Islam, huwa al hal ?

Since the establising of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, the slogan Islam,huwa al hal(Islam is the solution) has been synonymus with them. Now all of a sudden it´s dangerous, it´s mixing religion and politics - No kidding, and who reintroduced the islamists on the political arena ? President Anwar Sadat, allowed the islamists , to counter the Nasserists in the early seventies. They got 2 seats in the 1976 parlimentary elections and where able to reestablish their mouthpiece ad Daáwah.

And now they don´t want them to use their slogan ? In the past the Muslim Brotherhood has used the term ¨the Islamic trend¨ during election campaigns, in order to strike a balance between their illegal status and their de facto political entity. This year they have taken the decision to use their name openly, they are fielding 150 candidates , and in a bold move they staged a rally outside the Presidential palace in Korba.

In a Financial Times article, the other day. The Ikhwan sounded rather optimistic, Issam al Ariyyan, a leading brother, recently freed from prison stated that this was the first election campaign were the Ikhwan didn´t have any member in prison, a well known practice to disrupt election coordination for the MB, as usual and expected as the olympic games every four years. Now reports tells as that the Ikhwan candidate for the affluent middle clas area of Madinet Nasr(Nasr City), Issam al Mokhtar has been arrested. The brothers also complained about NDP thugs tearing down Issams banners, something that also happend to the secular Kefaya leader Kamal Khalil campaigning for a seat in the Imbaba constituency, during the last days of Ramadan.

During the NDP election campaign kick off for Cairo,in front of the Abdeen presidential Palace ,the NDP secretary general Safwat Sharif stated that the Muslim Brotherhood was to blame for the recent outburst of secterian violence, in the Muharram Beq area of Alexandria. A political consequense of the sectarian violence was that the coptic NDP candidate(one of two, from the NDP pool of 444 candidates) droped out of the race, instead of encouraging him to stay on, the NDP choose the blame game strategy, and indeed mixing religion and politics, just as one NDP candidate inthe 2000 parliamentary elections choose to use the religious card on his coptic advisary.

Islam,