In a free election, the Brothers would have swamped the NDP, but instead, they only contested a quarter of the seats in the People's Assembly; they did not want to provoke a backlash by an imperiled regime. Even serving in office was new for the organization, which had preoccupied itself for years with service and organization at the community and mosque level. It is true that one wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, radicalized in prison in the 1960s, became the forerunner of al Qaeda; Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of this faction, is now Osama bin Laden's deputy. But many of Zawahiri's cellmates rejected his call for violent resistance and embraced meliorism and a cautious, if often shadowy, distance from the state. It is this latter group that has shaped the modern Brotherhood. To not alarm the West, the Brotherhood has said that it will not run a candidate even if permitted to do so in a democratic presidential contest. Because this is consistent with past behavior, the burden of proof is on those who view the group's promise as a cynical ruse.
The Muslim Brotherhood has spread throughout the Arab world but has no central command, and in each country it has been shaped by the local political culture. In the Palestinian territories, the Brotherhood became Hamas; in Turkey, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The Egyptian Brotherhood does not engage in violence like Hamas but neither has it integrated into the larger society and polity like the AKP. The Brothers have been able to cling to vague and simple-minded slogans precisely because, unlike the AKP, they haven't been allowed to compete openly in the political marketplace. If they were to do so, the organization would have to choose between the tolerant-sounding message it offers to Western visitors and the more reactionary one reserved for the home front.
I think that's a risk Egypt should take -- not only because the Muslim Brotherhood is not Hamas, but because, in the wake of the thoroughly secular mass protest movement, the Brotherhood is no longer likely to attract a majority of Egyptian voters.
Still, that's not a risk Clinton or the Muslim Brotherhood's more vocal American detractors are in the mood for. The "specific agenda" they fear is not that the Brotherhood will impose sharia, but that it could destroy Israel. The Brothers with whom I spoke were not only anti-Israel, but pro-Hamas. Israel has every reason to fear the prospect of a Muslim Brotherhood government. But would a secular democracy in Egypt be more sympathetic to Israel than an Islamist one? In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Arab world, elites have learned that accepting Israel's existence is the price of admission to international good opinion. But the man or woman on the street would like to see Israel disappear tomorrow.
Successive U.S. administrations have supported Arab autocrats because they help advance a number of vital American interests; defending Israel is, of course, right on top of the list. Concern for Israel's security has thus been one of the chief factors limiting U.S. support for democracy in the Arab world. The Bush administration underwent a serious change of heart on the subject when Hamas won democratic elections in Palestine in January 2006. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now imploring the Obama administration to help keep Mubarak and his team in office, no matter the consequences for Egypt's revolution. He (along with some of those autocratic allies) has found a receptive audience in Washington.
The repudiation of Israel is a very serious problem -- but it is a problem with Middle Eastern democracy, not with Islamism. Turkey, the one democracy in the region, has taken a sharp turn away from its pro-Israel policies of years past. Turkish diplomats will tell you that public opinion will not permit a different policy. The answer, for the United States and for Israel, cannot be to stand athwart history shouting, "Stop!" The only possible answer is to accept the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for a state of their own. If that happens, American officials will sound a lot less conflicted about the Muslim Brotherhood's democratic bona fides.
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