MB leaders fear ‘intellectual revisions’: Brotherhood member

CAIRO – 11 November 2017: Senior leaders of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in prison have sought to stop the intellectual revisions that some Brotherhood members have carried out, MB member Amr Abdel Hafez said on Saturday.

Abdel Hafez told Egypt Today via a social platform that “the revisions” train has moved within the Brotherhood organization, but the senior leaders have tried to hinder it.

Abdel Hafez, who is in charge of collecting the intellectual revisions carried out by Brotherhood members inside prisons, described the revisions as a “threat” to the MB senior leaders. The situation also reveals a dispute among the Brotherhood leaders over these revisions.

“Brotherhood senior leaders believed these revisions would lead to rifts within the group’s body. They attempted to defame the revisions and slammed the members who expressed their intention to carry out intellectual revisions on the Brotherhood beliefs,” Abdel Hafez added.

He pointed out that Brotherhood prisoners at Al-Fayoum prison and its neighboring prisons have defected from the MB after various revisions, revealing that “The MB embraces three camps over the revisions. The first rejects the idea of revisions categorically. The second accepts revisions over some beliefs, but not all. The third camp, which I and my mates belong to, seeks a comprehensive revision to all the group’s beliefs.”


Pro-Muslim Brotherhood Rabaa sit-in- Ahmed Ramadan - File photo

Ibrahim Al-Zafrani, a onetime Brotherhood official who served on the group’s Shura Council, repeated the appeal that the group leaves politics.

“The Brotherhood should take a sincere decision to abandon the quest for political power and devote itself to proselytizing work. I hope to hear clear responses to this vision from the Brotherhood’s leaders. If they have alternative ideas, they should voice them clearly and publicly.”

Hundreds of young detainees have been freed after proving their intellectual revisions and showing good intentions of interacting with the Egyptian society and state.

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 they noticed were criticizing the policies of the Brotherhood leaders.

Presidential advisor for religious affairs 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 produced fruit, as there is information that hundreds of Brotherhood elements have already signed "repentance acknowledgements", where they denounced the Brotherhood. They also presented applications to the committee that was formed by the presidency last year to study files of youth prisoners. The files were an initial step for having a pardon issued, according to committee member MP Tarek al-Kholy’s statements to local media outlets.

“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 former late Guidance Bureau member Mohammad Kamal and opposing Brotherhood acting-Guide Mahmoud Ezzat did not use the usual phrases about injustice and oppression, nor the religious vocabulary the group had previously used.