One day, so the story goes, Al Banna’s students insisted he lead them on a journey to restore Arab dignity after years of foreign domination. Deeply moved, Al Banna accepted the challenge and announced they were all “brothers in the service of Islam.” The name stuck.
Al Banna’s was a lay revolution that challenged the entrenched religious and bourgeois elites. Farid Abdel Khalek, an Ikhwan charter member, first heard Al Banna speak at a religious event in 1942. “He spoke not of theory but of real life,” said the 93-year-old Abdel Khalek in a 2006 interview. “He spoke of Islam as a civilization, how the umma had been suffering from imperialism and occupation and backwardness since the end of the caliphate. He was talking to me. There was a connection between us.”
The Ikhwan allied briefly with Gamal Abdel Nasser in his revolution against the British-supported monarchy and attacked him afterward for his refusal to hold elections. In 1964, the radical intellectual Sayyid Qutb led a splinter group of Ikhwan members in a failed coup against Nasser. Qutb was arrested and executed and in the crackdown that followed mainstream Ikhwan leaders emigrated. Those emigrants were expected to internationalize the movement.
Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser after his death in 1970, revived the Ikhwan as a counter-weight to the growing leftist movement of the 1970s, just as the US government had used the Islamists to challenge Nasser’s socialist-leaning Arab Nationalism a generation earlier. Under Sadat, and increasingly under Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood recast itself as a civic-minded proponent of peaceful change. It now operates a broadly based network of social services and charitable work that doubles as a formidable political machine. So entrenched is the Ikhwan in the life of average Egyptians that so-called Ikhwan representatives of Egypt’s organizations of civil society routinely lobby US legislators to soften their resistance to the group. But Congress has so far refused, preferring a civil Egypt to a religious one.
In 2005, in response to US President George Bush’s campaign for a democratic Middle East, Egyptians were allowed a shaft of political freedom. Elections were held and activists like Ayman Nour of the Al Ghad Party received enthusiastic support from Washington. But it was not secular groups that posted the biggest gains in the December polling but the Ikhwan, which won a quarter of the seats in parliament. Its triumph was followed two months later by Hamas’s election victory in Palestine.
Bush’s romance with representative government in the Arab world ended when the Egyptian government fought the Ikhwan fiercely. Hundreds of Ikhwan members have been imprisoned and only a handful of those who filed to contest municipal elections in 2007 were allowed to campaign. In a move clearly aimed at the Brotherhood, parliament in 2007 passed a constitutional amendment that effectively prohibits members of religious parties from vying for legislative seats.
Internal divisions within the Ikhwan are evident. Last year, it leaked the contents of a draft political platform that, among other things, would establish a religious council with veto power over parliament and ban women and non-Muslims from running for president. The draft outraged many Egyptians who, though religious, still cling to the country’s tradition of multiculturalism and tolerance, however faded it may be. Brotherhood leaders were obliged to emphasize the document was just a draft and liable to be amended.
The looming departure of Akef, who cultivated the Ikhwan’s more activist role in Egyptian politics and civic affairs, has fuelled talk about where the group goes from here. In a June interview, the octogenarian leader dismissed as “idle talk” rumours that the group was fracturing between conservatives and reformers, or between those who would withdraw from political activity or intensify it. He told The Majalla whatever dissent that is expressed among the members is respectful and healthy so long as it “is not in contradiction with the laws of Islam.”
Yet as the succession enters its critical final phase, analysts are watching closely for any sign of friction among Ikhwan leaders. In April, when Mohammad Habib, Akef’s number 2 and a possible successor, was quoted as saying the Brotherhood would not confront the regime “single handedly,” it was interpreted as a concession to Gamal as he positions himself for his father’s job. Habib’s “semi-cordial” language, as it was described in the press, fuelled speculation about what the Ikhwan might expect in return. Some analysts suggested the moderate Habib may have been angling for a security guarantee, assuming the group remains active politically. Hardliners in the group, however, reacted against Habib’s remarks as the language of betrayal, while others are arguing for a return to the Ikhwan’s core mission of religious education and indoctrination.
In his interview with Majalla, Akef suggested his successor would most likely be Egyptian, though the group’s bylaws allow for a non-Egyptian to serve as Supreme Guide. Either way, recent events illustrate how difficult it may be for the next Supreme Guide to reconcile the various conflicts that divide the Ikhwan movement. In August, a power struggle erupted within the Brotherhood’s Jordanian chapter, known as the Islamic Action Front, when its pro-Jordanian members demanded pro-Hamas ethnic Palestinians in the group relinquish their duel-membership in both the IAF and Hamas. Last month, it was reported that the Ikhwan’s Syrian wing, exiled from the country since its revolt against the government was violently crushed in 1982, is in reconciliation talks with Damascus. According to an Italian news agency, Islamists from Jordan and Turkey are mediating a channel that could end with the restoration of the Syrian Ikhwan, or at least some of its leading cadres, in return for its commitment to embrace a moderate form of Islamism. For its part, the fiercely secular ruling Baath Party is reportedly drafting legislation that would revoke Law no. 49, which allows for the death penalty to be imposed on Ikhwan members.
The spread of radical Islamist groups in Syria has become a growing concern for President Bashar al Assad and renewed ties with the Ikhwan might provide him with a powerful ally. It could be a mitigating factor, however, in Washington’s efforts to cajole Damascus back to the bargaining table as part of a regional peace deal with Israel. If nothing else, Bashar’s wooing of the Muslim Brotherhood after nearly three decades of estrangement is a measure of how indispensable the Ikhwan has become.
Nevertheless, it is hard to blame those Brotherhood members who want to turn away from politics and return to the mosque. Having peacefully and fairly engaged Egyptian politics with great success three years ago, it has little to show for it except for government reprisals that are passively endorsed by the United States. Though the Muslim Brotherhood is not on the US list of terrorist groups, Washington has on occasion treated its members as such. In October 2006, Kemel Helbawy, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a founding member of the Muslim Association of Britain, was removed from an airplane bound from London, where he is based, to New York, where he was to lead a conference on the Ikhwan and Islamism. Helbawy was informed by an official of the US Department of Homeland Security that he was prohibited from entering the United States because he did not have a visa – despite the fact that British citizens like the 80-year-old Helbawy are not required to apply for visas to travel to the US.
Less than a year later, there was a sign of a thaw in relations between Washington and the Ikhwan. In April 2007, senior US legislator Steny Hoyer, then the leader of the Democratic minority in Congress, met a prominent Brotherhood parliamentarian at the residence of the US ambassador in Cairo. The meeting, which was cleared by the State Department, represented the most senior-level contact between the Ikhwan and the US government since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Hoyer downplayed the significance of the meeting when asked about it by Newsweek and the Bush administration declined to build on the encounter, a measure of how radioactive are even moderate Islamist groups in Washington. Despite his historic speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, there is no sign the Obama administration is prepared to open a channel to the Ikhwan anytime soon. Obama is overwhelmed with opposition to its health care bill, the economy remains fragile and his efforts to jump-start the failed Middle East peace process is bogged down by recalcitrance on both sides.
This is regrettable, according to a fraternity of experts in Washington who know the Arab world well, to say nothing of Egyptian dissidents and opposition leaders. “I’ve always thought it was a mistake that we don’t meet with the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Michelle Dunne, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and a former Middle East specialist at the State Department and the White House. “It’s not a terrorist group and it should be enfranchised. Reaching out is difficult and delicate to do, but the US should be promoting political openness and dialogue.”
The prospect for US-Ikhwan engagement depends very much on the next Supreme Guide. Should a conservative become the new face of the world’s largest Islamist movement, the US may rue its neglect of Akef just as it regrets spurning relatively moderate Middle Eastern leaders who came before him, from Egypt’s Nasser to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.
Stephen Glain
