Turkish Lessons for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood

In my view, there is no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood is the victim of bloody events in present-day Egypt. The country is suffering a brutal military coup — yes, a coup, not “popular impeachment,” let alone “restoration of democracy,” as some otherwise sensible figures mistakenly called it — and the deposed President Mohammed Morsi’s supporters are being violently oppressed and massacred.

Meanwhile, various governments, from the Arab Peninsula to the Western world, are failing miserably by not condemning the Egyptian military and its crimes. The Obama administration, for example, is “complicit in the new and horrifyingly bloody crackdown launched Wednesday by the de facto regime against tens of thousands of protesters,” as The Washington Post put it.

However, the fact the Brotherhood is the victim does not imply that it is impuissant. Quite the contrary. How the Islamist organization responds to injustice will be definitive for the future of Egypt and even beyond. I believe that are two crucial necessities:

Staying nonviolent: Since the first day of the military coup against Morsi, the Brotherhood has taken a peaceful stance, organizing nonviolent sit-ins in the Rabia al-Adawiya Square in Cairo and Nahda Square in Giza. Of course, the military regime condemned “the terrorists” of the Brotherhood, as all trigger-happy dictatorships in the region always do, before massacring them in hundreds. While the attacks on some government buildings and churches in the past week might apparently give some credibility to that “terrorism” narrative, it is unclear who really committed these attacks. Gehad El-Haddad, the Brotherhood media spokesman and senior adviser to its Freedom and Justice Party, said on Twitter: “We condemn all attacks on houses of [sic] worships & condemn police treachery in leaving thugs 2 [sic] vandalise while focusing on killing protesters.”