Muslim Sisterhood conducts front line of protests in Egypt

CAIRO - They tirelessly hold rallies, whether at night or under cold rain, chanting for the return of Egypt’s ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. They clash with police, hurling back fuming tear gas canisters and getting dragged by their veils and thrown behind bars. At protests in universities, they get into fistfights with rival female students.

Female supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood have stepped into the front line of Islamist protests, one of the few branches of the organization not crushed by a heavy crackdown since Morsi’s removal in a July 3 coup.

Former group members say it’s an intentional survival tactic by the Brotherhood, aiming to keep its street pressure alive and betting that security forces are less likely to strike heavily against women - and that if they do, it will win public sympathy for the Islamists’ cause.

It’s a major change in role for the Muslim Sisterhood, as the women’s branch is known. Like the Brotherhood’s male cadres, its women are highly disciplined and undergo years of indoctrination instilling principles of obedience - often from childhood - but in the women’s case, they have largely been trained to play a mostly backseat, family-centered part.

In daily protests the past months, they have proved determined and ferocious.

“We are protecting our religion. I came out for the sake of Islam,” said a slim, veiled 13-year-old Souhidah Abdel-Rahman, who was arrested along with her mother during a pro-Morsi protest in October in the Mediterraneancity of Alexandria. Souhidah was immediately released because of her age, but her mother remained in detention.

“They want to break our back but we are not going to back off,” she said, speaking to The Associated Press as she visited her mother earlier this month at a prison in the Nile Delta city of Damanhour.

A male Brotherhood youth leader from the southern city of Assiut said he and many members are “hibernating” in the face of the crackdown. But he said the group is betting that the public, which largely backed Morsi’s ouster, will eventually turn against the military and interim government under pressing economic conditions. He spoke of the “butterfly” tactic of swift, snap demonstrations organized by the group’s surviving lower cadres.

Women and students, he said, play an important role. “The women are hardly harmed because no one knows them. Security authorities don’t have files for them,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. Also, women help heal the relationship between the Brotherhood and the public, he added, acknowledging that “the group is hated in the street now.”

The attempt to win public sympathies appears to be having mixed success.

One win for the group came when 21 women arrested in the October Alexandria protest, including seven juveniles, received heavy sentences of up to 11 years in prison for protesting. The harshness of the sentences - along with images of the handcuffed women and girls in their white robes in the courtroom’s defendants cage - shocked even some opponents of Islamists. The sentences were reduced to one-year suspended prison terms on appeal and the women have been released.

As part of their indoctrination, Sisters learn by heart the diaries of Zeinab el-Ghazali, an iconic female Brotherhood member who was imprisoned in the 1960s and sentenced to death, although the sentence was commuted to life in prison.

But Sisterhood members are not included in the decision-making hierarchy or leadership bodies. While male members have rankings defining their missions, women only hold the titles of “lover” - as in, of God - or “Sister.” The founder of the 83-year old Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, underlined that women are for “housekeeping and children” and that extra education is “unnecessary.”

Religion, Pages 15 on 12/28/2013

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