Word: erian
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...Erian's latest tussle occurred this year, when authorities sent him back to prison for six months for organizing antigovernment street protests. He was released only three weeks before the first round of parliamentary voting. Though freed too late to run for parliament, el-Erian took command of the party's political wing and set up an operations center to coordinate activists, respond to reports of voter intimidation and conduct exit polls. Interviewed by TIME after the final results, el-Erian downplayed fears that the Brotherhood would focus on such issues as banning alcohol and veiling women according to Islamic...
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 uses its clout may be determined by younger leaders like el-Erian, who heads the party's political department. A practicing physician, el-Erian, 51, joined the group after Israel's defeat of the Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day War helped spur a revival of Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world. He was among thousands of activists rounded up at about the time a Muslim extremist assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. After a year in prison, el-Erian won a seat in parliament in 1987, serving three years before being jailed again...
...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 in the democratic reform process." The many calls for change from the U.S. and Europe, acknowledges Brotherhood activist Essam Erian, "made a difference...