Islamist blogs in Egypt before the revolution... A new reading after 15 years

We are now in the second half of 2022, meaning that more than ten years separate us from the removal of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and three years separate us from the death of the late President Mohamed Morsi, the first president of Egypt after the revolution, and nearly 6000 days separate us from the text that It was published by the German researcher "Evisa Lubin" (1) under the title: "Young Islamists in Cyberspace... The Blogging World of Muslim Brotherhood Youth."

What does translating a German text on the state of Islamist blogs, published in 2008, add?

How does it help us understand what we are experiencing today in 2022?

The past years have brought millions of stories from Cairo that never sleeps, and these are of course stories that are not recorded in political sociology books, nor monitored by analyzes of the economic situation.

Books of politics, economics, and sociology, and even history, often anticipate major events until the small details characteristic of lived reality almost disappear, the features of daily life disappear within them, and the voices of the marginalized disappear within them.

However, sociologists and specialists in the processes of social change tell us that the day-to-day happenings are central to political society, a fact that the Arab Spring practically told us.

Therefore, it is certain that the past years and the events that took place within it should be conveyed and their details highlighted among the major events.

There is a more important thing that gives such a text its value, which is that understanding the Egyptian reality today is linked to understanding the small details that it tells. From protesters united against the Mubarak regime via blogs to revolutionaries, politicians, opponents, journalists, party leaders, parliamentarians, prisoners and presidential candidates.

protest and blogging

If we want to describe the state of the political meeting in Egypt prior to the end of Mubarak’s rule in one word, we will not find a better word than the word “pent-up pressure”, which ended with the explosion in the January revolution, and the archives of Egyptian newspapers saved us thousands of headlines from which we can discern this pressure in the street. Egyptian at that time.

If we want to summarize the political pulse of this era in one word, the word “protest” would be the best description of what happened at that time.

Protest was the defining characteristic of this period, and barely a month passed without a new protest erupted.

The protests included general classes of society, beginning with senior state officials such as judges and university professors, and ending with student movements and workers' uprisings.

The Egyptian street at that time acquired vocabulary that became entrenched in its dictionary, and left and liberal movements emerged on the margins of this pent-up anger.

In addition to these names, the greatest activity in the Egyptian street came from the Islamists, and the Muslim Brotherhood was the main and perhaps the only prominent representative in the scene.

The group entered politics with all its might after obtaining 88 parliamentary seats in the 2005 legislative elections. However, it is noticeable during this period that youth coordination was more effective than group coordination. The youth voice actually made the voice of the youth even marginalized sometimes, the voices of major entities.

There was a real rapprochement between the youth of the Brotherhood and the youth of other currents at that time, which is what this text reveals in detail.

This whole recent history is not separate from our reality, and therefore the reader can easily link the old text with the modern reality, and sees the Brotherhood turning into a liberal, and a Salafist who is averse to politics and denounces the Brotherhood’s policy, turning into a parliamentary representative of a Salafi party, and a leftist fighter against oppression in the era of oppression. Mubarak turns to one of the pillars of beautifying a regime that is not very different from the one that opposed it.

Blogs were the secret behind all that movement, as they represented the real outlet for active youth at the time from various intellectual currents.

Despite the restrictions and arrests practiced by the authorities on bloggers at that time, the space for freedom was much greater than these harassments.

Egypt knew the phenomenon of electronic blogs at the beginning of the millennium, and its users grew significantly until the number of blogs before the revolution reached 200,000, which means that blogs were full of hearing and sight until some considered them as factors of revolution before the January revolution, noting that the general bloggers were without thirty years at the time.

The users of political blogs dominated the liberal and left-wing tendency and writing in English at first, but soon Islamist youth entered the arena and formed a major phenomenon known as "Islamist Youth Blogs".

The auditor will find that the term “Islamists” here is almost limited to “Muslim Brotherhood youth,” and that is why these blogs were sometimes called Brotherhood youth blogs.

The youth of the Salafist movement had other knowledge channels that they engaged in away from politics and political action, from the networks of scholars to their activities on electronic forums to religious debates to respond to violators.

The relationship in general was not good between the Brotherhood’s youth and the Salafi youth at that time due to the different religious orientations and visions, as well as the different priorities of societal work between them, and the hostility was at the most intense between the Salafi organizers (the Salafism of Alexandria in particular) and the Brotherhood, as each of them implicitly saw that the other was a danger to him. .

This was clearly revealed after the revolution, and this old psychology later played a role in political choices, especially after the army overthrew Morsi’s rule in mid-2013.

The Islamists are clashing and Al-Azhar is withdrawing

Al-Azhar’s role in Egypt revived after the revolution, but it was hardly heard of as a real actor, at least two or three decades before the revolution, except by individual scholars who are influential in the public.

Most of the bloggers looked at him with suspicion in light of his usual alignment with the authority, and attacked his sheikh at that time, "Mohamed Hussein Tantawi", and attacked the president of Al-Azhar University at the time, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, as Lupine observed in her study.

These facts make us wonder about the statement that the Islamists are the ones who excluded Al-Azhar from the public scene, and instilled in the people the spirit of “religious extremism”, as if Al-Azhar was well and healthy in its societal roles before that, and the Islamic movement suddenly appeared to pull the rug out from under its feet.

Any follower of public affairs can see that it was Al-Azhar that had withdrawn itself from society and its issues before 2011, and charted a path for itself that was in harmony with the political mood until many broke up with it.

The great thinkers involved in public affairs wrote about this phenomenon before the revolution and criticized it.

Religious groups, especially the Brotherhood, have tried to establish a foothold or a channel of communication with Al-Azhar.

Whatever the religious or intellectual shortcomings of the so-called Islamic trend, its advantages remain to preserve the spirit of religiosity in the hearts of young people, and to preserve the religious sense related to Muslim issues after the absence of the role of the official religious institution.

Such phenomena are not listed in political history books, but are illustrated by a text such as the one we put in the hands of the reader.

The observer of the Islamic situation after the revolution will not be mistaken that the tendency of “liberalization” entered many young Islamists, and spread among the blogger generation, who later became influential positions in the Arab public sphere.

This generation of bloggers also tended to the reformist current, which was one of the two wings of the Brotherhood at the time.

This rapprochement between the generation of bloggers and the reformist movement had later repercussions. After the revolution, most of them turned around the most important figure of the reformist generation when it split from the Brotherhood, "Abdel-Moneim Aboul Fotouh" and his "Strong Egypt" party, with what he tried to represent from a major current among Islamists. And other currents, although his attempt did not succeed on the ground.

The text raises many other questions on various issues such as the Islamists’ advocacy movement and its relationship with the politician, mechanisms for understanding and dealing with Sharia, and the position of women in Islamic parties.

The veil reveals the intellectual discrepancies between the members of the same movement, and even within the members of the same group, which is visible only to those who approached the scene accurately.

It also shows something of the intellectual thinness that characterized the blogging of young people in this period, as they immersed themselves in the movement and did not address theorizing only in a soft way.

These questions have been abundantly attended after the revolution and the violent clashes in which the Islamists found themselves a party without having an answer to them.

Now, after the end of the blogosphere, after revolutions and counter-revolutions;

The importance of this text, which was published by the writer in 2008 and addressed to the German reader, increases, and we are now reading it in Arabic after fifteen years, not in the eyes of the German reader, but in the eyes of the Arab who witnessed and experienced the events and tries to benefit from these experiences.

Islamist youth..Critical voices of the organization

By the end of 2005 the first blogs of the Muslim Brotherhood appeared.

The Brotherhood was already more use of the Internet than any political party, including the ruling National Democratic Party.

In 2003, the Brotherhood established the "Ikhwan Online" website, which became the group's official website.

Shortly after that, they launched the Brotherhood Forum and the English version of the Brotherhood Web site.

By the 2005 elections, the group had a website for nearly every electoral district.

Then came the beta version of the Wiki Brothers in September 2008, a Wikipedia-style electronic archiving site that focused on the history of the Brotherhood and its most important personalities.

Many of the Brotherhood’s youth bloggers took pseudonyms that revealed their affiliation with the Brotherhood, such as “Nephew” or “Brotherhood Youth,” and also expressed the feelings of the Islamist youth in Egypt at the time, such as “Let’s dream” and “Brotherhood Youth.”

The majority of Islamist bloggers at that time were between twenty and thirty years old, and they were either university students, young researchers, journalists, doctors, engineers, merchants and businessmen, all of whom had grown up under the Mubarak regime, and were active in the ranks of the student movement.

In universities, they had experience in student union elections, and the security services interfered with fraud in favor of students loyal to the regime against them.

As for students opposing the regime explicitly, they were expelled from universities, and were even arrested and sometimes charged (2).

In the years preceding the revolution, students and young Islamists talked in their blogs about their friends and the political movement in Egypt, wrote poems of ghazal, managed their relations with God, argued about political events, stood in solidarity in the face of political arrest, and described their hopes and fears about the general situation in Egypt at the time.

And the Islamist youth's view of reality was more critical, more distinguished, and more open to the world compared to their leaders from the older generations.

And engineer "Ahmed" expressed this in his blog "My Brothers, Sisters", saying: "I am traveling on a journey in search of the truth. I am a human being who is searching for the meaning of humanity in a person."

These young people, then, strove toward an individualism that accords with the beliefs of the Islamists and the society around them.

Islamist bloggers have also searched for a new self-awareness, calling for critical thinking about the group's politics.

In April 2007, Magdy Saad, owner of the "Yalla Not Important" blog, wrote an article entitled: "Teach Yourselves to Rebellion, Surprising and Throwing Stones" (3).

The article sparked a great polemic, where Magdy opposed the internal hierarchy inherited in the group and its isolation from society, arguing that a group that succumbs to routine and resists internal criticism cannot develop, and that the Brotherhood must have moral courage and express this criticism.

At the same time, Magdy calls for maintaining mutual respect and fraternal spirit among the brothers.

Magdy also called for more openness: "We have to learn to be amazed, to open our eyes to ideas and get excited about them. This will only happen if we learn to listen to different opinions from us. This week, there is a practical duty to engage with someone who knows for sure that he has different convictions." about your convictions.

Brotherhood Party Draft

In August 2007, the Muslim Brotherhood leadership sent a draft of their proposed party program at the time to fifty Egyptian intellectuals, asking for their views on the draft.

The Brotherhood’s purpose in this step was not only to enhance their legal transparency in the public sphere, but they also wanted to obtain tacit legitimacy from societal forces, so that they would not be prevented from party representation by a non-democratic authority.

In the spring of the same year, the government made constitutional amendments prohibiting the formation of parties on a religious basis.

The Brotherhood’s program did not clash with criticism from left-wing and liberal thinkers only. The Brotherhood journalist, Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, and the Brotherhood’s most controversial blogger, wrote objections to the program, including the group’s desire to establish a committee of Sharia scholars entitled to decide whether this law or that Shariah-compliant.

Saw "Abdul Moneim"

That this matter contradicts the principle of people’s sovereignty, so why is this proposition in the first place when we announce day and night that we believe in the nation’s right to review the ruler and that the people are the source of the authorities (4).

Abdel Moneim also objected to the program, which stipulated on the one hand the civil state, which means equality of all citizens, but on the other hand, he refused non-Muslims assuming the presidency.

In the same context, Najm al-Din Azzam (5), a member of the Brotherhood's Political Committee, wrote in the readers' mail to the "Waves of Change" blog critical opinions of the party's draft, including that the draft was drafted by a limited number of the political elite.

This was not the first time that a member of the political committee had made critical statements, even though the committee is supposed to represent the political heart of the Brotherhood.

Azzam also demanded clearer obligations towards banks and tourism. The guide, Muhammad Mahdi Akef, suggested that foreign tourists adhere to the Islamic religion and its ethics.

According to Azzam, such a statement would be "nonsense" and would harm tourism (which generates hundreds of thousands of job opportunities annually).

"Azzam" considered that it is also disastrous for the Brotherhood to criticize the government's performance in social reform projects, such as family planning projects, women's access to the judiciary, and the societal debate about female circumcision, without the Brotherhood taking positive societal initiatives in the same files.

Concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, Azzam wrote that the Brotherhood should clearly differentiate between Judaism and Zionism, saying: “We are against the Zionist occupation of Arab lands, but we are not against the followers of the Jewish religion” (6).

Azzam called for a different discourse towards the West, and a clear commitment from the group towards all international treaties and conventions ratified by Egypt.

The Islamist bloggers’ discussion about the Brotherhood’s draft led to more thinking about understanding Islam itself, the Brotherhood’s way of understanding Sharia, and who from the various intellectual currents within the group stood behind the content of this contradictory program of the party, and what we mean by the word “Sharia.”

And if the Brotherhood has already established a party, what will be the relationship between the party and the group, and what will be the relationship between the call and politics, and how the Brotherhood will act if there is a political demand that they have to take pragmatically, but it contradicts a legitimate origin.

Abdel-Moneim Mahmoud and Najm El-Din Azzam believe that there is great resistance from the cadres of the intermediate regions within the group that prevents political openness.

This opposition to openness reflects the purity of the brothers’ behavior, but at the same time it represents a weakness in political awareness, as they do not realize the nature of the modern civil state, and do not understand how political blocs are formed.

reformers and conservatives

The example of Ibrahim Al-Zaafani, the Alexandrian doctor and one of the reformist leaders in the group, who pushed his wife, Jihan Al-Halfawi, to be the first of the sisters to run for a parliamentary seat in the People's Assembly in the 2000 elections, stands out. Al-Zaafani (58 years old at the time), is one of the few bloggers who They came from the older generation in the group, and he wrote in his blog "Al-Zafarani's Blog" (7) what indicates that there have been two schools within the Brotherhood since Hassan al-Banna.

The first school wants to open up to society and cooperate with other societal forces. The most important representative of this current is the Muslim Brotherhood's third guide, Omar al-Telmisani, who was concerned with reintegrating the group back into Egyptian society during the Sadat era.

As for the second wing, it adheres to Islamic fundamentalism, with unconditional loyalty to members of the group, a constant willingness to sacrifice, and a tendency to withdraw from society.

The most important representative of this current is Mustafa Mashhour.

Jihan Al-Halfawi, the first of the sisters to run for a parliamentary seat in the People's Assembly (right) Mr. Mustafa Mashhour (left)

The political flexibility of a group with an Islamic reference is necessarily related to the question of reference itself.

In a press interview conducted by the bloggers “Abdul Moneim Mahmoud” and “Islam Lotfi” with the professor of jurisprudence, “Abdul Majid Sobh,” Sobh criticized the use by many Muslims of Islamic texts (including the Qur’anic texts) without considering what is behind them (9). Islamic politics on truth and justice.

Therefore, Egypt is not a complete Islamic country, according to him, because it did not adhere to these two principles.

As for the blogger, "Mohammed Hamza", he demanded in his blog "One of the Brotherhood"(10) that the "Fiqh al-Maqasid" should be the starting point for interpreting legitimate politics.

The jurisprudence of purposes is the approach of political jurisprudence in Islam, which stands with the moderation faculties of revelation of self-preservation, religion, honor, reason and money.

Hamza suggested that a sixth college be added to these five colleges, "Preserving Freedom."

With regard to the authority of the traditional religious institution, mistrust prevailed among bloggers about it, especially after the Sheikh of Al-Azhar "Sayed Tantawi" attended the Eid al-Fitr celebration with the president in 2007, and his demand to apply the limit of defamation and flogging of journalists (11).

Shaza Essam, owner of the Molotov blog, posted a questionnaire on her blog in which she asked: “From which (religious) authority do you derive the legitimacy of your actions?” Half of the readers answered that they question their hearts, and 40% said they are guided by fatwas from websites or programs The TV fatwa, while only 10 percent said they rely on Dar al-Ifta, the institution actually responsible for fatwas in Egypt.

Islamists and others

Islamist bloggers participated in the activities and events organized by the youth of other movements, such as the "Enough" movement and the annual anti-globalization conferences as well as the activities of human rights organizations.

Marwa, the owner of the "Freedom" blog, traveled with a solidarity convoy in December 2007 to break the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip and deliver aid across the Egyptian border.

Marwa wrote about the convoy’s convoy that “in its entirety, just like the homeland, you find the leftist, the Brotherhood and the Nasserite, and you find other members of the (democratic) front or in the (movement) Kefaya, and the differences and trends disappear between us and the voice of the one goal we agreed upon, and the dream that We carried it together on our journey, the dream of breaking the siege on Gaza. I saw in our bus a miniature picture of Egypt. A mixed mixture of ideas, directions and visions, but it had one goal and one road that brought us together..

Then, "Marwa" added about the atmosphere inside the bus, saying: "We shared the joy and enjoyment of company along the way, as we shared the ban, the bitterness of injustice, the cruelty of oppression and oppression. At the beginning of the journey, everyone participated in singing, and we heard some poetry by Ahmed Matar, followed by poems by Ahmed Fouad Negm and Amal Dunqul. And Mahmoud Darwish. We listen for a little while to the voice of Abdel Halim Hafez singing for the homeland, then we hear a cassette tape carrying an Islamic chant, which is a mixture despite its differences.

The student movement in the seventies always witnessed violent clashes that lasted for a long time between the left and the Islamists, but before the revolution there was a feeling for everyone that young people were deprived of all their rights and had no future prospects.

The left tried to make a political home in the "Enough" movement, while the liberals saw in the founder of the Al-Ghad Party "Ayman Nour" a new hope, until "Nour" was convicted of five years in prison in a mock trial after his candidacy for the presidential elections against Mubarak.

As for the Nasserists, they resented the Nasserist Party and defected to found a new party, "Al Karama", which was banned from licensing until 2011. This shared feeling of concern prompted the Brotherhood's youth to redefine themselves and reconsider their relationship with the youth of other political forces.

In this regard, the blogger "Mohamed Hamza" wrote on his blog: "The liberals accuse the Brotherhood of wanting a totalitarian regime. As for the left, they classify us as reactionaries, while the Islamists reject anyone but them as secular, and instead of mutual rejection, it is better to look for common ground."

Such meanings do not only mean, according to Hamza, mutual respect, but also imply an organized exchange of ideas and shared activity whenever possible.

There are many points of intersection between Islamists and liberals, and liberals have long defended the country's Islamic identity.

There are also many similarities with the left, particularly when it comes to the issue of social justice.

Here, we find the left-wing activist, "Mohamed Sharif" criticizing the leadership of the leftist "Tajammu" party, describing it as having made himself affiliated with the ruling National Party out of his hatred of the Brotherhood.

Sharif wrote for the "Waves of Change" blog that the Islamists are not the cause of the current weakness of the left, as claimed by the Tagammu Party, but rather the party's own policies, which decades ago began to submit to the interests of the Soviet Union, and then allied themselves with the current regime.

On the “Waves of Change” blog, the collective blog run by the reformist Brotherhood, Sharif also called for “building an independent left that does not operate under the regime’s command, but rather a left that puts its hand in the hands of Islamists, such as the Iranian Tudeh Party, in joint alliances:” This includes Alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood in the fight against emergency laws, the coalition for free elections, and the coalition against corruption campaigns in the country.” The open hostility of the left to the Muslim Brotherhood will only serve the regime.

Brotherhood bloggers also showed great seriousness in defending freedom of opinion and expression in the case of blogger "Karim Amer," who differed in opinion from the Muslim Brotherhood.

In March 2007, the Alexandria Court sentenced him to three years in prison for contempt of Islam and insult to the president's dignity.(13)

Instead of defending Islam, Muslim Brotherhood bloggers and the group's English-speaking websites (such as IslamWeb) joined the solidarity campaign with Amer.

Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, who was also detained for several weeks in 2007 for his political activism, wrote: "The regime is not concerned with religion at all in order to rise up in defense of it. Amer, but I do not disagree at all about the refusal to deal with the security forces with him and his punishment for his personal opinions and his condemnation of what was called contempt for the president” (14).

Women within the Brotherhood

"The Rebellion of the Muslim Sisters", with this headline, Al-Dustour newspaper sparked controversy because of a message sent from one of the sisters to the guide "Mahdi Akef", and it was published by Dr. "Rasha Ahmed" in the "Waves of Change" blog in November 2007 (15).

The author of the same letter defended herself against this title, saying that she wanted to reform the internal situation constructively, without engaging in battles of the sexes.

She began her message to the guide with: "My respected father, I am one of the thousands of your daughters and sisters who are proud to be part of this blessed movement."

Despite this, the sister was criticized at various levels within the ranks of the Muslim sisters, and she said in her letter: “Everyone in the Brotherhood knows that without the sisters’ active work, the electoral sweep of 2005 would not have been possible.

The sister also complained about the low level of training materials for sisters compared to the level of the brothers’ courses, saying: “The result is that many of our meetings have the nature of housewives’ meetings, where people talk about children and vegetables, while God directs His words to both women and men in the Qur’an. The Brotherhood has to prepare more women in important committees, so that the Brotherhood becomes a role model in society and proves in practice that women are the sister of men. The matter becomes especially important with the discussion about the party program, we have to ask ourselves: Should the party also be for men only? ?".

In his blog "Yalla, it is not important", "Magdy Saad" wrote about a revealing dialogue on this subject.

At a meeting of Brotherhood cadres, Majdi, who was sitting next to him, asked who was represented in this meeting, and he replied that he represented the sisters.

He asked "Majdi" amazed: "Can't the sisters represent themselves?!" The answer was brief: "Majdi, you know the security situation," and a third added: "You know very well what they do to political prisoners in detention, so imagine that this happens to one of the sisters. Do you think her father, brother, or husband will sit relaxed? Or will this lead to a bloodbath?"

“Majdi” not only presented the security argument, but also questioned the situation after the group became legalized, has headquarters and can hold public meetings without restrictions: “Do you agree to hold mixed meetings, and for a woman to be in charge of a committee, and will she respond to her directions?” And to the sisters: “Do you think that the sisters would be ready and daring to integrate into the group if they worked side by side with the men?”

Most comments supported a greater role for women, however, most comments - especially from sisters rather than brothers - wanted to keep separate entities, regardless of whether or not Islam permits mixed activities (opinions on this subject are highly controversial), especially since The traditions of Egyptian society prevent this integration.

Not all Brotherhood blogs shared the Brotherhood's reformist youth in their criticism of the group.

In the comment of a governor (16) from the pharmacist "Ahmed al-Qebsi" to the "Waves of Change" blog, which he called "before they sink the ship," he wrote that bloggers should stop harming the group's image, promote internal differences and poison the fraternal atmosphere under the pretext of self-criticism.

The blogs were supported by "Mohamed Morsi," a member of the Guidance Office at the time, and in a statement circulated on the Brotherhood's Web site in September 2008 considered the doves-and-hawks hypothesis an attempt by anti-Islamic forces to destroy the group from within.

In May 2008 the dispute escalated over the run-off elections for the Guidance Bureau (17).

Abdel Moneim Mahmoud wrote on his "I'm Brothers" blog that the "conservative" wing took advantage of the run-off elections to strengthen its position, and that the elections were appointments, not elections.

He talked about the conservatives' manipulation of the elections through the absence of the deputy guide in charge of organizational affairs, "Khairat Al-Shater", who was serving a seven-year military sentence in prison at the time.

The name "Khairat al-Shater" was circulated as a possible guide for the group (except for his imprisonment).

Abdel Moneim was criticized by many reformist bloggers, who saw the reform and strengthening of the group from within through constructive criticism.

In this text, which was written in 2007, the tension over the Brotherhood’s open involvement in the growing political opposition before 2011, its enthusiasm or lack of reformist ideas among young people against the background of the broader circulation of liberal and socialist ideas, and its reluctance to undertake real reforms in the solid structure of the organization, is evident. The reactions of a new generation of intellectually and kinetic active youth to the organization’s stagnation, and the contradictions that have drawn the organization’s features since the 1970s between the reformist “public work” wing that Tlemceni included in the group after 1976, and the conservative wing headed by the “private organization” hawks released from prisons.

These controversies seem to be coming from a long time ago, but they soon opened wide, and charted the paths of the people’s collision with the Mubarak regime, then the political currents with each other, and the Brotherhood’s youth with their leaders between 2011 and 2013.

The echoes of those events are still valid to this day within the organization, which may suffer more divisions than ever before, and its believers are still waiting for real reform and the emergence of new leaders from the generation of the revolution’s youth within the organization. Except in the belief that the golden age of the Brotherhood has ended, and that the generation of blogs and the emergence of the generation of “public work” and the subsequent major events gradually wrote the end of the solid organization, and then opened the door wide for new Islamic organizations and parties that will redraw the features of political Islam in the coming years and decades.

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