Rise of the brothers a worry for the West

FOR the US and Israel, the alarming spectre raised by the uprising in Egypt is the prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood seizing power and forming a hostile Islamist regime in a country that has for decades been a bastion of US and Western support. This, in turn, conjures images of Muslim dominoes toppling one by one, amid the rise of regimes modelled on the rabid theocracy in Iran.

This scenario has been successfully exploited by the Egyptian government for 30 years to maintain its emergency rule and justify the brutal crushing of opponents and has been cited by the US to rationalise its backing of President Hosni Mubarak's regime.

Now as the blowback in Egypt intensifies, the Muslim Brotherhood - outlawed for decades, its members jailed, tortured and executed - is emerging once again as a major political force, and one that must be reckoned with, whatever Egypt's future holds.

Despite Cairo's attempt to blame its old nemesis for fomenting the rebellion, the brotherhood has so far taken a mostly low profile. It refrained from endorsing the protests that began last Tuesday until the end of the week, when it urged its members to take to the streets.

A Muslim Brotherhood MP, Mohsen Radi, told Time magazine: "We are not out to win and form a government; participation, not victory, is our new slogan."

On Sunday it upped the ante by announcing its support for Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei as transitional president if Mubarak is forced aside.

Commentators say the move shows the group is willing to put aside its Islamist agenda and back a secularist who advocates Western-style democracy, as the likeliest way to achieve regime change. After that the group will move to pursue its political goals.

The importance of the Muslim Brotherhood in the political history of Egypt and the wider Middle East cannot be overstated. It was the fountainhead for the modern Islamist movement, which in turn spawned the rash of Muslim militant groups, some of which have embraced the use of terror.

The Society of Muslim Brothers, as it was known originally, was founded in 1928 by an Egyptian school teacher, Hassan al-Banna.

At the time the Muslim world was in political disarray. In the aftermath of World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman empire, the Islamic caliphate that had existed since the time of the prophet Mohammed had been dismantled and the lands under it carved up among the victorious Christian powers. It was the start of what Osama bin Laden would later call an era of "humiliation and disgrace" for Muslims and the trigger for the Islamic revival.

The brotherhood was formed initially as a protest movement against British colonial rule in Egypt. As Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist Steve Coll wrote in his history, Ghost Wars: "Muslim Brotherhood members believed that the only way to return the Islamic world to its rightful place of economic and political power was through a rigid adherence to core Islamic principles. Initiated brothers pledged to work secretly to create a pure Islamic society modelled on what they saw as the lost and triumphant Islamic civilisations founded in the 7th century."

The brotherhood's green flag adorned with a red Koran and crossed white swords, and its slogan, "The Koran is our constitution" spread quickly across Egypt as people flocked to embrace its message of a return to the fundamental values and beliefs of Islam, combined with social and economic reform. Its adherents embraced modernisation but blamed Western culture for the corruption, depravity and injustice of modern life. As the movement flourished, Islam increasingly became an ideology of resistance against the west.

Despite being harshly suppressed by the colonial government, by 1949 the brotherhood had half a million members across Egypt. It spread to Jordan, Algeria, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia and won strong support by delivering badly needed social and human services such as hospitals, schools and factories.

In the 1950s under the nationalist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the ruthless repression of the movement in its homeland continued. Thousands of its members were imprisoned without trial, beaten, tortured and executed.

"The brutal treadmill of torture broke bones, stripped out skins, shocked nerves and killed souls," wrote one militant who was jailed in the 80s. The writer was Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahari, who later became chief lieutenant to bin Laden. Zawahari has cited the savage repression by the Egyptian security apparatus as a key factor in the formation of al-Qa'ida.

The brotherhood's most influential ideologue was Egyptian writer and theologian Sayyid Qutb, who was involved in a plot to assassinate Nasser and was executed in 1966 for advocating the overthrow of the secular regime. Before his execution he wrote a manifesto called Signposts, arguing for a Leninist-style Islamic revolution and justifying the killing of non-believers, which became a defining tract for the militant Islamist movement.

Qutb's writings underpinned the Islamic resistance against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 80s, and inspired the formation of like-minded groups across the Muslim world.

While the brotherhood is certainly not a terrorist organisation, many terrorists and groups bent on the use of violence against civilians to pursue their political goals have sprung from its ranks.

In Indonesia, the writings of al-Banna were a key inspiration for radical clerics Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, who formed the militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, which embraced the use of terror in the late 90s. Sungkar and Bashir modelled their organisation on the cell structure pioneered by the brotherhood, urging their followers to form small groups to implement Islamic law, as a prelude to fighting for an Islamic state.

Another brotherhood luminary was Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam, who ran the brotherhood's office in Peshawar, Pakistan, during the jihad against the Soviets. Azzam and bin Laden, his former student from Jeddah University, established the Afghan Services Bureau to co-ordinate foreign mujaheddin, which later evolved into al-Qa'ida.

In the 80s the brotherhood gave birth to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which was formed on the basis of Azzam's teachings as an Islamist rival to Yasser Arafat's secular-leftist Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Hamas is classified as a terrorist organisation by the US, Israel and several other governments.

The brotherhood is not included on the US government's list of foreign terrorist organisations. It publicly renounced violence in the 70s and has no military wing of its own. A statement on its English language website, Ikhanweb, says it supports "legitimate resistance" but opposes terrorism.

"We have differentiated between legitimate resistance in Palestine and Iraq against occupation forces on the one hand, and the criminal terrorist operations on the other," the statement says.

In recent years, the brotherhood has moved to publicly distance itself from al-Qa'ida. In November last year it condemned al-Qa'ida's threat to attack Coptic Christians in Egypt as criminal and heinous. Another statement on its website points out the epistemological and political separation between the Muslim Brotherhood and the al-Qa'ida movement is unmistakable, adding the organisation condemns every terrorist operation and considers them to be against Islam.

According to Ikhwanweb: "the Muslim Brotherhood is a socio-political nonviolent organisation devoted to peaceful gradual reform, and is the complete opposite of al-Qa'ida in its interpretation of Islam and its attitude to violence."

In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood is a powerful political force, despite the Mubarak government's concerted efforts to crush it.

It has been led since January last year by Muhammad Badie, a trained veterinarian and veteran dissident, who has spent more than 12 years in Egyptian jails. The eighth leader since its establishment, Badie has sought to cement the avowed strategy of nonviolence. He told Newsweek after his appointment, "the only way to achieve peaceful change is through the ballot box."

The brotherhood has been banned in Egypt for most of the past 30 years. When it was allowed to contest elections in 2005, after the US pressured Mubarak to implement democratic reforms, the brotherhood won 88 of some 500 seats, becoming the largest independent bloc in the parliament. Those gains were virtually wiped out in last year's elections, which were widely believed to have been rigged by the regime.

More than 1000 brotherhood members were arrested in the lead-up to those polls, and Mubarak has since amended the constitution to formalise the longstanding ban on the brothers' political participation.

Despite this, the organisation continues to enjoy popular backing among Egypt's educated middle class. It has remained the most effective vehicle for public resentment towards a tyrannical regime, reflects the religious aspirations of many Egyptians and has deep grassroots support due to its long track record of providing badly needed social and human services.

The brotherhood is far less extreme than the Iranian ayatollahs or some other radical militant groups. Unlike the jihadists, it is committed to working through democratic and parliamentary systems to achieve its goals, a policy that has earned it condemnation from groups such as al-Qa'ida, which believe all human forms of government should be shunned and fought.

Badie denies the group is intent on establishing an Islamic state. He told Newsweek, "We want a civilian state with civilian people, not religious people, but with a Muslim background."

However the organisation rejects the possibility of a woman or a Christian being president, and would be sure to impose stricter Islamic codes, such as banning alcohol and topless sunbathing at the hedonistic beach resort of Sharm el Sheik.

The International Crisis Group writes in a recent assessment that there is reason for concern about some elements of the brotherhood's program, which retains a "distinctly non-democratic, illiberal tone", particularly concerning the role of women and religious minorities. However, it argues that attempting to crush the group is dangerously shortsighted.

The ICG reports: "Ultimately, the Muslim Brothers are too powerful and too representative for there to be either stability or genuine democratisation without finding a way to incorporate them. Their integration [into the political arena] should be pursued not just for its own sake, but as an essential step to a genuine opening of the political sphere that would also benefit secular opposition forces."

Commentators say it appears the brotherhood believes backing ElBaradei now is the best option to further its own ambitions in the long term.

"They don't want to appear as if they're using this revolt to seize power," Wahid Abdul Magid, an analyst at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo told the Los Angeles Times. What they want is free and fair elections to allow them to take power transparently.