Perhaps the best illustration of the Brotherhood’s capability was its remarkably efficient and politically opportune response to the 1992 Cairo earthquake. The Brotherhood’s engineering and medical branches built shelters and medical tents that served thousands of victims. The group’s growing financial resources provided for an influx of food, clothing, and blankets, and the Brotherhood even donated US$1,000 to every newly homeless family in the city. The municipal government’s response had been slow, giving the Brotherhood an opportunity to promote its own cause. Journalist Robert Kaplan summarizes the widespread attitude such measures have brought about in the country: “When the Muslim Brothers are asked, they open the drawer and they give you something. When you ask government officials, they open the drawer and they ask you to give something.”

Opinions such as these demonstrate the enormous power base the Brotherhood has achieved among the lower and working classes. One further program that deserves mention is the establishment of Islamic banks and financial institutions, which offer depositors a return nearly double the 13 percent interest of the commercial banks by operating under profit-sharing arrangements instead of simply issuing certificates of deposit. The great advantage of the Islamic banks is their predominance in the informal sector of the economy (mostly unofficially remitted wages from the Gulf), which accounts for about 35 percent of the official Egyptian GDP. The banks admittedly have suffered in the past from clear instances of fraud and mismanagement, but their general success has broadened the Brotherhood’s constituency to include parts of the business sector and has solidified its support among workers’ families who depend on remitted wages.

Dismissing Distinctions

The success of the Brotherhood’s activities in general elections, professional associations, and social support institutions ultimately led to a harsh response from the Egyptian government, causing a souring of relations between the state and the centrist Islamist opposition from the mid-1980s onward. The state has raised quotas for entry into parliament, sternly challenged the legitimacy of elections in the associations, outlawed many social services unless handled through the Ministry of Social Affairs, and dramatically increased minimum required capital holdings for the Islamic banks. Such actions show a lack of rigid discrimination between radicals and moderates, and very possibly Mubarak’s recognition of the moderates as the greater political threat. Amr Moussa, Egypt’s interior minister, said in The Economist, “The Brotherhood is a greater threat to the safety of the state than the terrorists and the militant groups. We are determined not to go Algeria’s way.” Mubarak has also repeatedly made statements like the one he made in The New Yorker in 1994: “The problem of Middle Eastern terrorism is a by-product of our own illegal Muslim Brotherhood.”

The remainder of the 1990s saw violent outbreaks that erased the distinction between radical and moderate Islamic groups in Egyptian government policy. A wave of terrorist attacks after the Gulf War led to outright warfare between security forces and radical factions; by 1995, the regime had successfully isolated the violence to Middle and Upper Egypt, away from major population and tourist centers. The 1997 Luxor Massacre of 70 tourists precipitated a series of arrests that left al-Gama’at al-Islamiyyah and al-Jihad shadows of their former selves. In fact, the former has now dramatically changed its orientation and made startling pro-Mubarak and even pro-United States statements. Both campaigns struck the Muslim Brotherhood as well, as the regime arrested numerous civic officials, academics, former parliamentarians, and members of professional syndicates. While there are still 17 Brotherhood-affiliated members of Parliament, many of whom were forced to run as “independents,” the last year has brought more restrictions on recruiting and activism. In late July 2002, 16 Muslim Brothers were sentenced to three- and five-year jail terms for planning a protest outside a mosque, and scores more were arrested. The United States has long condoned the anti-terror campaigns; an unfortunate consequence is that though the threat to the regime from the radicals has been successfully contained, the Mubarak government continues to receive an international mandate for repression of all dissident Islamic groups, not only the violent ones.

Lessons for the West

Western observers are most concerned that Islamist regimes in power would be undemocratic and violent, particularly toward the West. While it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that these notions are false, it is certain that the strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood has allayed these fears during Mubarak’s tenure. The evidence does not support the suggestion that the Brotherhood’s democratic and nonviolent tendencies are a faзade.

If the Brotherhood is committed to working within the system, then greater democracy within the country is certainly to its advantage. In a completely free election, the Brotherhood would carry the country in a landslide. The question becomes whether the Brotherhood would uphold democracy in Egypt after its hypothetical rise to power. While concrete statements on any policy in a future Islamic state are somewhat hard to come by, it is worth noting that the Brotherhood has frequently dismissed the notion of an incompatibility between Islam and democracy. Isam al-Aryan, a leader of the centrist Islamist Wasat party, has stated that “the Brothers consider constitutional rule to be closest to Islamic rule. ... We are the first to call for and apply democracy. We are devoted to it.” Journalist Fahmi Huwaydi even notes that Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna himself never explicitly rejected some form of democracy. It would be foolish to count on a pluralist, liberal state to emerge the minute a moderate Islamic party came to power in Egypt, but these are encouraging statements that, if nothing else, compare favorably to the lack of democracy in the country today. What is perhaps more significant, however, is that the Brotherhood’s goal is the rule of shari’a, not the seizure of power. Few members display an overabundance of personal ambition, and the Brotherhood has always stated that it does not matter who implements shari’a and the Islamic state in Egypt.

The second fear is that the current non-violent face of the Brotherhood will last only as long as it is politically expedient. The revolutionary extremism in Khomeini’s Iran, Qaddafi’s Libya, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan has left the West with a bleak view of what happens when Islamic fervor is allowed to take control of a country. Brotherhood leader Ahmed Hasanein insists that the Brotherhood has never ordered an act of terrorism, even during the organization’s truly underground days in the peak of the Nasser revolution.