As the fountainhead of global Islamic terrorism, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has long had a public-relations problem. For years the Brotherhood has struggled to veil its reputation as a violent and reactionary religious movement without moderating the substance of its politics, which continue to include support for terror attacks and the institution of hard-line Sharia law. At the University of California at Irvine (UCI), the Brotherhood has now found an audience receptive to its efforts.
This Wednesday, four separate UCI programs – including the department of history; the Center for Research on International and Global Studies at UCI’s School of Social Sciences; the school’s Middle East Studies Student Initiative and its Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies – will host Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, a young member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the leader of its new generation of self-styled “moderate Islamist” activists. Still in his twenties, the Cairo-based Houdaiby has a long lineage in the Brotherhood: His grandfather was Hassan el-Houdaiby, a prominent Brotherhood ideologist. Houdaiby has carried on the family tradition, writing a column for the Brotherhood’s official English-language website, IkhwaWeb.com, and generally trying to arouse foreign sympathy for a movement still regarded as dangerous in the West.
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10:15 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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