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4 - The Egyptian Movement for Change: Intellectual antecedents and generational conflicts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2010

Michaelle L. Browers
Affiliation:
Wake Forest University, North Carolina
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Summary

On June 8, 2006, around 700 activists, lawyers, and journalists convened at the Lawyers’ Syndicate in Cairo to speak out against the ongoing detention of political activists and in support of the judges who were fighting for the independence of the judiciary and the lawyers who were to be tried for publication of the “blacklist” of judges allegedly complicit in vote-rigging during the 2005 parliamentary elections. The event featured speakers from the Muslim Brotherhood, the Revolutionary Socialists, the Nasirist-leaning Karama Party, the Islamist Labor Party, the liberal Ghad Party, the Egyptian Movement for Change (better known as Kifaya), the leftist Tagammu’ Party, as well as various human rights groups. Muntasir al-Zayyat, an Islamist lawyer best known for his defense of the blind Shaykh ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and for his writing of an Ayman al-Zawahiri biography, gave the first speech, welcoming all in the name of the lawyers’ syndicate and calling for the various organizations represented “to be united under these circumstances.” “These are,” he proclaimed, “the worst of times.” Zayyat thanked Kifaya and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular “for grabbing this opportunity for us” to fight for political reform and other issues of common concern. A member of the Ghad Party, speaking on behalf of his party's chairman, Ayman Nur (b. 1964), who remains in prison on charges of forging signatures to obtain a license for his party, followed Zayyat in sending “his regards and gratitude to the Muslim Brothers and Kifaya for their role in the fight.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Political Ideology in the Arab World
Accommodation and Transformation
, pp. 109 - 137
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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