THE THRONG in Cairo’s Tahrir Square begins to swell early in the afternoon. Youngsters fresh from school stroll in gossiping groups across Qasr al-Nil bridge and pause for security at the main entrance to the square.
Girls with and without headscarves arrive with boys in leather jackets. Middle-aged businessmen and diplomats in suits and ties stand on the pavement in twos and threes discussing the developments. Ultra-orthodox Muslim men with bushy beards and women covered from head to toe in black drapery stride purposefully toward a group listening to a lecture by a man with a loud hailer standing on the wall of the roundabout.
In addition to security at the entrance to the square, black plastic bags filled with rubbish reveal that the revolutionaries are becoming more organised and preparing for a long stay in Tahrir, the cradle of the uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak last February.
Once again protesters are chanting: “The people want to end the regime.”
Today, they are determined to remain here until field marshal Mohamad Hussein Tantawi, head of the ruling military council, stands down.
Mona, a colleague, remarks: “There are very few in the square from the Muslim Brotherhood” which is formally boycotting the protests in Tahrir and elsewhere while its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, is energetically campaigning for the parliamentary poll scheduled for next Monday.
Hani Shukrallah, editor of al-Ahram’s English online edition, says the brotherhood’s initial strategy was to “partner the military” in government.
The brotherhood was prepared to allow the generals to exercise a veto on policy, handle relations with Israel and avoid civilian oversight of the military budget and of commercial interests that account for 30 per cent of the economy.
The brotherhood fell out with the generals when they declared that the new constitution should be secular. The brotherhood insists that Muslim canon law should be enshrined as the basis for law and legislation, as is the case in the current constitution. The brotherhood’s long-term objective is to use this provision to transform Egypt into an “Islamic state”. Shukrallah says, however, that the brotherhood has “overestimated its power” on the electoral scene. However, the inexperienced, divided revolutionaries have “little power” when it comes to securing votes, fostering the notion that the brotherhood is more popular than it is, in fact. He observes that the mindset of all the country’s political elites remains “pre-revolutionary” since they have not taken in changing circumstances.
Independent commentator and newspaper editor Hisham Kassem agrees that the brotherhood “will not do as well as it and people in the West are expecting”. He observes, “the brotherhood frightened many people last Friday when it staged a rally in Tahrir and called on the people to become martyrs”.
In his view, the brotherhood will not win enough seats in the new assembly to form a government on its own or to cobble together a coalition with other parties. “It could end up as the main opposition party. No one trusts the brotherhood because it keeps shifting” between generals and revolutionaries.
The rift between the military and the brotherhood could widen because its spokesmen have been accusing the military command of orchestrating a campaign of violence against protesters with the aim of postponing the assembly election.
This line has also been adopted by the more radical Jamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group). Safwat Abdel Ghani, speaking for its political wing, the Construction and Development Party, said the military had succumbed to “foreign pressure” to cancel the elections because of the likelihood that fundamentalists would win a majority of seats.