CAIRO - An Egyptian court ordered Monday the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood and the confiscation of its assets, sharply escalating a broad crackdown on the group in the three months since the military ousted its ally, Mohammed Morsi, from the presidency.
Security forces have already been moving against the Brotherhood’s social networks, raiding schools and hospitals run by the group. The sweep points to the ambitions of Egypt’s new leaders to go beyond the arrests of top Brotherhood figures to strike a long-term, even mortal, blow to the group by hitting the pillars of its grass-roots organization.
“The plan is to drain the sources of funding, break the joints of the group and dismantle podiums from which they deliver their message,” said one senior security official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The court ruling formalizes the suppression of the group and comes after mass shootings of more than 1,000 pro-Morsi demonstrators and the arrest of thousands of Brotherhood members and almost all of the group’s leaders. Even before Morsi was overthrown, the police watched idly as a crowd of anti-Brotherhood protesters methodically burned down its gleaming headquarters, capping weeks of attacks on its officers around the country.
The Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, sponsored the political party that won the most votes in recent elections. So the court’s formal prohibition of the Brotherhood makes it harder for the new government appointed by Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to fulfill its promises of a new, inclusive democratic process - one that would be open even to Morsi’s Islamist supporters. Instead, the ruling pushes the Brotherhood back underground, where it was for most of its 85-year history before the 2011 revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak allowed the group to operate in the open.
Blurring its political and religious nature, the Brotherhood vaulted to election dominance in large part because of its multiple business interests that provide funding, as well as schools, mosques and powerful social institutions providing cheap medical care and services to millions of impoverished Egyptians.
“The hospitals and schools are among the most powerful tools to garner support, which would be translated into votes,” said Ahmed Ban, a researcher and former Brotherhood member. Schools give the group “a large pool to recruit new cadres at every stage of their lives,” he said. Hospitals send the message that “we are offering good and cheap services, and we are the good Muslims.”
In election seasons, Brotherhood hospitals, joined by candidates, would send medical convoys offering free care to villages where state services are absent. The past two years, the Brotherhood’s political party, the Freedom and Justice Party, held markets selling reduced-price food and clothes.
The decision was issued by the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters. Some Islamist lawyers questioned the court’s jurisdiction and vowed to appeal. The court ordered that all the Brotherhood’s assets, including real estate it owned or leased, be held in trust until the appeals were resolved.
But the appeals seemed unlikely to settle the matter because the Brotherhood faces similar litigation in other jurisdictions as well.
Monday’s ruling addressed a lawsuit filed by the leftist party Tagammu, which accused the Brotherhood of being a terrorist organization and of“exploiting religion in political slogans.” Laying out its decision, the court reached back to the Brotherhood’s founding in 1928, when Egypt was ruled by a British-backed monarchy, and argued that the organization had always used religion as a cover for its political goals.
The state newspaper Al Ahram gave its own rationale for the ban, saying Monday that since winning power at the polls the Brotherhood had “violated the rights of the citizens, who found only oppression and arrogance during their reign” until the public had risen up to protest “under the protection of the armed forces; the sword of the homeland inseparable from their people in the confrontation with an unjust regime.”
The court’s ruling, which banned “all activities” organized, sponsored or financed by the Islamist group, was unexpectedly sweeping.
The ruling will be appealed, Al Ahram reported, citing Ali Beshr, a senior member of the Brotherhood.
“How can someone question our legitimacy and existence when we’ve existed for 85 years? We will remain, as we are, no matter what,” the Brotherhood said in a post on its Ikhwanweb Twitter account. “Muslim Brotherhood is part and parcel of Egyptian society, corrupt and politically motivated judicial decisions cannot change that.”
The Brotherhood, which began as a social and religious revival movement, was tacitly tolerated for years despite being outlawed, growing into Egypt’s largest philanthropic organization and helping to provide a partial social safety net below the rickety Egyptian state.
It sponsored legislative candidates, who formed a minority bloc in Parliament for more than 20 years, and in 2011 spun off a closely allied but ostensibly autonomous political unit, the Freedom and Justice Party. The party won nearly half the seats in Egypt’s first parliamentary election after Mubarak’s overthrow, and its candidate,Morsi, won about a quarter of the vote in the first round of the presidential race; he later won a runoff.
More than a million dues-paying members are believed to attend weekly local Brotherhood meetings, according to scholars who study the group, and hundreds of thousands of “sisters” belong to its women’s auxiliary.
If enforced, the court’s ruling would prohibit all of those meetings and functions, eradicating a major component of Egyptian civil society.
Ibrahim Moneir, a Brotherhood official who is still at large, called the ruling “totalitarian.” In an interview with a satellite news channel, he said the group would survive “with God’s help, not by the orders of Sissi’s judiciary.”
Over the past weeks, security forces stormed at least 10 Brotherhood-linked schools and eight hospitals, confiscating equipment and arresting directors, often on allegations the sites were hiding weapons. The Education Ministry says the Brotherhood is believed to run 40-60 schools nationwide.
The schools are under various Brotherhood-run associations, each with a board of directors headed by the group’s top administrative official in each province, part of the pyramid hierarchy of the group.
In southern Assiut province, security forces raided the six schools of the Dar el-Haraa chain, headed by former Brotherhood lawmaker Wafaa Mashhour, daughter of the group’s former top leader Mustafa Mashhour. The police seized computers and arrested teachers and even cleaning workers.
“I told the police that this will backfire,” Mashhour told the Associated Press.
Information for this article was contributed by David D. Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh of The New York Times; and by Abdel Latif Wahba and Salma El Wardany of Bloomberg News; and by Maggie Michael of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 09/24/2013