Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is likely to come back into the spotlight after the death of the country’s deposed President Mohammed Morsi.
In January 2016, Morsi supporters took to the streets on the anniversary of the 2011 uprising in Cairo, Egypt. “Our comeback is only a matter of time,” Talaat Fehmi, the spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood, says with a smile.
Following the Rabaa massacre in Cairo, which claimed over 800 lives of unarmed protesters who challenged the military coup, Sisi launched a brutal crackdown against the Brotherhood, declaring it a terrorist organisation. Since then, the party's senior leadership has either gone underground, or moved to the UK, Qatar and Turkey.
The signs of the ideological divide were forced out into public view in early March, when the group's Administrative Committee, led by new and relatively younger Brotherhood leaders, released a report containing critical observations about the organisation's past performance. The Administrative Committee was formed by the Cairo-based Brotherhood leader Mohamed Kamal, who was assassinated in October 2016.
The Brotherhood is being cornered from many sides. Its senior leadership is in jail, including the ousted president Mohamed Morsi, and the second-tier members who managed to escape Sisis military crackdown are living in exile. Turkey, where many of the senior Brotherhood exiles now live, has been against the Egyptian coup from the very beginning — as has the Gulf state of Qatar. The country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly used the four-fingered sign of Rabaa as a symbol of his convictions and his political philosophy during his mass rallies.
When a movement suffers such severe repression and efforts to undermine it, maintaining its internal organisational structures is extremely challenging. Tensions between the old established leadership and upstarts who question the path of the old guard; between the conservatists and reformists. Fehmi has strongly argued that if there were an armed struggle against the Egyptian regime by the Brotherhood, there would be a bitter civil war and political deadlock. Egypt would be a new Syria, which should be avoided at all costs. Political parties could function in a national platform, and if a nation ceases to exist as a whole, there will be no point to be a political party there. There would be no winners, he argues.
But ordinary people obviously want to go ahead with their lives no matter what has happened to the Brotherhood or other movements. It is not clear how the movement is able to appeal and remain relevant to ordinary people in Egypt. Fehmi says they are simply biding their time. But the young members of the group with a political orientation have strongly been opposing this stance and they want to embrace the methods of violent Salafist groups like Al Qaeda, Yaylaci observed. Ayman al Zawahiri was a former member of the Brotherhood before he became one of the top leaders of Al Qaeda. The youngsters are more inclined toward taking the Zawahiri path.
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