Lessons from the Banned Muslim Brotherhood’s Media Wing

MD Tanveer ©
Cairo: While Nur ad-Din Zangi might be a name known only to a few, even fewer people know any better about the media team working behind the Muslim Brotherhood - the organization which played a crucial role in the recent Egyptian uprising and the eventual fall of Hosni Mubarak.
It was Nur ad-Din's dream to unite the disparate Muslim forces lying between the Euphrates and the Nile in order to forge a common front against the crusaders. Nur ad-Din ultimately succeeded in propagating the message of unity to defeat the crusaders. In turn, this effort would help his successor - Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi - against the same foes. Nor should it be forgotten that it was the propaganda unleashed by Peter, the Hermit, which lit the fire of the blood-soaked crusades. Doubtless, therefore, the effective propagation of the message, through whatever means available, is crucial for the success of any movement, either of solidarity, or of protest, even as the case might be.



The traditional tools of propaganda like sermons or letters have been all but taken over by the other, newer, tools of the media like the newspaper, television and the internet. The traditional methods of propaganda still exist, but these can be allowed a broader reach only if the other, more modern, tools are employed as well.

The vast majority of media houses in the world today invariably publish what sells well for them or whatever goes in their favour. Inevitably, therefore, real issues are often missed out in the general coverage of non-issues. A need for an alternative media thus presents itself clearly.

Despite its being repeatedly banned in Egypt since the 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood - or the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon - has kept growing in size and complexity as has the support for it among the Egyptian masses. This is clear from the excellent performance of this banned organization in the elections and from its part in the Egyptian revolution to topple Hosni Mubarak. But how was this possible by a banned organization? Answers to this question should prove to be invaluable lessons in themselves for all activists and revolutionaries.

One important way in which this turn of events was made possible was, of course, through the propagation of the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology through the internet. While it is still relatively unknown as to who started off this internet revolution, many believe that it is Abdul Jalil al-Sharnouby, a bespectacled tech guru, who is behind the recent online movement. Clearly, al-Sharnouby would have been more in his elements at a sleek Silicon Valley IT company but rather than the decrepit old building on a litter-strewn street in downtown Cairo that he today works out from.
Al-Sharnouby is the director of the Muslim Brotherhood's Internet Committee and the editor of Ikhwanonline.com website. Currently, he manages a full-time team of 30 employees and a freelance network of another 45 people - a fairly big unit to gear up to. This team is on the go round the clock to promote and to defend the Brotherhood in cyberspace, with an ‘unforeseen-event' plan to help it decide the course of action in the event of a government raid on their headquarters.

Despite its being the media department of a banned organization for much of the last decade, this bunch of technical experts has transformed the Muslim Brotherhood from being a shadowy social organization with power bases in mosques and charities to a media and tech-savvy public welfare machine. Due to this resource capability, the Muslim Brotherhood is today not only an opposition which rules the street, but also the one which dominates the web.

Hosni Mubarak's regime had always accused the Brotherhood of trying to topple the government and would brook no excuse in frequently cracking down on the organization and the websites that it manages. However, the Muslim Brotherhood's media team is only too aware of these kinds of emergencies. It has many alternative and substitute websites always on the ready to propagate their news and views. The Ikhwanonline.com website is just one among the many domains maintained by the Muslim Brotherhood's media team. What is more, this team has come up with an alternative to the Facebook, Wiki and even YouTube websites which are correspondingly named Ikhwanbook, Ikhwanwiki and Ikhwantube respectively. (The term Ikhwan means ‘Brotherhood' in Arabic). Of course, the Brotherhood's media team insists that it maintains its own version of Facebook, YouTube etc purely as a check against these websites which propagate the western line of thought based on a blind hatred for Islam and Islamic organizations.

The members of the Muslim Brotherhood are normally active in countering reports against them or in countering misrepresentations on any Islamic issue through the use of multiple comments, blogs and countless notes in Facebook etc. These are, of course, immediately reported as spam or are blocked from propagation. Clearly, then, the Brotherhood's use of these sites are intended more as a backup measure than as effective replacements for what actually must be done in response.

In fact, the Brotherhood's media team has gone even further and developed a website called www.ikhwanophobia.com which caters to the task of dismantling the myths and false allegations against the Brotherhood. The website also seeks to clarify the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate Muslim group, with no links to terrorism and with no anti-Western agendas whatsoever. According to the Brotherhood, this campaign is working, and working well at that.

Ikhwanonline, the Brotherhood's Arabic website is one of the top 100 websites in Egypt with an average 250,000 unique visitors a day. On a politically sensitive day, viewership of the Arabic site shoots up to around 450,000. The English language portal sees about 4,000 unique visitors per day, while there are approximately 22,000 Ikhwanbook members around the world.
This was the situation prevailing in the Mubarak period. Now, in the post-Mubarak period, wherein the Brotherhood is free to work more openly, they have already launched a political party of their own. Irrespective of the situation in the near-foreseeable future, the Brotherhood media team's past is definitely a lesson in persistence and constancy for all revolutionaries.