EgyptEgypt bans the Muslim Brotherhood, confiscates group’s assets

Egypt has banned the Muslim Brotherhood, continuing the process of marginalizing the Islamist movement and pushing it out of the country’s public life.

A Cairo administrative court on Monday ordered the freezing of the Brotherhood’s assets and also banned the activities of the Islamist movement’s various spin-off groups.

According to official Egyptian news agency MENA, the Cairo court “ruled to ban all activities by the Muslim Brotherhood organization, the group emanating from it and its non-governmental organization.”

The Independent reports that the verdict outlaws groups that cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood or receive financial benefits from it. The court also said an independent committee would be formed by the Cabinet to manage the group’s assets until final court orders are issued.

The Guardian reports that, in effect, since 3 July, when then-president Mohammed Morsi was ousted, the movement has been forced underground. Thousands of its members have been arrested in the last two months, including most of its senior leaders. More than a 1,000 of its followers have been killed in clashes with the army.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928, has been banned for most of its existence, and ruthlessly suppressed under President Gamal Abdel Nasser during his rule (1954-70). Nasser’s successors, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, were more tolerant of the group, and allowed some members of the movement to participate in carefully watched parliamentary elections as independents.

The group’s London-based spokesman, Abdullah al-Haddad, tweeted: “The Muslim Brotherhood are part and parcel of Egyptian society. Corrupt illegitimate judicial decisions cannot change that … [The Muslim Brotherhood] will continue to be present on the ground: they cannot kill an idea, they tried before and failed — they are trying again and they will fail.”

Brotherhood members who remain at liberty told the Guardian that the arrests of the movement’s leaders and senior organizers, and the killings of their group’s followers, threaten the organization’s operational capacity.

Only a handful of senior Muslim Brothers senior officials dare live in the open, and two recently told the Guardian that they were unsure of who was now in charge of the group, since the movement’s leader, Mohamed Badie, is being held incommunicado in an unknown location.

Egyptian political analysts note that the arrests and detention of the group’s senior leaders have allowed younger rank-and-file members more freedom to have their say, something they were denied in the usually highly hierarchical and disciplined movement.

One example of the Brotherhood’s current organizational disarray is the an effort by some younger members to draft an apology for some of the mistakes the movement made during the post-Mubarak period. When the statement of apology was released on a Brotherhood-linked Web site, however, one of the remaining Brotherhood leaders immediately ordered its removal, claiming it did not represent the group.

Analysts estimate membership in the Muslim Brotherhood to be between 300,000 and one million. The Guardian notes that the Brotherhood remains highly unpopular among much of the rest of Egypt’s population of eighty-five million, who blame the group for trying to grab too much power following Morsi’s election in June 2012, and for combining a crude effort to impose Islamic law on an unwilling society with woeful mismanagement of the economy.