Muslim Brotherhood

CAIRO - A mechanic hammered a fender and boys wandered amid tin and rust as Adham Bishr, his opinions flaring on an agitated afternoon along the Nile, said Egypt's next president should give him a job, not tell him how to worship God. Men gathered around Bishr in a scrap of shade, arguing over inflation and politics before disappearing into the grit and anger of a neighborhood at Cairo's edge. The men, mostly unemployed drivers, mill hands and laborers, want work; their sons, college students with dim prospects, wonder whether the future will bring enough money to take a wife.

CAIRO - A mechanic hammered a fender and boys wandered amid tin and rust as Adham Bishr, his opinions flaring on an agitated afternoon along the Nile, said Egypt's next president should give him a job, not tell him how to worship God. Men gathered around Bishr in a scrap of shade, arguing over inflation and politics before disappearing into the grit and anger of a neighborhood at Cairo's edge. The men, mostly unemployed drivers, mill hands and laborers, want work; their sons, college students with dim prospects, wonder whether the future will bring enough money to take a wife.

To understand the Muslim Brotherhood, and to assess its role today in a shifting Middle East, it is necessary to first examine the forces that led to the organization's birth. And that takes us back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Ottoman Empire had been, before World War I, the strongest and most visible face of Islam in the world. At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, it controlled a vast swath of territory that extended from southeastern Europe into Asia and northern Africa.

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - The stage along the sea was a politically crafted advertisement for Egypt's diversity: An unveiled woman chatted with a bearded Islamist and a retired soccer star shared the spotlight with a young hero from last year's revolution. A roar erupted from a crowd, mostly students, when a white-haired man in a linen blazer raised his arms. As fireworks flashed in the night sky, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh called for national unity to end military rule and unrest that have soured the euphoria since Hosni Mubarak was forced from power.

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - The stage along the sea was a politically crafted advertisement for Egypt's diversity: An unveiled woman chatted with a bearded Islamist and a retired soccer star shared the spotlight with a young hero from last year's revolution. A roar erupted from a crowd, mostly students, when a white-haired man in a linen blazer raised his arms. As fireworks flashed in the night sky, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh called for national unity to end military rule and unrest that have soured the euphoria since Hosni Mubarak was forced from power.

The Muslim Brotherhood has expelled five of its youth members in a purge signaling that Egypt's most potent political force is unwilling to tolerate dissent within its ranks as it heads toward parliamentary elections in September. The dismissals are an indication that the Brotherhood's ideological and organizational rigidity, which buttressed it against decades of persecution by former President Hosni Mubarak, may be cracking as its young members yearn for wider political and religious freedoms in a new Egypt.

The outlawed Muslim Brotherhood joined talks Sunday with Egyptian officials in efforts to calm days of street protests and negotiate the possibility of a transitional government to run the country until September elections. The Brotherhood's participation in resolving the crisis around President Hosni Mubarak is another dramatic sign in recent days that Egypt is on new political terrain. The government for years has labeled the popular Brotherhood a terrorist organization, closing its offices and arresting thousands of its members.

Egyptian authorities arrested the fourth-highest official in the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, one of 25 members of the outlawed movement detained in a crackdown ahead of a referendum on presidential election rules the group opposes. Mahmoud Ezzat, secretary-general of the Islamist group and head of its Cairo operations, is the highest-profile member of the group arrested since 1996, a police official said. Three of the others arrested also held senior positions within the group.

EGYPT * A military court convicted 16 members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood on charges of conspiring against the government and sentenced them to up to five years in prison. The convictions were derided by the defendants, mostly academics and professionals, as a politically motivated attempt to reassure Washington.

The Muslim Brotherhood announced Tuesday that it would form a political party to run candidates for Egypt's parliament, while a committee of judges and legal scholars started work on amending the nation's constitution. But the country's military rulers ordered the committee to complete work in less than two weeks, suggesting that constitutional changes in the short term would not be as extensive as many critics of the old system had hoped. The Brotherhood, one of the oldest Islamic movements in the Middle East, has long been officially banned from Egyptian politics, though members have been allowed to run for parliament as independent candidates.

CAIRO - At least 11 people were killed Wednesday when unknown attackers armed with guns and firebombs clashed with protesters near Egypt's Defense Ministry in an escalation of violence highlighting political divisions that threaten the country ahead of this month's presidential election. Assailants stormed about 500 demonstrators at dawn, many of them supporters of Hazem Salah abu Ismail, an ultraconservative Islamist preacher recently disqualified from the presidential race. Police did not intervene for hours, and authorities said as many as 200 people were wounded in the nation's worst violence in months.

CAIRO - Osama Abdel Hadi was born into the Muslim Brotherhood. His father, a history professor, was respected within the Islamic movement and Hadi grew up steeped in piety and resistance to Hosni Mubarak's secular police state. He prayed in Cairo's ancient mosques and knew the names of Brotherhood members held in Egypt's jails. The group was his spiritual and intellectual buttress, and, amid the failings of other parties and opposition ideologies, he carried the Brotherhood's precepts as he entered university to study political science.

Like savvy boxers with knockout punches, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, and the Muslim Brotherhood have circled each other warily since the Arab Spring toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. But after the SCAF-appointed election commission's banning last week of 10 candidates for the May presidential elections, including the Brotherhood's nominee, Khairat Shater, the phase of circumspection may be ending. Egyptians could be in for rougher times. The SCAF abandoned Mubarak only after it realized that Egyptian protesters would not succumb to intimidation and force.

CAIRO - The well-tailored spy and the dueling Islamists are out. Egypt's election commission Tuesday upheld its decision to disqualify three key presidential candidates: Omar Suleiman, former intelligence chief and vice president; Khairat Shater, onetime political prisoner and Muslim Brotherhood financier; and Hazem Salah abu Ismail, an anti-Western ultraconservative preacher. The outcome was largely expected after the candidates appealed the commission's Saturday ruling.

Fourteen months after the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, a new Egypt is still a work in progress -- or possibly regress. The opposition that swelled Cairo's Tahrir Square has fractured into Islamist and secular factions. The Islamist-dominated parliament continues to compete for influence with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. And last week a presidential election scheduled for May was thrown into confusion. First an administrative court suspended the work of a 100-member assembly charged with writing a new constitution, raising the possibility that a president will be elected before the nature of the new Egyptian state is defined.

CAIRO - Egypt's curious gallery of presidential candidates reveals how much the nation has changed yet how deeply it still echoes with voices connected to the repressive rule of deposed President Hosni Mubarak. The country's revolution brought new faces, including Khairat Shater, onetime political prisoner now running as a candidate for the Muslim Brotherhood. But the revolt failed to sweep away prominent, if shadowy, challengers from the past, most notably Omar Suleiman, the former leader's spymaster and confidant.

Opposition groups including the banned Muslim Brotherhood held landmark talks Sunday with Egypt's vice president, but the two sides remained at apparent loggerheads over opponents' principal demand: that President Hosni Mubarak step aside now. The government offered a number of new concessions that would have constituted an undreamed-of bonanza for the opposition only a few weeks ago. But demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square shrugged off the...

Its members handcuffed and taken to prison, the Muslim Brotherhood is facing an extensive police crackdown that appears certain to weaken the standing of Egypt's largest opposition group in Sunday's parliamentary elections. More than 1,200 Brotherhood members and sympathizers, including eight candidates for parliament, have been arrested in recent weeks, the organization says. Most were reportedly detained in the governorate of Sharkeya in the Nile Delta, an Islamist stronghold characterized by poverty and frequent tensions.

CAIRO - The men gathering outside the yellow mosque agreed: Adulterers should be stoned to death, the hands of thieves cut off. "But not now," said Kareem Atta, waiting in a cool breeze for the sheik's car to roll up next to the Koran sellers. " Sharia law must be gradually put into place so it doesn't shock the system. You can't cut people's hands off if you first don't give them financial justice. " The young students, engineers and laborers are followers of Hazem Salah abu Ismail, a lawyer and holy man whose poetic blend of populism and ultraconservative Salafi Islam has turned him into a leading presidential candidate.

CAIRO - The Muslim Brotherhood chose a religiously conservative businessman as its presidential candidate Saturday, a provocative move expected to upset liberals and deepen the ruling military's suspicion over the growing political power of Islamists in Egypt. Khairat Shater, who was jailed for years under former President Hosni Mubarak, was selected after weeks of debate over whether the organization should field a candidate in the May election. The Brotherhood, which controls the parliament, had long promised not to run a contender to allay public fear that Islamists would dominate the government.