A Familiar Role for Muslim Brotherhood: Opposition
The New York Times -- 29 July 2013
Narciso Contreras for The New York Times Supporters of Egypt’s ousted
president, Mohamed Morsi, at Cairo University on Sunday. They pray day
and night as Koranic verses echo on a loudspeaker system.
By ROBERT F. WORTH
CAIRO — Among the muddy, crowded tents where tens of thousands of Muslim
Brotherhood members have been living for weeks in a vast sit-in
protest, men in Islamic dress can still be seen carrying incongruous
signs above the teeming crowd: “Liberals for Morsi,” “Christians for
Morsi,” “Actors for Morsi.” It is the vestige of a plea for diverse
allies in the Brotherhood’s quest to reinstate President Mohamed Morsi,
who was ousted by the military on July 3.
But in the wake of the bloody street clashes that took place just
outside the sit-in early on Saturday, leaving at least 72 Brotherhood
supporters dead and hundreds wounded, another, more embattled language
can be heard among the masses gathered around a large outdoor stage.
Many Brotherhood members are enraged by the reaction of Christian
leaders and the secular elite, who — the Islamists say — seemed to
ignore or even endorse the killings while giving full-throated support
to calls by Egypt’s defense minister, Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, for a
continued crackdown.
As the Brotherhood prepares for the possibility that the sit-in will be
forcibly dispersed by the police, and that the organization will be
driven underground, it faces a crisis that could shape its identity for
years to come. For all its stated commitment to democracy and
nonviolence, the Brotherhood’s only reliable partners now are other
Islamist groups whose members may be more willing to use violent or
radical tactics — partners that would tar the Brotherhood’s identity as a
more pragmatic movement with a broader base.
“Now there is just one big Islamist camp on one side and the military on
the other, and the differences between the Brotherhood and other
Islamists are blurred,” said Khalil al-Anani,
an expert on Islamist movements and Egyptian politics at Durham
University in England. “It’s a populist confrontation on both sides,
driven by hatred.”
Even the Brotherhood’s own members may prove harder to control after the
blood spilled on the weekend. On Saturday, some of the group’s leaders
pleaded with young members who were confronting the police and
plainclothes assailants to retreat to the relative safety of the sit-in.
The leaders were rebuffed, a startling act of insubordination for a
group that prides itself on strict hierarchy and iron discipline.
With much of its leadership — including Mr. Morsi — held incommunicado,
the Brotherhood has been unable to conduct any high-level internal
dialogue about what to do. Its options are limited in any case, because
to back down now, with no guarantee from Egypt’s interim government that
the Brotherhood would be spared deeper repression in the future, could
be political suicide. Backing down would also violate the group’s
understanding of Islamic law, under which no decision to undercut Mr.
Morsi can be made without consulting him, according to Gehad el-Haddad, a
Brotherhood spokesman.
In a sense, the Brotherhood’s struggle in recent weeks has been a return
to painfully familiar ground. Banned for decades under President Hosni
Mubarak and his predecessors, the group grew and matured under the
pressure of constant police harassment. Its top leaders were shaped by
long years in prison, and many of them were arrested again in early July
when the military deposed Mr. Morsi.
Most of the group’s remaining leaders are now effectively confined to
the main protest sit-in, in a broad intersection around a towering white
mosque in a residential area of northeast Cairo known as Nasr City. On
any given evening, some of them can be found in one of the mosque’s
outbuildings, looking exhausted but focused as they move from one crisis
meeting to the next.
In some ways, Brotherhood members say, the current crisis is almost
comforting. Gone are the challenges and inevitable compromises of
governing the country, which eroded the group’s popularity over the past
year. Now it is in opposition again, a role that sits more easily with
its historical self-image as a bulwark against oppression.
“These people dare to mock our religion!” shouted Safwat Hegazy, a
Brotherhood leader, as he stood under the bright stage lights on
Saturday night and the flag-waving crowd roared its approval. “God will
punish them,” he continued. A chant went up in the crowd: “The people
want the trial of the serial killer!” — a reference to General Sisi.
The sit-in, like many of the Arab protests of 2011, has taken on
elements of a carnival: fruit and popcorn vendors push carts through the
crowds, and visitors on their way to the stage clamber over sleeping
bodies. The morning and evening meals of the fasting month of Ramadan,
handed out in plastic-wrapped foil packages by Brotherhood volunteers,
impose a ritual congeniality.
But the slurry of garbage underfoot grows thicker every day, and the
smell gets worse. Last week the Brotherhood paid for flowers and
apologies to be sent to thousands of local residents.
A core group of Brotherhood leaders who have not been arrested — about a
dozen men — meet daily at the sit-in to discuss tactics, Mr. Haddad
said during a late-night interview at the meeting room behind the
mosque. “They go around, each one presenting his analysis of the
situation; then they narrow it down to three or four options, and they
vote,” Mr. Haddad said. “Sometimes it’s very heated, with shouting;
sometimes it’s easy.”
The discussions center on tactics like the route and timing of protest
marches, he said. Broader discussions of strategy are impossible, given
the absence of so many top leaders.
The mood is “very angry,” Mr. Haddad said. “The military needs to be
taught a lesson. At this point it’s a zero-sum game: it’s either the
Brotherhood or the old regime. Everyone else is too small to matter.”
Yet the other Islamist groups, which not long ago vied with the
Brotherhood for electoral seats, are now important parts of its effort
to restore Mr. Morsi to power. Although one powerful Islamist group, the
ultraconservative party Al Nour, officially supported the military’s
move, many of its rank and file sided with the Brotherhood and can now
be found at the sit-in.
Many Islamists from a variety of factions seem to believe that if the
Brotherhood falls, they — and the cause of political Islam here and
abroad — will fall with it.
In a tent at the Nasr City sit-in, members of Gamaa al-Islamiya, which
carried out a campaign of terrorism in Egypt before renouncing violence
more than a decade ago, sat together on the thin mats covering the
pavement, where they sleep every day during the long hours of fasting
for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.
“What is strange is that we followed the democratic game very well,”
said Yahya Abdelsamia, a middle-aged man with the bushy, unkempt beard
favored by the ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis. “We joined
the elections, we did what they wanted us to. Then we’re faced with
military force.” He added in English, with a pained smile, “Game over.”
A younger man named Tareq Ahmad Hussein spoke up: “Many of the youth now
say, ‘No more ballot boxes.’ We used to believe in the caliphate. The
international community said we should go with ballot boxes, so we
followed that path. But then they flip the ballot boxes over on us. So
forget it. If ballot boxes don’t bring righteousness, we will all go
back to demanding a caliphate.” He referred to a system where supreme
Islamic religious leaders also held sway over secular life.
A third man said the crisis had been useful in some ways. “It has been a
tough test, but it has had benefits — now we know who our true friends
are,” he said. “The liberals, the Christian leaders, they stood with the
old regime. It was painful to see some fellow Muslims going against us
at first, but they have now seen their mistake and returned to us. The
Islamic path is clear.”
The Brotherhood has made some effort to restrain that kind of talk. On a
recent evening, an older man in traditional dress was angrily shouting
to a reporter about a “war against Islam” led by liberals and the
military, and the need for all Muslims to fight against it. Several
Brotherhood members urged the man to change his tone, telling him to
stick to the words “democracy” and “legitimacy,” and then tried to
escort the reporter away.
But the countercurrent cannot be airbrushed away. At the field hospital
where dead and wounded Brotherhood supporters were brought during
Saturday morning’s fighting, one young Islamist shouted that Christian
snipers had been targeting his “brothers” from the rooftops.
Later at night, at the meeting room, Mohamed Beltagy,
one of the Brotherhood’s best-known leaders, sat wearily at a table,
dark circles under his eyes, talking to local reporters. Mr. Beltagy was
once on the leading edge of the Brotherhood’s outreach to Egyptian
liberals, a charismatic politician who seemed so willing to challenge
the group’s conservative orthodoxy that many predicted he would be
expelled.
Instead, he now speaks of his onetime liberal allies with bitterness,
and spends his days onstage at the sit-in, rallying the Brotherhood
faithful. (Arrest warrants have been issued for Mr. Beltagy and other
Brotherhood leaders at the sit-in, where volunteers keep the police from
entering.)
“So many friends we used to deal with as partners now speak of the coup
as a given,” he said. “Many show sympathy for the arrests, the killing,
the jailing.”
Unlike some Brotherhood leaders, Mr. Beltagy is willing to concede some
errors by Mr. Morsi, who often seemed indifferent to police repression
of non-Islamist protesters during his calamitous year in power. Yet Mr.
Beltagy’s position has hardened in recent weeks. He now accuses his
onetime liberal allies, and the United States government, of colluding
in an elaborate conspiracy to foil and bring down Mr. Morsi’s
government.
“Morsi’s biggest mistake was to trust the country’s institutions, which
were trying to undermine him,” he said. The corollary is that Mr. Morsi
should have been far more assertive.
That view is echoed nightly throughout the sit-in and at another,
smaller protest near Cairo University, where the faithful kneel together
in prayer day and night as Koranic verses echo on a loudspeaker system.
“You are here because of the evil that wanted to eliminate religion from
our lives,” a mosque speaker railed on a recent night.
Some Islamists seem to welcome the idea of a bloody contest. Posters
bearing the words “Martyr Project” adorn the walls around the sit-ins,
hinting at the power of fallen comrades to inflame public anger and
extend the protest movement.
Sitting in the darkness at a street-side cafe about a block from the
edge of the Nasr City sit-in, Ali Mashad, 34, a former Brotherhood
member, marveled at the movement’s new role as the center of an
energized Islamist camp.
“This is not the Muslim Brotherhood I knew,” said Mr. Mashad, who left
the group soon after the 2011 revolution. “They are now speaking the
language of the Salafis, because that is what is popular on the street.”
Labels: Conflict, Crisis Politics, Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood
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