By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: November 23, 2011
CAIRO — New divisions in the Muslim Brotherhood appeared on Wednesday as a senior leader hinted that it might walk away from a deal struck with Egypt’s interim military rulers, reflecting signs of confusion and hesitation as the Brotherhood’s most viable bid for power in eight decades has become tangled in the uncertainty and anger gripping Egypt’s streets.
A day after the Brotherhood agreed to the deal with the military that would speed the transition to civilian rule while also enhancing the group’s own political prospects, the senior official said that the security forces had not fulfilled their promise to halt their attacks on protesters in Tahrir Square.
“The killing didn’t stop,” the official, Mohamed Beltagy, general secretary of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, said in a statement on the group’s Web site. “Will our slogan be, ‘No negotiation until after a cease-fire’?”
His warnings came as an increasingly violent uprising has left the group torn between preserving its credibility with protesters and securing the political advantages of cooperating with the ruling military council. Amid the confusion, the Brotherhood’s leaders issued a series of seemingly contradictory statements, culminating Wednesday with several defending the deal from the sharp criticisms of its members and liberals.
“The Islamists are playing politics,” said Mohamed Ezzat, 32, a store owner watching the battle of tear gas and rocks just off Tahrir Square as a short-lived cease-fire gave way. “They don’t realize that street politics is deciding the fate of the country.”
Many Egyptians rolled their eyes at what they described as the combination of political ambition and the Brotherhood’s tactic of accommodation that they said had historically been employed by the group.
“They are accommodationists, not radicals,” said Samer Shehata, an Egyptian scholar at Georgetown University who had returned for the parliamentary elections scheduled for Monday. “Middle class, professional, respectable, high achievers, self-help types,” he said. “The Brotherhood is always risk-averse.”
Now the group is facing questions with extraordinary stakes, for itself as well as for Egypt and the region. The first elections since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak are set to begin, though the violence has cast doubt on the voting. Through its new Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood is poised for the first time to win a dominant political role, potentially positioning itself as a central force in drafting the next constitution and establishing an Islamist-run government in the most populous and influential Arab state.
But the uprising against the military council has threatened to upend the group’s plans. The Brotherhood had reason to oppose the military rulers because they had plans to grant themselves permanent political powers and autonomy, promising to be a check against the possibility of an Islamist takeover.
The protesters’ calls for an immediate transfer to a civilian government, however, would probably mean postponing the elections, giving other political parties a chance to catch up to the Brotherhood’s commanding lead in organizing. Or, some fear, the violence of the uprising could provide the rationale for a military crackdown that would put off elections indefinitely.
The situation “created a major split with factions and individuals and even the youth,” said Emad Shahin, an Egyptian scholar at the University of Notre Dame who is now in Cairo.
Hints of the divisions first surfaced on Saturday as security forces cleared the square of a tent city and protesters fought back. Some of the Brotherhood’s leaders, including Mr. Beltagy, argued that the group should call its members to the square.
“I thought that we should go to the square in great numbers to protect the protesters, secure the entrances, ensure the peacefulness,” Mr. Beltagy said in an interview, “not to keep a distance from the crisis.” (Some people had lamented that five days of violence, more than 30 deaths and more than 2,000 injuries could have been prevented if the Brotherhood had organized a presence in the square as it had during the uprising against Mr. Mubarak.)
After Mr. Beltagy sent out a message on Saturday saying he was headed to the square, other Brotherhood officials issued a statement on the group’s Web page clarifying that the group had only one spokesman, and that it was not Mr. Beltagy.
But many members of the Brotherhood, especially from its youth wing, did follow Mr. Beltagy into the square. And on Sunday he returned to the front lines. Many there were openly angry at the Brotherhood for failing to turn out, and he told them, “You have a right to be angry,” he wrote on the group’s Web site, adding, “We have to reconsider our position.”
But as the weekend wore on, Mr. Beltagy acknowledged that he had met resistance from leaders of the Brotherhood who he said saw the protests and clashes as essentially “an attempt to draw it into a made-up crisis,” he said.
A statement from the group issued late Wednesday explained its view that its presence would have drawn harsher reprisals. “If we had participated in these protests, violence, killing and vandalism would have escalated,” the group said.
The conflict reached a climax on Tuesday as almost every other party or political group called supporters to Tahrir Square for a “million-man march” against military rule. The Brotherhood was the only major group to tell its members not to attend. Instead, the Brotherhood made a deal with the military. It would let the ruling military council remain in power until June and preside over the writing of a constitution. In exchange, the Brotherhood won an agreement to let parliamentary elections proceed on Monday while moving up the presidential vote to June from 2013, an early timetable allowing the Brotherhood to capitalize on its vast lead in organization.
Members of the Brotherhood Youth openly flouted their elders and joined the protests on Tuesday and Wednesday as well, though Mr. Beltagy insisted that they were free to do so.
As the violence continued on Wednesday, so did criticism of the Brotherhood’s deal. Ayman Nour, a liberal presidential contender, said he was considering withdrawing his party from a coalition with the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Two other liberal leaders who attended the meeting with the military council apologized for doing so.
Some analysts argued that the Brotherhood might have been betting that most Egyptians far from Tahrir Square — “the party of the couch,” as they are sometimes known here — were now more concerned about stability than civilian government. But Professor Shahin contended that if the elections were held Monday, the Brotherhood would probably suffer at the polls, losing voters outside its base. “They lost credibility,” he said.
Mayy el Sheikh and Dina Salah Amer contributed reporting.
Divisions Unsettle Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt - NYTimes.com
