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June 30th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Then, when they were ready, they returned home, back to the drab Nile Delta
region where Mr Morsi was raised in poverty, and began their slow, worthy
ascent to prominence.
But, even as Mr Morsi capped those 35 years of hard slog by being sworn in on
Saturday as Egypt’s first democratically elected and first Muslim
Brotherhood president, this path of endeavour has divided the people over
whom he must rule.
They were offered engagement with the outside world, and conspicuously refused
to take it – so how can they now represent Egypt on the international stage?
The divisions in Egyptian society are deep, and the margin of victory of 52 to
48 per cent in the battle between the secular and military forces
represented by Ahmed Shafiq and Mr Morsi’s Brotherhood last week show how
much must be done to unite a troubled society.
Mr Morsi was a deliberately non-confrontational choice for the Brotherhood –
he became known as the “spare tyre” after he replaced the more
charismatic and forceful Khairat al-Shater, a long-term former political
prisoner, as their man.
But even his pious blandness raises hackles in an extrovert society; while the
more characterful Mrs Mahmoud – Egyptian women use their own name – is in
the eyes of many modern Egyptians, particularly liberal young women, even
worse.
For them her whole persona, her lack of education, her “khimar” –
the all in one headscarf and cloak beloved of working and lower middle class
housewives – and her avowed dislike of her new prominence are an affront to
a century of gains for Egyptian women in schooling, careers and social life.
“She does NOT represent me in any way!” said Sarah Ebeid, a young
woman whose avatar sports defiantly free-flowing hair on Twitter, the
favoured social medium for the young elite in Egypt.
Such messages have flooded internet noticeboards, with an equal powerful
response of “But how can you say that – she looks just like my mother!”
from those wishing to defend the new First Lady.
Not that she allows herself to be called that.
“Who said that the president’s wife is the first lady anyway?” she
said in an interview last week.
She said that – again in keeping with a tradition much sneered at by more
modern types – she would prefer to continue to be known as “Umm
Ahmed” – Mother of Ahmed, her firstborn son.
For Mr Morsi, 60, and Mrs Mahmoud, 50, it has been a long and surprising path
to the presidential palace.
He was brought up on a small farm allotted his father by the first Egyptian
revolution in 1952, and she in a poor Cairo suburb.
Devout and particularly devoted to his mother, his brothers told The Sunday
Telegraph from their hometown in the Delta this week, he was a model
pupil, told his friends to study the Koran and work rather than to play
cards, and won a place at Cairo University.
“He was a Brother before he joined the Brotherhood,” his sibling,
Al-Said, said.
Mr Morsi’s life changed when he won a place to study at the University of
Southern California in inner-city Los Angeles from 1978 to 1982. Hers
changed too. First cousins, they were formally betrothed before he left,
even though she was only 16 – a classic way, many who have trodden the path
say, for religious families to help their sons resist the temptations of
American society.
Sometimes it works, and that certainly seems to have been the case for the
Morsis.
According to those who remember his seven years there – he went on to teach
for three years as an assistant professor at California State University
Northridge in the San Fernando Valley.
While young California danced or immersed itself in political causes he prayed
five times a day, observed the fasting month of Ramadan and foreswore
alcohol.
But nor did he grow a beard, sporting only a moustache that was the style of
the time, and was never heard to complain about Western social mores, unlike
some more outspoken Muslim students.
“He was an affable hard-working young man, a typical graduate student who
was certainly conservative but also social and certainly did not espouse
radical politics,” said Farghalli Mohamed, an academic at USC who first
met him in 1978 when he moved to Los Angeles.
Dr Mohamed befriended the then solo new arrival, who sometimes visited his
family at their home for meals and joined trips local attractions such as
the Magic Mountain amusement park.
Mr Morsi’s new wife arrived two years later. At the time, her husband was
living in student dormitory accommodation close to USC’s urban campus in an
area known as South Central that was long-plagued by gang violence.
“It was an elite private school, but the neighbourhood was pretty rough
and we knew not to walk on the streets at night,” said Dr Mohamed.
Mrs Mahmoud took a job helping at a hostel for Muslim students and translating
religious texts for American women interested in converting to Islam.
The couple’s mutually reinforcing religiosity has been a key factor in their
rise to power, as both admit: he calls his marriage his “greatest
achievement” while she has described how when he nervously told her he
had been invited to join the Brotherhood, she supported him enthusiastically.
Mrs Mahmoud enjoyed life in California and would have been happy not to leave,
she said recently, but her husband wanted their family to be raised in
Egypt. It is typical of his life – he does not seem to have expressed an
anti-American feelings at this stage – but he was more comfortable at home,
and he returned to a teaching position at Zagazig University in the Nile
delta in 1985.
He has been there ever since, mixing his teaching duties with a growing
prominence in the Brotherhood. Mrs Mahmoud stayed at home, bringing up their
children all of whom save the youngest, who is still at high school, have
gone on to university.
It has been an anonymous life by choice, and that has left many analysts,
diplomats and even those who know them asking for the real Mr Morsi please
stand up.
“He is Mr Average,” said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent Egyptian
writer and professor of politics, who first met Mr Morsi when both were
detained in Torah Prison in southern Cairo – one of two occasions when Mr
Morsi’s Brotherhood membership was held against him by the old regime.
Mr Morsi was part of the senior cadre of Brotherhood leaders in Block Three of
the jail, an immaculately kept enclosure with a well-maintained exterior and
even freshly plants flower beds – a tribute to the organisation of the
Brotherhood rather than to the efforts of prison staff.
Brotherhood members would exercise, pray, and take lectures, Mr Ibrahim said,
and had their own football team. They were also helped by being well-funded
from outside.
Mr Morsi was a senior figure in the strictly hierarchical Brotherhood, but he
was not a natural leader, Mr Ibrahim said.
“He struck me as decent, quiet, but not much of a leader.
“Whenever I met with them as a group there was always an order in which
they spoke, and in the way they sat around.”
Mr Morsi, then as now in the hierarchy, was not number one. That position went
to Khairat al-Shater, a man who differed from Mr Morsi in many respects –
not least his forceful charisma and drive. Mr Shater was the undisputed
Brotherhood spokesman in the prison, with the right to address the governor
in person over its concerns.
Mr Morsi – along with Mr Shater and other Brotherhood leaders – has been
meeting western diplomats, including the British, since 2003, holding
dialogues at the Swiss diplomatic club.
But Mr Morsi has remained ambiguous, punctuating speeches with fierce
criticisms of American imperialism and in particular of Israel.
On Friday, Mr Morsi told crowds thronging Tahrir Square that he would campaign
to free Omar Abdel-Rahmann, the “blind sheikh” jailed in the
United States for his role in planning the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings.
“If he was a fundamentalist, he was a private fundamentalist,” said
one academic who knew him at the time.
Perhaps the answer does really lie in the figure of his wife.
She may be different from her predecessors – Suzanne Mubarak, the half-British
wife of ex-President Hosni, dressed glamorously, loved publicity, and
espoused worthy causes while not relaxing at their Sharm el-Sheikh holiday
home – but she has, in an expression she would never use, “kept
her man real”.
Mr Morsi can now cook, says his wife, and at least helps clear the dishes. In
return, she says that her own life was suitable for women of 30 years ago
like her – but not for modern women, who even if devout need to get out and
earn a living. Her own daughter took a science degree at her father’s
university.
There was a touching moment on Monday morning, when the farmer’s son president
took his slum-born wife to the Presidential Palace, to show her around. He
showed every sign of thrilling to his new home; she less so. She found it
impersonal, she said in her interview this week.
“All I want,” she said, “is to live in a simple place where I
can perform my duties as a wife.”
Everything has changed in Egypt, and as with everything else, no one knows
whether that promise can be kept.
* Additional reporting by Jeff Maysh and Catherine Elsworth in Los
Angeles
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