MB - Turning the other cheek?

There was a new crackdown on high-ranking MB leaders on Saturday morning, including Dr Abdel-Monein Aboul Fotouh - sometimes described as a leader of the "reformist" trend within the movement and respected by many outside its ranks. The Arabist speculates that this has something to do with Gaza: "Considering all of these people were involved in the fundraising drive and aid effort to Gaza, and the Egyptian government has just reopened the border, one wonders whether there’s any connection."

On the other hand, blogger Mahmoud Abdel-Monein sees the crackdown as part of the ongoing attempt to weaken the movement ahead of the coming transfer of the presidential post from Mubarak to his son. He goes on to criticize the weak response of the movement to recent crackdowns, pointing out that even when high leaders received harsh prison sentences in military tribunals last year, the movement left the campaigning on their behalf to their female relatives and younger bloggers. "Why did the movement decide to turn the other cheek to receive another slap?" he asks.

Abdel-Monein doesn't try to answer this question. But one of the commentators on his blog suggest that it is because of weakness: It is clear the Ikwhan doesn't have a million active members as many use to claim. "Most of them are behind bars." Even if this is an exaggeration, it would surprise me if the passivity in the face of the governments repression didn't cause considerable damage to the movement's appeal among the younger generation.

The effects of throwing someone from a fourth floor balcony

"Fracture of the right leg, hip and shoulder, three pelvic fractures, fracture nose, facial injuries, fracture of three vertebrae, blood accumulation in the stomach and around the liver, post concussion syndrome and difficulty breathing to upward pressure of abdominal blood collections."

According to El-Nadeem Center for Treatment of Victims of Torture this is the injuries suffered by Muslim Brotherhood member Fares Barak when he was thrown from a balcony on the fourth floor by state security investigators, who broke into his flat as the family was celebrating the 7th birthday of their daughter, on May 17.

MB: "Confrontation with the regime a red line we won't cross"

Shourouq ran a long article on Saturday where prominent Muslim Brotherhood figures Mohamed Habib and Essam El-Erian among others discussed the future of the movement - should it become a political party, or retreat from politics and focus on propaganda and social work, and so on. The usual questions, and the headline sums it up pretty well: "Al-Ikhwan: Confrontation with the regime is a red line we won't cross."

Habib and El-Erian both mentions threats from government officials that it would respond like a "bulldozer" or put "tanks in the street" if the banned opposition group tried to form a political party or grabbed too many seats in parliament - which is actually not impossible to believe, especially after the new Obama administration made clear that there will be no more conditions on aid to Egypt.

The efforts put into defending the current careful strategy of the movement clearly shows that the MB leaders feel the pressure from within its ranks and from other opposition groups to push harder for internal reform in Egypt. And the article ends with El-Erian dismissing some of this pressure as intended to push the MB and the NDP into a deadly confrontation which would annihilate them both: "Some opposition figures said: 'I wish I could close my eyes and open them again and there would be no Brotherhood and no NDP.'"

MB on Gaza, internal reform, and the social protest movement

Islam Online recently published an interview with Mohamed Habib, deputy supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, conducted by blogger and journalist Abdel Moneim Mahmoud. It focuses on the question - asked by many - of why the MB mobilized on a large scale during the recent war on Gaza, while being comparatively passive on internal issues, whether economic or political.

Habib's response is that solidarity with Gaza is among the first priorities of the movement, and that this is not separate from but "parallell" or "equivalent" to demands of internal reform, because of the strong link between fighting Israeli occupation and the autocratic regimes in the region. He also says that the issue of Palestine is the central and most important issue for all muslims and arabs, but also something that concerns the whole world. And for the MB, he says, it enters "the heart of our strategy and planing."

He then goes on to say: "The issue of Palestine, with its regional and international dimensions, has both negative and positive effects on the internal situation, whether economical or political, in the Islamic and the Arab world. We shouldn't distinguish between what's happening on the regional level and internally in Egypt. In our view, solving the question of Palestine will be an entrance to solving the internal problems of the arab nation and muslim nation, including the issue of political reform."

Interestingly, this is almost opposite the slogan that is commonly heard among leftists: that the road the the liberation of Palestine runs through Cairo, Damascus and Amman. One possible way to interpret this statement is as an implicit acknowledment that the MB won't dare to seriously challenge the regime as long as the regional situation means that a MB-led government in Egypt risk being treated as a pariah by the US and the "international community," in the same way as the elected Palestinian government led by Hamas.

Habib also says that support for the Palestinian resistance can "liberate us from fear" and inspire the peaceful struggle for change in Egypt and Arab countries. Comparing the issue of Gaza and internal reform, he says: "There are priorities, and when there is a humanitarian catastrophe as in Gaza, it is a human and legal and national duty to pressure our regimes and governments to move, and to express our angers towards the aggressor."

Still, he acknowledges that "the brotherhood did not respond as strongly to social issues like the bread crisis or soaring prices as we should have at the time." His explanation for this is that "involvement in the social protest movement in a political way could make the regime deal with it more harshly and violently." Despite this, he claims, the MB has been giving support to the social protest movement, and "were present" in many of the protests, including the strikes in Mahalla, "but without giving them a political character to ensure the continued existence [of the movement]."

This sounds rather vague. Also, all the union activists and workers I've met in Mahalla and during other strikes and protests in the industrial sector during the last year strongly denied any involvement of the MB (or any other political group for that matter) in organizing or supporting their struggle. In the rare cases where militant workers have admitted association with - or even talked favorably of - any political trend, it has been the socialists or communists.

Lawyer: 7555 MB members detained in 2008

According to a lawyer from the Muslim Brotherhood, 7555 members of the organization was arrested during 2008, el-Badeel reports. Around 1200 is also claimed to have been arrested during the first weeks of 2009, mostly in connection with Gaza solidarity protests.

Now, regardless of any political differences one might have with the Ikhwan (as for me personally, I have quite a few), imagine what the response from the "international community" would have been to the arrest of thousands (or even hundreds) of members of the main opposition group, had it happened in any other country - any country not ruled by a clique of pro-western neo-liberal gangsters, that is.

Gaza protests and crackdowns continue

Protests against the war in Gaza continue. A demo called for by the Muslim Brotherhood in Ramsees Square at 4 pm was prevented by security, but "thousands" who couldn't reach the square are protesting now in Abbasiyya and Ghamra, surrounded by riot police, according to the MB website. According to the report a journalist from al-Masry al-Youm is among many arrested, and the metro station in Ramsees was temporarily closed and trains forced to pass without stoping.

Alexandria mass protest - another MB show?

This CCTV-report contains short clips from the massive protest in Alexandria yesterday, which gathered between 50.000 (according to AFP) and 100.000 (according to an al-jazeera broadcast yesterday). Judging from the pics and movies I've seen, anything between those two numbers could be correct.

The protest was led by parliamentarians from the Muslim Brotherhood, and it's very typical that protestors reportedly chanted "Down with Israel, and with it every collaborator," which is a clear reference to Hosni Mubarak but still short from explicitly saying "Down with Mubarak." Even more ingenious is the chant "Gaza excuse us: opening Rafah is not in our hands." Now that's as close as you can get to an open admission that the MB is not going to seriously challenge the politics of the Egyptian regime, as I suggested in a previous post.

Even in a democratic country, a one-time protest of 50.000 or 100.000 will not necessarily have much of an impact, as the huge protests against the war in Iraq in both the US and the UK have shown. To achieve change in an authoritarian state like Egypt it would take strikes, blockades and other acts of civil disobedience on a huge scale - not necessarily a revolution, but something close to it. I don't want to sound like a fatalist, and I'm definitely not saying that this will never happen in Egypt - just that it won't be initiated by the MB leadership.

When I read the AFP report, I was reminded of an interview I made last spring with two young girls from the "muslim brotherhood sisters," who took great pride in the historic role of the MB in supporting the Palestinian struggle. Today, it seems, their role has been reduced to taking to the streets in thousands, apologizing for not coming to the aid of the people of Gaza!

Muslim Brotherhood calls for "Friday of wrath"

Maybe fighting Sufi philosophy isn't the only thing on the Muslim Brotherhood's agenda right now after all. Mohamed Mehdi Akef, supreme guide of the movement, has called for Friday to be a day of mass anger against the Israeli aggression, demanding concrete action from of Arab regimes - especially Egypt - to support the Palestinian people. I don't know what will come out of this though. An attempt to organize protests outside mosques in downtown Cairo last week was met by violent repression, and three days later very few MB supporters showed up at a demonstration called for in Tahrir Square.

The reality is that in order to actually change Egypt's policies against Hamas and Israel, it would take protests on a scale that threatened the stability of the regime. And this is clearly something the MB leadership does not desire, even if they were capable of doing it. After all, we are talking about a reformist movement whose leaders fear the explosive potential of popular protests on a massive scale, and didn't mobilize their supporters even when several of its leaders were sentenced to long prison terms in a military court last May.

The inner tensions of a movement like the MB will always make its behaviour contradictory and unpredictable. Leading members have a lot to loose: they can have their financial assets frozen or even be sent to military courts and jailed. On the other hand, many MB supporters is clearly willing to risk being beaten up in the streets or arrested in order to express their anger against what's happening in Gaza. And despite the constant attempts of MB functionaries to stop them, many were happy to join the "Down with Mubarak" chants initiated by socialist and other activists at last week's demonstrations.

While Gaza is burning, MB parlamentarian voices concern about re-printing of work by sufi mystic

According to a report in al-badeel today, Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian Ali Laban is raising objections to the printing of a new edition of "The Meccan Illuminations" (Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyya), a work by 13th century Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn Arabi. The MP also criticized the fact that a conference about the author was organized in cooperation with the Spanish embassy (Ibn Arabi was born in Andalusia), saying it had received "dubious" foreign financing, "an attempt to further Zionist-American goals" by spreading the thinking of a "Sufi extremist."

Is this the explanation behind the absence of a major MB mobilization against the invasion of Gaza - they are too busy fighting the more serious threat of Sufi philosophy?

Gaza protest: A massive display of genuine anger - and a show of MB-State coordination

As expected there was large demonstrations against the Israeli bombings of Gaza today. Hundreds or thousands, many of them MB-supporters, first gathered outside the parlament after the noon prayer. Later they moved to the doctors syndicate, where the protest grew bigger as more people joined and bystanders joined the chanting.

(Click the picture for a collection of photos from the protest, and see Hossam al-Hamalawys blog for more updates)

The most interesting thing about this demo (at least for someone who has never been at a MB-demo before) was the high degree of coordination between the organizers and the security forces. Despite being in the thousands, the demonstrators basically stood and behaved as the police told them. When one of the demonstrators started chanting "Down with Mubarak!" several others immediatly silenced him, and turned the crowd to less politically dangerous pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas chants (although later there was also chants against Mubarak, like "hey Mubarak answer now, are you with us or against?" and "hey Mubarak why the silence, are you with them or what?") When the protest moved to the doctors syndicate, the crowds walked there from the parlament under silence, because they were "under orders not to chant" in the streets!

The police ignored or even acted friendly towards journalists and photographers instead of harrassing them like they usually do - probably because for once they wanted us to be there. This might be because the regime is using the "islamist threat" to put pressure on their allies in Washington and Tel Aviv, but more likely it's simply because they wanted to pretend in front of their own people that they allow expressions of anger towards Israel.


Of course this protest was a genuine expression of anger by the participants towards the outrageous agression in Gaza, which continued today and have left towards 300 people dead. But I also got the feeling that more than anything else, it was an attempt to "went some steam" by the state as well as the MB leadership. More people were still joining the protest outside the doctors syndicate, and some of the younger participants was showing signs of restlessness (they wanted to march in the streets of course), when the demo was suddenly dissolved peacefully. This might of course have been because there was a fixed time to start with - but it definitely made it look like the leadership simply didn't want to risk loosing control of the situation.


Returning from the demo, I ran into a group of leftist, nasserist and labour party activists having their own protest on the sidewalk of Qasr el-aini outside the shoura council. Compared to the MB protest there was a huge difference in police behaviour. Even though the number of protestors were not more than 50 by the time I arrived, the central security recruits were in full riot gear, with helmets and sticks, and plain-clothes officers tried to prevent me from taking pictures as usual.