Word: brotherhoods
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Posters on the wall herald the march of Islam, but tonight the Cairo headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood is a different kind of war room. Essam el-Erian, chief political strategist for the banned but officially tolerated fundamentalist group, performs evening prayers with a dozen other officials and then starts working the phones like James Carville, checking on the results of the final round of the parliamentary elections held last week in Egypt. The early returns are promising. Later that evening, he heads to the Brotherhood's operations center, where banks of computers and election charts, rather than Islamic symbols...
After years of government repression, activists like el-Erian have a lot to cheer about. The final round of balloting gave the Brotherhood, whose candidates ran as independents, 88 seats in the 454-member parliament, making it the main opposition to President Hosni Mubarak's secular, military-backed regime, which has ruled Egypt for 24 years. The result, a sixfold increase over the group's 15 seats in the current national assembly, came despite clashes between Brotherhood supporters and government police who tried to prevent them from voting. The violence left 12 dead and hundreds injured. And the election raised...
...Brotherhood's emergence has set off political tremors across the Middle East--and poses a quandary for the Bush Administration's strategy of promoting democracy and free elections in the region. Founded in 1928, the Brotherhood has never renounced its goal of re-establishing an Islamic caliphate and has long been associated with radical ideologues like Sayyid Qutb, whose writings helped inspire al-Qaeda. During a visit to Egypt last June, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ruled out meetings with the group out of respect for Egypt's laws. And Egyptians across the political spectrum say the Brotherhood's vague...
...Bush Administration's Arab democracy campaign is helping bring change to Egypt, if not quite the sort Washington is after. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which strongly opposes U.S. intervention in Iraq and support for Israel, won 76 seats in the first two rounds of parliamentary elections and could gain a total of 100 once the final vote is completed this week. Says Abdel Monem Said of Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies: "Everyone is surprised, perhaps even the Brotherhood...
President Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party is still expected to wind up with nearly 80% of the Parliament's 454 seats. But the unprecedented freedom it granted opponents in this election enabled the 77-year-old Brotherhood--whose members run as independents because of a ban on religious parties--to field twice as many candidates as in the last vote five years ago, when 15 members took office. The group did well this year despite voter intimidation, including some poll closings, witnessed by TIME. A U.S. State Department spokesman still praised the vote as "an important step...