‘Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence' — Pervez Musharraf “She quickly bent down to snatch up a tear gas canister and hurl it back at the police. Her face was masked. She clutched her textbooks with her other arm. The university campus had become a battlefield.” Scenes like this, reported in Al-Ahram, have occurred at universities around the country over recent months, with the violence that erupted with the anger of protesting students filling the country's television screens and arousing condemnation, concerned analysis and prayers for it to end. Violence has intensified and spread in Egyptian society since 30 June, and many political analysts lay the blame for this on the Islamists, particularly after the breakup of the sit-ins held by supporters of ousted former president Mohamed Morsi in Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque and in Nahda Square in Cairo in August, a view that Al-Ahram Weekly has sought to probe in the hope that this could contribute to the formulation of solutions that will bring it to an end. Some analysts associate the anger and violence now being seen on university campuses with the history of the Islamist movement in Egypt. They argue that violence has been the predominant trait of the Islamists since the founding of the movement with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. They also point to the Muslim Brotherhood's “secret apparatus” that was created in the 1940s and the assassinations and bombings it carried out during that period. Other analysts dismiss such associations and maintain that the violence that has erupted since 3 July is the natural consequence of “the coup”, as they refer to the events that led to the dismissal of Morsi as president and the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government. According to this view, the violence in the Muslim Brotherhood's history was limited to a few isolated events and these were connected with the resistance against the British occupation of Egypt and the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Proponents of this argument point to the Muslim Brotherhood brigades in the 1948 War and the many deaths that took place among their ranks. In like manner, Muslim Brotherhood members, including Brotherhood students at Al-Azhar and other Egyptian universities, took part in the 1956 Tripartite Aggression, and, again, many of them died. Yet, their reward for this bravery was years in prison. As for the violence outside the field of battle, this camp of opinion holds that it was limited and targeted only Israeli and British interests as a response to the massacres in Palestine perpetrated by Zionist militias. Kamal Al-Helbawi, a breakaway Muslim Brotherhood leader, states that no one from the Muslim Brotherhood has ever attacked a visitor to Egypt or a Copt, or killed a woman, child or elderly person. In addition, although there were in the past a number of well-known incidents of political violence attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood, these should be regarded in the context of their times, he said. Political assassinations occurred since the earliest phases of the Egyptian nationalist movement. Boutros Pasha Ghali, prime minister at the time of his death in the early decades of the last century, was assassinated by a member of the Watani (Nationalist) Party, for example. Anwar Al-Sadat, who would later go on to become president in the 1970s, was implicated in the assassination of minister Amin Othman in 1946. Al-Helbawi extends his argument to discuss three incidents of violence that Muslim Brotherhood members have historically been involved in. The first took place in 1948 with the assassination of judge Ahmed Al-Khazendar in retaliation for a sentence he handed down against a Muslim Brotherhood member. However, this assassination did not take place on the orders of or even with the knowledge of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna, who condemned the act, Al-Helbawi said, adding that this was the first and last time anyone from the Muslim Brotherhood had contemplated vengeance against a judge for passing a sentence. The second incident was the assassination of the then prime minister Mustafa Al-Nuqrashi in December 1948. Al-Nuqrashi had ordered the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood, and members of the organisation at the time held him responsible for what Al-Helbawi calls “driving them into prison in their thousands and torture, dismissal from their jobs, homelessness and starvation.” Even the Muslim Brotherhood soldiers who had fought in the war in Palestine “were taken from the field of battle and thrown into prison,” he said. According to Al-Helbawi, a Muslim Brotherhood youth with the assistance of some of his colleagues in the “special apparatus” assassinated Al-Nuqrashi. Al-Banna had tried to prevent this and had met with officials in the organisation to urge them to restrain impetuous youths, Al-Helbawi said, and he had been summoned for questioning after the assassination of Al-Nuqrashi and only released when it had been established that he had had no connection with the incident. The third incident was the attempted bombing of the Court of Appeals during the same period, which was thought to hold documents pertaining to cases involving Muslim Brotherhood members. The act also infuriated Al-Banna, who famously said of the perpetrators that “these are not brothers. These are not Muslims,” Al-Helbawi said. Al-Helbawi said that since the time of the incidents outlined above the group had not been implicated in a single incident of violence, apart from the attempted assassination of former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser in Manshiya Square in Alexandria in October 1954. However, numerous ambiguities still surround this incident, some of them raising doubts over Muslim Brotherhood involvement, he said. This scepticism was even shared by some members of the post-1952 revolutionary regime, including Hassan Al-Tohami. From 1954 to July 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood has never sought recourse to violence in spite of the injustices meted out by the country's military tribunals and the execution of many of its leaders, such as Abdel-Kader Ouda, Mohamed Farghali, Youssef Talaat and Ibrahim Al-Tayeb, and, at a later stage, Sayed Qutb, Abdel-Fattah Ismail and Mohamed Hawash, Al-Helbawi said. “The Muslim Brothers did not exact a single drop of blood in revenge for these executions,” Al-Helbawi said, adding that “it is thus fair to say that circumstances in the country in the 1940s and early 1950s were such as to compel the Muslim Brotherhood, like other nationalist groups at the time, to create an apparatus consisting of a number of individuals endowed with a spirit of self-sacrifice and a willingness to die for their cause to undertake jihadist operations against the British occupation that was clutching at Egypt's throat and the Zionist gangs that were wreaking havoc throughout Palestine.” “This special apparatus performed its role superbly, as is testified to by the many heroic acts that were witnessed on the banks of the Suez Canal and in the land of Palestine of which every patriot can be proud,” Al-Helbawi said, adding that the Brotherhood's special apparatus had been dissolved with the end of the reasons for its creation more than 40 years ago. Yet, even if this argument that the history of the Muslim Brotherhood is not marked by uninterrupted and systematic violence and that the violence associated with it has historically been limited to some isolated and intermittent incidents, there still remains the question of the violence associated with the organisation since 3 July, especially among its members in Egyptian universities. “We have no reliable information to confirm that the violence against the army and police is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood,” a Brotherhood leader told the Weekly. “The students are acting in a decentralised manner in the universities. They do not have specific instructions. Rather, they have ideals and principles, and these have been informing their movement, which is part of the resistance against the coup.” “The student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has been taking escalatory steps in response to the escalation on the part of the security forces, the arbitrary arrests, and the refusal to bring those responsible for violence against the students to account. It is odd that the people ‘incited' to acts of violence are being punished for it, whereas those ‘committing' the real violence are not,” the Brotherhood leader said. These “double standards” and the “absence of justice” are the sources of the student anger in the universities, the source continued. “The Muslim Brotherhood students are spread out horizontally and vertically in the universities, and they have been joined by other students who oppose injustice and military rule. The failure to prosecute those responsible for the deaths of around 130 Al-Azhar students during the breakup of the Rabaa Al-Adawiya sit-in and the subsequent arbitrary arrests is what has given rise to this anger.” Another Muslim Brotherhood leader rejected the use of the term “student violence”. “The word should be student ‘anger' not ‘violence',” he said. “Most of the actions we have seen have been reactions against the actions of the police. The photograph that appeared in Al-Ahram on 13 December of the female student throwing back a tear gas canister that had been fired at the students confirms this. The students are in the position of exercising their right to self-defence.” The National Coalition to Support Legitimacy, an umbrella organisation consisting of a number of Islamist parties that reject the post-3 July roadmap, is an ardent backer of what it calls the “students' revolutionary march.” A coalition statement to the students proclaims that “the path of the coup-makers is a dark dead-end. Neither repression nor terror will halt your revolutionary march, God willing. Continue your wrath and your revolution in total peacefulness, dedication and love for the nation, its martyrs and its detainees.” The statement goes on to urge students to take to the streets in mass demonstrations throughout the week beneath the banner “Students ignite the revolution.” It also instructs them to wave Egyptian flags and the so-called “Rabaa hand” as “you continue your glorious revolution until it achieves its aims.” The question for many observers is how this kind of student violence, or anger, which has brought education to a standstill in many faculties can be brought to a halt. “Absolute justice,” said a Muslim Brotherhood source. “Those responsible for the crimes of violence against students must be prosecuted and given appropriate punishments. The channels for a comprehensive political solution must be opened, all forms of violence must be condemned, and there must be no more displays of strength through provocative threats to break up any demonstration in five minutes.” The students have not been the only sources of the violence, however. According to Yehia Sayed, vice president of the political department of the Nour Party, Sinai is also a hotbed of violence “largely due to the absence of social and economic development there. The people of Sinai feel marginalised and as if they are guests in their own country.” In Sayed's opinion, one of the most immediate causes of the recent spread of violence in Sinai has been the destruction of the Sinai-Gaza tunnels which were a considerable source of income for people in the north of the Peninsula. A Muslim Brotherhood source denied that his organisation was allied to the jihadists in Sinai, and he took exception to the term “takfiri” often used to describe them. “There have been no investigations to enable us to determine whether or not they are takfiri,” he said. “Undoubtedly one of our mistakes as an organisation has been to ally ourselves with a group from the ultra-right, namely the Gamaa Islamiya. It was not appropriate that the Muslim Brotherhood should have allied itself with them, but political circumstances forced us to do so.” Amr Mohamed of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies told the Weekly that “the violence that has spread throughout Egyptian society and that has been so detrimental to the economy that it has almost brought it to ruin requires urgent solutions.” While he believes that progress in the transitional roadmap could alleviate tensions among the student community and in the country as a whole, he does not feel confident that the referendum on the new constitution will pass peacefully. Instead, he fears outbreaks of violence because of the “blood-thirstiness” of the Islamists who are determined to sabotage the roadmap and dismantle the Egyptian state. At all events, it seems clear that a security solution alone cannot solve the violence crisis. “All sides must sit down together at the dialogue table in order to safeguard the future of the country. Judicial hearings must be reopened, and detainees who have not been proven guilty of any wrongdoings must be released,” concluded a Muslim Brotherhood leader who refused to reveal her name.
