The Muslim Brotherhood (7 page)

As their frustration grew, this group became more overt about their disappointment with the leadership, bringing the disunity into the public sphere. In January 1995 Salah Abd al-Karim, the editor of the
Engineers Union
magazine, wrote an article criticising the domination of the old guard within the Ikhwan and calling on party elders to restrict themselves to the role of advisers.
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Similarly, at a meeting of brothers in the unions one of the Ikhwan gave a speech in which he criticised the old guard for being too narrow-minded and inward-looking and insufficiently open to other political and social forces outside the movement.
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By the mid-1990s the reformist current
had come to the conclusion that, in the words of one of them, ‘We are something and they are something else and it is impossible for these two seas to meet. One of them was fresh water and the other salty.’
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After concluding that there was no scope to change the Ikhwan from inside, one group of reformists decided to push ahead with their own project to establish a political party. This group was led by Abu Ala Madhi with the support of around seventy young reformists including Issam Sultan and the journalist and member of the Engineers Syndicate Council, Salah Abd al-Maqsud. A striking number of those involved were from the engineering sector including Abu Ala Madhi himself.
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Notably, this group also included two Copts, one Anglican and a number of women, presumably as a means of demonstrating the group’s commitment to the rights of non-Muslims and women. The former was a particularly controversial subject within the Ikhwan, not least because of Mustafa Mashour’s comments in 1996 that Christians should not be permitted to join the armed forces and that they should pay a
jiziya
(tax), something that he later retracted.

In January 1996 this group bypassed the Ikhwan machine and submitted their proposal to set up the party, Hizb al-Wasat, to the Parties Committee for approval. Although they had decided to act alone, they did have the support of key figures on the international Islamist scene including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Moreover, in a concession to the leadership they did inform Mehdi Akef, less hawkish than many of the others, of their plans. According to them, Akef supported them although he was not informed about the details of the new party. Akef, however, asserts that the whole al-Wasat project was his idea and said: ‘I am the one who came with the idea of Hizb al-Wasat. We came with it in order to embarrass the government. Some of the Ikhwan set this party up and since 1996 the government has refused to accept it.’
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Regardless of Akef’s role, the al-Wasat affair was clearly a shocking challenge to the Brotherhood leadership. It certainly met
with the wrath of the leadership, who could not believe that such disobedience and rebelliousness that went so against the whole spirit of the Brotherhood had come from within its own ranks. In reality, the al-Wasat platform was not essentially very different from much of the thinking within the Ikhwan at that time and there was nothing especially controversial in their party programme. Rather, the young brothers had crossed the line of acting without permission. According to Abu Ala Madhi, al-Hodeibi and Mashour led a major campaign against the al-Wasat group. Al-Hodeibi summoned Issam Sultan to his house and their meeting was ‘violent and crushing’.
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As a result those involved in the al-Wasat affair resigned from the Ikhwan although there was an equal push from the leadership to get them out, as ‘when Mashour discovered a new mentality that did not listen and obey in the traditional sense, he took a rigid decision against them and expelled them’.
⁸⁶

Needless to say, their application to become a political party was turned down by the Parties Committee and many of those involved, including Abu Ala Madhi, were arrested, prompting the vast majority who had signed the al-Wasat application to back down and rejoin the Brotherhood. Yet this al-Wasat group were to pay an even greater price for having dared to disobey the party line. When they went to appeal against the decision, the Ikhwan’s leadership attended the court session and demanded that their appeal be turned down. Ironically, the al-Wasat group’s bid to take political engagement to a new level was sufficient to make the Ikhwan’s leadership close ranks with the regime against them.

What was notable about the affair was that other figures within the reformist current, who clearly supported a more open approach, did not join the initiative. This included Aboul Fotouh and al-Ariyan, who decided to remain within the ranks of the Brotherhood despite their closeness to Abu Ala Madhi. According to Sultan, whilst many of this group were ideologically with the al-Wasat current, they
did not take the step of actually joining them because of ‘practical and administrative considerations that made them stay within the Brotherhood’.
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Aboul Fotouh described his differences with the al-Wasat current as being organisational in nature and as a split between those who wanted to see reform inside the
jama’a
rather than outside it. Yet the refusal of these individuals to join the al-Wasat group led some to assert that the true reformists within the Ikhwan left the movement at this time.
⁸⁸

However, it could be argued that the likes of Aboul Fotouh and al-Ariyan ultimately proved themselves to be shrewder: not only was the al-Wasat project rejected by the government; it was never going to gain any real public support. Such a project could never have any real populist appeal, given that in Egypt politics is still very much the domain of the urban elite and any party that is willing to work within the established system is likely to draw charges of having been co-opted by the regime. As Amr Shobaki has argued, Aboul Fotouh and al-Ariyan were all too well aware that their political ideas would have no real future outside the movement.
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It is this very point that the old guard perhaps understood better than the reformist generation – to become a political party would bring charges of being compromised, leaving the Ikhwan as just one party among a number of others operating within the system.

Yet the al-Wasat affair did spark further internal debate within the Ikhwan. It caused figures such as Aboul Fotouh to begin questioning whether internal reform was possible whilst the Nizam al-Khass were in control. He allegedly began voicing his view that a
jama’a
that doesn’t know democracy in its internal life is incapable of guaranteeing democracy outside of itself.
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Over twenty years later, Aboul Fotouh, along with others of his generation such as Issam al-Ariyan, were still struggling with the same questions and challenges that the movement has been grappling with since the 1920s.

The years after the al-Wasat affair saw a continuation of the reform debate within the Ikhwan and of the seemingly endless questions about how best to engage in the political process without selling out on the movement’s core Islamic principles. This debate came into sharper relief following the 9/11 attacks on the US. Suddenly the world began to focus its attentions on the various Islamist movements, and what had until then been considered as domestic opposition groups now came to be viewed by some as part of a global Islamist network that threatened the whole of Western civilisation. Regimes were quick to pick up on this sea change of sentiment and sought to use the 9/11 attacks as evidence that they had been right to clamp down so hard on their Islamist opponents. The Egyptian regime was no exception. For the Brotherhood, with its somewhat questionable past, its role in the Afghanistan conflict of the 1970s and its aspiration to create a society ruled by Sharia, the imperative to demonstrate its commitment to moderation and to playing by the political rules was all too obvious. The fear of being labelled as a terrorist organisation prompted a greater urgency to be seen as willing to work within the political framework of the state.

In spite of the Ikhwan’s deep reservations about the War on Terror and the role of the West in the Islamic world, it seems that the reformist current within the Egyptian Ikhwan somehow received a boost from this new international climate. It was as if now the world was watching they could come into their own and find a truly appreciative audience. The reformists, many of whom speak English, took advantage of renewed interest by scholars and journalists and were keen to engage in interviews and debates as a means of demonstrating their commitment to reform. In line with the globalised age they also began promoting themselves through the Internet, setting up their own English language website. In doing so these figures started to become personalities
beyond the confines of their own environment and were able to project a new image of the Brotherhood that contradicted the picture of them as secretive, autocratic and aggressive that was doing the rounds in some Western circles. The group was given a further boost in 2004 when after the death of Maimoun al-Hodeibi, Mehdi Akef was appointed to the post of Murshid. Although Akef was a member of the Nizam al-Khass and part of the older generation of leaders, he had a reputation for being more tolerant and sympathetic to the reformist wing. As such he was widely considered to be a compromise figure who could bridge the gap between the old guard and the reformists. He was certainly a more acceptable choice for figures such as Aboul Fotouh who had huge personal antagonism with Akef’s hardline predecessor.

Under Akef’s leadership, the Ikhwan produced a series of reform platforms such as that of 2004 which was titled ‘Muslim Brotherhood Initiative: On the General Principles of Reform in Egypt’. It laid out the movement’s stance on a range of issues from political and legal reform to education and foreign policy. Although this rather thin document was in essence simply a reissuing of its 2000 election programme, it was touted as a new expression of the Ikhwan’s commitment to progressive liberal ideas. This and other similar documents that the Ikhwan has produced in recent years stress the movement’s belief in the civic nature of political authority and respect for the basic values of and instruments of democracy; the transfer of power through clean and free elections; and the acceptance of citizenship as the basis for rights and responsibilities for Muslims and non-Muslims.
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Yet while this initiative represents a more progressive and open approach by the Ikhwan, it still comes across as somewhat of a muddle and contains a series of contradictions.

Although it expresses support for the peaceful transferral of power based upon elections and the freedom to establish political parties, the first section of the initiative states: ‘We, the Muslim Brotherhood, have a defined mission which we present as a basic concept for reform …
This mission is represented collectively in working to establish Allah’s Sharia as we believe it to be the real effective way out of all sufferings and problems, both on the internal front – and the external one.’
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The document goes on to assert that the starting point for any reform must be in reforming the Egyptian individual, who has become clouded by ‘negligence and selfishness’ and ‘immediate desires and materialistic values’, so that he can be purified on ‘a base of faith, straightforwardness and good manners’. Therefore the initiative promotes democratic principles on the one hand, yet restricts individual freedoms on the other. It also promotes the rights of non-Muslims yet stresses the Islamic nature of the Egyptian state; it accepts the principle of free and fair elections and the civic nature of political authority yet asserts that the Ikhwan will strive to change the laws and purify them to be in conformity with the principles of Islamic Sharia.

The ambiguities in this document are hardly surprising. They simply reflect the Ikhwan’s age-old problem of having to accommodate both tendencies present within the movement. As Shobaki has argued, the absence of detail is a deliberate means of protecting the Brotherhood from factionalism, as being clear and explicit will only exacerbate differences within the movement.
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Yet this desire to conceal division is only part of the story of why the Ikhwan remained so ambiguous over concepts such as democracy or Sharia. The vagueness over these issues was also related to the fact that the Ikhwan has always had to play to several different constituencies simultaneously. For all its activity in the political arena, the Brotherhood has relied on a wide social base that supports the movement not because of politics, but because it is considered by many to represent Islam itself.
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In stark contrast to successive regimes, the Brotherhood is seen by many Egyptians as pure and uncorrupted, standing for untainted Islamic concepts including Sharia law rather than the rather messy business of politics. As influential Kuwaiti scholar, Sheikh Abdullah Nafisi, has argued, ‘People don’t consider there to be any difference between their religion
and the
tanzeem
[organisation]. They take a mixture of its religion, its orders, its instructions and its prohibitions.’
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This is very well understood even by reformists. As Issam al-Ariyan acknowledged, the
tanzeem
is a central concept to the Brotherhood and is still considered the main source of its power.
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As such, there were many within the Ikhwan who feared delving too deeply into the mainstream political arena, believing that straying too far from the movement’s core principles over issues such as Sharia, or women’s status, would risk alienating its grass roots support base. This was one of the reasons why there was considerable hostility among some parts of the movement to trying to establish a political party. Although some of this hostility was linked to the knowledge that the regime would not permit it to do so, there was also a strong concern that going down the party route (as opposed to trying to influence the political process by standing as independents) would be a step too far from the movement’s core ideology. As Abu Ala Madhi asserts, ‘There is a mistaken idea in the Ikhwan that the government is the only obstacle to becoming a political party. There are powerful leaders in the al-Jama’a that object to the idea of a political party in spite of the fact that they say they want one. They prefer to keep al-Jama’a illegal.’
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Thus, the push for the reform current was hampered as much by the challenges of maintaining the movement’s social base as it was by the old guard.