Egypt’s opposition leader, Muhammad Badie, allegedly supports the
anti-governemnt jihad. Andrea Glioti discusses whether or not he is really bad.

The appointment of Muhammad Badie as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide has raised questions about his radical ideological orientation, and the future of the opposition Party as a whole. Within the Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest political opposition organisation, Muhammad Badie is believed to be a radical, having spent nine years in jail after being condemned for paramilitary militancy in the Brotherhood’s troubled 60’s. According to al-Jazeera, Badie has since continued to support anti-government jihad, as formulated by the political thinker Sayyid Qutb.

Though Badie has promptly assured the rejection of violence in all its forms, the doubts about his persona are legitimized by his admiration for Qutb, who advocated violence, rather than reform, for the overthrowal of un-Islamic rulers. Badie has attempted to reply to the doubts regarding his ideological background by redefining Qutb as a “reformist” on the Brotherhood’s English Website. Unsurprisingly, such statements have failed to quell unrest within the party. A senior Brotherhood member, Khaled Dawoud, has recently announced to anti-establishment newspaper Al-Dostour that the parties reformists will not pledge allegiance to this new leader.

These tensions are to be understood in the light of the internal conflicts the Brotherhood has been recently facing. Last year, the former Supreme Guide, Muhammad Akef, temporarily resigned after the conservatives’ opposition to the promotion of reformist Essam Erian. Central figures in the Brotherhood, such as the Islamic scholar Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, criticised the blockade on Erian as contrary to the original principles of the Brotherhood. This trend follows the party’s newly elected directive board excluding prominent reformists Abdul Monem Aboul Fetouh and Muhammad Habib in December ’09. Despite the Brotherhood’s insistence on its unity, and tendency to blame external analysts for inventing reformist and conservative trends, the conservatives’ pressure to accelerate the choice of the Supreme Guide was directly behind these exclusions.

As can be expected, the US are concerned about the hardliners’ takeover within the Brotherhood, as a radicalization of such an influent actor in the Middle East would be detrimental to their interests. However, the Brotherhood’s apparent shift towards a more conservative stance has not occurred in a vacuum, and is influenced by more then ideology alone. The political Islam expert Deyaa Rashwan commented for the LA Times that whilst Badie’s “ideological strand…is one of the two causes for the regression of the brotherhood’s political work”, he also cautions that “the second is intense government pressures”. Indeed, underlying the shift in leadership is the growing frustration of a movement being firmly suppressed by the Egyptian government.

In 2007, the constitutional amendment of Article 76 passed by the government erected even greater barriers to Brotherhood opposition forces taking democratic seats, have stacking the construction of parliament against the opposition. New Presidential laws now require potential Presidents to receive at least 250 votes from members of the elected councils and the People’s Assembly.

Such a requirement effectively guarantees the nepotistic appointment of Jamal Mubarak, the current presidents son, too the post. In addition, the above mentioned constitutional amendment effectively denies the Brotherhood the right to exist, by prohibiting the formation of any party “based on a religious frame of reference”. Under such conditions, the Brotherhood has had to desperately group independent candidates to successfully obtain 1/5 of the seats in the last parliamentarian elections (2005). It is because of this severe pressure from the government that reformists are finding their moderate line increasingly unpopular within the Brotherhood.

Badie’s appointment is thus indicative of growing frustration within the organisation at a lack of viable democratic routes to change. Whilst Washington continues to favour reformists within the Brotherhood, this is predominantly due to their moderate views on democratisation as a work-in-progress in Egypt. Yet given the belligerence of the Egyptian government to Brotherhood incorporation to parliament, radical voices such as Muhammed Badie will continue to gain strength. The future of the Brotherhood, and its apparent shift to conservatism, will thus depend on the organisations belief in real political change in Egypt’s entrenched political system. Without such change, the ideological radicalisation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt seems likely to continue.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 18:00 and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.