I have always held out hope that the Egyptians would recall their proud, pharaonic roots and quell the growing Islamo-extremism within their country.
Today, I caught the first positive news I have read about the region in a long time: An Egyptian court has banned the Muslim Brotherhood and its NGO, leaving the Islamist group with no legal status.
Protesters ransack the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in the Moqattam district in Cairo, Monday, July 1, 2013 (Photo: AP)
A court in Cairo has banned “all activities” by the Muslim Brotherhood.The ruling on Monday applies to the group, its NGO and “any organisation derived from it,” judges said.The court also ordered the interim government to seize the group’s funds and establish a panel to administer its frozen assets until any appeal had been heard.A Brotherhood source told Ahram Online the verdict would be appealed within ten days.The Islamist group existed outside of Egyptian law for decades and was only officially registered as an NGO in March 2013.
A just-published New York Times piece offers more details:
Laying out its reasoning, the court reached back to the Brotherhood’s founding as a religious revival group in 1928, when Egypt was in the last tumultuous decades under a British-backed monarchy. From its beginning, the court argued, the Brotherhood has always used Islam as a tool to achieve its political goals and adopted violence as its tactic.The state newspaper Al Ahram elaborated further, declaring on its Web site that the court found the Brotherhood had “violated the rights of the citizens, who found only oppression and arrogance during their reign” — until fatigued citizens had risen up this summer “under the protection of the armed forces, the sword of the homeland inseparable from their people in the confrontation with an unjust regime.”
And I have some almost good news on the Malawi Museum, which lost over 1000 artifacts during a wave of violence that followed the ouster of Mohamed Morsi: Recent reports indicate over 100 objects have been recovered.
One of those items was a statute of the ancient Egyptian Lord of the Underworld, Osiris:
Malawi Museum’s Osiris Statue Returned
Hopefully, as an organization, the Muslim Brotherhood has truly “gone West” to join Osiris and the Egyptians can start making progress in healing their country socially and economically.
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