But this week the Brotherhood sent its first official delegation to Washington, meeting with high level administration officials. The visit was part of a global goodwill tour to soften the group’s image and introduce its political faction, the Freedom and Justice Party, which emerged from the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak to capture nearly half the seats in Egypt’s new parliament. “We are here to start building bridges of understanding with the United States," Sondos Asem, a member of the party's foreign relations committee and editor of its official English-language website, told students at Georgetown University. "We acknowledge the very important role of the United States in the world and we would like our relations with the United States to be better than before."
The delegation also joined Islamist parties from Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco at a conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that addressed the rise of Islamists into mainstream politics after revolutions across the Arab world swept secular, Western-backed dictators from power. Dressed in suits, speaking English and delivering PowerPoint presentations, the delegation presented a kinder, gentler face of the Brotherhood, in an effort to counter long-held assumptions by Americans of the movement. Several held doctorate degrees from American universities.
At every turn, the group went to great lengths to portray the Brotherhood as a moderate and socially conscious movement which represents all Egyptians and believes in a pluralistic society with the separation of religion and the state. "The principles are universal: freedom, human rights, justice for all. This is the priority of the Freedom and Justice Party," said Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, a member of EgyptÂ’s parliament from Luxor, who earned his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. But U.S. officials are wondering how representative the delegation, and the moderate values they espoused during their visit, are of the conservative BrotherhoodÂ’s true beliefs.
While the Obama administration has reached out to the Brotherhood since it swept to power in parliamentary elections last year, officials have expressed serious concerns, echoed by Egypt’s secularists, that the Islamist group would impose Islamic laws, which could threaten the rights of women and religious minorities such as Coptic Christians. Although the Freedom and Justice Party represents the more pragmatic wing of the movement, it is finding itself at odds with the more fundamentalist al-Nour party, whose Salafist interpretation of Islam won a quarter of votes in last year's parliamentary elections. The Brotherhood, one U.S. official noted has a history of evolving over time and is “now redefining itself,” which raises the question “do they really know themselves, who they are today?”
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