Interview with Dr. Issam el-Arian

“The US administration has worked out a package deal with our
government,” key Muslim Brotherhood (MB) spokesperson Dr. Issam
el-Arian told me recently.  “The regime works for US
interests in the region, and the
US remains silent on its abuses.  That deal  worked for many
years.  But it
can’t work now in an era of transparency.”

I met Dr. Arian in his office in the gracious– and
bustling– 1930s villa in downtown Cairo that is the headquarters of
the Egyptian Medical Society.  Arian is the organization’s
treasurer, having been released just this past fall at the end of a
five-year stint in jail.  (He had earlier served two shorter prison terms.) I asked him about the kind of
treatment he had received in jail this time round.  “It was more
terrible under President Nasser,” he said.  But he said that
regime agents had been following him throughout the preceding week, and
there was a risk he might be re-arrested.  “And they’ve prevented
me from traveling,” he said.

We talked February 11.  Four days later, the Egyptian police
arrested an additional 73 MB members, including some individuals who
had run as candidates in the parliamentary elections held in November
2005.  But not Arian. This brought to around 300 the total number
of imprisoned MB members, with the majority of them having been
arrested within the past 12 months.  (Human Rights Watch has a list of
the 226 MB members detained as of February 13, 2007.)

Arian is a friendly, well organized man in his early fifties, with a
slightly receding hairline and the same kind of neatly trimmed beard
that the Hamas people wear. “I feel we are in a border stage between
two eras,” he told
me.  “Our president is 79 and ill.  There are many rumors
about the possible succession of his son, Gamal.  This is a big
problem in Egypt because the army has always been the main power
here.  It still is, though now the “State Security” is much
stronger than it was.  Still, the army has taken to the streets
twice here, in 1977 and 1986.  And that has to be a big concern.”

He said that in his view, the constitutional changes now being
discussed in Egypt “are aimed at preventing the ermergence of all
indpendent political parties, not just the Brotherhood.”  He
explained that though there are some 23 or 24 “official” opposition
parties in the country, “they only have seven or eight seats between
all of them.”  (The parliament contains 444 elected seats– and
ten seats allocated by the President.)  Some of the changes
currently being discussed for the country’s Constitution concern
Articles 76 and 77, which define strict conditions for which
parties  should be allowed to field candidates in the presidential
election.  Though Article 76 stipulates that the president should
be elected in a multi-party election it is in fact true that, under the
current rules and most currently presented changes to them, none of the
“official” opposition parties would qualify!

For its part, the MB now has 88 members of parliament who are loyal to
it, though they ran as independents in the November 2005
election.  In addition, Arian said that six of the country’s
two-member constituencies still have not had their election results
certified.  “And they would give us probably another seven
members.”

Despite the fact he felt he was being closely watched and followed,
Arian seemed relaxed, and he even projected a
certain amount of confidence.  One of the topics I was eager to
discuss with him was the complex relationship between Egypt and
Palestine– and between the MB and the organization that had grown out
of the MB’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas.

“The main obstacle to the development of strong relations between Gaza
and Egypt comes from Egypt,” he said.  “And the main reason for
that obstacle is the government’s fear of the relationship between the
Brotherhood and Hamas.”  He recalled a news account of the degree
to which Hamas’s victory had distrubed the Egyptian government.

“The fact that Fateh and Hamas reached their recent agreement in Mecca,
not here, was significant, because the negotiations were actually going
well here in Egypt until the Americans intervened,” he said.  “The
Egyptians have no room to navigate with the Americans.  Saudi
Arabia has more…  As for Hamas, it continues to work with the
regime here regardless of what the regime does to the
Brotherhood.”  He indicated that he understood why Hamas made that
choice, and he could live with it.

Later, he said, “If you consider what Hamas was able to do– to survive
for a whole year under those terrible siege conditions– it was really
remarkable.”  He also said that the Egyptian Medical Society had
been making aid shipments to the Palestinians for the past 20 years,
and that the society and the Arab Medical Union with which it is
affiliated now have plans to raise $1 billion of aid to send to
Palestine.

He noted, regarding the demonstrations that had taken place the
previous Friday to protest Israel’s launching of some excavation work
in occupied East Jerusalem, at an entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque, that

I was also interested to ask this spokesperson for a large Sunni Muslim
organization for his views on the possibility fo a serious split
developing within the Middle East along primarily sectarian,
Sunni-Shiite lines.  “Recently, our Murshed (Supreme Guide) made an
address about this issue, warning about the risk of breakdown between
the Sunnis and the Shiites.  The MB has worked on this since
1940… But why are we seeing this issue re-emerging now?  Because
of the rise of Islamic trends, from Morocco to Indonesia. So the
Americans have been planning how to try to stop this.”

He said he thought the issue was most problematic for Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and the Gulf states.  “In Iraq, many Sunnis and Shiites
had intermarried.  They were all oppressed under Saddam
Hussein.  He was not a Sunni
ruler, but a dictator.”

I asked what he thought the reaction of Egyptians would be to any
prospective US military attack on Iran.  “At the official level,
the government will probably be quietly supportive,” he said. 

He also noted the apparent disregard of  US officials to the
troubling rights situation in Egypt.
 

There is a lot more that can be said, certainly, about the political
prospects in its birth-country of this veteran organization, which was
founded in Egypt in 1928 and now has affiliates in many other parts of
the Arab and Muslim worlds.  Egypt is now– as I noted here—
entering a decidedly fin de
régime period, in which great uncertainties abound. 
It is doing so, moreover, at a time when the region of which it is a
part is in huge turmoil, the future course of which is hard to predict.

The regime that is approaching its fin—
at at the very least, approaching a crucial turning point as the powers
of the president continue to decline– is one in which there are many
different trends and currents, including the representatives of the
different security forces, the power of NDP officials and
bureaucracies, the eroded power of officials in the public sector, and
the “lobby” of the big  business interests that have emerged under
the past three decades of economic infitah
(opening) of what was previously a tightly state-controlled
economy.  And yes, there are some really huge business interests
in Egypt today.  Some of those trends push towards liberalism and
open-ness; others are much more conservative. 

And the Brotherhood itself is, by all accounts, not monolithic. 
Indeed, one look at the relative radicalism of its rhetoric and the
conservatism of its actual political practice will quickly indicate
that there must be many younger members or supporters of the
organization who, fired up by its rhetoric, may not yet have fully
understood the nuances or practices of its political
conservatism.  And the Brotherhood, too, has some big business
interests behind it…  There are, indeed, many ways in which it
might seem to line up naturally with portions of the conservative trend
that is under the regime’s umbrella, and others in which it benefits
from the (relative) political open-ness that is encouraged by the
liberalizing trend within the regime.

One thing seems certain, though.  That is that the opening of the
Egyptian public space– principally, its media– that has occurred over
the past decade will prove almost impossible to roll back.  And in
this new atmosphere of the proliferation of media sources and the
general democratization of the information order both locally here in
Egypt, and internationally, it will be impossible for the regime to
keep all its opponents bottled up and excluded from political power for
very much longer.  The broad crackdowns– against the MB, and all
other opponents, real and perceived– that were possible in the Nasser
era can never be repeated.  Even when Sadat attempted to repeat
those tactics in 1981 it proved extremely counter-productive for
him.  Now, no ruler who is even half-way sane would do to attempt
to repeat such actions.

It strikes me, therefore, that since the MB has proven its staying
power and its adaptability to the changing decades, it is very likely
that within the next few years the regime is going to have to do some
kind of a political deal with it, to ensure the stability of the
country.

For my part, yes, I do have concerns about several parts of the
organization’s agenda.  I wish that, like Hamas, they had done
more to foster the real inclusion of women into their public political
life.  I wish they would do a lot more to start thinking about a
future for the region that would seek to include the Israeli people and
their reasonable political aspirations, on an egalitarian basis. 
I hope that, benefitting as they now do from the agendas of many
human-rights organizations, they will continue to keep the human-rights
agenda very much in mind if and when they move closer to exercising
real political power.

Anyway, I learned a lot from my conversation with Dr. Arian.  I
hope I can explore some of these issues a lot further with him in the
future.