Abu Aardvark

credit where due

From yesterday's White House briefing:

In addition, regarding Egypt, we are concerned by a continuing campaign of arrests in Egypt of individuals who are opponents of the current governing party and are involved in the upcoming local elections. The people of Egypt should be permitted to choose freely among competing candidates. We call on the government of Egypt to cease any actions that would compromise the ability of the Egyptian people to fully exercise their internationally recognized human rights and to participate in a free and fair election.

That's a good start.   
I'm on the road today and tomorrow, will try to follow up when I can.

MB and democracy, again

This afternoon I spoke at a panel at Brookings with Daniel Levy about Islamist movements.  I'm not sure what the rules of engagement were, so I won't talk about any of the content really.  But I did want to share my own reflections on the subject after almost a year of sustained dialogues about the subject of the Muslim Brotherhood.  (I'd also like to flag the incisive rejoinder to my efforts by the Jordanian analyst Mohammed Abu Roman in al-Hayat yesterday - I promise to summarize his comments and respond when I get the chance.   But that's not the point of today's post.)

One of the main axes of debate has long been the Brotherhood's commitment to democracy, both as a process and as a normative ideal.   I've argued throughout that at this point, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - to say nothing of Islamist movements such as the AKP - have done pretty much everything they could reasonably do to demonstrate their commitment to the democratic process, often paying heavy costs for their efforts.  That doesn't mean that they have answered all the questions - as the discussion over their political party platform demonstrated - nor that they could be seen as a force promoting Western-style liberal or secularist values.  Still, this demonstrated commitment to the democratic game is no small thing and should not be undervalued.   

At the same time, I increasingly feel like the discussion has become pointless at a time when the Egyptian government's lack of commitment to democracy and American indifference to its non-democratic ways have never been more blatantly clear.   I've grown tired of debating the finer points of the Brotherhood's party platform searching for clues as to their true feelings about democracy at a time when large numbers of their members are once again being arrested for the crime of trying to participate in elections.  I find it frustrating to push for dialogue when its leading advocates within the organization - such as Ikhwanweb's Khaled Hamza, who languishes in prison and was recently rushed to the hospital for treatment - are arrested for the crime of trying to promote dialogue with nary a peep from most Western democracy activists.  I fear that the moderates and reformists within the Muslim Brotherhood will lose more and more ground as their democratic efforts produce few results at home or abroad and trigger greater regime repression - and that radicals will gain ground as a result.   I find it hard to persuade anyone in Egypt that the United States cares in the slightest about democracy in their country when the Bush administration quietly drops even its symbolic protests and gives back the $100 million in aid that it docked over human rights violations which have only grown worse.    

Last week a delegation from the Egyptian Parliament headed by Speaker Fathi Srour trooped through the Elliott School, parading its members before the invited audience as if it demonstrated the diversity of Egyptian politics. I didn't go, partly because I taught a class at the same time, and partly because it felt like an ugly, sick joke.  A delegation from the Russian Parliament would be about as edifying - but at least there, nobody pretends to be fooled.  It's about time that they start fielding the questions about their commitment to democracy, and paying a price for their failure to offer satisfying answers.  They might start by explaining why Khaled Hamza is still in jail, and what exactly the crime is in trying to contest elections and pushing tirelessly to promote dialogue with the West.    

No Brothers in Doha

Earlier this week I presented a paper on Islamist views of reform to the US-Islamic World Forum.  It pushed my arguments in earlier papers further, identifying not only the potential for dialogue between the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood but also the very real problems.  I explored in some depth the very different notions of "reform" held by Islamists and many in the West, and challenged participants on both sides to engage seriously, critically, and constructively with these real differences.  (I'll add a link when it's published.)

I was excited not by the prospect of presenting a paper - even with discussants of such high quality as the Egyptian analyst Diya Rashwan and the Jordanian journalist Mohammed Abu Rumman - but because of the dialogue which I hoped would ensue.  At my urging, Brookings had invited Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Council member Abd el-Moneim Abou el-Fattouh, a key Brotherhood reformist who I had interviewed in October. To their credit, they extended the invitation.  To his credit, he accepted it.  Unfortunately, at the last minute Abou el-Fattouh cancelled, citing the usual "health reasons". In fact, it appears that he was banned from traveling by the Egyptian authorities. 

This is typical of the Egyptian government, which routinely bans Brotherhood leaders from traveling to such conferences.  The Egyptian regime recently accelerated its year and a half long crackdown on the Brotherhood in advance of local elections.  Alongside the ongoing military trial of a number of leaders such as Khairat al-Shater - revered by reformist Brotherhood youth, there has been a new campaign of arrests against political organizers and activists, including the outrageous arrest of the quietly influential reformist Khaled Hamza.  It's quite telling that the Brotherhood has evidently decided to go ahead with participating in the municipal elections despite all the obstacles thrown up by the regime.  Its willingness to pay such heavy costs with so few clear benefits supports the conclusion that the Brotherhood's current commitment to the democratic process goes beyond purely tactical considerations. 

The Egyptian regime's focus on repressing the moderate wing of the Brotherhood is worth emphasizing.  Its turn to repression came when the Brotherhood performed well in elections and proposed the formation of a political party - not when it was turning to violence or even street protests.  The more moderate the Brotherhood appears, it seems, the more threatened the Egyptian regime evidently feels.  That has to be seen in the context of the deep uncertainties surrounding the succession to Hosni Mubarak, which Gamal Mubarak has not by any stretch locked up.   I suspect that the Mubarak regime gets extremely agitated by any contacts between the US and the Muslim Brotherhood not because of their radicalism, but because of their fear that Americans might find them to be an acceptable alternative to the Mubaraks.  They see an increasingly urgent survival interest in Americans not seeing the Brotherhood as moderate.

The Egyptian regime might see an interest in producing a more radical Muslim Brotherhood, whether in image or reality.   It certainly seems to be doing all that it can to provoke it into abandoning the democratic process or into violent protests which would justify an even fiercer crackdown and maybe frighten off potentially interested Westerners.   That isn't America's interest, though.  I'd reckon that seeing the moderate trends in the Brotherhood win out is very much in the American interest - for promoting democracy and for fighting al-Qaeda and salafi-jihadist radicalism - and we should be upset when we see allies undermining those interests.   

It's a pity that Dr. Abou el-Fattouh was not allowed to attend. He did send his thoughts on the questions of reform raised in my paper.   Saad Eddin Ibrahim, reading through them, zeroed in on one crucial point:  Abou el-Fattouh's statement that the political discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood was a matter of ijtihad, a human product, not divine, and as such was open to criticism and debate and revision.  More broadly, his written comments demonstrated a deep commitment to democratic procedures and freedoms, and an equally profound commitment to a conservative Islamic cultural agenda and fierce opposition to aspects of American foreign policy (especially in the Israeli-Palestinian arena).  This would not have been a love-fest.  But it would have been a step towads a real dialogue with the chance to actually make progress on identifying real points of convergence and disagreement among a diverse and contentious group of participants.  Perhaps next time. 

End of the MB Blogging Spring?

My recent article for Middle East Report captured a moment in which young members of the Muslim Brotherhood turned to blogging as a way to challenge the organization's status quo - openly discussing its political platform and tactical political decisions, and putting a human face on an often secretive organization.  This "Brotherhood bloggers" phenomenon was controversial, sparking sharp criticism from more traditionalist Brotherhood leaders and inspiring a number of articles in the Egyptian press about impending splits and factionalization of the organization.   The controversies were rising to something of a fever pitch, both within and outside the organization, no doubt fueled in part by the increasing attention being paid to it by the Egyptian and Western media. "Young Brothers in Cyperspace" concluded with this:

The bloggers of the Muslim Brothers represent a growing intellectual and political force within the movement that could, over time, help tip it in a reformist direction. But they face considerable challenges: a leadership wary of change, a regime increasingly prone to arresting troublesome Internet activists. and a salafi counter-trend that could well take the Muslim Brothers in another direction entirely. How much impact the blogging Brothers  can really have remains to be seen, but at the least they represent a new dynamic in the world of Islamism and Arab politics, and offer a striking new window upon the internal life of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Last week, sadly, that window appeared to be closing. In a controversial article published on al-Jazeera Talk (and, notably, not on his own blog or on an official MB website), Abd al-Monem Mahmoud ("Ana Ikhwan"), one of the leaders of the Brotherhood blogging movement, declared a mournful end to the Brotherhood blogging opening.   The great mistake of the MB bloggers, Mahmoud concluded, was that they became identified with a specific ideological and political trend - which made it too easy for them to be portrayed by internal and external critics as a "faction."  Blogging was supposed to be a personal thing, not a political trend, and its growth into a movement doomed the experiment.  Leaders were particularly concerned about the trend since it came a time when the Brotherhood faced a harsh regime crackdown;  the airing of internal disagreements helped the organization's enemies and weakened its public image.   A number of senior leaders rebuked the blogging Brothers, both publicly and privately, urging them to come to their elders to discuss their concerns rather than just posting them online for all to see.    Finally, argues Mahmoud, the recklessness of a few of the youth (especially the "Islam IkhwanOffline" episode, where some young bloggers posted a parody site of the official Brotherhood website in protest over its editorial decisions) triggered a harsh backlash throughout the senior ranks.  The organization's leaders, he hints, decided that the time had come for discipline to replace openness - while the greatest pressure, I hear, actually came from the more radical and salafi youth who vehemently opposed the relatively liberal trend embodied in the blogging experiment.

Mahmoud concludes that it will not be easy for the Brotherhood youth to continue using blogs to push the movement to greater openness under these conditions.  That would be a shame.  I, and many of the youth themselves, had seen the blogging phenomenon as a healthy trend which could over time reshape the internal politics of the organization and strengthen the reformist trend.  The disciplining of these youth will likely strengthen the hand of critics of the organization, and remove one of the hopeful signs about where it's going. (Recall that in my Foreign Policy memo to the Brotherhood, and in my meetings in Cairo, I had encouraged Akef and other Brotherhood leaders to nurture and tolerate the bloggers as a signal of the movement's ability to handle internal debate and criticism.  Oh well.)   

Despite Mahmoud's current pessimism, I still think that this is possible down the road - if these creative and energetic youth activists can find ways to reassure their elders that their blogging helps the organization in the long term more than it hurts it in the short term.   I expect that the "campaign" style blogs will continue (the ones working on behalf of imprisoned Brotherhood leaders, for instance), but that for now the ones discussing internal Brotherhood affairs will go dark.  For now, the Brotherhood blogging experiment which seemed so hopeful just months ago seems to have hit a much rougher patch.  But is that forever, or just for now?    It's hard to imagine the bloggers just letting it go over the long term, given their technophilia and their political energy and the taste of public engagement which they've now had.  I'm somewhat reassured by the fascinating cross-blog dialogue over the role of women in the Muslim Brotherhood which continues in spite of the current troubles. 

MERIP 245: Politics of Youth

The new issue of Middle East Report is out.  It focuses on youth issues in the region - it's full of really interesting articles, including a good overview piece by Ted Swedenberg and my own article on Muslim Brotherhood bloggers.  Those are free online, along with a wealth of fascinating material in the print edition.

"Young Brothers in Cyberspace" is one of the two articles that I wrote up after returning from Egypt - I hope that it does justice to the fascinating trends and individuals I saw emerging there. I started writing this piece before the issue really started to heat up - and then watched as over the course of a few months the MB bloggers emerged as one of the hottest and most contentious issues within the Brotherhood.  I got the article as up to date as possible before it went to the printers (amazingly so, all things considered), but still couldn't capture the denouement of the recent dust-up over "Ikhwan Offline", al-Masry al-Youm's attempt to again cast the bloggers as threatening to split the MB, Mohammed Habib's suggestion in an interview that bloggers talk to their elders before rattling off the first thing which comes into their heads, or the official Ikhwan Online's publication of Ahmed Abd al-'Atti's advice to and Mustafa al-Naggar's defense of the MB bloggers.   Also, I've presented the material three times since completing the article and given the opportunity I would probably have adjusted a few minor points (mainly of emphasis and presentation) in light of the excellent feedback.  At any rate, I'm really happy with the article and hope that y'all enjoy it.    Thanks to all the Brotherhood bloggers and activists who took the time to meet with me (including Abd al-Monem Mahmoud, AbdulRahman Rashwan, AbelRahman Ayesh, Mohamed Hamza, Ibrahim Hodeybi, Khaled Hamza, Abdelrahman Mansour and so many more - including others like Magdi Saad and Asma el-Erian whose blogs I've long followed but didn't get a chance to meet, and analysts like Khalil el-Anani, Diya Rashwan, Mona el-Ghobashy, and Chris Toensing who helped put it all in perspective). I hope they find it accurate and useful, even if some of the conclusions might not be totally as they might have liked.   I don't think that these MB bloggers are alone going to change Egypt, or even that they'll necessarily win their internal battles over the Brotherhood's future - but it's a fascinating and important trend worth respect and attention which has become a surprisingly potent issue in recent months.

Both my and Ted's articles are available online for free. I'm glad that it will therefore reach a wider audience, but there's also a more serious issue there.   MERIP, for decades one of the single best sources for quality analysis of the Middle East, has fallen on even tougher financial times than usual, as post-9/11 foundation interest has begun to dry up. They're facing a $60,000 shortfall, which in some political quarters would be the bar tab for a weekend conference but in the non-profit world is rather steep.  Now would be a good time, if you're so inclined, to subscribe or donate or do what you can to save this invaluable institution.

And now, I'm off to Montreal for the MESA annual meeting.  Hope to see friends new and old there!

Abd el-Monem Said at Brandeis

Back from Boston.   Baseball fans might have noticed that my temporary presence on the Red Sox roster seems to have made a difference.  I didn't make it to the mound, but I'd like to think that my steadying veteran presence made a contribution - Curt Schilling, in particular, seemed to appreciate having a fellow blogger around. 

On the academic side, I thorougly enjoyed the Crown Center's conference on the Middle East.  It was fascinating to see Iran experts Naghmeh Sohrabi and Farideh Farhi mix it up with a former Israeli defense official about Iranian intentions, to see Josh Landis and Itamar Rabinovich debate Syria's attitudes towards peace with Israel, to finally meet the distinguished Israeli historian of Jordan Asher Susser, and more (I won't even mention the challenges posed by the stage setup to the, shall we say, differently gendered when said gender happened to be wearing a skirt).  One of the most interesting themes running through the conference - notably by Roger Owen and Jon Alterman - about the increasingly Asian orientation of Gulf economies and societies.   That's something to which I haven't given enough thought, and it does raise some provocative questions... for another day.

For me personally, the highlight was the chance to debate the Muslim Brotherhood in public and private with the well-known Egyptian political scientist Abd el-Monem Said (director of the Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, member of the NDP's Policy Bureau, and prolific columnist for al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Ahram, and other newspapers).  Said was one of the first and most prominent critics of the MB's draft political party platform, and has been a long-time skeptic of the Brotherhood's democratic credentials.  I won't say anything here about our lengthy private discussions, but our public exchanges brought out some very interesting and constructive points of disagreement.

We basically agreed in characterizing the MB as a divided organization which has been struggling to define its goals and its strategies in the face of both internal disagreements and a rapidly changing political environment.  But where I am impressed by the potential and performance of the MB's pragmatists over the last few years, Said sees the hard-line, conservative face presented in the draft party document as  the majority trend within the MB.   Despite the MB's willingness to participate in elections, Said sees the MB as inherently undemocratic in its goals and methods:  he described their agenda of social transformation and the creation of new Islamic individuals as totalitarian by nature, and their attempt to evaluate legislation in terms of religious dictates of right and wrong as contrary to the spirit of pragmatic problem solving and bargaining.   The devil is in the details, he argued, and even the seemingly liberal documents produced by the Brotherhood over the last few years fail to impress him as genuinely democratic.  Finally, he disputed the claim that the Brotherhood is experience significant repression - for an organization of perhaps 100,000 members the arrest of a few dozen or even few hundred leaders isn't that big a deal.

I disagreed about how to read the earlier MB political documents - the 2004 reform document, the 2005 Parliamentary election platform, the 2007 Shura Council election platform, and others.   I think that he seriously underestimates the importance of the evolution of the MB's political discourse in the direction of an embrace of democracy and public freedoms.  I also think he profoundly understates the repressive turn in Egypt over the last few years, and the corrosive effect on the rule of law of such things as using military courts against Brotherhood leaders and going after opposition journalists on flimsy pretenses.  I also didn't think that he had a good answer to my arguments about how the MB had demonstrated its democratic commitments through both words and deeds over the last few years - in electoral participation in 2005 and 2007, in refraining from demonstrations and protests, in its policy documents, and simply in remaining committed to the electoral realm despite all efforts to force it to retreat.  Of course the Brotherhood has not become liberal, but it has done pretty much everything it can do to prove its commitment to the democratic process short of running in an election, winning, governing, losing an election, and surrendering power peacefully - none of which is likely to be a realistic possibility any time soon.   

At any rate, I'll make this case much more systematically - with footnotes and everything! - in a paper coming out quite soon.  These arguments won't be resolved any time soon, and it's great to have them in such a constructive way.  I've already benefited from his comments on a previous draft, and since he does read Abu Aardvark, I hope that he'll send me a note if I've mischaracterized his public statements in any way - or if he wants to continue the discussion here!

Abd el-Monem Said also made one other very interesting remark during the open session worth highlighting here.  I asked him about what he thought, as a political scientist and as a member of the NDP's Policy Committee, about what would happen when Hosni Mubarak left the scene.  His response:  absolutely, categorically, 100% definitively, Gamal Mubarak will not become President.   He said that the succession issue had been driven by the political opposition and by the foreign media, but had little to do with reality. If Mubarak lasted until the next election, then there would be an open competition for the NDP nomination, in which Gamal would have a chance but would not be likely to muster a majority from among the various barons and cadres of the NDP.  If Mubarak passed on before the next scheduled election, the likely next President would be neither Gamal nor someone from the military.     It would be the Secretary-General of the NDP - Safwat al-Sharif.  I thought that was kind of an interesting analysis;   Egypt-watchers, have at it.

UPDATE:  Abd el-Monem Said offers his thoughts in his al-Sharq al-Awsat column today, here.  He says that it is a rare bit of good news that the MB has announced that it will review the draft party proposal, but that he does not expect it to be a real change because the problems with Brotherhood ideology run too deep.

UPDATE 2:  And a full response here, elevated from comments:

I think you have misrepresented my comments. There was no defense of the government repression of the Brothers. I did denounce it in public in newspapers articles the military courts and other forms of extra legal treatment of the Brothers. Yet, I did not see that as repressive as Nasser did, nor as Assad did in Hama. There is was never a massive assualt on the Brothers to arrest the supreme guide or to arrest their members of Parliament. That does not make the repression nice or commendable. It is just to put the analysis in perspective; and more important to make it a justfication for the totalitarian views of the Brothers. I have pointed in clear terms their record in Parliament regarding the Bahais, the converted Muslims to christianity, the Higab issue, and their programs from 2004 onward which speaks for the creation of the " faithful man" through a process of indoctronation customary of totalitarian parties. Their socio-economic very interventionist program and their national security perspective is typical of parties which are ready to whip their population for a frenzy of hatred of the others. Abdel Monem Said Aly

Speaking of Egypt

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is due to visit Cairo tomorrow.  Many Egyptians will be watching to see whether she manages to spend her day there without making a public statement in defense of Ibrahim Eissa and the other Egyptian journalists facing prosecution  - or, more accurately, political persecution - over the "crime" of spreading rumours. 

Nobody really expects much from the United States anymore, to be frank.  It seems like a long, long time ago that Condoleeza Rice came to the American University of Cairo to deliver a stirring speech apologizing for past American support for Arab dictatorships and pledging American support for democracy and reform.   Rice has repeatedly managed to go to Egypt during particularly repressive moments without saying a thing.   To this day, Egyptians of all political stripes marvel at the fact that America has failed to even get Ayman Nour out of prison - how is it possible, they ask, that America can't even protect its friends?   Egyptians are divided over what is more relevant:  American hypocrisy (talking democracy but doing nothing about it) or American impotence (failing to move Mubarak even when it does "try").

Look, nobody really expected America to be able to convince Hosni Mubarak to let himself be voted out of office, even if that had been something the US wanted.  And nobody really expects the Bush administration to speak out on behalf of imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood leaders, even if they are tried in blatantly undemocratic military courts, their property seized without a pretence of due process, or their human rights violated in the notorious Egyptian security prisons.  But is it too much to ask that the Bush administration speak out forcefully, and act effectively, in support of such a small but existentially important thing as the freedom of the press?   

Ibrahim Eissa and his fellow defendents represent the heart of what remains of Egypt's political opening, a brash and courageous independent press without which any serious reform is impossible.  Rice should say something about this, even if it annoys Mubarak's regime... and if she doesn't, it will be noticed.

MB party platform: which true face?

Mohammed Elmenshawy, the editor of the DC-based Arabic news site Taqrir Washington, published an article in the Christian Science Monitor declaring that the draft political party platform of the Muslim Brotherhood revealed its "true face."  Elmenshawy repeats the conventional wisdom in Egyptian circles about the disastrous nature of the draft platform.  The platform includes a controversial proposal for a Higher Ulema Council, which by the worst reading would create an Iranian style religious authority with power over laws.  It also refuses to allow women or Christians to serve as head of state.   Those three points have overshadowed everything else in the platform, and have been taken as a major setback in the MB's efforts to reassure Egyptians of their democratic intentions.   For their critics - egged on by the Mubarak regime - this is the "true face" of the Muslim Brotherhood:  Iranian style religious despotism and chauvinism.   

Elmenshawy and the other Egyptian critics of the Brotherhood's draft platform are right, but not in quite the way he meant.  Rather than revealing the "true face" of the Brotherhood, the development of the party platform offers a fascinating glimpse of a divided organization struggling to figure out how to respond to a changing political environment.  How those internal battles are resolved will tell us - in the West and in Egypt - a lot about the future of Egyptian Islamism and of Egyptian politics. 

As I wrote the other day, I was as taken aback by the platform as were many of these Egyptian critics - enough so that I actually postponed publishing a nearly-finished article in order to try to find out what was going on.    So during my conversations with the MB leaders I asked a lot of questions about it.   Most of the people I spoke with complained that it had been misinterpreted, probably willfully by hostile critics determined to make the MB look bad).  But that didn't stop many of them from them going on to say that it was, in fact, a terrible idea and shouldn't have been included. 

The defense of the Higher Ulema Council idea boiled down to the claim that it wasn't as new or as important as the critics claimed.  Several of the Brotherhood leaders pointed to language within the platform which, they argued, clearly makes the elected Parliament the soveriegn authority and the Constitutional Court the arbiter.  The proposed Higher Ulema Council, they argued, would simply provide expert advice to Parliament, the way that specialized committees on agriculture, engineering, finance (or whatever) already do.   Whether this is what the MB *really* meant by the HUC proposal or whether it is a hasty retreat to a more acceptable ground, I do not know.  But that's what they are now saying.

For them, the point of the HUC was not to create a new religious authority but to contest the current role of al-Azhar.  In the eyes of the MB, al-Azhar has become so subservient to the government that it no longer plays an independent or useful role.  The HUC would be elected and independent, thereby rescuing religious advice from governmental domination.  Would that be a good thing?  Presumably they expect that a freely elected HUC would take positions closer to Brotherhood views than does the current system, which elevates the views of the determinedly pro-regime Shaykh of al-Azhar. Right now, the MB is recapturing its mojo a bit by going after the Shaykh of al-Azhar, Mohamed al-Tantawy, for his ridiculous declaration that journalists spreading rumors should be punished with 80 lashes.  With the Shaykh of al-Azhar taking the government's side in one of its most transparently despotic moves, the MB perhaps looks on stronger ground here.   But from what I can tell after studying the platform, it remains quite vague on how the HUC would be elected, who would be eligible for election, and such details.   I also failed, despite repeated and very pointed questions, to elicit any clear positions on what would happen if the Egyptian government passed laws which the HUC deemed counter to Sharia - a point of obvious and great importance which really can't be fudged.

The broader point that I want to make here, though, is that the controversy over the party platform reveals as much about the "true face" of the Brotherhood as does the platform itself.  Since its release, a range of major Brotherhood figures have publicly criticized the Higher Ulema Council idea and the ban on a female or Christian President.  Abd al-Monem Abou el-Fattouh, Essam el-Erian and Gamal Hishmet are some of the most prominent MB figures to publicly denounce the platform, while a slew of activist MB bloggers such as Abd al-Monem Mahmoud, Mohamed Hamza, and Abdel Rahman Rashwan, have opened up fascinating public debates and revealed a diversity of views inside the MB. 

Essam el-Erian recently told al-Masry al-Youm that the platform would be reviewed by a committee headed by Deputy Supreme Guide Mohamed Habib. In our conversation, Habib told me that the review would take into account all of the internal and external criticisms.  If the final version of the platform nevertheless stays the same, then this will vindicate skeptics such as Abd al-Monem Said, Khalil el-Anani, and Elmenshawy and reveal that the conservative trend in the MB is currently dominant and the reformers in retreat. If the platform changes upon review, it will reveal that the reformers still have a strong position within the organization and are willing to fight in defense of their pragmatic views.  For anyone interested in the future of Egyptian politics and Islamist movements, this should be watched carefully.

Doing dialogue in Cairo

I'm just back to the US, and now I can say a bit more about where I was and what I was doing.  Some readers might recall that last month I published an essay in Foreign Policy magazine, "How to Talk to America", cast as a memo to the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Mohammed Mehdi Akef.   So last week I flew to Cairo, where I spent four intense days of meetings and discussions with more than 25 people.  I got to talk with most of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood which isn't currently in prison,  about a dozen Muslim Brotherhood bloggers and activists, a number of Egyptian analysts with keen insight into the Brotherhood such as Diya Rashwan and Khalil el-Anani, and of course the usual journalist suspects (i.e. my friends).   I was also interviewed by al-Masry al-Youm and al-Dustour, which may prove entertaining depending on what gets published.   My deepest thanks here go to Abd el-Monem Mahmoud (who you might remember him as the MB blogger arrested and tortured several months ago); Monem was my constant companion over the last week, and I can't say how much I appreciate his tireless good humor and flexibility and tolerance for my occasional struggles with his Alexandrian colloquial Arabic!

I'm not going to go into great detail about what I found, since I am going to be publishing articles very soon exploring each of the three main topics of my research, but I thought I could at least give an idea of what I was doing.

The visit had three main objectives.  First, to actually begin to talk to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood about the possibilities of dialogue with America -  not, I must stress, as any kind of channel but simply to explore their responses to my memo and their thoughts about the future of the organization's relations with the United States.   Most of the leaders had read the memo, and came into the meetings with some detailed criticisms and complaints - I was impressed that Akef made the effort to thank me for the "good advice" in English (though other than that all the conversations were in Arabic).   

With Mohamed Mehdi Akef, Supreme Guide of the MB

I found people at all levels of the organization delighted to talk to me, and very generous with their time and ideas, but few were particularly forthcoming with regard to the idea of dialogue.  Most emphasized that they valued dialogue in principle, and some went so far as to say that they would be happy to talk with any American government - even Bush - if it admitted American mistakes and changed US polices. But overall, I did not come away with a sense that many Brotherhood leaders saw much value in any official dialogue with the US right now:  discussion with researchers such as myself, yes, but not political dialogue of any sort.  This didn't really surprise me, since it's consistent with what they've been saying in their interviews and public statements for quite some time (including in Akef's contentious interview published in al-Dustour the day I arrived, where he basically said that the Brotherhood had nothing to do with calls for dialogues with the West such as mine). 

The discussions were still valuable, though.  Many of the MB leaders are clearly keen to be better understood in the West, and bitter over what they see as misconceptions about them.  I tried to push back against their understanding of what this entailed, which actually reminded me of nothing more than the Bush administration's concept of public diplomacy:  they see the problem lying primarily in misunderstandings on the other side, so the problem is to better explain themselves and correct these false impressions.  I tried to convince them that the problems went deeper than that, and that they needed to engage in real dialogues which might expose their own inconsistencies and shortcomings and not only "fix" faulty American understandings.   I pushed the Brotherhood leaders quite hard in explaining where Americans had doubts about their intentions and emphasizing the need for actions which matched their words.  I also tried to emphasize the need for active rather than passive steps:  when an Islamist radical files a "hisba" suit against a liberal, or declares takfir on someone, it isn't enough to just disagree privately or say that the MB doesn't have anything to do with such things - strong, clear, public condemnation would have much more of an impact.  I don't know if any of this had any effect, but they seemed to listen carefully.  Anyway, I'll be writing this up in an article quite soon;  stay tuned. 

Abd al-Monem Abou el-Fattouh clarifying the text of the political party platform

Second, I wanted to explore the controversial political party platform which the Brotherhood circulated to about 50 Egyptian intellectuals last month, which aroused quite a public controversy because of the presence of several inflammatory new ideas such as a "Higher Ulema Council" and a rejection of a Christian or woman president. Again, I'm not going to go into too much detail about what I found out on this topic, simply because I will have lengthy article coming out about it in a few weeks.  The background, for those who haven't been following the story, is that the Brotherhood has been working on a political party platform.  Several earlier drafts which were published in al-Masry al-Youm newspaper and Islam Online closely resembled earlier MB programmatic statements, and were consistent with the MB's evolving political discourse.  But the platform which was distributed in preliminary form to the intellectuals shocked everyone (including me), and sparked a fiercely negative public response.  Analysts hostile to the MB went to town on it, claiming that it revealed the true, despotic, radical face of the MB:   Abd al-Monem al-Said, for instance, called it a program for MB religious state along the Iranian model.  Even analysts sympathetic to the MB such as Amru Shoukbi and Diya Rashwan were fiercely critical.  Personally, I was quite taken aback since the draft was such a major departure from the two previous ones - leading me to put on hold an article about the MB and democracy which had been almost ready for the copyeditor until I could look at this more closely.

After my conversations, it is clear to me that the Brotherhood's leadership is divided about the party platform, with some defending it as written and others bluntly stating that of course it will be changed.  The draft party platform isn't the "true face" of the MB, but it is one face of the MB and it is profoundly unclear whether it is a more powerful trend than the more pragmatic political trend which had produced earlier documents. Some of the criticism has gone public (Abou el-Fattouh and Gamal Hishmet have both publicly dissented, while Essam el-Erian on his release from prison said that he hadn't even seen the program before it's release - it seems likely that the fact that Erian, Kheirat al-Shater, and several other of the key pragmatists in the organization were in prison at the time let the more conservative faction rewrite the platform into its current form).   

They were all keen to explain to me that the controversial Higher Ulema Council would only be advisory, not compulsory, and that sovereignty would still rest in the elected Parliament and the Constitutional Court.   They argued that their purpose had not been to create a new religious authority, but rather to create a new body which would be elected and independent of the Executive Branch - taking power away from al-Azhar rather than imposing Shia-style religious authority.  Abou el-Fattouh, in the picture above, was going through the program line by line to show me that this what it actually said.   On the question of whether there could be a Christian or woman president, the party line now seems to be that it simply could never happen in Egypt since Muslims wouldn't vote that way - begging the question of why it would need to be written into the platform that they can't.  But in one especially interesting exchange, Abou el-Fattouh told me that he would vote for the prominent Coptic Christian intellectual Rafik Habib over Gamal Mubarak.  For all their efforts to explain themselves, most seem to recognize that they have a problem, since one of the main objectives of the platform was to reassure other Egyptians about their intentions - something which has spectacularly backfired and left them open to all kinds of attacks from skeptics.  It will be very interesting to see if it really does change - and an important test of the internal balance of power in the MB and the depth of their interest in responding to the concerns of their fellow citizens (and, of course, the West).

 

Finally, I wanted to follow up on an article I wrote about Muslim Brotherhood bloggers earlier this year, to learn more about this new generation of Brotherhood bloggers and activists.   This was a smashing success, as I got to meet a wide range of young activists from different trends - mostly, but not entirely, from the Brotherhood (including several very impressive young women - don't be fooled by the picture above).  I'm running out of steam now and don't have the time to go into those meetings in as much depth, but it was really fascinating.  The MB bloggers represent an important new phenomenon.  I was struck by the point made by many of them that it isn't only Americans who usually don't know any MB members personally - even in Egypt, most people don't know any MB members personally. The blogs, argue the bloggers, humanize the MB and have let them start building connections and relationships among themselves and with non-MB youth.   MB bloggers have also raised some of the most biting public criticisms of the organization itself, such as Abd al-Monem Mahmoud's critique of the political party platform - which generated over 50 comments, cross-blog controversies, and a spirited public argument which offers a fascinating glimpse into the controversies and ideas within the MB youth.  Some of the older MB clearly worry about exposing these disagreements in public, but others - including the imprisoned Kheirat al-Shater - have encouraged the MB blogging phenomenon as a way of revitalizing the organization and energizing its youth.   I'll have much more to say about this soon.   I do want to thank Abd al-Rahman Ayesh, who participated in one of my meetings with the MB bloggers, for the nicest thing anyone said about the whole trip:  in his post about our meeting, he called me "young"... just as chatting with these young, spirited activists in a giant mall in Cairo had driven me to gloomy reflections on the fact that I could no longer fit anyone's definition of "youth".   

Oh, while I was there the Egyptian independent press went on strike for a day in protest over the lawsuits against Ibrahim Eissa and other editors.  More on that later.   I have to go now...

Massacre of the Egyptian press

Ibrahim Eissa, one of the most courageous independent journalists in Egypt, has just been sentenced to a year in prison on charges that his newspaper al-Dustour published false and malicious rumours about the death of Hosni Mubarak, and also of insulting Mubarak and his son Gamal.   Three other editors of independent weeeklies ere also sent to jail:  Adel Hamouda, Wail al-Ibrashi, and Abd al-Halim Qandil.  This is nothing short of a massacre of Egypt's independent press.  If the American embassy in Cairo has even a modicum of pretensions to caring about such things as press freedoms, reform, or democracy then it should be issuing a very stern protest immediately.  If it doesn't, then any American who claims to care about such things should be absolutely outraged.   Docking Egypt $200 million in military aid should only be the beginning.   

UPDATE -  as several people have pointed out, there are two different cases in play here, one over the spreading of rumours and the other over the defamation of the President;  the sentences just handed down were over the latter.   Don't think this changes anything at all, but worth noting since the original post was confusing.