Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Embraces Business

Only a few months ago, Khairat El-shater was languishing in an Egyptian prison, put there by the Hosni Mubarak regime. Many of his businesses were shuttered. Now the Deputy Supreme Guide or No. 2 leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s dominant political-Islamic group, shuttles between meetings at one of his once-closed offices in a grimy building in the Nasr City district of Cairo. His visitors include bankers and foreign investors from the U.S. to Australia. “They all have many questions about one issue: What impact will the Muslim Brotherhood have on the investment climate?” says El-shater.

Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood has helped spawn Islamic groups across the globe, including the militant Palestinian movement Hamas. The Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan Al-Banna, preached the adoption of Islamic law as the way to lift the yoke of Western domination. Because of its popular appeal and occasionally violent tactics, the group came into conflict with secular Arab states such as Syria and Egypt, where the Brothers were persecuted intermittently from the 1950s until the Arab Spring. The Egyptian Brotherhood has long since disavowed violence.