The Muslim Brotherhood and the New Egyptian Divide
The Muslim Brotherhood and the New Egyptian Divide
Egypt is running short on common ground. The election of Mohamed Morsi as president was itself a near thing, the longtime Muslim Brotherhood official winning office with less than 52% of the vote over a former prime minister from the time of Hosni Mubarak. But in the last two weeks, his decisions have polarized the country to the extent that some saw, in the strife of the last two weeks, glimpses of a potential civil war. Much of the problem is the Brotherhood and its the ambiguous performance so far, as I report in my magazine story this week.
Just what is the Muslim Brotherhood? Is it the flailing, benign but essentially well-intentioned force described by a senior Brotherhood official named Gehad el-Haddad, who wears a lapel pin of the Egyptian flag? Or is it the juggernaut of political Islam feared by the West for most of a century, a shadowy group intent on dismantling the modern nation state to restore the dominion of a Caliphate over the the world’s Muslims? Or is it, as some Islamist thinkers maintain, essentially a spent force, a haven of mediocrity that exists largely to perpetuate itself?
Six months into the Brotherhood’s rule, no clear answer has emerged. But one thing it hasn’t done, not two years after the stirring revolution, is build anything remotely resembling consensus. The clannish, long-underground organization entered the realm of electoral politics with no great reservoir of trust among non-members, and since coming to power has done little to re-assure the many skeptics. As el-Haddad put it, in an interview with myself and TIME’s Cairo reporter, Ashraf Khalil, the organization has been writing checks on its credibility since the revolution, and needs to start replenishing its account.