The lead headline in Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram this morning was both startling and contradictory (عربي): "The repeal of the emergency, and its restriction to terrorism and drugs." That was followed by a notice from the Egyptian prime minister's office, announcing a 10:30GMT press conference on the renewal of the emergency laws.
Confused? You'd think all of these things would be mutually exclusive: How can you abolish a law, restrict it, and renew it?
Cairo's criminal court ordered the release of 16 Muslim Brotherhood members arrested in February, but it's unclear whether the Egyptian government will agree to carry out the verdict.
The court ordered the men released on bail of LE5,000 (US$900) each. The verdict won't be executed for at least another day, though, because this is a public holiday in Egypt (Sham an-Nassim). And the government might decide to ignore it altogether: The Brotherhood's lawyer, Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maksoud, told the group's English-language Web site that the government could use the emergency laws to defy the verdict and keep the detainees in jail (wouldn't be the first time).
The detainees -- including deputy supreme guide Mahmoud Ezzat -- have been in jail nearly two months, and they've been accused of plotting terrorist attacks and forming a secret women's organization within the Brotherhood.
As Egypt draws closer to elections -- a parliamentary ballot this year, and the presidential vote next year -- expect the government to keep increasing its pressure on opposition groups.
At least 45 members of the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested today (عربي) in six Egyptian governorates. That number might be higher: The Brotherhood claims 58 people were rounded up. Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maksoud, the group's lawyer, said the arrests are probably linked to the upcoming parliamentary elections.
(Updated below) Egyptian state media reported today that Ahmed al-Tayeb has been appointed the new sheikh (عربي) of Al-Azhar University, replacing Mohamed Tantawi, who passed away last week.
The 64-year-old Tayeb, born in Qena province, is a safe choice for Mubarak. He's spent more than four decades at Al-Azhar: He received a Ph.D. in religion from the school in 1977, then went on to join the faculty, and eventually became dean of the philosophy department. In 2003, he was appointed president of the university; he also served a one-year stint as Egypt's grand mufti. (The current grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, congratulated Tayeb on his appointment today.)
With elections for Egypt's People's Assembly, the lower house of parliament, set for this fall, the government has already begun its usual crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist social organization and political party that is banned by law but allowed to operate with a low profile by the government. Following the arrest in February of high-ranking Brothers, police arrested dozens (perhaps hundreds) on Friday and Tuesday at protests.
The Brotherhood won 88 seats in the 454-seat Assembly during landmark elections in 2005. Since then, the leadership of the Brotherhood has changed and signaled less of an interest in electoral politics, but President Hosni Mubarak's approach to the organization has remained the same: Mubarak's government looks like it's in the process of turning the screws on the Brotherhood in the run-up to this year's elections, just as it did in 2005.
One more item from yesterday's Muslim Brotherhood hearing in Heliopolis: According to El-Shorouk, Essam el-Erian promised that the Brotherhood will participate in all coming elections (عربي).
Someone should tell Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who last month proposed a 20-year boycott of Egyptian elections (عربي) in order to focus on building the Brotherhood internally.
This isn't a new division within the Brotherhood (Marc Lynch and Shadi Hamid, among others, have written about it previously). Electoral participation yields few benefits for the Brotherhood, and it has a steep downside -- increased arrests, greater repression. There was some hope that the Brotherhood's internal election this winter would resolve the debate. It didn't -- and the division is likely to deepen as Egypt draws closer to parliamentary elections this fall.
No imminent release for the senior Muslim Brotherhood officials arrested last month in Cairo: A court in Heliopolis overturned their appeal yesterday (عربي), so the group -- which includes deputy supreme guide Mahmoud Ezzat -- will stay in jail a while longer.
Egypt's Supreme Administrative Court ruled today that the privately-owned East Mediterranean Gas (EMG) company can, in fact, sell natural gas to Israel.
EMG started selling gas to Israel in May of 2008; it has a contract to provide 1.7 billion cubic meters of gas annually for the next 20 years. A court ruled in November 2008 that the contract was illegal. The government has largely ignored that ruling -- natural gas sales to Israel continued -- but today's vote officially overrules the previous decision.
First they were accused of plotting terrorist attacks. Now the Egyptian government says the 16 Muslim Brotherhood members it arrested last week are also setting up a secret "women's organization" within the Brotherhood (عربي).
The text of the indictment... says that [deputy supreme guide Mahmoud] Ezzat and other Brotherhood members are working to attract women to the organization, and to use them to pass messages to other Brotherhood members undetected by Egyptian security forces.
There's a bit of precedent for this: A woman named Zainab al-Ghazali, who died a few years ago, ran an organization called Jama'at al-Sayyidaat al-Muslimaat (the Organization of Muslim Women). It was affiliated with the Brotherhood, and Ghazali was imprisoned and tortured because of her connection to the group.
Since we're talking about the Muslim Brotherhood this morning: Shadi Hamid and Amanda Kadlec have a good new POMED paper out on engaging political Islamist movements, like the Brotherhood and Jordan's Islamic Action Front.
The paper traces the unimpressive history of U.S. and European engagement with Islamist groups and offers some policy suggestions. More importantly, it does a good job of explaining why Western governments should engage with Islamists.
The Egyptian government says it arrested more than a dozen members of the Muslim Brotherhood on Monday because they were setting up training camps and "planning a string of attacks" around the country.
That's an absurd claim: The Brotherhood renounced violence 40 years ago, and has not been linked to any attacks in Egypt in decades. And the government, needless to say, has not offered up any evidence to support its allegations.
Egyptian police arrested 13 members of the Muslim Brotherhood (عربي) -- including Mahmoud Ezzat, the organization's deputy leader -- in overnight raids in six provinces.
The raids targeted homes in Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Assiut, Sharqiyya and Gharbiyya governorates. In addition to Ezzat, police also arrested two members of the Brotherhood's guidance council, Essam el-Erian and Abdul-Rahman el-Bir; three members of the Brotherhood's administrative office in Alexandria; and several writers and professors with ties to the group.
A couple of weeks ago I promised to write about Muhammad Badie's election as the Muslim Brotherhood's new supreme guide. I never did, mostly because I didn't have anything interesting to say; Evan has already written about the internal drama that surrounded the vote, and I don't think the election has much external significance, despite widely-publicized concerns that Badie (a conservative) will push the group to the right.
Muhammad Badie, the newly-elected supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, delivered an acceptance speech today to an audience of Brotherhood members. We'll post some thoughts on the speech (and Badie's election) a little later; for now, though, we're posting a full English translation of the speech, along with a PDF version. It's after the jump.
Bill Roggio, writing yesterday about the death of a Jordanian al-Qaeda member in a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan, described the Muslim Brotherhood as a "gateway to al-Qaeda."
The Muslim Brotherhood advocates the imposition of Islamic State using political means. Disaffected members of the MB who think that method is too soft often join more radical groups, such as Hamas, al Qaeda, etc. The Egyptian Islamic Group broke off from the MB.
Statistically speaking, if the Brotherhood is a gateway to terrorism, it's a damn ineffective one. The Muslim Brotherhood has had millions of members throughout its history; only a small fraction of them joined radical groups.
Coptic-Muslim violence continues to flare around Nag Hammadi, the site of Wednesday's Christmas Eve drive-by shooting. Reuters reports that Muslims and Copts have set fire to each others' stores and homes in the villages surrounding Nag Hammadi. The fires injured six people, and police have questioned more than 40 in connection with the arsons.
The Jordanian newspaper ad-Dustour reports (عربي) that thousands of Egyptian soldiers have been deployed in Qena province to try to keep the peace.
A group of more than 100 activists and politicians filed a lawsuit today (عربي) against the Egyptian government, demanding that Egypt stop building an underground wall along the Gaza border.
The lawsuit also demands that the government open border crossings to Gaza, and stop exporting natural gas to Israel. Parties to the suit include Mohamed el-Beltagy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood's parliamentary bloc, and the novelists Bahaa Taher and Alaa al-Aswany.
Egyptian officials insist that the wall is a security measure; that's how the state-run Al-Gomhuria defended it in an editorial last month. But the lawsuit calls the wall a "social and human barrier" that cuts off needed aid to the people of Gaza.
Construction continues along the border, according to the Associated Press, but it's impossible to say how far along the wall is, or when it will be done.
Another twist in the ongoing Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood soap opera: Mohamed Habib, the group's deputy supreme guide, has threatened to resign all of his positions within the organization in protest over this month's election.
Habib issued a brief statement today, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm, and repeated his claim that the election was illegitimate. Habib fared poorly in the elections. He didn't earn a seat in the Guide's Office, which serves as the Brotherhood's cabinet; and he's believed to have failed in his bid to become the next guide, despite being considered a shoo-in earlier this year.
Al-Masry Al-Youm reports that several high-ranking Brotherhood members are meeting with Habib in his home in Assiut to negotiate a compromise.
The Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood held an impromptu internal election over the weekend to decide on a new makeup of its 16-member Guide's Office. The Office functions as a kind of cabinet, or executive branch, for the banned-but-tolerated Brotherhood. Marc Lynch, rounding up the events of the past 72 hours and citing a plethora of Arabic sources, says that conservative Brotherhood elements appear to have won out over moderates who favor democratic political engagement.
The National Democratic Party's sixth annual conference ended, predictably, without any decision on who will replace Mubarak. The party has two years until the election, and you can imagine the NDP leadership is in no hurry to announce what will surely be an unpopular candidate.
The NDP did find some time to bash the Muslim Brotherhood, though, according to Bikya Masr, which reports that two members of parliament urged the government to confiscate the Brotherhood's funds.
