Muslim Brotherhood

CAIRO — The Egyptian government requested this week that the United States release the sole Egyptian detained at the Guantanamo Bay military prison , language that amounts to a stark demand by a country that has been among Washington's most reliable counterterrorism allies in the Middle East. The case of Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed al-Sawah, 54, whom the United States accuses of belonging to al-Qaeda, has the potential to become the first thorn in the relationship between the two governments since the election of Egypt's new Islamist...

CAIRO — Egypt's president on Sunday appointed 17 new provincial governors, including seven members of his Muslim Brotherhood, adding to its already considerable power in the legislative and executive branches. Mohammed Morsi's appointments come before the June 30 anniversary of his taking office, when the liberal and secular Egyptian opposition plans mass demonstrations to demand his ouster. A leading opponent, Mohamed ElBaradei, told a group of striking writers, film makers and Opera...

In his Jan. 27 Washington Forum op-ed, David Pollock accused the Muslim Brotherhood of "double talk" in Egypt. But his argument appears to be based on an assumption that our English Web site Ikhwanweb.com is a mere translation of our Arabic site Ikhwanonline . These Web sites are separate editorially, which means that Ikhwanweb.com doesn't simply translate Ikhwanonline but has a different set of editorial priorities and a different audience....

CAIRO — A hard-line Muslim cleric received an 11-year suspended sentence Sunday for tearing up and burning a Bible, Egypt's official news agency said. Cairo's Nasr City court sentenced Ahmed Abdullah and his son was given a suspended sentence of eight years over the same incident, the Middle East News Agency reported. The two were ordered to pay a fine of 5,000 Egyptian pounds ($700). The ruling can be appealed. Abdullah ripped up a Bible and burned it during a Sept. 11 rally by...

CAIRO — Egypt's most powerful Islamist organization on Saturday nominated one of its members for president, breaking a promise that it would not enter the race and angering critics who called the decision an attempt to control the country. The Muslim Brotherhood announced at a news conference that Khairat el-Shater , the group's top financier and arguably its most influential member, would be the candidate of its political wing, as a rift grows between the Islamist group and the country's ruling military...

The Muslim Brotherhood is a global organization. 1 Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood saw its ideas quickly spread throughout the Arab world and beyond. Today, groups in more than 80 countries trace their ideologies to the Brotherhood, but these entities do not form a cohesive unit. Globally, the Brotherhood is more a school of thought than an official organization of card-carrying members. Attempts to create a more formal global structure have failed, and the movement instead has...

President Obama's outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood began three years ago in his famous June 2009 speech in Cairo . Ten members of the Brotherhood were invited to listen to the address, and they heard a passage crafted especially for them: "America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments — provided they govern with respect for all their people.

ISTANBUL — The Muslim Brotherhood is set to open offices in Syria for the first time since the organization was crushed there decades ago, in an apparent effort to capitalize on the increasingly Islamized rebellion in that country. Riad al-Shaqfa, the movement's exiled leader, said in an interview with the Financial Times that a decision was recently taken to revive organizational structures in Syria and that followers have been asked to start opening party offices in rebel-held areas.

CAIRO — Egypt's most powerful political force, the Muslim Brotherhood, may be splintering. The influence and organizational abilities of the Islamist group have raised fears in the West and among some secular and liberal groups in Egypt that the path to democracy in the country may instead end with an Islamic state. But the historically unified movement, long considered the only viable opposition to Hosni Mubarak, has struggled to adapt to the new political...

WASHINGTON — Accusations by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., that an Islamist group has infiltrated the U.S. government are drawing fierce criticism from fellow lawmakers and religious groups. Bachmann and four other GOP legislators have sent letters to five government agencies citing "serious security concerns" about what Bachmann has called a "deep penetration in the halls of our United States government" by the Muslim Brotherhood. Bachmann also accused Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary...

CAIRO — Egypt's Islamist president announced Saturday that he was cutting off diplomatic relations with Syria and closing Damascus' embassy in Cairo, decisions made amid growing calls from hard-line Sunni clerics in Egypt and elsewhere to launch a "holy war" against Syria's embattled regime. Mohammed Morsi told thousands of supporters at a rally in Cairo that his government was also withdrawing the Egyptian charge d'affaires from Damascus. He called on Lebanon's Hezbollah to leave...

CAIRO — A senior official in Egypt's presidency said Thursday that Egyptians are free to join the fight in Syria and will not be prosecuted upon return amid increasingly public calls by leading clerics for Sunni Muslims to back the rebels there with firepower. In a response to an Associated Press question about the government's stance on citizens going to fight alongside Syrian rebels, Khaled al-Qazzaz said that "the right of travel or freedom of travel is open for...

CAIRO — Egypt's largest opposition group on Tuesday rejected calls by the president for national reconciliation talks as "too late" as pro and anti-government protesters briefly clashed ahead of plans for a mass rally calling for his ouster later this month. Critics accuse President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party of trying to monopolize power and making unilateral decisions that have further polarized society as turmoil persists after the...

IRAQ At least 14 shot dead at fake checkpoint Gunmen ambushed a group of travelers at a fake checkpoint at a remote desert site in western Iraq on Wednesday and killed at least 14 of them, according to Iraqi officials, in what appeared to be the latest manifestation of the sectarian violence gripping the country. The gunmen, apparently seeking Shiites, struck near the town of Nukhaib, which sits west of the Shiite holy city of Karbala but is in mainly Sunni Anbar province.

Lally Weymouth is a senior associate editor of The Washington Post. Dead Sea, Jordan Emad Abdel Ghafour is a key aide to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the leader of a new Salafist party called Watan. He sat down with Washington Post senior associate editor Lally Weymouth at a World Economic Forum conference this past week to explain his views on Egypt's future — including its relations with Iran, parliamentary elections and the possibility of imposing sharia law. Excerpts: You were a...

Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Nathan J. Brown is a nonresident senior associate. After Egypt's presidential elections last summer, the Obama administration adopted a pragmatic policy toward the new Muslim Brotherhood-led government . The basic message to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was straightforward: Respect Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and basic democratic norms, and the U.S. government will be a helpful, productive partner.

The Islamic political party known as the Muslim Brotherhood has soured American attitudes towards Egypt, arguably America's most important Arab ally, since its candidate Mohamed Morsi won presidential elections there in June 2012. That's according to a poll released Friday (April 12) by the Arab American Institute in Washington D.C. Morsi's term has been dogged by charges that he opts for authoritarian measures such as martial law. Muslim-Christian clashes have also shadowed his term; there were clashes on April 5...

Amid the rise of Islamist parties in Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia, the aftermath of the Arab Spring has often looked like an unstoppable victory march for the Muslim Brotherhood — "contagious successes," in the words of a smiling Hamza Mansour, a top Brotherhood leader in this desert kingdom. Yet even as the Jordan branch of the Brotherhood participates in a simmering protest movement that has shaken stability here, the group says it is pushing to ride the Islamist tide...

TEL AVIV It's a measure of the relatively quiet time for Israel these days that the sharpest argument at a big national security conference here was between an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who wanted "autonomy" for his fellow believers and secular Israelis in the audience who shouted out denunciations of what one called his "apartheid" plan. To be sure, the Iranian threat looms on the horizon. And Amos Yadlin , a retired major general who heads the Institute for National Security Studies, warns of an approaching choice between "bombing or the bomb"...