In order to assess the magnitude and influence of bloggers within the Muslim Brotherhood group we must first know how far the group is interested in the blogging community and their ideas and the size of support that bloggers are receiving from the group's reformist leaders. We can surely say that the group had to take interest in the phenomenon of bloggers because of their outspoken attitude which caused media uproar in some cases. Although this interest may have come too late, it was noticeable that some of the group's leaders had to follow up on the postings of young Brotherhood bloggers and sometimes engage in intellectual debate with them. Those leaders include Mohamed Morsi, chairman of the Brotherhood's political committee, who held a meeting in the summer of 2007 to try to contain the young bloggers; Dr Mohammed Beltagi, a Muslim Brotherhood MP; engineer Ali Abdel Fattah, Ahmed Abdel Aati and Anwar Hamed. As for support, it can be said that despite the absence of real support for bloggers from the reformist leaders, some MB members have called for dealing with these young peoples' ideas seriously. Some of these leaders have even launched a blog to exchange ideas with MB bloggers such as Dr Ibrahim Zaafarani in Alexandria. Perhaps the failure of the reformist leaders to support the Brotherhood bloggers is attributable to their poor influence within the group in general in addition to their concern that their sympathy with the MB bloggers could encourage them to rebel against young MB members and increase their clout in the face of the conservative wing, threatening the unity and cohesion of the group. Nevertheless, the bloggers have succeeded over the past two years in making substantial gains whose effects will be felt later. First, blogging has demolished the psychological barrier that has prevented many of them from criticizing the group. It has also broken the concept of secrecy that has been the bedrock of the group since its establishment eight decades ago. A concept that has been hiding behind the famous saying of the group's founder Hassan El-Banna: "We cooperate in what we have agreed on and excuse each other for what we have disagreed on. Now this saying has been transformed to: "No cooperation without consensus, and no agreement without listening to and respecting the opposing opinions. The second gain is that blogging has put the group in a cleft stick: ignoring the voices of young bloggers and dealing with them as mere electronic banter is an option that will be very costly for the group, as it will tarnish its image and portray it in the media as an authoritarian group which does not accommodate other opinions. This option will also give bloggers a fresh drive to continue their struggle against intellectual and organizational inertia within the group, which is already happening. The other option is to listen to the criticism of these young people and deal with them seriously, which means making concessions that may affect the internal structure of the group. The choice adopted by the group was a combination of both options. But their attitude of "constructive disregard through a strategy of containment, has unfortunately failed. The third gain was that the group's leaders are now bracing themselves for any strategic decisions that might be taken against them and the bloggers' reactions to them. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that have delayed the issuance of the final version of the Muslim Brotherhood party's political program that has drawn strong criticism from young bloggers. The question that imposes itself on the bloggers now is: what comes after blogging? Khalil Al-Anani is an Egyptian expert on political Islam and democratization in the Middle East and is a senior fellow at Al-Ahram Foundation. E-mail: [email protected]
