CAIRO — With the unprecedented arrests of the top and mid-levels of the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive organization through which Mohammed Morsi ascended to the presidency before he was ousted this summer, the group’s younger members are forming splinter groups that they promise will revive the embattled organization.
With scores of such spinoff groups emerging, it portends Egypt confronting multiple smaller Islamist groups instead of what was once the most powerful organization here. The youths said the new groups would allow them to rebrand the Muslim Brotherhood from its more militant approach.
Many of those forming the new groups were in Rabaa on Aug. 14 as part of a sit-in protesting Morsi’s ouster, when at least 634 people — estimates run as high as 1,100 — were killed in clashes with security forces, marking one of the deadliest days in Egypt’s history. Many youths had met during the six-week sit-in that led up to the attack and began communicating after the government broke them up. The youths said that salvaging the Islamist message was as much about avenging the deaths of friends as it was about saving Egypt from a return to military dictatorship.
Using social websites such as Facebook, the Brotherhood’s younger members are creating groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood without Violence and Youth Against the Coup to galvanize protests and rebrand the group in the face of its arrested leadership.
They said they weren’t the Brotherhood that had defined the Morsi presidency. Whereas Morsi was divisive and sought to carry out the group’s vision of an Islamic Egypt while working with the military, the youth said they were inclusive and that they rejected working with the armed forces.
Among them is Gihad Khalid, 19, whose husband, an Al Jazeera journalist, was among the thousands rounded up by the security forces.
“The stupidity of the regime is that it doesn’t recognize that they are actually serving the Brotherhood, not hurting it,” Khalid wrote earlier this week on her Facebook page. Now the youth “will not only lead this period, but they also might correct the mistakes that took place and correct the past.”
By Nancy A. Youssef
(McClatchy special correspondent Amina Ismail contributed to this report from Cairo.)
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