Omayma Abdel-Latif tries to decipher the message behind the latest government clampdown on the banned Muslim Brotherhood "Ask the government about it," said Ma'moun El- Hodeibi, the supreme guide of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, when asked to place the most recent round of Brotherhood arrests within the context of the state-Brotherhood relationship. "They are the ones who approach and negotiate with us in the daylight, and then arrest our members and leadership when night falls." El-Hodeibi's statement was made in the wake of yet another "preemptive strike" against some of the group's most senior members. Five Muslim Brothers -- including Gamal Heshmat, a former Damanhour MP, and Ali Abdel-Fattah, the director of the Alexandria Centre for Human Rights -- were arrested on 8 August. Though the round up was not that surprising to the Brotherhood's leadership, it reinforces the all too familiar quandary surrounding the true nature of the relationship between the state and its strongest opponent. In many ways, El-Hodeibi's comment amounts to the most explicit description of this somewhat unfathomable relationship. Brotherhood sources told Al-Ahram Weekly that, "there are indeed channels of communication between the two parties. The Brotherhood has always been willing to open a dialogue with the state, and the endgame for us is to be able to employ legitimate political channels, since we already enjoy a relatively good degree of popular legitimacy," said a senior Brotherhood member. He told the Weekly that it was the state that determined exactly when and how this dialogue would take place. Meanwhile, El-Hodeibi's repeated calls for a national reconciliation have hardly impressed the government. Another senior member of the group described the continuous arrests, and harassment of the group, as part of a "bankrupt policy" on the government's part. "We have largely become a political movement which has proven its success in electoral politics and maintained a strong influence over the public debate, and yet the government decides to see us only as a security threat," said Khayrat El-Shater, a senior member of the group's politburo. This sense of frustration will not, however, affect the way the group decides to respond to such systematic targeting. "They are being pushed against the wall and yet they remain faithful to the strategic decision of remaining steadfast," said a political observer. He explained that the message this time round is that the government will have zero tolerance for the Brotherhood when it comes to its attempts to capitalise on domestic economic woes to mobilise the masses against the state. It is precisely charges of posing a threat to state security and mobilisation of the masses that the police have been invoking against the outlawed group. According to Abdel- Moneim Abdel-Maqsoud, the group's lawyer, the rap sheet of the recent arrests included the routine charges of attempting to reestablish a banned group, incite violence and influence public opinion in a manner hostile to the government, as well as the acquisition of books and leaflets that propagate the group's ideology and the recruitment of new members. Last week's round-up is the sixth in a period of less than a year which have involved more than 60 Brotherhood members from Alexandria, Menoufiya, Mansoura and Damanhour. Abdel-Fattah expects that Heshmat and his colleagues were likely to serve no less than six months. "Heshmat's arrest was not unexpected," said Abdel-Fattah. The government had been wary of Heshmat ever since he had consistently raised controversial and thorny issues of morality and culture while serving as a Brotherhood MP. Heshmat's modus operandi involved embarrassing the government by showing it to be hostile to Islamic norms. As a result, he was stripped of his parliamentary membership through adhereing to a court ruling which found that vote-counting errors had unlawfully earned him the Damanhour seat. Despite all this, the Brotherhood still sees itself as becoming an increasingly influential political actor. According to Mohamed Ibrahim Mabrouk, an Islamist commentator who writes for the London- based Al-Hayat newspaper and is the author of several books on Islamist politics, this is precisely why the government is becoming jittery. "There are indeed some legitimate fears on the part of the state that the Brotherhood wants to exclude other actors from the political game and present itself -- particularly to the West -- as the only viable alternative," Mabrouk told the Weekly. He described the state-Brotherhood relationship as "very complicated". He pointed out that while the Brotherhood is the one political force that the regime is seeking to marginalise at all costs, the government cannot do without the group at the same time, and therefore does not genuinely seek to liquidate it once and for all. "The Egyptian state fully realises the Brotherhood's limited ability to challenge it, and thus keeps them as a safety valve to face up to the more radical groups." This was illustrated during the American-led war on Iraq when, as Mabrouk explains, the Brotherhood was coordinating with the state to lead the popular protests against the war. "The Brotherhood was completely under the state's wing and was even used to absorb popular anger and resentment on the one hand, and to contain the other opposition forces on the other." This utilitarian relationship has prompted Mabrouk to describe parts of the group -- including El-Hodeibi himself -- as veering towards pragmatism rather than truly upholding an Islamic fundamentalist doctrine, which might explain the group's inability to confront the regime more effectively. "They shy away from any direct confrontation with the state," Mabrouk said. They don't push the confrontation to the maximum level because they don't have the ability or the mechanism for it. They try different tactics, but if the confrontation becomes too costly, they retreat." He said the latest arrests represented punitive measures against the Brotherhood for failing to respond positively to the demands of those who set the rules of the game. One such demand is for the brothers to become the government's arm amongst the opposition, where it would act in ways that are favourable to the regime's interests. "While the group remains tolerated," Mabrouk said, "the manoeuvering room granted to them by the state will shrink or expand according to how positively they respond to the government demands."
