[Debate] Meet Egyptian MB's Presidential Candidate Khairat el-Shater

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://nyti.ms/H4xzIQ>
March 12, 2012
Keeper of Islamic Flame Rises as Egypt’s New Decisive Voice
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — For more than a dozen years, Khairat el-Shater guided his
family of 10 children, his sprawling business empire and Egypt’s
largest Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, all from a prison
cell.

Each week, he held court behind prison walls as young Muslim Brothers
delivered to him dossiers about the organization that sometimes were
as long as 200 pages. His corporate employees paid regular visits for
strategic advice about his investments in software, textile, bus
manufacturing and furniture companies and other enterprises. And
before consenting to the marriages of his eight daughters, he met in
prison with each of their suitors. Some of the grooms were prisoners
with him, others made the pilgrimage, and five said their vows in his
presence, behind bars.

Now Mr. Shater, 62, commands far wider influence.

One year after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak brought Mr. Shater
freedom, he has emerged as the most decisive voice in the leadership
of the Brotherhood, the 83-year-old fountainhead of political Islam,
at the moment when it has established itself as the dominant power in
Egyptian politics.

With firm control of Egypt’s Parliament, the Brotherhood’s political
arm is holding talks to form the next cabinet while Mr. Shater is
grooming about 500 future officials to form a government-in-waiting.
As the group’s chief policy architect, Mr. Shater is overseeing the
blueprint for the new Egypt, negotiating with its current military
rulers over their future role, shaping its relations with Israel and a
domestic Christian minority, and devising the economic policies the
Brotherhood hopes will revive Egypt’s moribund economy.

With power he could only dream of when he padded around Mr. Mubarak’s
prisons in a white track suit, Mr. Shater meets foreign ambassadors,
the executives of multinational corporations and Wall Street firms,
and a parade of United States senators and other officials to explain
the Brotherhood’s vision. To the Brotherhood, he tells them, Islam
requires democracy, free markets and tolerance of religious
minorities.

But he also says that recent elections have proved that Egyptians
demand an explicitly Islamic state. And he is guiding its creation
from a position that his critics say may undercut his avowed
commitment to open democracy: he sits atop a secretive and
hierarchical organization, shaped by decades of working underground,
that still asks its members — including those in Parliament — to swear
obedience to the directions of its leaders, whether in the group’s
religious, charitable or political work.

“The Islamic reference point regulates life in its entirety,
politically, economically and socially; we don’t have this separation”
between religion and government, Mr. Shater said in a lengthy
interview. “The Muslim Brotherhood is a value-based organization that
expresses itself using different political, economic, sportive,
health-related and social means. You can’t take one part from one
place and another part from another — this isn’t how it’s done.”

A former leftist and a millionaire businessman who is also the
Brotherhood’s chief financier, Mr. Shater was known for years as the
group’s most important internal advocate for moderation and
modernization.

In prison, he talked radical Islamist inmates into renouncing
violence. He helped chart the Brotherhood’s first steps into electoral
politics, initially in Egypt’s professional associations of doctors,
lawyers, engineers and the like. Then he was at the forefront of its
more transformative drive to win seats in the Mubarak-dominated
Parliament; the experience did more than anything to moderate the
group as it forged coalitions and courted the mainstream. And over the
past decade he also oversaw its stepped-up outreach to the West
through Web sites in Arabic and English.

“No need to be afraid of us” declared the headline of a 2005 article
he wrote from behind bars for the British newspaper The Guardian. “The
Brotherhood,” he wrote, “believes democratic reforms could trigger a
renaissance in Egypt.”

Moving Toward a New Model

But in the new context of Egypt’s fledgling democracy, his critics —
including both liberals and Islamists — charge that he is using the
Brotherhood’s all-encompassing understanding of Islam as a tool for
political power. Against dissidents arguing that in a free society the
Brotherhood should allow its members to decide for themselves how to
apply Islam to politics, Mr. Shater has enforced the group’s
traditional view of itself as the guardian of a single,
take-it-or-leave-it vision.

He has defended the Brotherhood’s traditional view of itself as a
society within society that employs politics as just one tool, along
with preaching and charity, to move society toward an Islamic model.
He has led an internal crackdown on younger members who sought to
change its insular and hierarchical culture. And he has pushed for the
expulsion of Brotherhood members who disagree with the political
decisions made by its ruling Guidance Council — including a popular
former Brotherhood leader, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who is now
running for president. At the core of his campaign is a call for a
more pluralistic understanding of Islamist politics.

Mr. Shater, however, says that his critics misunderstand Islam, the
Brotherhood and democracy. The Islamist landslide in parliamentary
elections — the Brotherhood’s party or more conservative Islamists won
70 percent of the vote — is an indisputable democratic mandate for an
explicitly Islamic government, he said recently in a rare television
interview.

“The people are insistent,” Mr. Shater said. “All institutions should
revise their cultures, their training programs and the way they build
their individuals in the light of this real popular choice.”

How to fulfill that mandate, though, is the overarching question of
the Arab Spring. With Islamists approaching power in Tunisia, Egypt,
Libya and Morocco, and perhaps someday in Syria, all face a similar
challenge: how they reconcile their historic religious missions with
more recent commitments to pluralistic democracy.

Some are seeking a new way. Convinced that fallible politicians will
never know the definitive way to apply divine law to public life,
Islamists in Turkey and Tunisia and in breakaway parties here have
sought to extricate governing from religious interpretation — a view
some call post-Islamist.

But Egypt’s Brotherhood, the original Islamist movement at the center
of the Arab world, has never flinched from demanding an Islamic
government and opposing secular rule. “Egypt is the first Sunni
Islamist experiment in democracy,” said Shadi Hamid, the director of
research for the Brookings Doha Center, which is based in Qatar.

Mr. Shater — whose title is deputy to the Brotherhood’s top leader,
known as the supreme guide — is acknowledged as the most important
strategist and clearest exponent of the group’s answer to that test.
In an interview, he explained that the Brotherhood believed that
Islam’s concept of “shura,” or consultation, meant representative
democracy. He said the group supported the right of those with a more
secular vision to compete in free and fair elections. If differences
arose over how to apply Islamic teachings to public life, then society
should rely on democratic methods to settle any disputes.

But the parameters of policy choices, he argued, should be laid out by
experts drawing not only on economics, political science and other
disciplines, but also on a deep knowledge of Islam. “It is better,
with time, to have someone who knows both subjects,” he said.

In practice, liberals say, the Brotherhood’s approach has already made
its ruling Guidance Council — where Mr. Shater is the dominant voice —
the de facto overseer of Egypt’s next government. “Egypt is now being
run from the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council,” Mohamed Abu Hamed, an
outspoken liberal lawmaker, said in an interview, describing events at
a recent party at the Indian Embassy to illustrate his point.

Politicians, diplomats and businessmen all rushed past the elected
lawmakers and straight for Mr. Shater, Mr. Abu Hamed said, just as
they once did for Mr. Mubarak’s son and heir apparent, Gamal.

“This tells you where power lies,” Mr. Abu Hamed said.

A World of Brothers

Like many who clung to the Brotherhood through years of persecution,
Mr. Shater inhabits a world defined by its fellowship. He employs
mostly Muslim Brothers, his daughters married Muslim Brothers and a
brother-in-law, Mahmoud Ghozlan, is the group’s official spokesman.

Mr. Shater is a traditionalist but also a pragmatist, his friends and
critics say. He sits on the board of an Islamist study group so
conservative that it opposes almost all musical entertainment. It
advocates a segregation of the sexes so strict that it advises women
not to talk on the telephone with men outside their immediate
families. One of its leaders, Sheik Shaaban Darwish, praised Mr.
Shater as “a man of very high morality.”

But Mr. Shater’s advisers say he sits on the board without endorsing
its views. They say he is there to maintain a dialogue with the rival
faction of ultraconservative Islamists, known as Salafis, who control
nearly a quarter of Parliament.

The son of a merchant in the town of Mansoura, Mr. Shater grew up an
avid socialist under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and he read widely
in the works of Western mid-century Marxists. But after Nasser’s
disastrous 1967 war with Israel, Mr. Shater joined the student protest
movement. At 18, he was jailed for four months, expelled from college
and conscripted early into military service.

He was drawn to the Muslim Brotherhood, he said, because of its
comprehensiveness. “It talks about building the individual, building
the family, building the society, building the state,” he said. “It
talks about the economy, it talks about sociology, it talks about
culture.”

He also invested in his own businesses, and with another prominent
Brotherhood businessman, Hassan Malek, founded one of Egypt’s first
software companies, Salsabeel, which signed the Egyptian military as
one of its clients.

Then, in 1995, as Mr. Shater’s influence in the Brotherhood was
growing, the government confiscated the company after a military
trial. Mr. Shater was sentenced to one of four stints in prison under
Mr. Mubarak. He served a total of 12 years, longer than any other
Brotherhood leader. His central role in the group’s financial affairs,
Brotherhood leaders say, made him a special target and now remains a
source of his clout.

Disappointed Dissenters

After Mr. Shater’s release last March, though, many young Brotherhood
members and reformers say they were disappointed by the man who
emerged. His talk of democracy and tolerance for Egypt did not extend
to reforming the Brotherhood, they complained. “We were deceived,”
said Mohamed el-Gibba, 27, a former member.

In the context of a more open and democratic Egypt, some in the
Brotherhood argued that the group should let its members enter
politics on their own while focusing on its missionary work, in
preaching and charity. In addition to Mr. Aboul Fotouh, the
presidential candidate, a procession of reformers sought to run for
office on post-Islamist platforms, including some of the young members
who, against their elders’ advice, helped kick off the uprising
against Mr. Mubarak.

But instead, Mr. Shater helped guide the Brotherhood’s leadership into
creating a new political party — the Freedom and Justice Party —
financed and controlled by the Brotherhood itself. Brotherhood members
are barred from publicly contesting against the party or its
positions.

The only reason the Brotherhood had set up an ostensibly independent
party, Mr. Shater said in the interview, was because Egyptian law
required it. Otherwise, he said, they would be “one thing.”

“You have one of two choices,” Mr. Shater said he told a group of
dissenting Brotherhood youth. “Either you stay in the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, or if you insist on
another party, then you’ll be the ones leaving us.”

“This is normal,” he said, “because the party is an expression of a
political vision. If you have the same vision, you will join this
party. You can’t adopt a different vision from the party that
represents us, that represents the vision of the group.”

Some former members say this arrangement puts the democratic
Parliament under the effective control of the undemocratic
Brotherhood. Abdulrahman Ayyash, 22, a former Brotherhood member who
worked closely with Mr. Shater before leaving over the issue, said:
“Is it O.K. that the Freedom and Justice Party takes direction from
the Guidance Council of the Muslim Brotherhood? No, it is a majority
party now, not the Muslim Brotherhood party.” But the Brotherhood
leaders, Mr. Ayyash said, “are building all their authority on the
policy of blind obedience.”

The dissidents say that Mr. Shater has enforced compliance with even
internally controversial positions. He is overseeing revisions of the
Brotherhood’s internal teaching materials to reflect a more tolerant
stance toward Israel as the group’s political arm comes to terms with
the Camp David treaty. People who work with him say that he has led
talks to consider offering criminal immunity or limited scrutiny of
the defense budget as trade-offs to ease the ruling generals out of
power. He has also promoted an understanding of Islam that includes
business-friendly free-market economics. “They tightened the screws on
anyone who had different ideas about economics,” said Mohamed Habib, a
former deputy Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood who also recently quit
the group over its intolerance of internal political dissent.

“It is a group for Muslims, not ‘the’ group for Muslims,” Mr. Habib complained.

But for now, American officials say they value Mr. Shater’s cool
effectiveness. “He is the behind-the-scenes guy,” said Senator Lindsey
Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who recently met with Mr. Shater
along with a group of mostly Republican lawmakers. “Very impressive.”

Mr. Shater assured them of the group’s commitments to free-market
capitalism, to equality for Egypt’s Christian minority and to freedom
of association for nonprofit groups, Mr. Graham said. When the
senators asked him to publicly clarify the last point in order to help
resolve the criminal charges against some nonprofit organizations
backed by the United States, the Brotherhood’s party released a
statement a few hours later, Mr. Graham said, earning the senators’
gratitude.

Mr. Graham said he noticed that Mr. Shater seemed to wield
considerable power without holding any public office, and that he saw
some American parallels. “I think they call that Chicago,” the senator
said.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>