Divisions in Muslim Brotherhood – World – theage.com.au

Divisions in Muslim Brotherhood – World – theage.com.au

Muslim Brotherhood members and internet bloggers Sondos Asem Shalabi, 21, and Abdulrahman Mansour, 21, in a cafe in Cairo.
David Wroe
November 17, 2007

THE lowly shoe is considered a degrading weapon in Egypt. To be beaten with a shoe adds insult to injury.

So when Mohamed Mahdi Akef, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned Islamist group whose members have frequent encounters with the police, threatened critics with his shoes last year, it was seen as a classic example of an intemperate leader’s inability to control his language.

Under Mr Akef’s leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood, considered the world’s largest, oldest and most influential Islamist organisation, is in crisis in its home country. Analysts in Egypt say it is struggling to define its political goals amid divisions at the top and a lack of fresh, charismatic leadership.

At the same time, a new generation of brothers and sisters are gaining prominence through Egypt’s ubiquitous political tool, internet blogging, and are starting, sometimes gently, to criticise their leaders.

Differences within the 79-year-old organisation emerged last month when it released a draft of its first political platform, which advocated banning women and Coptic Christians, who make up a 10th of Egypt’s population, from becoming president. The draft also raised the spectre of an Iran-style religious council.

Before the final version of the platform is released, Mr Akef, 79, indicated in two interviews with The Age that he would not bow on the question of women and Copts. “It is the Muslim Brotherhood’s opinion that a woman cannot be president,” he said.

“How can a Christian president protect the religion of Islam?”

Mr Akef also railed against globalisation, which he sees as naked US ambition, and slammed Western democracy as subservient to whims of the masses, without moral absolutes.

Banned since 1954, the brotherhood shocked the ruling National Democratic Party and Western observers in 2005 by winning a fifth of the seats in the Egyptian Parliament through independent proxies.

Pragmatist brothers are pushing to create a more mainstream political party. But Khalil al-Anani, an expert on political Islam, who has written a book on the brotherhood and is deputy editor of a government-funded political journal, said most brothers did not really understand democratic values such as pluralism and the protection of minorities.

“It’s very complicated for a religious organisation to transfer to a political party,” he said. “Most of them don’t believe in the value of equality.” He said the organisation was in crisis, with deep divisions in the wake of the poor public reaction to its draft platform.

One moderate on the brotherhood’s 15-member executive, Abdel Monem Abou el-Fotouh, told The Age: “I believe it is the right of any citizen to be president, whatever their sex … whatever their religion.”

Brotherhood members played down the divisions but Hesham Kassem, founder of the respected independent newspaper al-Masry al-Youm, said: “I don’t remember ever seeing so many schisms and differences between the dinosaurs and the innovators.”

As well as having influential branches around the world, the brotherhood is Egypt’s strongest opposition to President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled this country of 80 million people as an effective autocrat since 1981 and is a key ally of the US. The Government initiates periodic crackdowns, the most recent of which has seen 40 members facing military courts, sparking human rights protests. Most leaders have been jailed repeatedly, in Mr Akef’s case for a total of 23 years. Estimates of the brotherhood’s Egyptian membership range from 100,000 to 400,000.

Doubts linger over how it would behave in power. Young brothers become defensive when quizzed on the specifics of Islamic democracy.