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Egyptian Brotherhood leader reflects on group's mistakes, future

In an extensive interview with Al-Monitor, Egyptian Brotherhood leader and former minister of planning and international cooperation Amr Darrag speaks about the challenges the group has faced in the past, the reassessments it has undergone and its vision for the future.
Amr Darrag, member of Egypt's National Alliance to Support the Electoral Legitimacy, speaks during a news conference in Cairo July 29, 2013. Europe's top diplomat Catherine Ashton pressed Egypt's rulers on Monday to step back from a growing confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Mursi, two days after 80 of his supporters were gunned down in Cairo. Raising the prospect of more bloodshed, the Muslim Brotherhood said it would march again on Monday evening on Interior Mi
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Nearly three years have passed since the Egyptian army ousted Mohammed Morsi, the first civilian president elected following the January 25 Revolution, and then there were the subsequent campaigns of harassment and persecution waged by the Egyptian security forces against the Muslim Brotherhood (with which Morsi is organizationally affiliated). Nevertheless, the Muslim Brotherhood remains strong enough to occupy a considerable part of the Egyptian landscape. Observers remain preoccupied by discussions about the future of the Brotherhood, the transformations it has undergone, the extent of its relationship with violence in Egypt, the re-assessments it has undertaken, its conception of relations with the outside world — be it Arab or Western — and the Brotherhood's fate in the wake of an ongoing escalation by the Egyptian regime against all its rivals and opponents.

In an extended interview with Al-Monitor, Amr Darrag spoke about these and other issues. Darrag is a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood who is in charge of the Brotherhood’s political office abroad; he is the former minister of planning and international cooperation and was a member of the Freedom and Justice Party’s planning office. He offered what might be considered a wide-angle view of the Brotherhood’s position and its role at the present moment, and in so doing offered his views on a number of topics.

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