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Egypt Islamic Political Movements
Islamic political activism has a lengthy history in Egypt.
Several Islamic political groups started soon after World War I
ended. The most well-known Islamic political organization is the
Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan al Muslimun, also known as the
Brotherhood), founded in 1928 by Hasan al Banna. After World War
II, the Muslim Brotherhood acquired a reputation as a radical
group prepared to use violence to achieve its religious goals.
The group was implicated in several assassinations, including the
murder of one prime minister. The Brotherhood had contacts with
the Free Officers before the 1952 Revolution and supported most
of their initial policies. The Brotherhood, however, soon came
into conflict with Nasser. The government accused the Brotherhood
of complicity in an alleged 1954 plot to assassinate the
president and imprisoned many of the group's leaders. In the
1970s, Anwar as Sadat amnestied the leaders and permitted them to
resume some of their activities. But by that time, the
Brotherhood was divided into at least three factions. The more
militant faction was committed to a policy of political
opposition to the government. A second faction advocated peaceful
withdrawal from society and the creation, to the extent possible,
of a separate, parallel society based upon Islamic values and
law. The dominant moderate group advocated cooperation with the
regime
(see Controlling the Mass Political Arena
, ch. 4;
Muslim Extremism
, ch. 5).
The Muslim Brotherhood's reemergence as a political force
coincided with the proliferation of Islamic groups. Some of these
groups espoused the violent overthrow of the government while
others espoused living a devout life of rigorous observance of
religious practices. It is impossible to list all the Islamic
groups that emerged in the late 1970s because many of them had
diffuse structures and some of the more militant groups were
underground. Egypt's defeat and loss of territory in the June
1967 War was the main cause for the growth of religiously
inspired political activism. Muslims tended to view the
humiliating experience as the culmination of 150 years of foreign
intrusion and an affront to their vision of a true Islamic
community. Islamic tradition rejected the idea of non-Muslims
dominating Muslim society. Such a state of affairs discredited
Muslim rulers who permitted it to persist. It was, therefore,
incumbent on believers to end the domination and restore the true
supremacy of Islam. As part of their Sunni creed, the most
radical activists adopted jihad (holy war--the Shia sixth pillar
of faith) and committed themselves to battling unbelievers and
impious Muslims. During the 1970s and 1980s, Islamists
perpetrated a number of violent acts, including the assassination
of Sadat in October 1981.
Disruptive social changes and Sadat's relative tolerance
toward political parties contributed to the rapid growth of
Islamic groups in the 1970s. On university campuses, for example,
Sadat initially viewed the rise of Islamic associations (Jamaat
al Islamiyah) as a counterbalance to leftist influence among
students. The Jamaat al Islamiyah spread quite rapidly on
campuses and won up to one-third of all student union elections.
These victories provided a platform from which the associations
campaigned for Islamic dress, the veiling of women, and the
segregation of classes by gender. Secular university
administrators opposed these goals. In 1979 Sadat sought to
diminish the influence of the associations through a law that
transferred most of the authority of the student unions to
professors and administrators. During the 1980s, however,
Islamists gradually penetrated college faculties. At Asyut
University, which was the scene of some of the most intense
clashes between Islamists and their opponents (including security
forces, secularists, and Copts), the president and other top
administrators--who were Islamists--supported Jamaat al Islamiyah
demands to end mixed-sex classes and to reduce total female
enrollment.
As of 1989, the Islamists sought to make Egypt a community of
the faithful based on their vision of an Islamic social order.
They rejected conventional, secularist social analyses of Egypt's
socioeconomic problems. They maintained, for example, that the
causes of poverty were not overpopulation or high defense
expenditures but the populace's spiritual failures--laxness,
secularism, and corruption. The solution was a return to the
simplicity, hard work, and self-reliance of earlier Muslim life.
The Islamists created their own alternative network of social and
economic institutions through which members could work, study,
and receive medical treatment in an Islamic environment.
Islamists rejected Marxism and Western capitalism. Indeed,
they viewed atheistic communism, Jewish Zionism, and Western
"Crusader-minded" Christianity as their main enemies, which were
responsible for the decadence that led to foreign domination and
defeat by Zionists. They were intolerant of people who did not
share their worldview. Islamists tended to be hostile toward the
orthodox ulama, especially the scholars at Al Azhar who
frequently criticized the Islamists' extreme religious
interpretations. Islamists believed that the established social
and political order had tainted the ulama, who had come to
represent stumbling blocks to the new Islamic order. In addition,
Islamists condemned the orthodox as "pulpit parrots" committed to
a formalist practice of Islam but not to its spirit.
The social origins of Islamists changed after the 1952
Revolution. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood
had appealed primarily to urban civil servants and white- and
blue-collar workers. After the early 1970s, the Islamic revival
attracted followers from a broad spectrum of social classes. Most
activists were university students or recent graduates; they
included rural-urban migrants and urban middle-class youth whose
fathers were middle-level government employees or professionals.
Their fields of study--medicine, engineering, military science,
and pharmacy--were among the most highly competitive and
prestigious disciplines in the university system. The rank-and-
file members of Islamist groups have come from the middle class,
the lower-middle class, and the urban working class.
Various Islamist groups espoused different means for
achieving their political agenda. All Islamists, however, were
concerned with Islam's role in the complex and changing society
of Egypt in the late twentieth century. A common focus of their
political efforts has been to incorporate the sharia into the
country's legal code. In deference to their increasing influence,
the Ministry of Justice in 1977 published a draft law making
apostasy by a Muslim a capital offense and proposing traditional
Islamic punishments for crimes, such as stoning for adultery and
amputation of a hand for theft. In 1980 Egypt supported a
referendum that proposed a constitutional amendment to make the
sharia "the sole source of law." The influence of the Islamists
temporarily waned in the aftermath of Sadat's assassination in
1981, but the election of nine members of the Muslim Brotherhood
to the People's Assembly in 1984 revived Islamists' prospects. In
1985 the People's Assembly voted to initiate a procedure for the
gradual application of the sharia, beginning with an indefinite
education period to prepare the population for the legal changes;
the next step would be to amend all existing laws to exclude any
provisions that conflict with the sharia. Moves to reform the
legal code received support from many Muslims who wanted to
purify society and reject Western legal codes forced on Egypt in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Data as of December 1990
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