Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes Had a Baby=v
Introduction
The Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt's oldest and largest Islamist organization, with offshoots throughout the Arab world. The Alliance renounced violence in the 1970s and earned popular back up by providing social services such as pharmacies, hospitals, and schools.
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After the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak in the Arab Spring protests of 2011, the group's political arm won a plurality of seats in Egypt's lower house of parliament and its candidate, Mohammed Morsi, was elected president. Merely Morsi was ousted by the military in July 2013, and the Alliance's members were imprisoned, went into exile, or were forced hugger-mugger. Every bit part of a wide-ranging crackdown on political opposition, the Egyptian government has labeled the group a terrorist arrangement, as have Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). U.S. President Donald J. Trump has expressed involvement in following arrange, just many experts say a designation—whether of the original Egyptian grouping or of kindred groups throughout the region—would stretch the bounds of the police and also complicate U.S. diplomacy beyond much of the Middle Eastward and Due north Africa.
A History of Violence
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Political Movements
Egypt
Demonstrations and Protests
Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood is the world's nigh influential Islamist arrangement. The Alliance's mission is to Islamize guild through the promotion of religious law, values, and morals. It has long combined preaching and political activism with social welfare to advance this objective.
The group earned legitimacy amidst its core constituency, the lower-middle course, equally the well-nigh effective organized resistance confronting the British occupation of Egypt (1882–1952). The Muslim Brotherhood joined with the Gratuitous Officers, nationalist military leaders who sought to wrest Egypt from a British-backed monarchy. After a coup d'état that forced Male monarch Farouk out of power in July 1952, the military machine junta that took charge and the Alliance became rivals. This conflict was over power and ideology; the Brotherhood rejected the war machine'south vision of Egypt every bit the leader of a socialist, secular, pan-Arab motion.
In 1954, a suspected fellow member of the Alliance attempted to electrocute the leader of the Costless Officers, Gamal Abdel Nasser. In response, thousands of suspected Brothers were imprisoned. Though Nasser barred the group from government, the Brotherhood nevertheless became ubiquitous in order, building allegiance as a populist alternative to the Egyptian country, which provided neither prosperity nor welfare and suffered repeated military machine defeats past Israel.
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Among those arrested was a member of the Brotherhood named Sayyid Qutb, who adult a doctrine of armed struggle confronting the regime in Egypt and beyond while writing from prison house. His work has provided the underpinnings for many militant Sunni Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas. Extremist leaders often cite Qutb, who was hanged in 1966, to argue that governments non based on sharia are apostate and therefore legitimate targets of jihad.
Toward Pragmatic Politics
Though establishing a land based on Islamic principles was at the core of the Brotherhood'south agenda, the group gained prominence by effectively providing social services where the land failed.
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Political Movements
Egypt
Demonstrations and Protests
The Brotherhood renounced violence at the insistence of Nasser's successor, Anwar al-Sadat, who allowed the group to preach and advocate in exchange for its support confronting his political rivals, Nasser loyalists and leftists. Sadat paid lip service to sharia and freed imprisoned Islamists. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of al-Jihad, an extremist group whose leaders opposed Sadat's 1979 peace treaty with Israel—though they were not the only ones—and sought the fierce overthrow of the Egyptian political organisation considering it was non based on religious constabulary.
Although Arab republic of egypt was not a democracy, it did concur parliamentary elections. Alliance-affiliated candidates first participated in parliamentary elections in 1984, even equally the party officially remained banned. An alliance with the officially recognized Wafd Party, which stood for nationalism and economic liberalism, won 65 of the parliament'southward 450 seats. Running as independents in the early 2000s, Brotherhood candidates won however more than seats, forming the largest opposition bloc.
Grappling With Power
The Alliance emerged as a dominant political strength in Egypt post-obit Mubarak'due south removal from office amid mass protests in February 2011. The Alliance'due south organizational chapters was unmatched, just the group's electoral victories were tarnished by ability struggles with the judiciary and the military. Battles over the drafting of a new constitution were a item wink betoken.
In the 2012 parliamentary elections, the Brotherhood'due south Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) won nearly one-half the seats in the lower house (People's Assembly) and Islamists took 84 percent of the seats in the upper house (Shura Council). Pushing dorsum against the Brotherhood's increasing power, the Mubarak-appointed Supreme Constitutional Court issued a decision in June 2012 that led to the dissolution of the People's Associates. At the same time, the Supreme Council of the Armed services (SCAF), which had been in control of Egypt since Mubarak'southward autumn, gave the military sectional control over defense and national security policy, diminishing the power of the president.
But before Mubarak had stepped aside, the Brotherhood said that it would not seek the presidency, but it nonetheless put forwards Khairat el-Shater, its deputy spiritual caput, as a candidate. After Shater was disqualified, Morsi took his place. In a contest that posed a pick between Ahmad Shafiq—who had been a regime minister during the Mubarak years and briefly prime minister after the January 2011 insurgence—and the Brotherhood's candidate, Morsi was appear the winner in June 2012.
With the lower house of parliament dissolved, Morsi had both executive and legislative command of the regime. In tardily November 2012, Morsi declared himself, the Shura Council (previously a consultative body without legislative authority), and the constituent assembly (which was charged with writing a new constitution) allowed from judicial review. Morsi had justified the move past arguing that the judiciary and much of the bureaucracy was dominated past remnants of the Mubarak government intent on impeding the revolution'south goals. But afterwards an immediate backfire, including public demonstrations, he annulled the decree.
The new constitution, which enshrined Islamic law as the ground for legislation, also stirred controversy. Though a like principle existed in Egypt'southward prior constitution, the new draft raised business organization with Egyptian liberals suspicious that the Brotherhood would accept it equally license to codify its worldview in the police force. Many Egyptians also feared insufficient protections for women'southward rights and freedoms of speech and worship and distrusted the broad power accorded to the presidency. The constitution was approved with a 64 percentage bulk in a nationwide referendum, only only a third of the electorate voted.
The conflict between Morsi and the judiciary continued in March 2013, when the Supreme Authoritative Court overturned a presidential decree calling for April parliamentary elections, questioning the constitutionality of election-police provisions. The secular opposition had previously called for a boycott of the vote.
Many analysts criticized Morsi's tactics equally majoritarian, and Egyptians critical of the Brotherhood coalesced around the group Tamarrod (Rebellion), which claimed to gather twenty-two meg signatories to a petition calling for Morsi to step downwards. As the Tamarrod movement gained steam, Egyptians complained of a breakdown in security and about Alliance vigilantism. Bringing things to a caput, Morsi appointed a member of the sometime militant grouping Jamaat al-Islamiyya as governor of Luxor, where the group had massacred dozens of tourists in 1997.
Every bit millions of protesters massed in the streets, the Supreme Quango of the Armed Forces—the same trunk that had forced Mubarak aside—issued an ultimatum to Morsi, giving him twoscore-eight hours to see their demands. On July 3, 2013, SCAF, led by Defence Government minister Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, ousted Morsi and suspended the new constitution.
The following month, security forces responded harshly to sit-ins protesting the coup, killing more than than 1,150 demonstrators, Human Rights Lookout constitute. The chief encampment, Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, became a rallying cry for opposition to the new regime.
The Brotherhood Subsequently the Coup
The government outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, forcing it underground in one case again. Nether Sisi, who became president in May 2014, the regime has taken strong steps to repress the opposition, using accusations of membership in the Alliance to repress dissent of all stripes.
Thousands of the group's leaders and members have been imprisoned, and others went into exile. The group's charities have been shuttered and their assets confiscated. Morsi, who had been on trial ever since his ouster, died in June 2019 after being denied medical care while held in solitary confinement, co-ordinate to Human being Rights Watch. Information technology was the seventh anniversary of his election.
Unable to seek a voice through political or borough participation, some members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood could divide off into radical factions and resort to violence, analysts say. In this style, the group could be forced in a direction far different than that of its offshoots, many of which have taken part in parliamentary politics as socially conservative parties.
Qatar and Turkey have cultivated ties with the Brotherhood and its offshoots, and many exiled members of the Egyptian group have settled in those countries. In contrast, Saudi arabia and the UAE have worked to suppress Brotherhood-affiliated movements, seeing their populist appeal as an ideological rival to their absolute monarchies. They have advocated a broad-brush U.S. terrorist designation. That would care for disparate movements and parties around the region as if they were all part of a monolithic organization, when in reality the original Egyptian organization'south influence over the diffuse network has been diminished, officials and experts say.
After Sisi's April 2019 visit, the White House directed national security officials to pursue a terrorist designation for the Muslim Brotherhood. Even the narrower arroyo of designating just the Egyptian co-operative could accept far-reaching consequences and invite legal challenge. The move, former U.S. officials Daniel Benjamin and Jason Blazakis write, would expose hundreds of thousands of the motion's followers to potential U.S. sanctions while alienating the Un and European Union—which take long followed U.South. designations—and "providing embrace for Sisi's government to expand an already brutal crackdown."
Source: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/egypts-muslim-brotherhood