Egypt Feature: The Muslim Brotherhood Comes to America (Bohn)

Sondos AsemLauren Bohn writes for CNN:

Sondos Asem has butterflies, formulating answers to questions she expects to be asked and practicing her diction with the devotion of a high school debate champion. The gentle 24-year-old graduate student at the American University in Cairo is in a hotel room in downtown New York, figuring out what to wear on national television. ("This blazer would look good, right?" "Should I wear more color?")

Like many young Egyptians, she's been tweeting the fallout after the 2011 uprising that brought down former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The stakes are higher than 140-character dispatches might suggest. Asem has emerged as an unlikely unofficial spokeswoman for the Muslim Brotherhood, helping to run its English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb, and in turn revamp the group's image in the West.

In no more than three lines, often using abbreviations and hyperlinks, she hashes out the views of the Brotherhood, the 83-year-old fountainhead of political Islam in the region and one of the most powerful organizations in Egypt. The Brotherhood's newly established political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, has won just under half of the seats in the country's new parliament --- more than any other group --- and will have a major hand in rewriting the country's constitution.

This week, Asem and five members of the Brotherhood are in New York as part of the group's first delegation in the United States, the face the Brotherhood thinks perhaps would be well received in the West. Asem is part of a worldly, urban generation. She shops at Egypt's flashy mega-malls. She brushes her eyelids with a modest dash of sparkly eye shadow and wears designer head-scarves. She has an affinity for cosmopolitan cities and uses American teen parlance like "You rock" and "Yeaaah, girl." She seems very unlike the kind of person who has historically been loyal to the Brotherhood.

Founded in Egypt in 1928, the group is the oldest and largest Islamist movement in the world. It has affiliates and branches throughout the region and adherents in Europe and the United States. Mostly made up of middle-class doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, the Brotherhood has sought a more traditional Islamic society by building extensive networks and social services across the country, often filling in gaps left by the neglect of sclerotic, corrupt regimes.

Until the Egyptian uprising in 2011, the Brotherhood was officially banned by Mubarak's government. Its members were routinely imprisoned. But it was given limited room to operate in the country and became one of the largest dissident organizations.

Many Western pundits and politicians have long denounced the group as a quasi-terrorist organization and the ancestor of al Qaeda. While some Al Qa'eda leaders --- notably Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is Egyptian --- have roots in the Brotherhood, Al Qa'eda largely dismisses it for renouncing violence and engaging politically.

When it comes to charming a largely Western audience, Asem is one of the Brotherhood's prized go-to people. She comes from a stalwart Brotherhood family. Her father is in charge of publishing all the organization's educational materials, like "How to be a good Muslim father" and "How to be a good Muslim wife." Her mother ran unsuccessfully for parliament and is the current chairman of the political party's committee on women.

Asem is persuasive and assertive, gesturing confidently as she talks, but she still looks down and shows the insecurities of a 20-something caught up in a national identity crisis.

Just six months ago, Asem went by a pseudonym in the press for fear of suffering a backlash among her private-university classmates, who are mostly secular and perceive the Brotherhood as a bunch of religious ideologues, bent on imposing Islamic law and diminishing civil liberties.

But times have changed since the Arab Spring.

The Brotherhood's near-landslide victory in parliamentary elections has given Asem and fellow members the confidence to back the group publicly. She and some of her equally eloquent colleagues have shuttled across the world to attend conferences on the revolutionary uprisings, and their opinions are being heard and heeded on an unprecedented scale.

At the recent Daily Beast/Newsweek Women in the World summit, Asem brushed elbows with actresses Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie and sat on a panel moderated by Andrew Sullivan, a renowned gay Catholic blogger. It was a far different scene from a few years ago, when she and other members gathered clandestinely in cramped living rooms, turning off their mobile phones because they were afraid state security forces could be tracking their whereabouts.

As Asem settled into her hotel room in New York and prepared to meet with a prominent news organization's editorial board, she got word that her boss had decided to run for the presidency of Egypt.

"Wow! I can't believe it," she exclaimed.

Not many can. The political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has nominated its longtime strategist and financier Khairat al-Shater for president. The announcement ran counter to the Brotherhood's previous pledge to stay out of the race, a decision the group said was made to prevent flooding the fledgling political system and derailing a smooth transition of power in the country.

The delegation that Asem is part of is meeting with Pulitzer-prize-winning journalists and the editorial boards of prestigious papers. The Council on Foreign Relations is hosting them in New York for a talk and they're meeting with the Carnegie Endowment and the Brookings Institution in Washington, with a lot of coffee-talk in between. The goal: to alleviate the fears of a still-suspicious American establishment.

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