Along the road to Huzaifa’s home in the Misr Gadidah quarter, the streets are filled with anti- Brotherhood sentiment. Banners bearing slogans criminalizing the Brotherhood and its supreme guide are hanging side by side with store signs. The air is thick with anger despite the continuous celebratory atmosphere several months after the ouster of Morsi.
“Allah is everywhere not only in the Brotherhood,” says Huzaifa, a thirty-year-old engineer with a trimmed beard and friendly smile. He has been a Brotherhood member for 11 years.
Along the road to Huzaifa’s home in the Misr Gadidah quarter, the streets are filled with anti- Brotherhood sentiment. Banners bearing slogans criminalizing the Brotherhood and its supreme guide are hanging side by side with store signs. The air is thick with anger despite the continuous celebratory atmosphere several months after the ouster of Morsi.
“Allah is everywhere not only in the Brotherhood,” says Huzaifa, a thirty-year-old engineer with a trimmed beard and friendly smile. He has been a Brotherhood member for 11 years.
Huzaifa entered the faculty of engineering in 2000, after joining the Brotherhood. His father has been working in Saudi Arabia since the late 1970s and his mother is a teacher at Ain Shams University— neither of them is affiliated to the Brotherhood.
“I have the advantage of not coming from a pro-Brotherhood family or from an Islamist background,” says Huzaifa. “My traditional Muslim name has been giving people a certain impression since my early school days. My father named me after an Iraqi he met while he was a student because he liked the name. Ever since, people never stopped speculating about my affiliation with the Islamist movement. I remember that on my first day in the seventh grade, the Arabic teacher asked me: ‘Is any of your family members a terrorist?’ The whole class laughed and I replied ‘No.’ When I returned home I started thinking about the whole terrorism issue and it was in those days that I started buying cassettes of preachers Omar Abdulkafi and Wagdi Ghnaim from a bearded vender. I began to perform prayers in the mosque near my home regularly from the seventh grade up to the 11th grade. A nice guy then came to me and said: ‘I admire your religious dedication and commitment, but you often miss the dawn prayer.’ I joined the Brotherhood soon after that conversation.”
Huzaifa says his affiliation caused him trouble but he did not leave the Brotherhood until much later, when he was ordered to vote for Mohamed Morsi.
“I had been seeing sins – not just errors – committed all the time, but I and other fellows had had hopes for reforms and had been aware of the problems inside the Brotherhood. We believed that the Islamic project would only be achieved through the Brotherhood. But how on earth could it be achieved through Morsi? We used to laugh at him; he is stupid. And all year long, I was torn between my desire to leave the Brotherhood and my aspiration to stay and carry out reforms. At the time, however, the situation seemed hopeless,” remembers Huzaifa.
Evolving identity
Young Brotherhood members have always been in the line of fire because they constitute the façade of this group and they are the main factor behind its strength and ego. Since its early days, the Brotherhood has always attempted to mold young members and integrate them into the collective Islamic conscience according to Hassan al-Banna’s own vision. Presenting itself as a victim of oppression and an anti-government movement, the Brotherhood managed to attract many angry young people who needed an organization to help them confront authority.
After seizing power, however, the Brotherhood’s traditional discourse was changed completely and replaced with an ideological supreme one. This prompted many members to ask more intense questions and cast doubts about the religious establishment itself not only that of the Brotherhood’s.
Unfit for the Brotherhood
Mohammed, a troublemaker photographer and an adventurous reporter, shocked everyone when he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Although he comes from a pro-Brotherhood family, his temperament and behavior are far away from the Brotherhood’s mechanisms designed to mold members according to Hassan al-Banna’s philosophies.
“Coming from a Brotherhood home naturally influenced my decision, but I had the ambition of belonging to a powerful political movement and the Brotherhood was the bridge to that dream, or so I thought,” explains Mohammed.
He left the Brotherhood practically in 2007 and officially in 2011. “I had to resign officially and let all people know that in order to prevent anyone from claiming that I am still with the Brotherhood,” says Mohammed. “I have not been at any meeting since 2007 except for taking photographs as part of my job. The Brotherhood places every member under its guardianship in every personal detail and for me this is too much, not to mention their political decay.”
A bombshell
In March 2011 – one month after Mubarak stepped down – Osama Durra, a young Brotherhood leading member posted his resignation on his Facebook page: “It is a hard decision to cut my ties with the Brotherhood. I am a son of the Islamic movement, but in order to observe my principles, preserve my self-respect and respect my readers I have decided to abandon this group and reject its dictates, decisions and approach.”
The Brotherhood was shocked by the resignation of Osama and then of 8,000 young members while it was still in power. But the real bombshell Osama dropped was a few months later when he bravely posted the following message on his Facebook account and blog: “I have decided to abandon Islam in my life because the cognitive contradiction between some of its specifics and what I consider to be rationality, justice and logic has reached for me an unbearable level. The Arab Spring has shaken our confidence in the convictions we held before it and it has become clear that the basic assumptions governing our life have turned to be somewhat unsound.”
Like Osama, many other former members are now criticizing the Brotherhood cognitively, historically and culturally.
