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But MAB’s freesheet Inspire, distributed on the anti-war demonstration of 28 September 2002,

firmly identified it with the Brotherhood. When MAB leader Anas Altikriti wrote to The Times (17
August 2004) in reply to an article about the links between MAB and the Brotherhood, he
effectively confirmed those links by stating: “MAB is an independent British organisation. Links
with others extend simply to shared ideas, values, and expertise, in which the Brotherhood is indeed
rich…”
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/3266

There is a somewhat unified leadership, and it did some preparatory work for the demonstration.

The leadership of the unified opposition comes out of the parliament elections that were completed
in December. Since the vote was completely rigged to give the Mubarak regime an overwhelming
majority, about 80 or 90 former members of parliament formed a shadow parliament and brought a
number of opposition parties into it. These people more or less coordinated the call for the protest.
Some of the youth held a number of workshops to discuss how to prepare the action in terms of
tactics. The Muslim Brotherhood--the largest opposition group in Egypt--didn't officially endorse
the protests, but allowed its members to participate on a personal basis.
The demonstration was organized in about 10 days. The organizers chose January 25--Police Day,
the day in 1951 when police fought the British occupiers.

Egyptian-American activist Mostafa Omar


http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/26/egypt-reaches-a-boiling-point

Sayyid Qutb, today their most influential ideologue.


Qutb said we are living in the midst of “jahiliya” (a period of unknowing). It is the duty of the true
believer to destroy that “jahiliya”, interpreted as everything to do with the West. Qutb’s beliefs are
the inspirational point of departure for many of the jihadi militarist groups today.

In Egypt today the Brotherhood present themselves as moderate, but the “moderateness” is relative.
For instance, they declared the Muslim academic Nasr Abu Zaid an apostate after he put forward
the theory that the Qur’an has been interpreted differently in different historical contexts. They tried
to force his wife to divorce him through the courts. The couple eventually fled to Scandinavia.
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/3026

MAB is a right-wing fundamentalist tendency associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
that supports the introduction of Sharia law, but for the SWP it is a vehicle through which it hopes
to make an opportunist appeal to the many young muslims who were opposed to the war […] The
SWP insisted that a refusal to raise political differences was essential in order to maintain the
heterogeneous movement against war; to keep things purely at the level of general opposition to
war so as not to alienate anyone.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jul2004/cal3-j07.shtml

PEW research on MAB website


http://mabonline.net/?p=3511

In Egypt, the banned Brotherhood has significant political influence, forging alliances over the last
twenty years with legal Egyptian political groups including New Wafd, Liberal, and Socialist Labor
parties.
legalization could draw moderate Muslims who identify with the Brotherhood’s ideology to
participate in electoral politics, thereby isolating violent jihadis. For its part, the Brotherhood is
eager to play a larger role in local and national politics. Brotherhood officials told the Associated
Press in March they would consider running a candidate in Egypt’s first competitive presidential
election, planned for September, if the government ban on their participation is lifted. Many experts
say that’s unlikely, as such a move would directly threaten President Hosni Mubarak’s 24-year hold
on power.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9248/does_the_muslim_brotherhood_have_ties_to_terrorism.html

The Muslim Brotherhood’s 2004 “reform initiative” stands as a landmark in the organization’s political
evolution (from parliamentary to presidential democracy).

the Brotherhood was benefitting from the Bush administration’s pressure on the Mubarak regime

The increased regime repression provoked internal disagreements within the Brotherhood over how best
to respond. The organization’s “traditionalists” (taqlidiyun) favored downplaying electoral competition
and focusing more on religious education (dawa), constituent service, and tending to the group’s
massive membership rolls. With an overwhelming majority in the shura council, they elected as general
guide Mohamed Badie, once a close associate of Sayyid Qutb and alleged hardliner, defeating the more
“reformist” Mohamed Habib.

The newly elected Badie quickly moved to reassure skeptics, reaffirming the Brotherhood’s
commitment to democracy, pluralism, and minority and women’s rights.

As a longtime financial sponsor of the Mubarak regime and the Hashemite monarchy, the United States
enjoys a significant degree of leverage. As an initial step, President Obama should publicly affirm the
right of all nonviolent political actors –- including Islamist parties –- to freely participate in elections.
This should be coupled with a consistent American policy of opposing not just the arrests of secular
activists, but Islamist ones as well
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2010/0809_islamist_groups_hamid/0809_islamist_gr
oups_hamid.pdf

The Brotherhood was banned in 1954 but is somewhat tolerated by the state. Its candidates are allowed
to run for parliament as independents and in 2005 won 20 percent of the seats, making them Egypt’s
largest opposition bloc.

Badie was once part of group of radical wing and charged with seeking to overthrow Egypt’s
government and was jailed for nine years in the 1960s. When he became a leader, he reaffirmed the
group’s rejection of violence and urged other members to do the same.
http://mabonline.net/?p=2309

(Referring to call for jihad against US, and professing Allah's support for Gazan mujahideen
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4650.htm) When the extreme and arguably marginal British
Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary says that Islam will conquer the West and raise its flag over the White
House, that can be treated as wild rhetoric. His remark is getting lots of attention because he said it in
English in an interview with CNN. Who cares what he says?

But when the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood says the same thing in Arabic, that's a program for
action, a call to arms for hundreds of thousands of people, and a national security threat to every
Western country.
http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/10/muslim-brotherhood-declares-war-on.html

Thus if one were to identify the main ideological element at work in popular mentalities in the Middle
East it would be anti-imperialist nationalism. The reasons for this are obvious – reactivated memories of
the colonial past, the scale and visibility of the Western domination of the region, the constantly
renewed wound of Israel, and the pathetic subordination of most Arab regimes to Washington. What the
historic shift I referred to earlier represents is the Islamists taking over the mantle of leadership of the
anti-imperialist struggle from the secular nationalists and the left. To the extent to which they translate
words into action, as Hezbollah have against Israel, then, on this central issue they cannot be described
as ‘ultra-conservative’. Of course, when it comes to social and economic issues the picture is different –
the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, supports privatization in Egypt. But even here one has to be
careful. Both the Brotherhood and Hezbollah have cultivated a popular base among the urban poor
through their welfare programmes, something that one can’t imagine American Republicans or British
Tories doing.

[…] the logic of such movements is to subordinate the interests of workers and other exploited classes
to those of the bourgeois leadership. This is what explains the many defeats the left has suffered in the
region. It is important to point out at this particular juncture, in the face of the euphoria created by
Hezbollah’s successful resistance to the IDF, that though its leaders dress differently and use a different
ideological language from those, say, of Fatah, they can repeat the same mistakes by, for example, tying
their movement to presently supportive states such as the Islamic Republican regime in Iran and the
Assad regime in Syria that may well be prepared to use it as a bargaining chip in their pursuit of their
own geopolitical interests.
http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=241

Harman emphasised that it was frequently students who formed the backbone of Islamist movements:
[These were] students, the recent Arab speaking graduates and above all, the
unemployed ex-students who formed a bridge to the very large numbers of discontented
youth outside colleges who find that they cannot get college places… And through its
influence over a wide layer of students, graduates and the intellectual unemployed,
Islamism is able to spread out to dominate the propagation of ideas in the slums and
shanty towns as a “conservative” movement.

[...]

Similarly, student suicide bombers carried out the 11 September attack on New York in 2001 and led
many subsequent terrorist attacks. The leading figure in the September 2001 attacks is illustrative of
these trends. Mohammad Atta was born in Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile Delta, a slightly down at heel
Cairo suburb of Giza. His family belonged to a branch of the intelligentsia that was angry at Anwar
Sadat’s opening up of Egypt to the West in the late 1970s. Atta graduated from a university that had, by
the early 1990s, seen a ferment of fundamentalist activity. He joined the Engineers Syndicate, one of the
few Muslim Brotherhood controlled professional associations in Egypt. He became appalled by the
creation of what he regarded as a new class of Egyptian “fat cats”. Volker Hauth, who studied with him
in Germany, remembers, “One of the main points of his critique was the contrast between a few rich
people and the mass of people with barely enough to survive”. 59 Mohammed Atta is a portent of the
movements for Islamic revival, inspired by the desire to reverse real injustices that have emerged
violently across the Third World in the last 40 years, but in the absence of secular alternatives.
http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=641

These are serious people. Unlike Ms. Clinton, they realise that Mubarak is finished, and any attempt to
prop him up will only make things worse.

[problems. 1) Mubarak have their own agenda; 2) who will replace] The Islamic parties led by the
Muslim Brotherhood, did not play any role in the organisation of this action and originally they even
opposed it. Only at a later stage were they forced to allow their members to attend. That is a devastating
comment on those sorry “Marxists” in Europe who have been tail-ending the Islamists and given
uncritical support to the Muslim Brotherhood.
http://www.marxist.com/egypt-calm-before-the-storm.htm

secular
http://hurryupharry.org/2011/01/27/democratic-leftists-lead-uprising-in-egypt/

The meeting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8534365.stm

the question of how to address the events of September 11th was a


divisive issue within the Popular Committee. In an interview with Al-Ahram
Weekly,21 Adel El-Mashad, a founding member of the committee and an activist
with Leftist leanings described the situation:
. . . after 9/11 some of us felt we should issue an announcement extending our
condolences to the families of those who died and explaining the general context of the
crisis. Others in our ranks opposed the idea. In the end we issued nothing.

The Leftists maintain that they work ‘alongside’ Islamists in joint activities rather than
‘with’ the Islamists. The objective of joint activismis not ‘programmatic cooperation’ or
achieving a ‘third way’.23 It is clear to all that cooperation only means ‘coordinated
work for particular short-term missions and specific demands’.

However, the Left cannot take a neutral


stance towards these groups either. Harman28 articulates and explains the need for a
third position in the following passage:
But this does not mean we can simply take an abstentionist dismissive attitude to the
Islamists. They grow on the soil of very large social groups that suffer under existing society, and
whose feeling of revolt could be tapped for progressive purposes . . . many of
the individuals attracted to radical versions of Islamism can be influenced by socialists—
provided socialists combine complete political independence from all forms of Islamism
with a willingness to seize opportunities to draw individual Islamists into genuinely
radical forms alongside them.

On the one hand, the rising coalition


does hold the potential to become a precursor of a vibrant, broadly-based and
democratic grouping that can offer effective opposition to government repression.
But on the other, efforts at cooperation between the Left and the Islamists
have been slow-moving, reluctant and beset with major obstacles. For one thing,
collaboration so far has mostly taken place at the initiative of individuals
rather than organizations. The future of the collaboration, therefore, remains fragile
and is vulnerable to being nullified by the leadership of the institutionalized
organizations representing the main political factions if they decide to oppose any
further collaborative action. Moreover, initiatives taken for organizing
collaborative action have mostly, if not exclusively, come from the Left, which
is objectively the weaker partner in the coalition, rather than from the Muslim
Brotherhood.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2073312/Misc/Abdelrahman%20-%202009%20-
%20%E2%80%98With%20the%20Islamists%E2%80%94Sometimes.%20With%20the
%20State%E2%80%94Ne.pdf

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