On Rabaa 4th anniversary: Will Brotherhood repent their sins?

CAIRO – 12 August 2017: After the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in on August 14, 2013, disputes exploded between old and young members.

In April 2014, a new Guidance Bureau was formed. Mohamed Badie kept his position as the General Guide, despite his detention, while Mahmud Ezzat has been the acting Guide, along with keeping his position as the First Deputy of the Guide.

President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi showed mercy to the brain-washed youth affiliated to different Islamist movements, including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

On December 14, 2016, Sisi said, “I have personally followed up on all recommendations emanating from this conference and I used my constitutional powers to issue pardons for a number of detained young people as a first batch, to be followed by others. I met with the committee that was formed to examine the cases of the detainees and got an understanding of its efforts.”

Till this moment, hundreds of young detainees have been freed after proving their intellectual revisions and showing good intentions to interact with the Egyptian society and state.

The question arises about the leaders of the Brotherhood: will they reconsider their ideas?

Will they pay attention, even once in the history, to the state interests?

Will they listen to the young generations of the Brotherhood who seek reconciliation with the state?

Or will they keep insisting on caring only about their private interests and not the state interests?

Brotherhood youth dispute with leadership

Hundreds of elements of the Muslim Brotherhood group inside prisons have presented requests for pardon after they denounced the Brotherhood and signed a revision document known as ’repentance acknowledgments’, according to media reports in February.

Egyptian security authorities made a classification process of Islamists inside prisons in the middle of last year, and isolated those who took up arms and carried out terrorist operations. They also separated the organizational leaders of the Brotherhood from the elements that were noticed to criticize the policies of the Brotherhood leaders.

Presidential advisor for religious affairs Dr. Osama al-Azhari and a number of preachers also held preaching sessions with Islamists, most of whom were Brotherhood members, hoping they would revise their ideas.

These measures seemed to have born fruit, as there is information that hundreds of Brotherhood elements have already signed "repentance acknowledgements", where they denounced the Brotherhood, before making applications to the committee that was formed by the presidency last year to study files of youth prisoners, in an initial step for having a pardon issued, according to committee member MP Tarek al-Kholy’s statements to local media outlets.

“Brotherhood elements signed acknowledgements pledging to abandon the ideas of the group they denounced, and asked for pardon,” Al-Hayat revealed.

Currently, the Brotherhood is experiencing internal disputes, which reached a peak in December 2015, regarding the organization’s management and the form of revolution to be pursued against the current Egyptian authorities.

The group is led by two currents, one by Mahmoud Ezzat , acting Brotherhood Supreme Guide, and another current led by Mohammed Montasser, the group’s media spokesman, who was recently isolated and dismissed by Ezzat .

Intellectual revisions by Brotherhood

In April 2016, Egyptian authorities started easing pressures on the Brotherhood's allies by releasing key figures of the Islamic Group, the last of whom was the leader of its Construction and Development Party, Safwat Abdul Ghany, and the party's secretary-general, Alaa Abul Nasr, a few days after releasing leading member of the Islamic Labor Party Magdy Hussein.

The Islamic Group and the Labor Party were part of the Pro-Legitimacy Alliance that was formed by the Brotherhood a few days before the ouster of former President Mohammad Mosri.

Simultaneously with their release, authorities carried out a classification operation of Islamists inside prisons, as authorities boosted isolating extremist prisoners involved in armed organizations who were detained lately, especially members of the pro-ISIS Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and Ajnad Misr groups.

They also separated the Brotherhood group's senior leaders from the central leaders and cadres, who have been classified according to the danger they pose and their closeness to the hardliner Qutbist wing (in reference to supporters of Brotherhood hardliner Sayed Qutb).

“A number of the Brotherhood cadres announced repentance after expressing their opposition to the approach adopted by the Brotherhood lately and in rejection of violence,” local media reported earlier in 2016.

It was noticeable that the front that was led by former Guidance Bureau member Mohammad Kamal before his death last year and opposing Brotherhood acting-Guide Mahmoud Ezzat had not used in its statement the usual phrases about injustice and oppression or the religious vocabulary the group had previously used.

Political expert Ammar Ali Hassan told Arab media in January that “the Brotherhood group has been known throughout its history for rejecting any revision of its ideas, which the Brotherhood believes are holy and cannot be revised.”

He added, "Since the Qutbist wing is talking about intellectual revision, it added a new term to the rhetoric of the Brotherhood if its intention was true, because it would be a radical change in the Brotherhood thinking.”