Is Egypt going Islamist? and if that’s the case, which way will the Islamists go? Will they go “orthodox,” turning Egypt into another Saudi Arabia, or will they handle governance with the same remarkable pragmatism they’ve exhibited in coordinating with other political tendencies. An article by Stephen Glain, tries to address those questions.
A fairly predictable artilce. It raised one point that I’ve heard repeated in a lot of reports about Islamists, which is that Islamist groups throughout the Arab world are not just inspired by the Brothers/Qutb but actually “affiliated” with the MB. Does anyone know what the existing relationship between the MB and Hamas et al is? I always assumed it was something of a franchise and not really an active relationship (except for MB fundraising for Hamas recently).
Some curious mistakes. Nasser was a pious, westernized Muslim? The Brotherhood aspire to follow Qutb’s line?
Pshaw.
SP, Hamas in Palestine is the Muslim Brotherhood. They originally formed Hamas to take part in the intifada, but in case they messed things up they did not want to soil the MB name. However, the Hamas name remained.
There is no doubt that historically the Palestinian MB was close to the Egyptian MB, however now I am not so sure about the extent of the realtionship (I haven’t followed Hamas that closely for about a year, so I missed a lot of developments), whether it might be direct or indirect in the sense of sharing goals etc. Probably somewhere in between.