A Firsthand Look at the Muslim Brotherhood

Since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has emerged as a legitimate political force that is sure to play a large role in shaping Egypt’s future. Both Egyptian and Western media organizations have devoted a large amount of focus to analyzing the MB’s political prospects, its power structure, and its position in Egyptian society. While most Egyptians have plenty of opportunities to form their own opinions about the MB from their own interactions with members and the Egyptian media’s coverage of the subject, the only exposure to the MB that many non-Egyptians have is through the Western media. Those articles and news reports have alternately described the MB as a widely popular, democratizing force, or terrorist sympathizers bent on war with Israel and ensuring that Egypt becomes another case of “one man, one vote, one time.”

While I do not consider myself an expert on the MB, I want to share with the readers of this blog some of my experiences with the Brotherhood throughout the past few months in Cairo. Before this year, I had not had the opportunity to meet any Brotherhood members. Open membership in the MB during the Mubarak era could easily lead to expulsion from college or the loss of a job. This year, however, everything has changed. Membership in the Brotherhood no longer puts one at risk of intimidation or state-sponsored violence. As a result, I have had the opportunity to meet and befriend an MB member, and I think that his story is quite instructive for anyone wanting to learn more about the role that the MB plays in Egyptian politics and society.

The story begins with a discussion group that I attend every Thursday afternoon at a Cairo think tank. A group of Egyptian political activists and interested citizens from all sides of the political spectrum come together to discuss a specific political issue with an expert in the field – past meetings have focused on the relationship between religion and the state, the continued sit-ins in Tahrir Square, and analyzing the recently released electoral laws. I generally do much more listening than talking at these meetings (I consider it an achievement that I am merely able to understand much of what is being discussed…), and I consider each meeting one of the highlights of my week.

My friend Mohamed, a 27 year-old man who works at a pharmaceutical company, is the leader and organizer of the group. Until this past March, Mohamed was a member of the MB, but he and several hundred other young members formally split from the Brotherhood a few months ago. Mohamed had been a part of the Brotherhood for 12 years. While we had discussed politics and international relations several times previously, I did not learn Mohamed’s personal story until my last week in Cairo this summer. After we finished our weekly meeting, he asked me if I would come with him to a local café and serve as a translator for an interview that a Czech researcher had scheduled with him. The interview lasted an hour and a half, and, in addition to learning firsthand how tough it is to serve as a translator, I was fascinated by Mohamed’s story.

Mohamed grew up in a town in the Nile Delta near the Mediterranean coast, the son of a politically indifferent mother and a socialist father. At age 15, he decided to join the Muslim Brotherhood. He respected the local Brotherhood members and believed that there was a natural synthesis between the Islamic principles that the Brotherhood espoused and the establishment of a just, transparent government in Egypt (i.e. the opposite of the Mubarak regime). While Mohamed’s father was initially opposed to his participation in the MB, Mohamed recalled that his father’s opposition softened over time as he saw that Mohamed’s participation in the MB seemed to make him a more focused student and well-rounded person.

Mohamed climbed the ranks of the Brotherhood, and he continued to play a role in it throughout college and after graduation. He eventually reached the fifth and highest level of Brotherhood membership (although if he had stayed on he would have had a ways to go before obtaining a provincial or national leadership position). He participated in the January revolution that toppled Mubarak, but in the wake of Mubarak’s resignation Mohamed found himself caught in the divide that has currently split the MB in two.

In a meeting on March 26 with several hundred members of the Brotherhood’s younger generation, Mohamed and his colleagues declared that they were officially cutting ties with the MB. As Mohamed was careful to point out, he did not split off from the MB because he disagreed with the group’s political or religious principles. Instead, he fundamentally disagreed with what he saw as the MB’s mixing of preaching and politics as it sought to garner political support leading up to the first elections in the post-Mubarak Egypt. While Mohamed himself had taken part in both fields (preaching and politics), he steadfastly maintained that two must remain separate. The MB devotes a great deal of effort to maintaining a presence at local mosques and spreading its version of Islamic values to the attendees therein. In Mohamed’s opinion, however, the MB’s preaching had begun to cross over into the political realm. As he explained to me in one of our earlier conversations, bringing politics into the mosque has the potential to sow division and detract from the Brotherhood’s political and religious goals. “Politics is a matter of choice,” he said, “you pick the person or the party that you think best represents you. Disagreement is normal. The problem with mixing preaching and politics is that if someone disagrees with your politics, that disagreement can carry over to religion, too. Our opponents will then seem to be arguing not only against our politics, but also against religion as a whole. If that happened, it would sully both our name and Islam as a whole.”

That was Mohamed’s official reason for leaving the Brotherhood, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. At the same time, however, he and his fellow youth defectors did not disavow the Brotherhood’s ideology. He joined a new party called the “Renaissance Party,” which he described as embracing almost all of the Brotherhood’s values without mixing preaching and politics. He also supports former Brotherhood leader and current presidential candidate Abd-Munam Abu-al-Futuh (who was expelled from the Brotherhood upon declaring his intention to stand in the presidential elections – the MB is not fielding an official candidate for this year’s presidential elections). Mohamed’s continued adherence to Islamist political platforms suggests that there is another factor that contributed to his decision: the split between the older and younger generations of the MB.

While people often think of the Brotherhood as a monolithic institution devoid of any differentiating views on politics or religion, it has become quite clear since the January 25 revolution that the Brotherhood is actually quite diverse. The Brotherhood’s leadership is largely composed of the old guard members whose political views have been hardened by years of repression under the Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak regimes. The younger generation, however, has shown itself much more amenable to cooperation with non-Islamist groups. Furthermore, the younger generation has publicly chafed against the old guard’s hesitance to turn over leadership positions to them. This split in the Brotherhood continues to grow, and, with defections such as those of Mohamed and his colleagues and the rise of more hardline groups such as the Salafis, the MB no longer has a monopoly on Islamist politics in Egypt.