Little Known Muslim Brotherhood

It is said that the Moslem Brotherhood is playing down its religious message for the meantime, in the midst a popular Arab revolt that is theoretically not motivated by either Islam or politics.

The organization announced its support for opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mohamed El Baradei, a secularist with Western democratic principles, as a transitional president, if the Mubarak government was removed.

A movement member, Esam Shosha, said "The revolution does not belong to any one group. We are one country. It's not just about the Brotherhood, at least not now; it's about all Egyptians."

An analyst at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, Wahid Abdul Magid, said "They don't want to appear as if they're using this revolt to seize power. What they want is free and fair elections to allow them to take power transparently."

The aim of the Muslim Brotherhood is to infiltrate and overtake other Muslim organizations for the sake of uniting all Muslims to the general goals of the brotherhood, which is the world's oldest and largest Islamic political group and most influential Islamist movement.

When compared with many of the world's more militant Muslim organizations, the beliefs of the Brotherhood are restrained. It rejects however, the thought that a woman, or a Christian could become president of a Muslim country and would push the nation's laws toward more stringent Islamic codes. It would definitely ban alcohol, as well as the topless beaches at the resort of Sharm el Sheik, in Egypt. The organization also bans dancing and other such pastimes.

The Brotherhood was formed in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna, the Islamic scholar and Sufi schoolteacher, who believed in reclaiming Islam's manifest destiny, an empire stretching from Spain to Indonesia.

The organization's aim being to make the Quarn and Sunnah as the 'sole reference point for ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual and community and state'. In general the organization opposes violence to achieve its goals, though division has been created inside the organization, through its stand on no violence.

The Muslim Brotherhood was banned in Egypt, with members being arrested, in spite of the membership being kept a secret. The Egyptian government accused the group of a campaign of killings in Egypt after World War II, as the organization strongly opposed Western colonialism. The brotherhood was involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and assisted in the overthrow of secular Ba'athist dictators in Syria.

Al Qaeda has criticized the brotherhood and accused them of 'betraying the cause of Islam and abandoning the 'jihad' in favour of forming political parties and supporting modern state institutions'.

While studying at university, Osama bin Laden claimed he was influenced by the religious and political beliefs of many professors, who had strong connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.