As the Muslim Brotherhood prepares to enter the political process openly and in an above-board manner, its leadership might consider three models for an Islamist political party, writes Hossam Tammam Of all the Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood will probably be the most affected by the profound social and political changes that are being ushered in by the 25 January Revolution. The revolution has brought the Brotherhood face-to- face with a number of urgent issues, after having brought down the Mubarak regime whose 30 years in power coincided with the history of the Brotherhood's participation in the political process. The first thing the Brotherhood will have to resolve is the question of the relationship between the political party it plans to found in the coming weeks and the mother organisation. One of the key questions that will be discussed by its leadership and among concerned observers is whether the Brotherhood will emulate the experiences of other Islamist groups in the Arab and Islamic world, or whether it will seek to forge a course of its own in the light of the current circumstances in Egypt. Certainly, this unique juncture in Egyptian history will put the Brotherhood to the test. It will need to address such crucial questions as the full and equal citizenship of all, especially as applied to women and Copts. It will also have to contend with its relationship with other political forces, which still eye the Brotherhood with suspicion, accusing it of dissimulation and political opportunism as regards its alliances, its participation in the democratic process and its commitment to democracy. For the first time in contemporary history, the Muslim Brotherhood faces the challenge of participating in the political process openly and in an above-board manner. Brotherhood candidates will now run in elections not as independents, as they used to do under Egypt's previous regime, but as part of a legitimate party created to engage in politics and to compete electorally alongside other political parties. This brings to the fore many questions that thus far remain unresolved, not only for the rank and file of the Brotherhood, but also for the Islamist movement as a whole at a time of democratic transformation. On a larger level, such questions converge upon the relationship between proselytising and politics and which activity or mode of operation is best suited for a movement of this sort in the context of its immediate environment and in the framework of the democratisation process. This dilemma has been thrown into bold relief during the course of the political experiences of Islamists in Jordan, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco and elsewhere since the early 1970s, all such groups being heavily infused with religiously-based ideologies, identity politics and campaign sloganeering. Perhaps it would be best to begin with the approach that seeks to differentiate between proselytising and politicking, as this has been espoused by Harakat Al-Islah wal-Tawhid in Morocco (the Movement for Unity and Reform, or MUR). I first attempted to tackle this subject five years ago, when I was drawn to consider the theoretical discourse generated by this Islamist movement, which entered the party political fray and scored a landmark success in Morocco's 2002 legislative elections and went on to become the second largest parliamentary bloc after the country's 2007 elections. What particularly inspired this theoretical work was the need to address the mounting controversy over the right to employ religious terms of reference in the political discourse and rhetoric of a party in a predominantly Muslim society whose government also has a strong basis of religious legitimacy. Although MUR, the largest of the Islamist groups to have agreed to engage in the Moroccan political process, is virtually a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood project, it has refused to join the global Muslim Brotherhood umbrella movement that was founded in 1982 and has preferred instead to remain independent. Its political wing -- the Justice and Development Party (PJD) -- arose from the historic understanding the movement reached with Abdel-karim Al-Khatib, leader of the Moroccan Popular Democratic and Constitutional Movement Party (MPDC) in 1996. Following a process of restructuring that began in 1997, the party became the movement's political wing. In 1998, in the light of its first successes in participating in the electoral process, the MUR began to clarify its relationship with the party. From this point onwards, the MUR leadership displayed an increasingly strong tendency to regard proselytising and religious education as its responsibility, leaving matters pertaining to the conduct of public affairs to the PJD, which was essentially a political organisation. The 2003 Casablanca bombings and their various repercussions set the movement more firmly on course in terms of this functional differentiation, which soon evolved into a strategy that was explicitly laid out in a policy paper. Unveiled in 2006 after years of debate within the movement's organisational structures, this document, called Political Participation and the Relationship between the Movement (MUR) and the Party (PJD), topped the agenda of the MUR conference held in summer 2006 to mark the tenth anniversary of the movement's founding. The MUR's strategy for separating religious proselytising from politics is based on the premise that the movement is an Islamic component of Moroccan society whose aim is to promote the faith. It exists together with other components of the society, and it cannot therefore present itself as an alternative to existing political and social forces. It follows that if the movement is to perform its central mission effectively, it needs to differentiate between the primary functions that form its raison d'être, namely proselytising and inculcating Islamic values and moral formation, and what the policy paper termed its "specialised functions", including political activity, even if both functions are part of an overarching Islamic frame of reference. In practice, such a differentiation entails the complete separation of the movement and the party at the organisational and operational levels. PJD members do not necessarily have to be MUR members or vice versa, and each organisation has its own decision-making bodies and institutions. As mentioned above, the MUR engages in religious education, and its conditions of membership and internal promotion are largely inspired by moral considerations. The party's organisations on the other hand design policy, develop and mobilise party membership, and take political stances. Accordingly, commitment to the needs and aims of the party take precedence over moral considerations where matters of membership and promotion are concerned, as they do with other political parties. The Moroccan Islamist movement has succeeded in resolving important issues connected with the presence of an Islamist player in the political domain. It has, for example, been able to show that political discourse can change according to the pragmatic needs of the world of politics. It has instructed its preachers and proselytisers not to put themselves forward for election or to come out in support of PJD candidates or participate in PJD electoral campaigns, arguing that these things would demean the MUR's Islamic frame of reference, the property of all Moroccan people, by embroiling it in political competition. As a result, there has been a growing tendency in the MUR to concern itself with identity issues, leaving it to the party to focus on practical matters and people's daily and more immediate concerns. As a general rule, according to this outlook an identity issue should only be allowed to become a political issue backed by both the movement and the party in concert if there is a broad trend in support of that cause in Moroccan society as a whole. This has the advantage of helping to identify areas in which identity matters and questions of public morals intersect in political affairs. The MUR has also made use of political practice in order to implement a hierarchical distinction between the movement and the party. It has argued that a separation between the religious leaders in charge of the MUR and the political leaders in charge of the PJD is the best guarantee of the party's continuity and political efficacy. The resignation of PJD leaders including the secretary-general and members of the secretariat from their posts in the MUR came as an affirmation of this principle of differentiation. There are two other models that have a bearing on the relationship between an Islamist movement and the political party that might be formed from it should the movement take the decision to take part openly and legitimately in a pluralistic political party system. The first is to transform itself in its entirety into a political party, as has occurred in Algeria and Yemen, whereby the core of the movement becomes the core of the political party, modified only by the addition of some other public figures, whether tribal leaders or prominent businessmen. However, this model is laden with risks for the party, especially in the event of an alliance between government and movement that might erode the latter's political and social assets, as occurred with the Movement of Society for Peace (HMS) in Algeria, or in the event that it finds itself faced with having to side with the regime, becoming an instrument of it, as occurred with the Yemeni Congregation for Reform in the 1970s. The second of these two other models is furnished by the Jordanian case. Here, the Islamist movement has stressed its need to retain unity and cohesion as a religious organisation, while at the same time forming a political party, in this case the Islamic Action Front, which acts as its political wing and takes part in the electoral process. There is no attempt to draw a clear functional or organisational distinction between the mother movement and the political party. The drawbacks of this second model are that the movement's religious work can make itself vulnerable to political dictates, given the vagaries of the social structure and an international climate that is averse to the religious frame of reference of the Islamist movements. This has been the case with the Jordanian movement, especially in the light of that country's relationship with Israel. Yet, in spite of such drawbacks, I believe that the Jordanian model is nevertheless the closest to the thinking of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the one it will most likely opt for. There are two reasons for this. First, the Moroccan model is already quite remote from the political imagination of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and emulating the Moroccan model is even more remote to its way of thinking, given the Brotherhood's self-conception as the sole historical representative of the Islamist frame of reference by virtue of its political longevity and its identity as the first of all the Islamist movements. The second and related factor has to do with the difficulty of implementing a differentiation between the movement and its prospective political party at the membership level, let alone at the functional and operational levels, as the Moroccan model demands. It is, therefore, difficult to envision an effective separation between proselytising and politicking in the political domain in terms of the figures involved, the rhetoric used and the campaign strategies employed. It therefore seems most likely that the political party set up by the Muslim Brotherhood will resort to familiar religious sloganeering and attempt to mobilise the entire Brotherhood rank and file behind its electoral campaigns.
