The West’s traditional suspicion of anything that could be called an Islamist movement has increased in light of recent events. In the rush to distinguish friend from foe in the Islamic world, US favor has gravitated toward the stable, secular, and overtly “friendly” regimes of the region, of which Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government is probably the best example. There has always been a tendency to group the moderate and radical branches of Islamist movements together, but recent developments have made it especially important to realize how much they differ.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood provides an example of the goals and methods of centrist Islamism. This group and Egypt’s radicals share the long-term goal of implementing shari’a (Qu’ranic law) as the basis of national law. The Brotherhood, however, has committed itself to working within the current Egyptian system to achieve this objective and renounces—at least in its official statements—the violent tactics of militant splinter groups such as al-Gama’at al-Islamiyyah and al-Jihad. Since Mubarak’s 1981 ascent to power, the Brotherhood has used a three-fold strategy to gain influence in the existing political framework. First, it sought to gain properly elected representation in the Egyptian parliament, largely through coalitions with other small opposition parties. Second, it has taken control of professional and student associations (the most prominent private organizations in the country), again through proper electoral process. Finally, it has established a network of social services in neighborhoods and villages. These initiatives fill gaps in government services, creating an enormous degree of popular support for the Brotherhood without directly challenging the government. In return, Mubarak has declared that he would work together with nonviolent Islamists, although not with the radicals. Though this policy has proven successful, Mubarak has never followed it scrupulously, and most Islamist successes within the Egyptian system have met with some measure of repression from the regime. The Brotherhood’s experiences in the past 20 years have suggested that it may be more capable of providing social services to the Egyptian population, more reliable in keeping the promises it has made, and even more democratic than the secular regime that has enjoyed consistent US support.

Ascendancy Under Mubarak

As in many other areas of his rule, when handling Islamic groups Mubarak has steered a middle course between the policies of his predecessors Gamel Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. From the beginning, Mubarak balanced accommodationist and repressive strategies, mixing the expected sweep of arrests in retaliation for Sadat’s 1981 assassination with surprising gestures of conciliation. On one hand, members of the radical factions blamed for the assassination were arrested by the thousands. On the other hand, Mubarak attempted to reduce the Islamic movement’s ill feeling toward the regime; like Sadat a decade earlier, he aimed to distance himself from his predecessor. This effort began with the release of Supreme Guide Omar Tilimsani and other Brotherhood members imprisoned during the crackdown of Sadat’s final years. The shuffle of Islamist prisoners between these two initiatives illustrates Mubarak’s early differentiation between radical and moderate groups.

Despite retaliating for the assassination of Sadat, Mubarak offered an olive branch to centrist Islamists. Both sides had much to gain from this arrangement. By legitimizing the Brotherhood as the primary representatives of centrist Islamism, Mubarak could place militants outside the mainstream. Once they were isolated, he could take forceful measures against them with little protest from Egyptians sympathetic to centrist Islamists. In return for his leniency, Mubarak expected the Brotherhood to restrain itself from attempting to co-opt the political system and even to deliver a measure of support for his initiatives. Brotherhood parliamentarians provided this support by voting with Mubarak’s National Democratic Party on important matters and went so far as to endorse Mubarak’s candidacy for president in 1988.

Unofficial cooperation between the president and the opposition was similarly advantageous for the Brotherhood during the following five years. Mubarak’s benevolence provided an early opportunity for the Brotherhood to win the president to its side, or at least to establish a substantial foothold after the years of Sadat’s hard-line approach. The newly released supreme guide and his successor, Hammed al-Nasr, maintained friendly relations with the president, with the latter even assuring Mubarak that the Brotherhood demanded no rapid time frame for the implementation of shari’a as long as Mubarak remained dedicated to it in principle. This period of goodwill opened the door for the Muslim Brotherhood’s entry into parliamentary politics. Alliances with the New Wafd, Liberal, and Socialist Labor Parties during the 1980s amplified the Brotherhood’s influence and brought about varying degrees of Islamization in alliance partners.

Civil Successes

The second major advance for the Brotherhood was its penetration of professional and student associations, which Mubarak opened to participatory elections in 1984. In 1987, the Brotherhood won control of the Engineers’ Syndicate, an enormous body with 200,000 members and US$5 million in assets, and by the early 1990s it had taken over nearly all of the prominent associations, many of which had previously been viewed as strongholds of liberal-secular nationalism. Throughout these campaigns, the Brotherhood exploited the longstanding alienation of young, educated Egyptian professionals who had been guaranteed government jobs upon graduation since the days of Nasser but had become a heavy burden on the state. The social support network that the Brotherhood had cultivated as the third wing of their campaign during this period was an enormous draw for these professionals; the Brotherhood offered full health insurance and other considerable welfare benefits that no other organization could provide.

The same phenomenon took place in the student associations, over which the Brothers won virtual hegemony. University dormitories and lecture halls were, and still are, horribly overcrowded, and the exorbitant costs of textbooks, lecture notes, food, and transportation constituted a serious economic hardship for students. Again, these are the circumstances in which the Brotherhood traditionally has been most successful. As with the professionals, the Brotherhood used its extensive social resources to support an alienated population that few other organizations could or would help.

The Brotherhood’s evolving social network is probably more responsible than anything else for the enormous power the organization could now wield in an open election. These services are compatible with the organization’s Islamic message and thus serve as an important counterbalance to the supposedly divinely-sanctioned violence of al-Gama’at and al-Jihad. Not only is this an important face to present to the outside world, but in the domestic environment it offers the important message that Egyptians can return to “true” Islam and still be materially comfortable. Following dramatic growth in the 1980s, the Brotherhood’s web of private humanitarian services has become one of the most formidable grassroots organizations in the Islamic world. These individual organizations give a sense of community to neighborhoods across the country by helping citizens obtain food, jobs, and healthcare. The groups have not tried to gain any formal power in the neighborhoods, but merely to step in where the state has failed and to effect a degree of Islamization in the process. Not all of these private societies have direct links to the Muslim Brotherhood, though most share the same moderate Islamist ideology and tend to support Islamic candidates and reforms.