By Lee Keath

Associated Press 
 

CAIRO: The night breeze blew foul wafts from a nearby canal black with garbage and pollution. The streets jammed with trucks and motorized rickshaws were so shattered that they hardly seemed paved at all.
It was to Cairo’s slum of Munib on a recent evening that the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest Islamic group, brought its election campaign message: The country must turn to Islam to rebuild.

“Muslims around the world expect great things from you,” Essam el-Erian, deputy head of the Brotherhood’s new political party, told supporters crowded into a tent, with men across the aisle from women, who wore headscarves or black veils. “We have to build a nation of freedom and equality, a nation of the true Islam.” The scene, like many in Egypt now, was inconceivable before president Hosni Mubarak’s Feb. 11 removal from power. Under Mubarak’s autocratic regime, the Brotherhood was banned and operated largely in secret.

Now the Brotherhood is storming into the open, appealing to religious voters and trying to win over Egypt’s poor. It is likely to be part of Egypt’s next government, with a hand not only in ruling but also in writing a new constitution.
The Brotherhood’s own identity is on the line as well, and there is pressure for it not to go down a sharp-right Islamic road. Internally, Brotherhood moderates – many from a younger generation – are resisting control from hard-line leaders, in a struggle that could fragment the group.

How the Brotherhood deals with its new status will be a major test of whether Islamic purists and democracy can be compatible in the aftermath of the Middle East’s wave of revolutions. With the Brotherhood involved in protests in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Jordan, the answer here could be a model across the region.
“We’re not ready for power, we don’t have the flexibility,” said Mohammad Osman, a 29-year-old pharmacist who counts himself among the Brotherhood’s new generation. “To go from prison to power, that could be extremely dangerous.”

In one of Cairo’s most prominent mosques, the Brotherhood’s top leader, Mohammad Badie, paused in the combination sermon-campaign speech he was delivering from an ornate niche marking the direction of Islam’s holy city of Mecca. A child next to him, with a green Brotherhood sash across his chest, took the cue to break in with a chant.

“God is great!” the boy piped up. The crowd of more than 1,000 men, seated on the carpets of the Amr ibn al-As Mosque, echoed back, “God is great, God is great!”
“Egypt’s revolution was produced by none other than God Almighty,” Badie resumed. “The days of ‘no religion in politics and no politics in religion’ ended long ago.”

The image recalls the nightmares Mubarak’s regime often evoked. Without Mubarak’s iron grip, his officials warned, the Brotherhood would seize power through the mosque. Women would be forced to wear the headscarf, clerics would hand out punishments like amputations for thieves and whippings for adulterers, and Egypt’s large Christian minority would be consigned to second-class status.
It is an image the Brotherhood is trying to shed as it adapts to the demands of a democratic system.
For the first time, the Brotherhood has formed a political party, holding rallies nationwide, from rural towns to urban slums.

Brotherhood leaders say the new Freedom and Justice Party will run for only half of parliament’s seats so it cannot gain a majority; they predict 30-40 percent. Nor will it field a candidate in November’s presidential election. It also is trying to form coalitions with other parties, including liberals.

Erian, the party’s deputy head, says parties must work together for several years to entrench a democratic system.
“Maybe after that, everyone can compete without any problems,” he said.
Many Brothers style their party in the mold of Turkey’s Islamic-based Justice and Development Party, which has held power for nearly a decade by improving the economy without aggressively pushing a religious agenda.
The vision they have for Egypt: a “civil state with an Islamic basis.”

It is a vague formula, and the Brotherhood is under pressure to make clear what it means. Decades of oppression provided the group an odd luxury: Barred from state-dominated media, it rarely had to sell positions to the public.
Now Brotherhood officials are asked whether they will ban alcohol or implement Islamic punishments. Their answer: It is not the time. The time may never come, they say, and if it does it will only be with voters’ consent.

In a draft, the party’s vision for a new constitution mirrors that of most liberals, a parliamentary system with limited powers for the president and guarantees of personal freedoms, a radical change to ensure that no irremovable “pharaoh” like Mubarak can rule. Absent are past Brotherhood ideas, such as a panel of clerics to advise the government.

“We are for freedom of expression for all, even if it’s a communist, a leftist or a secularist,” says Aly Khafagy, a 29-year-old party organizer. “Ultimately, the street is the one that rules. If the street is the one that can put us in, it can also put us out.”

And “the Islamic basis?” Khafagy depicts it as a democracy that “respects Islamic values,” in the vein of U.S. conservatives who talk of America’s “Judeo-Christian heritage.” But from others it sounds far stronger.
“The Brotherhood won’t stop and won’t be silent and won’t accept anything but the complete implementation of Islamic Shariah law,” Sobhi Saleh, a former parliament member and now one of the Brotherhood’s most active campaigners, told a crowd at a rally in Cairo’s Matariya district.

Electoral success for the party, though, will likely come down to Egypt’s silent majority.
“The vast majority of the population, say 70 percent, have nothing to do with Islamists and nothing to do with secularists,” Osman, the pharmacist, says. “Whoever wins them will be the ones who rule Egypt.”