Down Goes the Brotherhood

One midnight last week, squads of red-capped MPs and Egyptian security troops poured from their posts throughout the land, arrested 450 leaders of the nationalist-terrorist Moslem Brotherhood, sealed most of its 2,000 headquarters with red wax and confiscated its property worth $8,500,000. Egypt's new revolutionary regime had at last found the decision and strength to break the fanatic group it once found necessary to appease. Said a communique: "The Revolution will not allow a recurrence of the reactionary tragedy in the name of religion." A quarter century ago, an intense young theology graduate named Hassan el Banna wrathfully watched the French and British, with their well-dressed women, tippling in the Canal Zone clubs and saw his own people adopting the same ways.

"Ours is the highest ideal," cried el Banna, "the holiest cause and the purest way.

Those who criticize us want to live as Europe has taught them--to dance, to drink, to revel, to mix the sexes openly and in public." Cutthroats & Idealists. El Banna proceeded to put together the tightest-disciplined assortment of cutthroats and idealists in the country, half a million fanatics organized into twelve-man cells called "families" reaching into every wadi in Egypt. Objective of the Ihkwan el Muslimin: expel the foreigners, return Egypt to the simple brotherhood of primitive, eighth-century Islam. The Ihkwan battle-cry: "We will knock at the doors of heaven with the heads of the British."

The Brotherhood's killers dispatched Premier Ahmed Maher in Parliament the day he joined the British side and declared war on the Axis. In 1948 they murdered Cairo's police chief, and when Premier Mahmoud Fahmy el Nokrashy bravely outlawed the Brotherhood, they murdered Nokrashy as well. Two months later el Banna paid for his crimes: an auto load of gunmen shot him down in broad daylight on a Cairo street. The movement went underground.When it legally emerged again in 1951, its popular resistance to King Farouk and the British gained it many fellow travelers, among them a young colonel named Gamel Abdel Nasser and a general named Mohammed Naguib.

Use or Be Used. The very day Naguib's military junta ousted King Farouk and took over Egypt, Lieut. Colonel Nasser, chief of the Revolutionary Command Council, dispatched an urgent message to one of the most powerful men in Egypt: Hassan el Hodeiby, the Brotherhood's new Supreme Guide. Would the Brotherhood please support the new regime?

Nasser, needing a mass political base, thought he could use the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood thought it could use Nasser. Both miscalculated, and a quiet duel for mastery began. Mild-looking Hodeiby offered to support the soldiers, if Nasser would submit all their proposals for prior approval. Nasser politely declined, instead offered Hodeiby three Cabinet posts for his Brotherhood. After some parleying, the Supreme Guide angrily refused to let his followers join the new regime. Still the cautious wooing continued; there was no open break.

But there could be no peace between the fundamentally progressive, Western-influenced Naguib regime and the West-hating, reactionary Brotherhood. Either Nasser would crush the Brotherhood or be crushed by it. Last June the revolutionary regime got word that Brotherhood agents were inflaming dissident police and army men, to prepare a coup.

One day last week, on the campus of Cairo University, came the open conflict that could no longer be avoided. As Brotherhood students held memorial services for members killed battling the British in the Canal Zone two years ago, an army jeep rolled in, broadcasting pro-regime slogans. In a few moments Egypt's two great rival movements faced each other in battle order on the college grounds. Brotherhood students rushed forward, overturned the jeep and set it afire. Guns cracked and 20 fell wounded.

That night, the Revolutionary Council, in urgent session, made its decision. By the next day Supreme Guide Hodeiby and the rest of the Ihkwan leaders were seized and crowded into a tightly guarded Alexandria army barracks. The charge: plotting against the government and negotiating with the British. ("Complete nonsense," snapped the British embassy.)

How would the public take this forthright action? Two days later, the regime's pipe-smoking front man, President-Premier Naguib, walked into a Cairo mosque for Friday prayers. He was wildly cheered.

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