Islam in Egypt: fear and fantasy | Editorial

It is right to be anxious about Egypt but not the weary, confused organisation that represents political Islam there Fear of political Islam is the pivot around which debate on Egypt’s future in the outside world often revolves. It is the spectre which a jittery Israel invokes, and it is still President Hosni Mubarak’s last card in arguing that the system which he and his predecessors created should survive more or less intact, even when he is no longer part of it. Al-Qaida’s Egyptian connections are remembered and the Iranian revolution’s tragic slide into religious fascism recalled. Thus it is that many who cheer on the Egyptian demonstrators feel anxiety when they ask themselves what comes afterward. Yet that anxiety is misplaced. It is misplaced in the very precise sense that it is right to be anxious about Egypt but not right to centre that anxiety on the rather weary, confused and unready organisation which represents political Islam in Egypt today. The Muslim Brotherhood will play a serious part in any new politics. But it is now less a radical organisation than a conservative one, striving to be relevant to modern needs, and divided on how far it can or should trim its policies. Its leadership looks back on several decades of hard decisions, as well as of hard times under a president whose instincts always tended toward persecution or exclusion rather than reconciliation. The most fundamental such decision was to abandon violence, both in practice and in theory, at least on Egyptian soil. Distancing itself from violent means was, quite apart from the question of morality, the right thing to do if the Brotherhood was to have standing among Egyptians, who have consistently shown that they find such means abhorrent. It earned the Brotherhood the hatred of al-Qaida, but that was a political help, not a hindrance. Since then the Brotherhood has

Posted by on February 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry