Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Gets a Facelift

[Valin]

Foreign Affairs:

The Movement's Young Leaders Turn Revolutionary to Stay Relevant

By Eric Trager and Marina Shalabi

May 20 2015

 

Amr Farrag is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood youth cadre. The 28-year-old Cairene is a widely followed exponent of the organization’s ideology on social media and manages the popular pro-Brotherhood news portal Rassd. But these days, he no longer operates in Cairo. On July 5, 2013—two days after the Egyptian military responded to mass protests by removing Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi—the organization’s leaders urged Farrag to relocate to Istanbul, so that he could evade the Egyptian government’s anti-Brotherhood crackdown and reestablish the organization’s media operations in exile. Meanwhile, as many more Muslim Brothers fled to Turkey during the chaotic weeks that followed Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood formed a committee in Istanbul to resettle them, hoping to preserve the organization until it could return to power in Egypt, which it promised its members would happen very soon.

 

But as the months wore on, and Egypt’s repression of the Muslim Brotherhood grew more severe (at least 2,500 people were killed and 16,000 imprisoned, and Morsi has just been sentenced to death), impatience with the rate of progress divided the organization’s younger members from its older ones. Farrag and other exiled Brotherhood youths rebelled against the group’s older leaders, blaming them for “misanalyzing” the political situation leading up to Morsi’s overthrow and then mismanaging the post-Morsi period. They further rejected their leaders’ calls for a patient, long-term struggle against Egypt’s military-backed government. They advocated instead for revolutionary—and violent—tactics to destabilize the government sooner rather than later.

 

The Brotherhood’s leaders also lost control over its younger members within Egypt, who launched a low-profile insurgency to undermine Egypt’s economy and topple the current regime. “There are things we’re not allowed to speak of,” Farrag said during an October 2014 interview in Istanbul, when asked about Muslim Brothers’ activities in Egypt. “Like the [so-called] anonymous acts that the Egyptian media speaks about, such as blocking roads and bringing down electricity towers.” It was the first time any member had acknowledged on the record, the Muslim Brotherhood’s responsibility for the attacks on Egypt’s power grid.

 

(Snip)

 

 

H/T Michael J Totten