Word: brotherhoods
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...example, Egyptian security forces arrested 16 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most popular opposition group. Those arrested included three senior members, including the deputy leader, Mahmoud Ezzat. More than 30 others had been arrested in the two weeks prior to that. "They were arrested having done nothing except calling for reform and freedom and for adopting a moderate approach which Egypt needs the most at this time," read a statement posted on the Muslim Brotherhood website on Feb. 9. (See pictures of the soft revolution of the women of Cairo...
This isn't anything new for the Brotherhood. The group has been banned since 1954, but its popularity - derived mainly through Islamic charity work, calls for political reform and appeals to Muslim religiosity - makes it especially threatening to the authoritarian regime of President Hosni Mubarak. Even so, the Brotherhood has been tolerated to varying degrees over the years, the state having found a way to keep its members in check through a system of arbitrary arrests and detentions that rights groups say are illegal under international law. "It's a repeated situation," says Taha Ali, a political analyst...
Indeed, the state has previously detained hundreds of Brotherhood members in the run-up periods before elections, but the upcoming polls (the upper-house vote is scheduled for May, the more important lower-house vote is in November) - and the arrests, detentions and trials that come with them - could set a new historical precedent for two reasons...
First, the Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to see anything close to the electoral success it enjoyed during the 2005 parliamentary elections, in which the group, whose members run as independent candidates to get around the ban, swept a stunning 20% of the seats in the lower house of parliament, making it the largest opposition bloc to face off against Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party. The regime now seems ready to make sure that doesn't happen again. Three senior leaders among the 16 Brotherhood members arrested earlier this month, including the deputy leader of the group, are, according...
Even so, ElBaradei's potential political campaign will face an intimidating stack of obstacles. The next election is unlikely to be any less controversial than the last; the regime has already launched a crackdown on Egypt's largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and two ElBaradei supporters were arrested and then released earlier in the week for spray-painting anti-Mubarak graffiti...