-News From the Arab World-

Re: Saudi Islamists Discuss The Status Of Women In Islam And In The West

salama

why u always talk abt saudi

its not like the whole islam nation is about saudis

im not hating anyone and i love every muslim but plz give coverage to other muslims who arent saudis too

there are other muslim countries u know

masalama
 
Re: Saudi Islamists Discuss The Status Of Women In Islam And In The West

sonz said:
salama

why u always talk abt saudi

its not like the whole islam nation is about saudis

im not hating anyone and i love every muslim but plz give coverage to other muslims who arent saudis too

there are other muslim countries u know

masalama
Click to expand...


:sl:
I know there are OTHER muslim countries. I dont ALWAYS talk about saudi and if I do, then its because I WISH to do so.:)
Plus! I saw the article and decided to share it with others. Nothing wrong with that!

Maybe you should check my 'Arab world news' thread. It not only has the news updates for saudi but other countries too!ENJOY.:coolsis:

Allah ma3ak
psstt....I strted loving saudi since I was 10....and its love grows day by day. You look at other 'MUSLIM' countreis and they are becoming westernised by the day.:confused: So....saudi it be!!:coolious:
 
Re: Saudi Islamists Discuss The Status Of Women In Islam And In The West

:sl:
Please post in the appropriate section,
JazakumAllahu khayran.
 
Re: Saudi Islamists Discuss The Status Of Women In Islam And In The West

salam
jazakalah sis ameeratul layl
wasalam
 
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Arab News Headlines:

* US image in Arab countries deteriorates: poll

*In Iraq, Signs of Political Evolution

* Egypt: A test of the democratic rhetoric

* Egypt ponders the price of Islamists' gains

*Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz today called for unity and tolerance to address the challenges faced by the Muslim world.
 
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WASHINGTON - The image of the United States took a beating this year in six Arab countries due to the war in Iraq and "American treatment of Arabs and Muslims," according a poll released Wednesday.
The poll by US-based Zogby International showed that the attitude toward the United States had particularly hardened in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where 84 percent and 82 percent, respectively, said their opinion of the superpower had worsened in the past year.

Negative sentiment was less severe in Lebanon, with 21 percent saying their opinion had improved and 49 percent saying it worsened, according to Zogby.

In Jordan, a key US ally in the war on terror, 62 percent said their attitude toward the United States had worsened, while 72 percent said so in Morocco and 58 percent in the United Arab Emirates.

China wins the popularity contest against the United States, Russia and India in five of six Arab countries.

The Asian giant is seen favorably by 70 percent in Egypt, 68 percent in Jordan, 46 percent in Lebanon, 52 percent in Morocco and 40 percent in Saudi Arabia. India leads in UAE with 58 percent.

To burnish the US image in Arab countries, President George W. Bush picked his close confidante Karen Hughes this year to become the US imagemaker abroad as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

Hughes traveled to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in her first tour in October.

In each of the six Arab countries, Zogby interviewed between 500 and 800 people in October. The margin of error is between 3.5 and 4.5 percentage points, except in UAE where it is 10 percentage points.
 
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Tucked into a bunker-like former headquarters of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, a type of war room unfamiliar in this country buzzed with life Wednesday. Halfway through a 14-hour shift, campaign workers from the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab group that boycotted the country's previous elections in January, munched rice and kebabs, their faces lit by computer screens.

Across town, hundreds of black-clad followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr -- who decried balloting 10 months ago as something imposed under American occupation -- beat their backs with chains and stomped across a large poster of former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi. Sadr's political wing has joined forces with the alliance of Shiite religious parties that leads Iraq's current government and opposes Allawi's secular movement.


As Iraqis nationwide prepare to go to the polls for the third time this year on Dec. 15 -- this time for a new parliament -- candidates and political parties of all stripes are embracing politics, Iraqi style, as never before and showing increasing sophistication about the electoral process, according to campaign specialists, party officials and candidates here.

"It is like night and day from 10 months ago in terms of level of participation and political awareness," said a Canadian election specialist with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a group affiliated with the U.S. Democratic Party that is working to ease Iraq's transition to democracy. The institute, which has provided free campaign training to more than 100 Iraqi parties and describes its programs as nonpartisan, granted a reporter access to its employees and training sessions on the condition that no one on its staff be named.

Evidence of political evolution is plastered all over Baghdad's normally drab concrete blast walls and hung on lampposts at nearly every major intersection: large, colorful, graphically appealing posters conveying a wide variety of punchy messages.

Television and radio airwaves are replete with slick advertisements costing anywhere from $1,250 per minute on al-Sumariya, a Lebanon-based satellite station focused on Iraq, to $5,000 per minute on al-Arabiya, a network based in the United Arab Emirates that is popular across the Arab world.

In one 30-second spot, a smartly dressed and smiling Allawi -- normally known for his brusque demeanor -- is shown seated on a stool in a dimly lit studio. "My faith is in Iraq," he tells the camera, to underscore his secularism.

Even the arrival of American-style negative campaigning is evidence of a growing political sophistication, the election trainers said. In recent days posters have started to appear in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum in north Baghdad, bearing the slogan "vote for the Baathist slate," along with a composite photograph of a face -- half Allawi's and half Hussein's. Allawi was a member of Hussein's Baath Party until the mid-1970s, when he joined Iraq's opposition.

In January, most candidates outside the dominant few parties largely eschewed campaigning, fearing they could be kidnapped or assassinated. Now, even long shots are getting into the act. One day this week, National Democratic Institute instructors explained get-out-the-vote techniques to a dozen members of the Free Iraq Gathering, a new coalition that "probably won't get many more votes than you see in that room," according to an institute employee.

In another room, a Canadian taught workers from the Iraqi National Congress, the party led by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, how to monitor polling stations on election day to prevent cheating and ensure their supporters are able to vote.

"You are the eyes of the party," he said, warning them to look out for husbands trying to cast ballots for their wives or tribal leaders seeking to vote for their members. "Your party may have the best solutions for Iraq, but it doesn't mean a thing unless people come and put a ballot in the box. You have to think, I have seen Mustafa and Mazen vote, but if someone is missing, maybe you call them up and offer them a ride to the polls."

As in January, the specter of election-related violence still hangs over Iraq. Insurgents have distributed leaflets throughout Anbar province, the center of the Sunni-led insurgency, threatening to kill anyone who attempts to vote. An Iraqi Islamic Party candidate was gunned down with two party workers on a highway west of Baghdad late last month. Allawi escaped unscathed from an attack by armed demonstrators in Najaf during a visit there Sunday, and two days later, a rocket-propelled grenade struck his party's Najaf office.
 
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In the recent Egyptian elections, the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and largest Islamic movement in the Arab world, has succeeded in winning approximately one third of the votes, even though the organisation, which continues to be banned in Egypt, had confined itself to contesting 144 out of the 454 parliamentary seats to avoid aggravating the government.


This result came in spite of the widespread violations that have marred the elections, ranging from the arrests of hundreds of Brotherhood activists, to the police blocking polling stations and shooting tear gas, and thugs wielding machetes, knives and guns to terrorise voters, while the police stood by.

The Egyptian case is the rule not the exception. Wherever relatively free and credible elections have been held in the region, mainstream Islamism has emerged as the principal player.

This has been the case in Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Turkey. Even in Algeria, where the army staged a coup d’etat against the Islamic Salvation Front in 1992, soon after, other Islamic parties came to occupy the seats the ousted FIS had held in parliament.

From Egypt to Syria, Iraq to Turkey, Algeria to Tunisia, the lesson has been the same: Deeply entrenched socio-political phenomena cannot be uprooted by force and coercion.



Mainstream Islamism is a fundamental and firmly- rooted factor in Arab and Islamic political life. It can be neither ignored nor cancelled.

Whether we like it or not, mainstream Islamism is an integral component of any equation of democratic transition in the region.

The claim that political Islam is in its last throes, which has gained currency in academic, political and media circles since it was first put forward by Olivier Roy in the 1990s, looks today more implausible than ever.

The problem with the failure of political Islam thesis is that it reduces the Islamic scene to its radical expressions, with no heed of the diversity of its modes of interpretation, political agendas, and order of priorities.

The trouble with Roy is that he turns his attention to the narrow violent fringes and turns a blind eye to the mainstream and its internal dynamism.



What we need is to bridge the gap between a sweet rhetoric and a gruesome, bitter reality.

The tendency to lump the great Islamist mosaic under the vague and obscure heading of Islamic fundamentalism leaves us in a conceptual vacuum, unable to decipher its complexity and make sense of its many variations.

Islamism, just like Socialism is not a uniform entity. It characterises an intensely colourful socio-political phenomenon with different strategies and discourses.

This enormously diverse movement ranges from the liberal to the conservative, from the modern to the traditional, from the moderate to the radical, from the democratic to the theocratic and from the peaceful to the violent.

What is common to these different trends is that they all derive their source of legitimacy from Islam, just as the Latin American anarchist guerrillas, the Social Democrats, Marxists, and Third way Blairites base theirs on Socialism. To view this broad canvass through the lens of Bin Laden or al-Zarqawi is nothing short of absurd.

It is equally immature to assume that the different manifestations of Islamism are all engaged in an open battle with modernity.

Whatever we may think of Islamism, whether we like it or not, we cannot change the reality on the ground. Islamists are the dominant force in much of the Muslim world.

Mainstream Islamism may in fact be described as a complex response to the challenges and deficiencies of modernity. It represents a synthesis between Islam’s historical and symbolic resources and the expressions of modernity.

It is as Islamic in its language and origins, as it is modern in its methods and instruments. Its social bases are largely drawn from the urban educated sectors of society, with a strong presence in the unions of students, teachers, lawyers, doctors and engineers.



The seeds of this phenomenon may be traced back to the dawn of the nineteenth century with the Islamic reform movement of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and his disciples Muhammad Abda and Rashid Rida.

These reformers may be credited with transmitting Islam’s symbolic capital from the traditional sectors of Muslim society to its modern institutions and adapting it the requirements of modern times.



This is not to say that the discourse of Islamists is entirely coherent, or that their historical experience is without its pitfalls. It is to recognise Islamism as a dynamic complex phenomenon, expressive of, and responsive to, the dilemmas and crises of a modern Islamic world struggling to regain its equilibrium after the painful bolts of colonialism and political fragmentation.



Whatever we may think of Islamism, whether we like it or not, we cannot change the reality on the ground. Islamists are the dominant force in much of the Muslim world.

It is equally immature to assume that the different manifestations of Islamism are all engaged in an open battle with modernity.

The campaigns of repression waged against them by the region’s dictatorships with the backing of their American and European allies have proved quite unable to halt their growth or stop the pace of Islamisation in Muslim society.



The broad trend in the Islamic political map today is one of incorporating the mechanisms of democracy, such as peaceful power alternation, power checks and balances and the separation of powers, within an Islamic framework.

Democracy is, indeed, neither a dogma, nor a doctrine. It denotes a collection of procedures and institutions which have the potential to function within different cultural contexts and various value- systems.

To break the Islamic political terrain into opposite trenches of enlightened secular democrats and fundamentalist remnants of medieval times is both simplistic and misleading.

The so-called fundamentalist threat has been, and continues to be, used as a means of obstructing real democratic transition in the region. Only if it generates the desired result is the ballot box to be accepted, only as a seal of a pre-determined outcome.



Mainstream Islamism is a fundamental and firmly- rooted factor in Arab and Islamic political life.

Those who fill the air with hymns to freedom and democracy are strangely silent today, unstirred by the scenes of police barrages encircling polling stations and machete wielding government thugs chasing voters away.

In a letter addressed to the American State Secretary in response to the Department spokesman’s denial of any knowledge of violence or irregularities in the Egyptian election.

Human Rights Watch said, such statements "make a mockery of the policies you and President Bush have articulated on numerous occasions this year regarding the importance of respect for democratic freedoms in the Middle East generally and in Egypt in particular" (2 Dec 2005).



The grand slogans of democracy and good governance in the Middle East are being tested today on the Egyptian soil.



What continues to be missing in the region, it seems, are not the forces of democracy, or the culture of democracy, but the international will to allow democratic change to take place. What we need is to bridge the gap between a sweet rhetoric and a gruesome, bitter reality.

[Soumaya Ghannoushi is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London.]
The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position or have the endorsement of Aljazeera.
 
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When stumping through the port city of Alexandria, whose crumbling mansions and rickety tram lines evoke long-faded glory, Sobhe Saleh of the Muslim Brotherhood vowed he had a different vision for Egypt's future.

"If Islam were applied, no one would be hungry," he roared recently to a crowd of fully veiled women ululating with joy. "Islam is a religion of construction. Islam is a religion of investment. Islam is a religion of development."

Religion, in fact, should profoundly alter both Egypt's domestic and foreign policy, said Mr. Saleh, a 52-year-old lawyer with a clipped helmet of steel-gray hair.

"If Islam were applied, the television would not show us prostitution and people lacking all decency!" he declared. "If Islam were applied, Iraq could not have been invaded, Israel could not occupy Jerusalem, and aggression could not have been used to humiliate Muslims everywhere!"

A long-expected day of reckoning is at hand in Egyptian politics now that the Brotherhood, an illegal organization with a violent past, is entering the corridors of power for the first time in significant numbers.

The outcome of the freest election in more than 50 years could determine whether political Islam will turn Egypt into a repressive, anti-American theocracy or if Islamic parties across the Arab world will themselves be transformed by participating in mainstream politics.

No sudden earthquake is expected. But initial results from the final round of voting on Wednesday showed that the Brotherhood had gained at least 11 more seats to bring its total to 87, with two races still being counted, according to a spokesman. That is five times the 17 seats the group won in 2000.

Already, those inroads have been greeted by conflict. At least eight people were killed in violence around polling places, according to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, including two felled by rubber bullets fired by the police.

As it did in the second round of voting, the Brotherhood accused the government of fomenting the violence and blocking access to the polling places to limit the ability of its supporters to vote. The government said opposition forces instigated riots.

"Reports reveal a systematic and planned campaign to prevent opposition voters from going to the polls," the Independent Committee on Election Monitoring said.

The violence is a measure of the jitteriness accompanying even the relatively modest gains the Brotherhood had made. While capturing roughly one-fifth of Parliament's 444 seats, the group does not control enough to enact laws or even override the governing National Democratic Party.

Its well-organized campaign, built around the vague slogan "Islam Is the Solution," did little to illuminate what it will do as the opposition.

The open question is whether political influence could transform the Brotherhood into a moderate political party, like the governing Justice and Development Party in Turkey, rather than an organization that uses Parliament as a platform to proselytize.

Its newfound role might also help answer the question whether Islamic parties are interested in democracy only as one person, one vote, one time.

"For the first time, they are not merely expected to be troublemakers but to gain the trust of their voters," said Mohamed Salah, the Cairo bureau chief for the London-based newspaper Al Hayat and an expert on Islamic movements. "If this time people voted for the Brothers to punish the N.D.P., they won't next time. So the Brothers face a difficult test."

Until now, religion has occupied an awkward twilight area in Egypt's mummified political life, grudgingly accepted but technically banned. Prohibited in 1954 after members carried out a string of violent attacks, the Muslim Brotherhood runs its candidates as independents, with scores of campaign workers jailed.

Deep apathy among the 70 million people of Egypt - by far the largest Arab country - meant turnout in this election officially averaged 34 percent, but many election analysts have put it at 25 percent or lower.

Parliament has neither budget oversight nor the power to remove ministers, serving mostly as a rubber stamp for presidential initiatives. But the Muslim Brotherhood vows to use the People's Assembly to lead the charge for reform, pushing for expanded civil liberties, albeit with a religious tint.

Since Hassan el-Banna, an elementary school teacher of Arabic, founded the Society of Muslim Brothers in 1928, the group has insisted that a state ruled by strict application of the Islamic law, or Shariah, and God's punishments will arrive by gradualism rather than by force.

The Government's Bogeyman

President Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian government has habitually warned critics at home and abroad that his 24-year rule remains the sole bulwark against the tide of radical Islam.

Some analysts argue that the government's strategy was to let the Brotherhood win just enough seats to force critics both here and in Washington to confront the fact that the choice comes down to the governing party or the abyss.

"The Brothers are the government's bogeyman," said Ibrahim Issa, the editor of the weekly Al Dustour. "It's like you say to misbehaving children, 'The Brothers will get you, the Brothers will get you.' The government does it, so we accept political despotism."

Indeed, the Brotherhood's dismayed opponents - among them governing party officials, Egypt's 10 percent Coptic minority and most intellectuals - are warning that doom lies ahead.

"The Mullahs Are Coming!" screamed one headline in the government-controlled newspaper Al Gomhouriya, using the title reserved for Iran's tyrannical clergy.

Talk show guests on state television have outdone themselves coming up with synonyms for shifty and sinister, while the latest nationally broadcast Friday Prayer sermon sponsored by the government blasted anyone mixing religion with politics.

Adel Hamouda, the editor of the new independent daily Al Fagr, positively frothed at the very idea of a Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc.

"They once relied upon secrecy, underground organizations and a militia until they decided to ride the wave of democracy to reach power," he wrote in a denunciation illustrated with a doctored picture of the Brotherhood's leader wearing a Nazi uniform. "Once they do, they will adopt dictatorship, fascism, Nazism; they will say that they are God's deputies, God's in-laws, God's friends, God's spokesmen, and whoever opposes them, differs with them or becomes their enemy will become the enemy of God."

A Disillusioned Nasserite

Mr. Saleh, the Alexandria lawyer who trounced his governing party opponent, dismisses such fears as groundless. In many ways, his path from childhood in a Nile delta village to parliamentary representative of one of the Mediterranean's biggest cities reflects the modern trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sent to Alexandria for high school, he was 13 when the Arabs lost the 1967 war against Israel, and he joined the mobs coursing through the streets to reject President Gamal Abdel Nasser's offer to step down.

The adolescent Mr. Saleh worshiped Nasser, memorizing lines from his famous speeches, which had given Arabs their first sense of pride in a postcolonial world. Indeed, Mr. Saleh's speeches echo Nasser's defiant tone.

"Leave peacefully with your own will, before you are forced to leave - go and never come back!" Mr. Saleh told the governing party in one speech, using virtually the same lines that Nasser hurled at Western colonial powers.

In 1971, a year after Nasser died, Mr. Saleh read "The Return of Consciousness" by the renowned writer Tawfik al-Hakim, which depicted the leader as a sorcerer who created a grand illusion. The most lasting shock for Mr. Saleh was the lie about Arab might.

"I thought we would never kneel, but I woke up to a bitter truth, that Israel occupied one-fifth of our land, that Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem was lost," Mr. Saleh said. "I felt like all my dignity was gone; I was miserable; I felt pain, rejection, bitterness. I was confused, shocked, reeling, looking for a solution and for something other than Abdel Nasser."

He recalled a night in 1965 when five village neighbors were arrested in a national sweep against thousands of suspected Muslim Brotherhood members. Mr. Saleh, by now in university, read their trial transcripts and heard their tales of degrading torture. He knew the arrested men as devout, sincere and hard-working.

At that point, he joined the Brotherhood, deciding that only an Islamic renaissance could rescue the Arabs from their plight.

One key reason the Muslim Brotherhood has endured is that its message combining spiritual salvation with an Islamic political renaissance captures the middle-class mood - particularly among conservative professionals like doctors, engineers and lawyers.

Mr. Banna, the movement's founder, believed that social ills could be cured by a return to the basic tenets of Sunni Islam, and that Muslims would always face enemies trying to thwart their revival.

The continued repression of the Brotherhood in Egypt, not to mention many of the 30 to 40 other Muslim Brotherhood organizations worldwide, has only added to their mystique. Syria mandates the death penalty for membership, while legal parties in other Arab countries, like Morocco and Jordan, are constantly harassed and highly popular.

The Muslim Brotherhood is often seen in two ways - as the fusty great uncle of Islamic politics, content to bide his time, or as the womb of all subsequent Islamic terror movements. Both views are true.

Mr. Banna organized a paramilitary Special Apparatus, ostensibly to train volunteers to fight in Palestine. Many did, but members also plotted a series of political assassinations.

Government gunmen killed Mr. Banna in 1949, just as the organization reached its peak, with 500,000 members. A failed attempt to assassinate Nasser in 1954 led to the Brotherhood's being banned, with up to 20,000 members languishing in jail for two decades.

Among them was Sayyid Qutb, who wrote a radical treatise from death row arguing for armed revolt. Subsequent groups, notably Al Qaeda, base their doctrine partly on his writings.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician and Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, volunteered in a Muslim Brotherhood clinic before founding Islamic Jihad, whose violence included assassinating President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981.

Shying Away From Violence

The Muslim Brotherhood calls all these links tenuous at best.

"The presence of these violent groups outside the Muslim Brotherhood proves that there is no place for those who support violence inside," Mr. Saleh, said in an interview in the Brotherhood's cramped Alexandria office.

If the group retains a shadowy aura, its leaders say, it is because decades of persecution have made it wary. Mr. Saleh has been imprisoned twice, including six months in 2003 after leading demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq.

This election underscores the risk of groups hostile to American policy emerging through reforms. The group's leader, Muhammad Mehdi Akef, 78, accuses the United States and its allies of carrying out brutal attacks on Iraqi civilians and mosques to sully the image of the resistance.

"Such dirty work is done by the Americans, the honorable resistance has a noble purpose so its means are always noble," Mr. Akef, known as the general guide, said in an interview.

Mr. Saleh, asked in an interview about what the Brotherhood would do in Parliament, echoes the national platform with its typically populist positions that derive their support from religious sentiment.

He calls Israel "an aggressor nation" and says Egypt should shun it, if not sever the peace treaty. He opposes any American aid that comes with strings attached.

On tourism, he wants foreign visitors segregated so the faithful can feel comfortable in areas that require modest clothing and a ban on alcohol.

Mr. Saleh also advocates enforcing public morality through a modified version of Saudi Arabia's religious police. Anyone who curses religion on the streets and any spouses caught kissing would be arrested.

"In Islam, a man doesn't have the right to kiss his wife in public, unless he was away and just returned, so the law needn't be applied in the airports or train stations," said Mr. Saleh, a father of four and grandfather of two.

Turning Egypt into an Islamic state is an interim goal along the way to recreating the Islamic empire, or caliphate, of 1,000 years ago, with the modern version mirroring something like the European Union.

The mere fact that the Brotherhood could hold rallies for hours and hang huge banners in the streets flaunting its symbol - two crossed swords over the Koran - is a sea change. Previous campaigns were hurried affairs of rushing around whispering "Islam is the Solution" in cafes for at most 20 minutes lest the police arrive.

This time, some of Mr. Saleh's attack lines bring guffaws from the faithful. He vows that before Muslim Brotherhood members sit in Parliament, seats formerly occupied by the governing party will be scrubbed seven times, once with sand. The listeners know this is the religious formula for purifying objects fouled by exposure to something ritually unclean, like dogs.

The Government Candidate

A rally by Mr. Saleh's governing party rival, Khalid Abu Ismael, a millionaire food exporter, seemed pallid after the revival meeting atmosphere of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some in the audience said they were government employees ordered to attend.

Mr. Abu Ismael is typical of the wealthy businessmen that Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and potential heir, has gathered into a 140-member policy council for the governing party.

The basic thrust of much of its reform program is harnessing the private sector to modernize Egypt, with the governing party running slick television campaign advertisements showing beaming Egyptians cavorting along well-scrubbed streets perhaps found in Sweden.

"We can't say anything has actually changed, but I feel like they are starting to," Mr. Abu Ismael said in an interview over chocolate cake in the neatly pruned back garden of his splendid mansion.

The genial mogul said he had received some 7,000 job requests while campaigning and had managed to place 650 people. He expressed shock at the living conditions in some of the poorer reaches of the district. He wanted to run in a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold because he resented its attitude. "I don't like their slogan 'Islam Is the Solution,' as if they are the only Muslims in this country," he said.

He and many others are convinced that if the government really tackled social ills, much of the Brotherhood's support would evaporate. The most vocal complaints from voters condemn their abysmal surroundings despite years of governing party promises to fix unpaved streets, overflowing sewage systems, undrinkable water, utter lack of garbage collection and the like.

Mr. Saleh and most Brotherhood members are often the very community members who found neighborhood collectives to treat nagging ills, indeed the only political group active on the streets.

In his neighborhood, for example, he helped establish a local health insurance system by which poorer families paid half their medical costs, with richer benefactors underwriting the difference. During Ramadan, his charitable organization distributes free food.

"Everything they do is very well organized," said Tahani Abdul Raouf, a homemaker with five children who attended the women's rally. "Anything we ask for, we get. They are very respectable people, very efficient people."

Not all fervent believers support the Brotherhood, of course. Some view democracy as a Western innovation and therefore a sin. It is the younger generation in the Brotherhood - more engaged and open-minded - who have plunged into the political process. The Brotherhood, the only significant opposition in the elections, limited itself to fielding about 150 candidates to avoid an overwhelming victory that might prompt a harsh crackdown, repeating the horrifying Algerian experience in the 1990's. There, the Islamists gained power through elections, which the government promptly annulled, setting off a civil war.

Essam el-Erian, a key strategist, thinks 75 percent of the Brotherhood's votes were from staunch supporters while the rest were protest votes against the governing party. Other analysts argue the reverse is true, but exact numbers are elusive.

In a typical interview after one of Mr. Saleh's rallies, an English-speaking engineer said he was voting for the Brotherhood as the best hope for change. Though he supports its conservative social agenda, Ashraf Omar, 40, said he feared replacing a secular dictatorship with a religious one.

"We want a system in the future where all the people can state their opinion, where they can change the government when they want to," Mr. Omar said.

The Future of Democracy

Opponents question just how committed the Brotherhood is to democracy given the civil rights disasters wrought by Islamic governments in Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan under the Taliban.

At least in the short run, both opponents and supporters of the Brotherhood expect that the election results are probably healthy for political life. The People's Assembly has been a sleepy place, with members rarely showing up, and the secular parties with their aging leaders and ideas captured fewer than a dozen seats.

If the political process is more vibrant, more people will vote, which conversely might diminish the weight of the Brotherhood, analysts believe. Other parties might also emerge to erode the Brotherhood's appeal as the sole opposition force.

"We have not been able to face this dilemma for so many years," said Muhammad Kamal, a key political strategist in the governing party and a political science professor at Cairo University. "Now we have to confront it, it's in our faces. You cannot have a true democracy in Egypt without reaching some kind of accommodation between religion and politics."

Some experts believe that it is the Brotherhood that will be forced to adapt, not Egypt. Gamal al-Banna, 85 and the youngest brother of the movement's founder, has long harbored doubts that Islam in the era of Prophet Muhammad provides a viable model for a modern government.

"Their spirit is not the spirit of the age, they want to live as the prophet lived," Mr. Banna said. "The real test of the Brotherhood is to let it enter politics. They will be in a different situation when they confront the necessities of ruling, and there are only two possible outcomes. They will have to compromise or fail."

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt When stumping through the port city of Alexandria, whose crumbling mansions and rickety tram lines evoke long-faded glory, Sobhe Saleh of the Muslim Brotherhood vowed he had a different vision for Egypt's future.

"If Islam were applied, no one would be hungry," he roared recently to a crowd of fully veiled women ululating with joy. "Islam is a religion of construction. Islam is a religion of investment. Islam is a religion of development."

Religion, in fact, should profoundly alter both Egypt's domestic and foreign policy, said Mr. Saleh, a 52-year-old lawyer with a clipped helmet of steel-gray hair.

"If Islam were applied, the television would not show us prostitution and people lacking all decency!" he declared. "If Islam were applied, Iraq could not have been invaded, Israel could not occupy Jerusalem, and aggression could not have been used to humiliate Muslims everywhere!"

A long-expected day of reckoning is at hand in Egyptian politics now that the Brotherhood, an illegal organization with a violent past, is entering the corridors of power for the first time in significant numbers.

The outcome of the freest election in more than 50 years could determine whether political Islam will turn Egypt into a repressive, anti-American theocracy or if Islamic parties across the Arab world will themselves be transformed by participating in mainstream politics.

No sudden earthquake is expected. But initial results from the final round of voting on Wednesday showed that the Brotherhood had gained at least 11 more seats to bring its total to 87, with two races still being counted, according to a spokesman. That is five times the 17 seats the group won in 2000.

Already, those inroads have been greeted by conflict. At least eight people were killed in violence around polling places, according to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, including two felled by rubber bullets fired by the police.

As it did in the second round of voting, the Brotherhood accused the government of fomenting the violence and blocking access to the polling places to limit the ability of its supporters to vote. The government said opposition forces instigated riots.

"Reports reveal a systematic and planned campaign to prevent opposition voters from going to the polls," the Independent Committee on Election Monitoring said.

The violence is a measure of the jitteriness accompanying even the relatively modest gains the Brotherhood had made. While capturing roughly one-fifth of Parliament's 444 seats, the group does not control enough to enact laws or even override the governing National Democratic Party.

Its well-organized campaign, built around the vague slogan "Islam Is the Solution," did little to illuminate what it will do as the opposition.

The open question is whether political influence could transform the Brotherhood into a moderate political party, like the governing Justice and Development Party in Turkey, rather than an organization that uses Parliament as a platform to proselytize.

Its newfound role might also help answer the question whether Islamic parties are interested in democracy only as one person, one vote, one time.

"For the first time, they are not merely expected to be troublemakers but to gain the trust of their voters," said Mohamed Salah, the Cairo bureau chief for the London-based newspaper Al Hayat and an expert on Islamic movements. "If this time people voted for the Brothers to punish the N.D.P., they won't next time. So the Brothers face a difficult test."

Until now, religion has occupied an awkward twilight area in Egypt's mummified political life, grudgingly accepted but technically banned. Prohibited in 1954 after members carried out a string of violent attacks, the Muslim Brotherhood runs its candidates as independents, with scores of campaign workers jailed.

Deep apathy among the 70 million people of Egypt - by far the largest Arab country - meant turnout in this election officially averaged 34 percent, but many election analysts have put it at 25 percent or lower.

Parliament has neither budget oversight nor the power to remove ministers, serving mostly as a rubber stamp for presidential initiatives. But the Muslim Brotherhood vows to use the People's Assembly to lead the charge for reform, pushing for expanded civil liberties, albeit with a religious tint.

Since Hassan el-Banna, an elementary school teacher of Arabic, founded the Society of Muslim Brothers in 1928, the group has insisted that a state ruled by strict application of the Islamic law, or Shariah, and God's punishments will arrive by gradualism rather than by force.

The Government's Bogeyman

President Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian government has habitually warned critics at home and abroad that his 24-year rule remains the sole bulwark against the tide of radical Islam.

Some analysts argue that the government's strategy was to let the Brotherhood win just enough seats to force critics both here and in Washington to confront the fact that the choice comes down to the governing party or the abyss.

"The Brothers are the government's bogeyman," said Ibrahim Issa, the editor of the weekly Al Dustour. "It's like you say to misbehaving children, 'The Brothers will get you, the Brothers will get you.' The government does it, so we accept political despotism."

Indeed, the Brotherhood's dismayed opponents - among them governing party officials, Egypt's 10 percent Coptic minority and most intellectuals - are warning that doom lies ahead.

"The Mullahs Are Coming!" screamed one headline in the government-controlled newspaper Al Gomhouriya, using the title reserved for Iran's tyrannical clergy.

Talk show guests on state television have outdone themselves coming up with synonyms for shifty and sinister, while the latest nationally broadcast Friday Prayer sermon sponsored by the government blasted anyone mixing religion with politics.

Adel Hamouda, the editor of the new independent daily Al Fagr, positively frothed at the very idea of a Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc.

"They once relied upon secrecy, underground organizations and a militia until they decided to ride the wave of democracy to reach power," he wrote in a denunciation illustrated with a doctored picture of the Brotherhood's leader wearing a Nazi uniform. "Once they do, they will adopt dictatorship, fascism, Nazism; they will say that they are God's deputies, God's in-laws, God's friends, God's spokesmen, and whoever opposes them, differs with them or becomes their enemy will become the enemy of God."

A Disillusioned Nasserite

Mr. Saleh, the Alexandria lawyer who trounced his governing party opponent, dismisses such fears as groundless. In many ways, his path from childhood in a Nile delta village to parliamentary representative of one of the Mediterranean's biggest cities reflects the modern trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sent to Alexandria for high school, he was 13 when the Arabs lost the 1967 war against Israel, and he joined the mobs coursing through the streets to reject President Gamal Abdel Nasser's offer to step down.

The adolescent Mr. Saleh worshiped Nasser, memorizing lines from his famous speeches, which had given Arabs their first sense of pride in a postcolonial world. Indeed, Mr. Saleh's speeches echo Nasser's defiant tone.

"Leave peacefully with your own will, before you are forced to leave - go and never come back!" Mr. Saleh told the governing party in one speech, using virtually the same lines that Nasser hurled at Western colonial powers.

In 1971, a year after Nasser died, Mr. Saleh read "The Return of Consciousness" by the renowned writer Tawfik al-Hakim, which depicted the leader as a sorcerer who created a grand illusion. The most lasting shock for Mr. Saleh was the lie about Arab might.

"I thought we would never kneel, but I woke up to a bitter truth, that Israel occupied one-fifth of our land, that Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem was lost," Mr. Saleh said. "I felt like all my dignity was gone; I was miserable; I felt pain, rejection, bitterness. I was confused, shocked, reeling, looking for a solution and for something other than Abdel Nasser."

He recalled a night in 1965 when five village neighbors were arrested in a national sweep against thousands of suspected Muslim Brotherhood members. Mr. Saleh, by now in university, read their trial transcripts and heard their tales of degrading torture. He knew the arrested men as devout, sincere and hard-working.

At that point, he joined the Brotherhood, deciding that only an Islamic renaissance could rescue the Arabs from their plight.

One key reason the Muslim Brotherhood has endured is that its message combining spiritual salvation with an Islamic political renaissance captures the middle-class mood - particularly among conservative professionals like doctors, engineers and lawyers.

Mr. Banna, the movement's founder, believed that social ills could be cured by a return to the basic tenets of Sunni Islam, and that Muslims would always face enemies trying to thwart their revival.

The continued repression of the Brotherhood in Egypt, not to mention many of the 30 to 40 other Muslim Brotherhood organizations worldwide, has only added to their mystique. Syria mandates the death penalty for membership, while legal parties in other Arab countries, like Morocco and Jordan, are constantly harassed and highly popular.

The Muslim Brotherhood is often seen in two ways - as the fusty great uncle of Islamic politics, content to bide his time, or as the womb of all subsequent Islamic terror movements. Both views are true.

Mr. Banna organized a paramilitary Special Apparatus, ostensibly to train volunteers to fight in Palestine. Many did, but members also plotted a series of political assassinations.

Government gunmen killed Mr. Banna in 1949, just as the organization reached its peak, with 500,000 members. A failed attempt to assassinate Nasser in 1954 led to the Brotherhood's being banned, with up to 20,000 members languishing in jail for two decades.

Among them was Sayyid Qutb, who wrote a radical treatise from death row arguing for armed revolt. Subsequent groups, notably Al Qaeda, base their doctrine partly on his writings.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician and Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, volunteered in a Muslim Brotherhood clinic before founding Islamic Jihad, whose violence included assassinating President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981.

Shying Away From Violence

The Muslim Brotherhood calls all these links tenuous at best.

"The presence of these violent groups outside the Muslim Brotherhood proves that there is no place for those who support violence inside," Mr. Saleh, said in an interview in the Brotherhood's cramped Alexandria office.

If the group retains a shadowy aura, its leaders say, it is because decades of persecution have made it wary. Mr. Saleh has been imprisoned twice, including six months in 2003 after leading demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq.

This election underscores the risk of groups hostile to American policy emerging through reforms. The group's leader, Muhammad Mehdi Akef, 78, accuses the United States and its allies of carrying out brutal attacks on Iraqi civilians and mosques to sully the image of the resistance.

"Such dirty work is done by the Americans, the honorable resistance has a noble purpose so its means are always noble," Mr. Akef, known as the general guide, said in an interview.

Mr. Saleh, asked in an interview about what the Brotherhood would do in Parliament, echoes the national platform with its typically populist positions that derive their support from religious sentiment.

He calls Israel "an aggressor nation" and says Egypt should shun it, if not sever the peace treaty. He opposes any American aid that comes with strings attached.

On tourism, he wants foreign visitors segregated so the faithful can feel comfortable in areas that require modest clothing and a ban on alcohol.

Mr. Saleh also advocates enforcing public morality through a modified version of Saudi Arabia's religious police. Anyone who curses religion on the streets and any spouses caught kissing would be arrested.

"In Islam, a man doesn't have the right to kiss his wife in public, unless he was away and just returned, so the law needn't be applied in the airports or train stations," said Mr. Saleh, a father of four and grandfather of two.

Turning Egypt into an Islamic state is an interim goal along the way to recreating the Islamic empire, or caliphate, of 1,000 years ago, with the modern version mirroring something like the European Union.

The mere fact that the Brotherhood could hold rallies for hours and hang huge banners in the streets flaunting its symbol - two crossed swords over the Koran - is a sea change. Previous campaigns were hurried affairs of rushing around whispering "Islam is the Solution" in cafes for at most 20 minutes lest the police arrive.

This time, some of Mr. Saleh's attack lines bring guffaws from the faithful. He vows that before Muslim Brotherhood members sit in Parliament, seats formerly occupied by the governing party will be scrubbed seven times, once with sand. The listeners know this is the religious formula for purifying objects fouled by exposure to something ritually unclean, like dogs.

The Government Candidate

A rally by Mr. Saleh's governing party rival, Khalid Abu Ismael, a millionaire food exporter, seemed pallid after the revival meeting atmosphere of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some in the audience said they were government employees ordered to attend.

Mr. Abu Ismael is typical of the wealthy businessmen that Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and potential heir, has gathered into a 140-member policy council for the governing party.

The basic thrust of much of its reform program is harnessing the private sector to modernize Egypt, with the governing party running slick television campaign advertisements showing beaming Egyptians cavorting along well-scrubbed streets perhaps found in Sweden.

"We can't say anything has actually changed, but I feel like they are starting to," Mr. Abu Ismael said in an interview over chocolate cake in the neatly pruned back garden of his splendid mansion.

The genial mogul said he had received some 7,000 job requests while campaigning and had managed to place 650 people. He expressed shock at the living conditions in some of the poorer reaches of the district. He wanted to run in a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold because he resented its attitude. "I don't like their slogan 'Islam Is the Solution,' as if they are the only Muslims in this country," he said.

He and many others are convinced that if the government really tackled social ills, much of the Brotherhood's support would evaporate. The most vocal complaints from voters condemn their abysmal surroundings despite years of governing party promises to fix unpaved streets, overflowing sewage systems, undrinkable water, utter lack of garbage collection and the like.

Mr. Saleh and most Brotherhood members are often the very community members who found neighborhood collectives to treat nagging ills, indeed the only political group active on the streets.

In his neighborhood, for example, he helped establish a local health insurance system by which poorer families paid half their medical costs, with richer benefactors underwriting the difference. During Ramadan, his charitable organization distributes free food.

"Everything they do is very well organized," said Tahani Abdul Raouf, a homemaker with five children who attended the women's rally. "Anything we ask for, we get. They are very respectable people, very efficient people."

Not all fervent believers support the Brotherhood, of course. Some view democracy as a Western innovation and therefore a sin. It is the younger generation in the Brotherhood - more engaged and open-minded - who have plunged into the political process. The Brotherhood, the only significant opposition in the elections, limited itself to fielding about 150 candidates to avoid an overwhelming victory that might prompt a harsh crackdown, repeating the horrifying Algerian experience in the 1990's. There, the Islamists gained power through elections, which the government promptly annulled, setting off a civil war.

Essam el-Erian, a key strategist, thinks 75 percent of the Brotherhood's votes were from staunch supporters while the rest were protest votes against the governing party. Other analysts argue the reverse is true, but exact numbers are elusive.

In a typical interview after one of Mr. Saleh's rallies, an English-speaking engineer said he was voting for the Brotherhood as the best hope for change. Though he supports its conservative social agenda, Ashraf Omar, 40, said he feared replacing a secular dictatorship with a religious one.

"We want a system in the future where all the people can state their opinion, where they can change the government when they want to," Mr. Omar said.

The Future of Democracy

Opponents question just how committed the Brotherhood is to democracy given the civil rights disasters wrought by Islamic governments in Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan under the Taliban.

At least in the short run, both opponents and supporters of the Brotherhood expect that the election results are probably healthy for political life. The People's Assembly has been a sleepy place, with members rarely showing up, and the secular parties with their aging leaders and ideas captured fewer than a dozen seats.

If the political process is more vibrant, more people will vote, which conversely might diminish the weight of the Brotherhood, analysts believe. Other parties might also emerge to erode the Brotherhood's appeal as the sole opposition force.

"We have not been able to face this dilemma for so many years," said Muhammad Kamal, a key political strategist in the governing party and a political science professor at Cairo University. "Now we have to confront it, it's in our faces. You cannot have a true democracy in Egypt without reaching some kind of accommodation between religion and politics."

Some experts believe that it is the Brotherhood that will be forced to adapt, not Egypt. Gamal al-Banna, 85 and the youngest brother of the movement's founder, has long harbored doubts that Islam in the era of Prophet Muhammad provides a viable model for a modern government.

"Their spirit is not the spirit of the age, they want to live as the prophet lived," Mr. Banna said. "The real test of the Brotherhood is to let it enter politics. They will be in a different situation when they confront the necessities of ruling, and there are only two possible outcomes. They will have to compromise or fail."

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt When stumping through the port city of Alexandria, whose crumbling mansions and rickety tram lines evoke long-faded glory, Sobhe Saleh of the Muslim Brotherhood vowed he had a different vision for Egypt's future.

"If Islam were applied, no one would be hungry," he roared recently to a crowd of fully veiled women ululating with joy. "Islam is a religion of construction. Islam is a religion of investment. Islam is a religion of development."

Religion, in fact, should profoundly alter both Egypt's domestic and foreign policy, said Mr. Saleh, a 52-year-old lawyer with a clipped helmet of steel-gray hair.

"If Islam were applied, the television would not show us prostitution and people lacking all decency!" he declared. "If Islam were applied, Iraq could not have been invaded, Israel could not occupy Jerusalem, and aggression could not have been used to humiliate Muslims everywhere!"

A long-expected day of reckoning is at hand in Egyptian politics now that the Brotherhood, an illegal organization with a violent past, is entering the corridors of power for the first time in significant numbers.

The outcome of the freest election in more than 50 years could determine whether political Islam will turn Egypt into a repressive, anti-American theocracy or if Islamic parties across the Arab world will themselves be transformed by participating in mainstream politics.

No sudden earthquake is expected. But initial results from the final round of voting on Wednesday showed that the Brotherhood had gained at least 11 more seats to bring its total to 87, with two races still being counted, according to a spokesman. That is five times the 17 seats the group won in 2000.

Already, those inroads have been greeted by conflict. At least eight people were killed in violence around polling places, according to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, including two felled by rubber bullets fired by the police.

As it did in the second round of voting, the Brotherhood accused the government of fomenting the violence and blocking access to the polling places to limit the ability of its supporters to vote. The government said opposition forces instigated riots.

"Reports reveal a systematic and planned campaign to prevent opposition voters from going to the polls," the Independent Committee on Election Monitoring said.

The violence is a measure of the jitteriness accompanying even the relatively modest gains the Brotherhood had made. While capturing roughly one-fifth of Parliament's 444 seats, the group does not control enough to enact laws or even override the governing National Democratic Party.

Its well-organized campaign, built around the vague slogan "Islam Is the Solution," did little to illuminate what it will do as the opposition.

The open question is whether political influence could transform the Brotherhood into a moderate political party, like the governing Justice and Development Party in Turkey, rather than an organization that uses Parliament as a platform to proselytize.

Its newfound role might also help answer the question whether Islamic parties are interested in democracy only as one person, one vote, one time.

"For the first time, they are not merely expected to be troublemakers but to gain the trust of their voters," said Mohamed Salah, the Cairo bureau chief for the London-based newspaper Al Hayat and an expert on Islamic movements. "If this time people voted for the Brothers to punish the N.D.P., they won't next time. So the Brothers face a difficult test."

Until now, religion has occupied an awkward twilight area in Egypt's mummified political life, grudgingly accepted but technically banned. Prohibited in 1954 after members carried out a string of violent attacks, the Muslim Brotherhood runs its candidates as independents, with scores of campaign workers jailed.

Deep apathy among the 70 million people of Egypt - by far the largest Arab country - meant turnout in this election officially averaged 34 percent, but many election analysts have put it at 25 percent or lower.

Parliament has neither budget oversight nor the power to remove ministers, serving mostly as a rubber stamp for presidential initiatives. But the Muslim Brotherhood vows to use the People's Assembly to lead the charge for reform, pushing for expanded civil liberties, albeit with a religious tint.

Since Hassan el-Banna, an elementary school teacher of Arabic, founded the Society of Muslim Brothers in 1928, the group has insisted that a state ruled by strict application of the Islamic law, or Shariah, and God's punishments will arrive by gradualism rather than by force.

The Government's Bogeyman

President Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian government has habitually warned critics at home and abroad that his 24-year rule remains the sole bulwark against the tide of radical Islam.

Some analysts argue that the government's strategy was to let the Brotherhood win just enough seats to force critics both here and in Washington to confront the fact that the choice comes down to the governing party or the abyss.

"The Brothers are the government's bogeyman," said Ibrahim Issa, the editor of the weekly Al Dustour. "It's like you say to misbehaving children, 'The Brothers will get you, the Brothers will get you.' The government does it, so we accept political despotism."

Indeed, the Brotherhood's dismayed opponents - among them governing party officials, Egypt's 10 percent Coptic minority and most intellectuals - are warning that doom lies ahead.

"The Mullahs Are Coming!" screamed one headline in the government-controlled newspaper Al Gomhouriya, using the title reserved for Iran's tyrannical clergy.

Talk show guests on state television have outdone themselves coming up with synonyms for shifty and sinister, while the latest nationally broadcast Friday Prayer sermon sponsored by the government blasted anyone mixing religion with politics.

Adel Hamouda, the editor of the new independent daily Al Fagr, positively frothed at the very idea of a Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc.

"They once relied upon secrecy, underground organizations and a militia until they decided to ride the wave of democracy to reach power," he wrote in a denunciation illustrated with a doctored picture of the Brotherhood's leader wearing a Nazi uniform. "Once they do, they will adopt dictatorship, fascism, Nazism; they will say that they are God's deputies, God's in-laws, God's friends, God's spokesmen, and whoever opposes them, differs with them or becomes their enemy will become the enemy of God."

A Disillusioned Nasserite

Mr. Saleh, the Alexandria lawyer who trounced his governing party opponent, dismisses such fears as groundless. In many ways, his path from childhood in a Nile delta village to parliamentary representative of one of the Mediterranean's biggest cities reflects the modern trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sent to Alexandria for high school, he was 13 when the Arabs lost the 1967 war against Israel, and he joined the mobs coursing through the streets to reject President Gamal Abdel Nasser's offer to step down.

The adolescent Mr. Saleh worshiped Nasser, memorizing lines from his famous speeches, which had given Arabs their first sense of pride in a postcolonial world. Indeed, Mr. Saleh's speeches echo Nasser's defiant tone.

"Leave peacefully with your own will, before you are forced to leave - go and never come back!" Mr. Saleh told the governing party in one speech, using virtually the same lines that Nasser hurled at Western colonial powers.

In 1971, a year after Nasser died, Mr. Saleh read "The Return of Consciousness" by the renowned writer Tawfik al-Hakim, which depicted the leader as a sorcerer who created a grand illusion. The most lasting shock for Mr. Saleh was the lie about Arab might.

"I thought we would never kneel, but I woke up to a bitter truth, that Israel occupied one-fifth of our land, that Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem was lost," Mr. Saleh said. "I felt like all my dignity was gone; I was miserable; I felt pain, rejection, bitterness. I was confused, shocked, reeling, looking for a solution and for something other than Abdel Nasser."

He recalled a night in 1965 when five village neighbors were arrested in a national sweep against thousands of suspected Muslim Brotherhood members. Mr. Saleh, by now in university, read their trial transcripts and heard their tales of degrading torture. He knew the arrested men as devout, sincere and hard-working.

At that point, he joined the Brotherhood, deciding that only an Islamic renaissance could rescue the Arabs from their plight.

One key reason the Muslim Brotherhood has endured is that its message combining spiritual salvation with an Islamic political renaissance captures the middle-class mood - particularly among conservative professionals like doctors, engineers and lawyers.

Mr. Banna, the movement's founder, believed that social ills could be cured by a return to the basic tenets of Sunni Islam, and that Muslims would always face enemies trying to thwart their revival.

The continued repression of the Brotherhood in Egypt, not to mention many of the 30 to 40 other Muslim Brotherhood organizations worldwide, has only added to their mystique. Syria mandates the death penalty for membership, while legal parties in other Arab countries, like Morocco and Jordan, are constantly harassed and highly popular.

The Muslim Brotherhood is often seen in two ways - as the fusty great uncle of Islamic politics, content to bide his time, or as the womb of all subsequent Islamic terror movements. Both views are true.

Mr. Banna organized a paramilitary Special Apparatus, ostensibly to train volunteers to fight in Palestine. Many did, but members also plotted a series of political assassinations.

Government gunmen killed Mr. Banna in 1949, just as the organization reached its peak, with 500,000 members. A failed attempt to assassinate Nasser in 1954 led to the Brotherhood's being banned, with up to 20,000 members languishing in jail for two decades.

Among them was Sayyid Qutb, who wrote a radical treatise from death row arguing for armed revolt. Subsequent groups, notably Al Qaeda, base their doctrine partly on his writings.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician and Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, volunteered in a Muslim Brotherhood clinic before founding Islamic Jihad, whose violence included assassinating President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981.

Shying Away From Violence

The Muslim Brotherhood calls all these links tenuous at best.

"The presence of these violent groups outside the Muslim Brotherhood proves that there is no place for those who support violence inside," Mr. Saleh, said in an interview in the Brotherhood's cramped Alexandria office.

If the group retains a shadowy aura, its leaders say, it is because decades of persecution have made it wary. Mr. Saleh has been imprisoned twice, including six months in 2003 after leading demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq.

This election underscores the risk of groups hostile to American policy emerging through reforms. The group's leader, Muhammad Mehdi Akef, 78, accuses the United States and its allies of carrying out brutal attacks on Iraqi civilians and mosques to sully the image of the resistance.

"Such dirty work is done by the Americans, the honorable resistance has a noble purpose so its means are always noble," Mr. Akef, known as the general guide, said in an interview.

Mr. Saleh, asked in an interview about what the Brotherhood would do in Parliament, echoes the national platform with its typically populist positions that derive their support from religious sentiment.

He calls Israel "an aggressor nation" and says Egypt should shun it, if not sever the peace treaty. He opposes any American aid that comes with strings attached.

On tourism, he wants foreign visitors segregated so the faithful can feel comfortable in areas that require modest clothing and a ban on alcohol.

Mr. Saleh also advocates enforcing public morality through a modified version of Saudi Arabia's religious police. Anyone who curses religion on the streets and any spouses caught kissing would be arrested.

"In Islam, a man doesn't have the right to kiss his wife in public, unless he was away and just returned, so the law needn't be applied in the airports or train stations," said Mr. Saleh, a father of four and grandfather of two.

Turning Egypt into an Islamic state is an interim goal along the way to recreating the Islamic empire, or caliphate, of 1,000 years ago, with the modern version mirroring something like the European Union.

The mere fact that the Brotherhood could hold rallies for hours and hang huge banners in the streets flaunting its symbol - two crossed swords over the Koran - is a sea change. Previous campaigns were hurried affairs of rushing around whispering "Islam is the Solution" in cafes for at most 20 minutes lest the police arrive.

This time, some of Mr. Saleh's attack lines bring guffaws from the faithful. He vows that before Muslim Brotherhood members sit in Parliament, seats formerly occupied by the governing party will be scrubbed seven times, once with sand. The listeners know this is the religious formula for purifying objects fouled by exposure to something ritually unclean, like dogs.

The Government Candidate

A rally by Mr. Saleh's governing party rival, Khalid Abu Ismael, a millionaire food exporter, seemed pallid after the revival meeting atmosphere of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some in the audience said they were government employees ordered to attend.

Mr. Abu Ismael is typical of the wealthy businessmen that Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and potential heir, has gathered into a 140-member policy council for the governing party.

The basic thrust of much of its reform program is harnessing the private sector to modernize Egypt, with the governing party running slick television campaign advertisements showing beaming Egyptians cavorting along well-scrubbed streets perhaps found in Sweden.

"We can't say anything has actually changed, but I feel like they are starting to," Mr. Abu Ismael said in an interview over chocolate cake in the neatly pruned back garden of his splendid mansion.

The genial mogul said he had received some 7,000 job requests while campaigning and had managed to place 650 people. He expressed shock at the living conditions in some of the poorer reaches of the district. He wanted to run in a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold because he resented its attitude. "I don't like their slogan 'Islam Is the Solution,' as if they are the only Muslims in this country," he said.

He and many others are convinced that if the government really tackled social ills, much of the Brotherhood's support would evaporate. The most vocal complaints from voters condemn their abysmal surroundings despite years of governing party promises to fix unpaved streets, overflowing sewage systems, undrinkable water, utter lack of garbage collection and the like.

Mr. Saleh and most Brotherhood members are often the very community members who found neighborhood collectives to treat nagging ills, indeed the only political group active on the streets.

In his neighborhood, for example, he helped establish a local health insurance system by which poorer families paid half their medical costs, with richer benefactors underwriting the difference. During Ramadan, his charitable organization distributes free food.

"Everything they do is very well organized," said Tahani Abdul Raouf, a homemaker with five children who attended the women's rally. "Anything we ask for, we get. They are very respectable people, very efficient people."

Not all fervent believers support the Brotherhood, of course. Some view democracy as a Western innovation and therefore a sin. It is the younger generation in the Brotherhood - more engaged and open-minded - who have plunged into the political process. The Brotherhood, the only significant opposition in the elections, limited itself to fielding about 150 candidates to avoid an overwhelming victory that might prompt a harsh crackdown, repeating the horrifying Algerian experience in the 1990's. There, the Islamists gained power through elections, which the government promptly annulled, setting off a civil war.

Essam el-Erian, a key strategist, thinks 75 percent of the Brotherhood's votes were from staunch supporters while the rest were protest votes against the governing party. Other analysts argue the reverse is true, but exact numbers are elusive.

In a typical interview after one of Mr. Saleh's rallies, an English-speaking engineer said he was voting for the Brotherhood as the best hope for change. Though he supports its conservative social agenda, Ashraf Omar, 40, said he feared replacing a secular dictatorship with a religious one.

"We want a system in the future where all the people can state their opinion, where they can change the government when they want to," Mr. Omar said.

The Future of Democracy

Opponents question just how committed the Brotherhood is to democracy given the civil rights disasters wrought by Islamic governments in Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan under the Taliban.

At least in the short run, both opponents and supporters of the Brotherhood expect that the election results are probably healthy for political life. The People's Assembly has been a sleepy place, with members rarely showing up, and the secular parties with their aging leaders and ideas captured fewer than a dozen seats.

If the political process is more vibrant, more people will vote, which conversely might diminish the weight of the Brotherhood, analysts believe. Other parties might also emerge to erode the Brotherhood's appeal as the sole opposition force.

"We have not been able to face this dilemma for so many years," said Muhammad Kamal, a key political strategist in the governing party and a political science professor at Cairo University. "Now we have to confront it, it's in our faces. You cannot have a true democracy in Egypt without reaching some kind of accommodation between religion and politics."

Some experts believe that it is the Brotherhood that will be forced to adapt, not Egypt. Gamal al-Banna, 85 and the youngest brother of the movement's founder, has long harbored doubts that Islam in the era of Prophet Muhammad provides a viable model for a modern government.

"Their spirit is not the spirit of the age, they want to live as the prophet lived," Mr. Banna said. "The real test of the Brotherhood is to let it enter politics. They will be in a different situation when they confront the necessities of ruling, and there are only two possible outcomes. They will have to compromise or fail."
 
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:sl:

The King delivered the remarks at the opening of the third extraordinary summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Makkah, Saudi Arabia.

“Let us bid farewell to the age of division and disintegration in order to usher in a new era of unity and dignity,” King Abdullah said. “I look forward to a united Muslim ummah [community] and good governance that eliminate injustice and oppression for the sake of the comprehensive Muslim development that eradicates destitution and poverty.”

The King denounced extremism and stressed that unity must be achieved through tolerance, not bloodshed.

“How painful that the ideology sprouted forth by criminal minds has unleashed wanton evil and corruption on earth,” he said. “Islamic unity will not be achieved by bloodletting as the miscreants – in their misguided waywardness – insist on claiming. Fanaticism and extremism cannot grow on an earth whose soil is embedded in the spirit of tolerance, moderation, and balance.”

The two-day summit was convened in response to a call by King Abdullah. Its goals include strengthening Islamic unity to fight common challenges, developing a plan for reforming the OIC, and addressing the issues of disaster relief, poverty and disease
 
metsudaistwice said:
salam
jazakallah for that sis, i read the last one but not the one above that becasue it is too long and the colour makes my eyes go funny
wasalam
Click to expand...

:sl:
Oh okay. Ill change the colour then. Others may want to read it and may feel the colour puts them off. JazakAllah for pointing that out brother.

Allah ma3ak

:sl:

Colour has been changed.

Allah ma3akum
 
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Ameera I admit I heard a lot of bad things concerning Saudi Arabia.You know there are threats to Saudi kingdom,western military agression.The last thing I want is a secular country in Arabia.

now I just wanted to know how true such allegations are and I just asked you.

thanks.
 
Abrar said:
Ameera I admit I heard a lot of bad things concerning Saudi Arabia.You know there are threats to Saudi kingdom,western military agression.The last thing I want is a secular country in Arabia.

now I just wanted to know how true such allegations are and I just asked you.

thanks.
Click to expand...


:sl:
Firstly. the name is Ameeratul layl

Secondly, I dont understand your question.

Thirdly, this is a news thread....not debate thread. THEREFORE, make a thread of your own about ur little query, and Ill try to answer it.inshAllah.

Allah ma3ak
 
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:sl:

Iraq has a future, but cost is great




SADDAM Hussein and his secular, socialist-minded Baath Party shared Iraq's oil wealth with his people more generously than, say, Saudi Arabia. He built roads and schools and brought in electricity. Iraq had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world. He spent generously to help agriculture and public health. He contained the clerical power, and he promoted literature and art. He also provided citizens with subsidized homes and cheap energy. Gasoline was plentiful and cheaper than water.
Women participated in society almost on an equal level with men.

Since the Shiites form a large majority, it is their religious commitments that are now bound to dominate. For Shiites, religion and politics seem to be inseparable. This is not good news for democracy to take root. It is not good news for women, and the chances are slim that Iraq will remain a secular society.

Baghdad was known for centuries as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Baghdad was the center of an ancient Muslim civilization, famous for its architecture, arts and culture. It was known as the "City of Peace," a city of parks, gardens, mosques and marble palaces.

Baghdad has lived through years of bombing and sanctions. Today Baghdad is in decay and one of the most dangerous cities to live in. The city has been turned into a war zone, marked by burned-out buildings and barbed wire. Daily explosions can be heard while U.S. tanks are roaming the streets.

Many small cities met the same fate and were left devastated. They smell of sewage and corpses. There is no water and no electricity. Mangled cars give testimony to what were once cities throbbing with life.

Today there is little electricity, water, or gasoline. There are daily power failures, and there are long lines waiting to fill up while the richest oil fields are just down the street.

In 1991, during the years of United Nations-imposed sanctions, Saddam Hussein introduced free food rations that went to the rich and poor alike. There were monthly food rations of sugar, beans, rice, cooking oil, flour, powdered milk and tea. More than half of Iraqis live below the poverty line and depended on these monthly food baskets for sheer survival. One of the many edicts Paul Bremer, U.S. Envoy to Iraq, left behind was to stop these subsidized monthly food rations. Today hunger and the threat of starvation is part of Iraqis' daily life.

To be an Iraqi policeman is the most dangerous job today, but with a 65 percent unemployment rate and large families to feed, they have no choice but to volunteer for the Iraqi police force, even if it may cost them their lives. In spite of repeated attacks and carnage at recruitment centers, new volunteers continue to line up.

Although Saddam Hussein was responsible for his share of massacres, they were carried out against those who posed a danger to his power. He was predictable. Most average Iraqis who remained politically uninvolved lived a comparably decent life.

What makes today's situation so nerve-racking is that insurgents can strike, maim and kill anytime and anywhere. Violence has become part of daily life. Nobody is safe, not even children crowding around soldiers who are handing out candy. The government can't provide security, not even for themselves, as insurgents target and assassinate their members.

The devastating casualties of the Iraqi people (whom we are supposedly liberating) are not part of the news. Only an occasional poignant picture showing blood-drenched bandages hanging from mangled bodies, and women and men crying out in grief at the loss of a family member bear testimony to their trauma. These pictures make a mockery of the claim that the Iraqi people are better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone. American troops are now faced with the unnerving truth that their very presence motivates the insurgents they seek to crush.

Yes, Iraq has a future, but the human cost of this war that the Iraqis did not ask for will be great. Life will go on, the suffering will go on, the dying will go on. But sometime in the future this nightmare will be increasingly more remote, and eventually the war in Iraq will take its place in history books as one of the many human tragedies.

Hannah Naiditch is a freelance

writer living in Altadena.
 
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Analysis: Saudi king seeking leading role in Arab worldBy Claude Salhani
UPI International Editor
Published December 8, 2005


JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Saudi Arabia's new king, Abdullah, is vying for a leading role in the Arab world, hoping to steer Arabs and Muslims out of troubled waters, away from terrorism and to eradicate misconceptions within Islam.

"The recent manifestation of extremism, violence and terrorism that are plaguing Muslims and non-Muslims alike has alarmed Saudi Arabia and made it clear that an endemic problem currently exists in the Islamic world," said the king in a "highly confidential" policy document made available to United Press International.


The document was drawn up as leaders of the Islamic world, responding to an invitation from Abdullah, convened in Mecca Dec. 7 and 8 for an extraordinary summit within the framework of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

"King Abdullah realizes that at no other time in history has the Islamic world been so leaderless," Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security adviser told UPI.

Abdullah recognizes Saudi Arabia's "great responsibility of moral leadership" in the Arab and Islamic world, and as such, hopes to assume a leading role in guiding the Muslim world through the multitude of problems it is facing today, said Obaid.

The Saudi king believes "a vast majority of Muslim countries today face political, economic and social underdevelopment that has evolved into a major crisis." The king is concerned by the "diminishing position of Muslims in the international arena." He made reference to the incapacity of Arabs and Muslims to prevent the invasion of Iraq war and their inability to influence peace in the aftermath of the invasion.

As king, Abdullah realizes he has the tools and the power to take over the leadership of the Arab and the Islamic world. Some of these tools come in the form of dollars earned from the rising price of oil. As the world's largest oil-producing nation, the kingdom has no shortfall of hard cash to distribute around and buy itself influence and friends, and quite possibly a seat at the head of the table.

Pakistan, for example, just saw its financial aid package from Saudi Arabia rise from $550 million to a whopping billion-dollar plus.

Calling for unity among Muslims, Abdullah lashed out at al-Qaida terrorists for "unleashing evil and corruption on earth and urged Islamic leaders meeting in Mecca to fight terrorism jointly."

In his address to the leaders of the OIC, Abdullah asked Muslim countries to open a new era of strength and unity by setting aside differences. He urged Islamic leaders to work together to bring about an end to extremism. Instead, the king asked that Muslim leaders work together to project the "beauty of Islamic tolerance."

Abdullah told his fellow Muslim leaders, most of who were in attendance, to stop "sitting as helpless observers" but to join the fight against international terrorism.

Saudi Arabia has in the past been the target of homegrown terrorism. Islamist groups said to be affiliated with Osama bin Laden, a former Saudi citizen, have carried out a wave of terror bombings, kidnappings and attacks against security forces and civilians in the kingdom. But decisive -- though initially delayed -- action by Saudi authorities has practically eradicated the dissident revolt. December will mark one year without any terrorist attack in the kingdom.

One Saudi intelligence analyst described the current status of al-Qaida in the kingdom as "destroyed but not exterminated."

In his quest for regional leadership, Abdullah, according to an adviser, will give "top priority to solving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute." Commenting on the coming elections in Israel, the Saudi king said of Israel's Labor candidate Amir Peretz, "We think he is a man of peace." A highly unusual statement from a member of the Saudi royal family regarding an Israeli politician.

The Saudi king has recognized the fact the Israeli-Palestinian dispute remains at the center of much of the Arab world's anger and that groups such as al-Qaida use the Palestinian issue as a recruiting poster.

Obaid told UPI the king will make "huge investments in the Palestinian areas in order to beef up the economy and to create jobs."

Would the king consider a peace treaty with Israel? "This will happen if all United Nations resolutions are met and if (occupied) territories are returned, including East Jerusalem, which would then become the capital of the future Palestinian state," said Obaid.

"If all conditions of the Abdullah peace initiative are met, Saudi Arabia will recognize Israel," Obaid said during a private discussion in Jeddah.

While still crown prince, Abdullah had put forward an initiative at the Beirut Arab summit in 2002 that became known as the Abdullah peace initiative.

"The king," went on Obaid, "wants to see a viable Palestinian state and he will use all his influence to achieve it." The Saudi security adviser said the king is ready to place Saudi Arabia's financial and international clout, as well as it influence with the United States to help the Palestinian territories climb out of their misery.

Noticeably absent from the summit were two Arab powerhouses -- Egypt and Syria -- who in the past have fought Saudi Arabia for leadership of the Arab world. But urgent domestic problems kept both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad at home.

Mubarak is faced with severe violence that marred a week of voting in his country, while Assad, preoccupied by the ongoing U.N. investigation into the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, feels it would be unwise to leave Damascus at this time.

At 85, Abdullah will certainly have his work cut out for him. He comes, however, with a great advantage over many of his peers. He is reputed to be extremely honest and incorruptible. "He does not own any villas in Marbella," said Obaid.
 
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Spiritual leader of Chechnya's Arab fighters killed

PARIS (AFP) - A Saudi man who is the purported spiritual leader of Arab fighters in Russia's rebel republic of Chechnya has been killed in fighting, an Internet statement said.

"Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdullah bin Saif al-Jaber al-Buaynayn al-Tamimi, also known as Abu Omar al-Saif, the spiritual guide of the mujahedeen (holy fighters) in Chechnya, was martyred during a fight with the Russians, the enemies of God," said the statement, whose authenticity could not be independently verified.

Other Islamists' sites reported the death of Saif's wife in the same fight.

Meanwhile, another statement posted Saturday on the Internet said that Jaber al-Taifi, deputy of the mujahedeen's emir, the Jordanian Abu Hafs al-Ourdoni, was also killed.

Sheikh Omar, described as the "judicial chief in the Shura (consultative) council" of the mujahedeen, left Saudi Arabia 10 years ago to fight in Chechnya, it said.

The native of Qassim province, north of Riyadh, had issued numerous fatwas (religious edicts) calling for jihad (holy war) and is the author of several video and audio messages including on the war in Iraq.

In April 2004, another Saudi Abdul Aziz al-Ghamdi, also known as Abu Walid, who was considered by Russian intelligence as the chief of Arab fighters, was killed in Chechnya.

Ghamdi succeeded Arab warlord "Khattab," who was also Saudi-born, after he was killed two years ago.

Saudi Arabia's hardline Wahhabite brand of Islam has a strong following among Chechen rebels fighting Russian authority in the Caucasus republic since 1994.
 
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UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: Red Crescent continues work in Iraq under difficult circumstances
ABU DHABI, 11 December (IRIN) - At a time when very few aid agencies are able to operate within Iraq, the United Arab Emirates' Red Crescent Association (RC) says the risks are high but that they will continue to assist the needy with a small team of workers inside the country.

"The situation is extremely dangerous and it is a challenge, but we are able to operate due to the trust and reputation we have managed to build for ourselves there," UAE Red Crescent Secretary General, Sana'a Darwish Al-Kitby, told IRIN from its Abu Dhabi headquarters.

As well as delivery of much needed relief items from the UAE, an office has also been established in Baghdad, with some four staff members supported by the UAE embassy in the Iraqi capital.

"We are assisting in all parts of the country when requested by the government. We do not discriminate against the different ethnic groups, we will assist anyone in need," she stressed.

Al-Kitby herself visited Iraq once in October 2003 and described the situation as very demanding. "The purpose of my visit was to get first hand knowledge of the humanitarian situation in Iraq and to visit the ongoing UAE Red Crescent operations in the country."

"The UAE Red Crescent needs to continue its cooperation with the Iraqi people," the dynamic secretary general added.

So far, some US $35 million has been spent on Iraq since the RC entered to assist prior to the April 2003 war.

Supplies such as medicine, vaccines, blankets, tents and food items such as dates, rice and sugar, as well as first aid kits have been delivered. In addition, generators for hospitals and water treatment plants across the country have also been provided.

Al-Kitby pointed out that the association was now assisting in more than 100 countries world-wide, with an annual budget of 10 million AED (US $ 2.7 million).

Some 70 injured Iraqis have been brought into the UAE for urgent medical treatment since the 2003 war started due to the lack of skilled doctors and medical facilities in Iraq. Another 300 Iraqis in the UAE have been assisted with shelter and voluntary repatriation to their homeland.

"We coordinated with the ICRC and made sure that we were in Iraq in time for the crisis. This was important to us as they [Iraq] are also a neighbour of ours," she added.

Speaking about ongoing collaboration with other aid agencies, she said: "The UAE Red Crescent is still exploring other means and partners to work with, to be able to deliver its humanitarian mandate not only in Iraq, but all over the world without regard to race, religion or nationality."
 

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