Fifty years after the Egyptian Revolution in July 1952, opinions still differ on the relationship between the Free Officers and the Muslim Brotherhood. To Ma'moun El-Hodeibi, spokesman for the Brotherhood and son of the movement's Supreme Guide in 1952, it was one of deception, bad faith and betrayal of trust, as he explains to Omayma Abdel-Latif Click to view caption "Abdel-Nasser deceived everyone who worked with him. He deceived all the allies with whom he collaborated prior to and after July 52." This is how Ma'moun El- Hodeibi sums up the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers, whose movement in July 1952 sparked the Egyptian Revolution. His statement, short and to the point, also sums up the Brotherhood's difficulty in coming to terms with Nasser's legacy and with Nasserism. Despite the many revisionist accounts of the relationship between the Free Officers, the Brotherhood and other oppositional political groups in the Egypt of the late 1940s and early 1950s that have appeared in recent years, the Brotherhood has remained faithful to its own version of events. Nasserism, they say, was a system that soon went awry, headed by an individual and an elite that was obsessed with power. Sitting in the group's Al-Roda office in Cairo, which has been the de facto headquarters of the illegal but tolerated group since its downtown office was closed by the security services in 1995, El-Hodeibi was reluctant to talk about the Revolution, not wanting, as he put it, "to reopen old wounds." Discussion of the errors committed by the Free Officers is futile, El-Hodeibi thinks, since although "much has been said and written about it by all the parties concerned, including the Brothers, the big questions have never been asked because the political atmosphere over the past five decades made a close examination of the thorny issues impossible." Will he address those "big questions" now? Not conclusively. El-Hodeibi was a young judge newly appointed to a court in Heliopolis in Cairo at the time of the Revolution. Although not himself engaged in political activities, he keenly felt the injustices then being meted out to the Egyptian people by the British occupiers. "Egypt was treading an uncertain path," he comments. "There was a strong conviction that the country was on the brink of a great upheaval and that major social and political change was in the making. In the years prior to the Revolution, Egypt was characterised by great weakness and division. "There were three poles of power in the country -- the monarchy, the British and the people. Party politics was a sorry state of affairs. Al-Wafd, Egypt's mainstream party, was divided between its liberal wing and a new grouping led by Aziz Fahmy who championed leftist tendencies. The Muslim Brotherhood wielded influence, but so did other political forces, whether political parties or social movements. They were all part of the national movement, which attracted, among other groups, the army officers." Despite the rising tide of political activism at the time, El-Hodeibi was not then a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or of any other group, preferring to distance himself from politics and concentrate on his career. "I was a judge, and I wanted to maintain my integrity and independence from politics. I observed what was going on, but I did not participate in political activity or join any political organisation. I found out later that Hassan El- Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had strong ties with different public figures in the judiciary, the police force and the army. But he did not want to involve any of these people directly in the Brotherhood's activities, since he knew that this would be potentially ruinous for their careers." 1950 was a turning point for El-Hodeibi's family. His father, Hassan El-Hodeibi, was a magistrate who had strong ties with Hassan El-Banna, though he was not himself a member of the Brotherhood. According to his son, he stood outside political activism, while believing strongly in an Islamic scheme of things. "When he was summoned by the Senate to give his views on a new law to be implemented in Egypt, he told the committee that he could not approve this law as he did not believe in man-made laws, believing only in the Shari'a [Islamic Law]," his son comments approvingly. "In our house, talk about politics never ceased. We were all involved in the national movement. Our independence was respected, and my father always respected women's rights to education and work." When Hassan El-Banna was assassinated in February 1949, the Brotherhood started looking for a successor, El-Hodeibi saying that there were four main candidates including El-Banna's brother. The group's Supreme Guidance Council wanted to appoint someone who could dispel the Brotherhood's reputation as a terrorist movement following the spate of assassinations carried out by its paramilitary wing in the 1940s, and as a result Hassan El-Hodeibi was named Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood in 1950. His appointment came at a crucial time both in the history of the movement and in that of Egypt as a whole. "My father was new to the Brotherhood," El-Hodeibi says. "He was a relative outsider, and therefore he was not accepted as Guide by some within the movement who considered themselves more worthy of the post than he was. At first, he refused to accept the post, but when he was told that El-Banna himself had mentioned my father's name as his possible successor, he accepted it for a transitional period of six months, saying he would then hand the position over to others." "My father," El-Hodeibi comments, "was trying to get to know how the group worked, because at the time he knew nothing about its organisation. He was also very different from Hassan El-Banna in that he was a judge, and he did not have El-Banna's charisma. This created a sense of confusion within the group, especially when the paramilitary wing, led by [Abdel-Fattah] El-Sanadi, did not accept his authority as leader, weakening the Brotherhood. As a result, there were only a few people within the movement that he really trusted, and he never had complete control over the paramilitary wing." Hassan El-Hodeibi, chosen to bring order and stability to the group after the assassination of its founder and leader, thus brought disarray to the movement, which then deepened into the schism. Nevertheless, he stayed on as the group's Supreme Guide well after the six- month transitional period that he had at first accepted. Why? "I believe the reason for this was because he knew that something was in the making, and the Muslim Brotherhood was deeply involved in it," Ma'moun El-Hodeibi comments. "There was no turning back. I once asked him why he had accepted an alliance with the Free Officers in the army, his answer being that 'whether I accepted the alliance or not, the Revolution was going to take place any way, and the alliance between the Brotherhood and the Free Officers had gone too deep for me to change it.'" "The original plan was that the Revolution would take place in September or October 1952, but news leaked out that the king was going to appoint Hussein Serry, the Officers' most important enemy, as minister of defence, and so, fearing that Serry would move against them, they brought the date forward." The relationship between the Muslim Brothers and the Free Officers was a controversial one, clouded by charges and counter-charges of deceit and betrayal. One view is that the Officers defined themselves in opposition to the Brotherhood, seeing themselves as everything that the Brothers were not. However, the Free Officers were not alone on the political stage, and although they were the most important of the opposition's actors, they were also acted upon by other forces. One of the most important of these was the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Hodeibi rejects claims that the Brotherhood wanted to impose its tutelage over the Free Officers, being disappointed when this was rejected. On the contrary, he says, key members of the Free Officers, including Nasser, Khaled Mohieddin and Kamaleddin Hussein, joined Brotherhood cells in the army, deferring to the leadership of Brotherhood organiser Mahmoud Labib. "Nasser professed his loyalty to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he later betrayed this and chose to go on alone, even though the Brotherhood was organising the revolutionary cells in the army," he says. According to some historians of the period, it was the death of Mahmoud Labib in 1951 that led to the collapse of the Brotherhood's influence in the army. But according to El- Hodeibi, there was always a powerful view within the Brotherhood itself that did not welcome Nasser and his group in the movement's ranks. "Abdel-Nasser," El- Hodeibi says, "re-directed the political cells in the army that had been organised by Mahmoud Labib, creating a movement that was independent of the Brotherhood. I believe that Nasser usurped our movement in the army." The Brotherhood has always claimed that in the events that followed the Free Officers were deceitful and that they betrayed the Brothers. Independent political analysts, however, think that members of the Brotherhood may have exaggerated the extent to which the Free Officers were allied to them, all the signs being that the Free Officers had long intended to act alone. Either the Brothers failed to note this independent trend, or they chose to ignore it, but it seems unlikely that there was a real case of deception. Historian Joel Gordon comments that Nasser was wary of the Brothers' and the Communists' political and military organisation, and this may have led him to remain silent about his plans, leading to charges of betrayal. Following the Revolution's successful outcome, the Free Officers attempted to dismantle both organisations, seeing them as threats to the new regime, and they used internal divisions within the Brotherhood in order to do so. January 1955 is often considered to be the turning point in the relationship between the Officers and the Brotherhood, the group being declared illegal nearly a year after the new regime had outlawed all other political parties. However, for his part El-Hodeibi believes that the relationship had gone sour long before, and he cites an incident told him by his father in order to bear this out. Hassan El-Hodeibi had been summoned to meet Nasser for the first time soon after the Revolution, the two men having been in contact only via third parties before this meeting. According to Ma'moun El-Hodeibi, his father asked Nasser to discuss "what we have agreed upon," but Nasser's response was "I don't think we have agreed on anything." "My father was shocked by Nasser's response," El- Hodeibi says, "feeling that this indicated sheer deception on his part. As a result, he stormed out of the room even though Nasser urged him to come back and talk." This incident was followed by another, which Ma'moun El-Hodeibi witnessed, in which his father was visited by El-Sanadi, leader of the Brotherhood's paramilitary wing, and threatened with a gun. El-Sanadi demanded that El-Hodeibi stand down from his role as Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, and Ma'moun El- Hodeibi believes that Nasser himself stood behind El- Sanadi's action. "This incident was incited by Nasser himself," El- Hodeibi comments, "and it was followed by the group's being disbanded in January 1955 and the 'massacre' of Brotherhood members," when the state acted against them. In 1955, an attempt was made on Nasser's life, allegedly by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, when he was giving a speech at Al-Manshiya in Alexandria. Nasser, El-Hodeibi says, "used the Al-Manshiya incident to justify killing the Brothers, and in fact it was originally Mohammed Naguib [then leader of the Free Officers], not Nasser, who was to give the speech." "A few days before the speech was due to be given," El-Hodeibi says, "Nasser visited Naguib because the latter man was ill and urged him to deliver the planned speech. Naguib, however, felt that something was being planned for him, so he refused and pretended to be seriously sick. Nasser wanted to get rid of Naguib by assassinating him, blaming the Brotherhood for the murder." " A couple of years ago," El-Hodeibi adds, "I met Hussein El-Shafie, who was responsible for the subsequent trials of the Brotherhood members, and I asked him to tell me the truth about the Al-Manshiya incident. He said that we should put the past behind us, but I say that it was a plot organised by Nasser to kill the Brothers." How much of Nasser's legacy does El-Hodeibi think is still with us today? "The Nasserist legacy is all about the rule of one individual. It created an autocratic system, residues of which still exist today." Have the Muslim Brothers learned any lessons from the movement's experience following the Revolution and in the decades that followed? "I believe we did gain experience from the results of internal division. This is why the group's organisational skills have developed tremendously: we have made sure that setbacks due to internal division can never happen again."
