"In October 1992, Cairo was struck by a devastating earthquake, in which nearly 600 people were killed and several thousand injured. Within hours, members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups were out on the streets, clearing the rubble and providing food, blankets and tents to the thousands who had lost their homes. The government of then-President Hosni Mubarak, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen." ... "This episode is instructive when considering the long-term consequences of the popular uprising turned coup that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and the first Brotherhood leader to assume the presidency of an Arab country." ... "Despite the missteps during its short-lived rule, the Brotherhood still has support among large segments of the population. Over decades, the movement built mosques, schools and clinics that often outperformed the government’s social welfare system. It is foolhardy to think the Brotherhood can be uprooted and cast out of the Egyptian political system." ... "Founded in 1928, the Brotherhood was initially focused not on politics but on religious outreach through preaching and providing social services. The group soon became politically active in the struggle against British colonial rule, and it called on Egyptians to confront the forces of imperialism and Zionism through a renewed commitment to Islamic piety. Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers Movement, which overthrew the British-backed monarchy in 1952, were nominally allied with the Brotherhood while keeping the Islamists at arm’s length. But after a member of the group tried to assassinate Nasser in 1954, the new military regime moved to crush them." ... "The most militant thinker of that period was Sayyid Qutb, a Brotherhood ideologue swept up in Nasser’s crackdown. After enduring nine years of prison and torture, Qutb published a manifesto in 1964, Milestones Along the Road, in which he argued that the secular Arab nationalism of Nasser had led to authoritarianism and a new period of jahiliyya, a term that has particular resonance for Islamists because it refers to the pre-Islamic “dark ages.” Qutb declared that a new Muslim vanguard was needed to restore Islam to its role as “the leader of mankind” and that a Muslim ruler who does not apply Islamic law—in its most austere iterations—should be removed from power. Nasser’s regime executed Qutb in 1966, and he joined the pantheon of Islamist martyrs. "Most of the Brotherhood’s surviving leadership renounced violence in the 1960s, urging accommodation with the secular regime. But Qutb’s ideas flourished, and his disciples abandoned the Brotherhood and splintered into violent factions. The two most important were the Islamic Group and Islamic Jihad. In 1981, members of Islamic Jihad infiltrated the Egyptian army and assassinated President Anwar Sadat. Mubarak, who succeeded Sadat as president, launched a new crackdown on violent Islamists as well as the Brotherhood. In the 1980s, another wave of Islamists were forced into exile, and many ended up joining the CIA-backed jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Egyptians—many of them followers of Qutb, including Ayman al-Zawahiri (a leader of Islamic Jihad at the time of Sadat’s assassination)—would later form the backbone of Al Qaeda. "In the 1990s, the Islamic Group launched attacks on police, government officials, tourists and intellectuals throughout Egypt, killing some 1,200 and paralyzing the economy. Mubarak’s regime responded with a severe crackdown, arresting, executing or deporting thousands of suspected Islamists. Egyptians rejected the violent Islamists, and during this period the Brotherhood, which adhered to nonviolence, began running candidates in elections for professional syndicates and later for seats in Parliament. "For Egyptian Islamists—and indeed Islamists throughout the region—there are two paths after Morsi’s ouster: the jihadism advocated by Qutb and his disciples, or the peaceful choice made by Islamist parties in Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. These groups committed themselves to the slow work of building a social base, providing services to their constituents and participating in electoral politics. Let us hope the Muslim Brotherhood does not abandon that hard-fought path after this devastating setback—and that the Egyptian military ends its newest cycle of repression." -- Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor at New York University, is a former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:37:02 +0000