(Reuters) – In decades of furtive meetings in tea houses, mosques and universities, members of Egypt’s underground Muslim Brotherhood spoke ardently of a country governed by Islamic law. Now that their debates take place in parliament and the presidential palace, they must decide how far to go in bringing it about.
Elections held since the fall of Hosni Mubarak have turned the once-banned Brotherhood and its allies into the dominant political force in the Arab world’s most populous country.
That success has left the Brotherhood facing competing pressures – on the one hand, to satisfy the conservative Islamists who supported them at the polling station, while on the other hand to avoid conflict with secular-minded Egyptians and a potent military establishment that opposes radical change.
For now, the outcome appears to be a compromise, satisfying neither side entirely but avoiding major confrontation, with the aim of giving the Brotherhood the leeway to meet the needs of running a modern state.
“Everything is a subject of compromise and negotiation for the Brotherhood,” said Khalil al-Anani, an expert on Islamist movements based at Durham University in England.
“It realizes that limiting personal freedoms will endanger their political gains,” he said. “At the same time, they will have to satisfy conservative sections of society.”
The Brotherhood’s move into public life frightens secular-minded Egyptians, who fear Islamist curbs could lead to dress codes, kill off music and cinema or force men and women to segregate in public. Christians, a tenth of Egyptians, are particularly worried, despite Mursi’s attempts at outreach.
Businesses fear for the impact on a tourism industry that creates one in eight jobs.
A call put out on Facebook for a march in defense of beer – first produced in Egypt in pharaonic times – captured a mood of defiance among some after the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi won the presidency.
While Mursi has promised to protect freedoms, his campaign was also peppered with promises to implement sharia, the Islamic law code.
“The fear is of destroying the civil state in which citizens are equal… The reassurance message is valueless, because we are seeing what they are doing in reality,” said Refaat el-Saeed, head of Tagammu leftist Party.
Some Egyptians worry that even without direction from the state, zealots emboldened by the Islamists’ ballot box success could seek to impose their will in the street. Those fears appeared to be manifested in the days following Mursi’s election, when a group of three men stabbed a young man to death for going out with his fiancée in the city of Suez.
Ahmed Eid was killed by three young men who have been charged with forming an illegal vigilante group to “fight vice and promote virtue”.
The Brotherhood denies that it is behind such attacks and has accused agents loyal to Mubarak’s old order of trying to tar it with the same brush by sending youths masquerading as Brotherhood members to threaten hair salons.
There are limits to how far the Brotherhood can go in transforming Egyptian society.
Founded in 1928 by urban intellectuals and run by engineers, teachers and doctors, the Brotherhood says it does not want a theocracy – something which in any case the military council has signaled it will not allow to come about.
“I don’t think anyone, even if he has a 40-year term rather than a four-year term, will have the ability to change society, such that the sharia is implemented with all its comprehensive aspects,” said Ahmad Ahmad, an associate professor of religious studies at Harvard University in the United States.
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