If you find the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt confusing, I suspect that is entirely intentional. The Brotherhood is now the largest organised political force in Egypt, but it currently operates from ramshackle offices in a Cairo suburb. It has sweeping ambitions and a grand vision for the entire Middle East. But it has promised not to seek a majority of seats in the coming parliamentary elections in Egypt or to run a candidate for president.

Essam el-Erian, the brotherhood’s spokesman, embodies the contradiction. He is smiling and welcoming to foreign visitors and he speaks about conciliation and pluralism in Egypt. But get him on international affairs and something much darker and angrier emerges. The Obama administration may hope that it gained credit by urging President Mubarak to step down. But not in the eyes of El-Erian. He insists that America is actively working to overturn the Egyptian revolution and adds – “The Americans always lie. They say one thing and do the opposite.”

 

The Brotherhood’s conspiracy-theories are, perhaps, unsurprising. This is an organisation that has been persecuted for something like seventy years in Egypt and is only now emerging blinking into the sunlight. El-Erian himself has served more than seven years in jail, in various spells since the 1980s.

He insists that the Brotherhood is in no hurry to take power, saying of the “liberal” forces in Egypt (the Facebook crowd) – “This is not the time for competition. We made the revolution together and together we will protect the revolution…It is enough for us to have 35% of the seats in parliament.” I asked him how long it would take before the Brotherhood might run for all the seats in parliament – “After building the new system”, he replied, “if it takes five years that’s OK. We’re not in a hurry…We need to convince people that we are not the bogeymen that Mubarak talked of.”

But while El-Erian and his brothers may succeed in this task in Egypt, I suspect that their language will be less than reassuring to the US, Israel and the European Union. His goals are pan-Arabist and he blames the West for much of what is wrong in the region: “All Arabs have faced the same problems – dictatorship, corruption – supported by Europe and the US, working for the interests of Israel.” However, according to El-Erian, there is a simple solution, the West must junk its support for Israel and accept that 5m Palestinian refugees should return to the Holy Land. “Your interests are with us, not with the Jews, that is clear,” he told me.

Source: Gideon Rachman’s blog

  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •