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Mashhour: The Obituary
Mustafa Mashhour, the leader of Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood who spent more than 20 years in jail, died Thursday. He was 81. He will be missed. Not very much, but he will be missed. Mashhour joined the Brotherhood at the young age of 17 in 1938. After obtaining a science degree in 1943, he worked for the Meteorological Department. He was arrested in 1948 and detained for three years for his involvement in what was known at the time as the "jeep case" - the seizure by police of a jeepload of firearms allegedly belonging to the Brotherhood. "He had a wholesome Islamic youth..." After President Gamal Abdel-Nasser's rise to power, Mashhour was detained for 10 years, regaining his freedom in 1964. But he was re-arrested in the same year and kept behind bars, without a trial, for six more years and was only released after Nasser's death in 1970. Would that Pakland would do the same with its Islamic loons! But don't worry. In a few years the U.S. will be doing similar things. If they don't, a few years after that our children will be bowing down to Mecca five times a day. He devoted himself to preaching the Islamist ideology from 1977, rising to become the group's deputy supreme guide in the early 1980s. He has written 17 books, including The Qualifications of a Preacher, which was banned by Al-Azhar. By al-Azhar? The university that's a hotbed of Islamist nutbaggery? Mashhour became the leader of Brotherhood in 1996 and helped the movement gain influence by forging alliances with legal parties. In the 2000 legislative elections, Brotherhood-backed candidates won 17 out of 454 seats, becoming the largest opposition bloc in a parliament dominated by the ruling National Democratic Party. G He's the new potentate-in-waiting... In 1997, Mashhour caused an uproar when he was quoted in an interview as saying that Egypt's minority Christian Copts should not serve in the armed forces, and that their loyalty could be questioned if Egypt were attacked "by a Christian country." He also said Copts should pay the "jizyah" â the tax imposed in the early stage of Islam on non-Muslims living in Islamic countries. After a public outcry, Mashhour denied making the comments. "Nope. Nope. Not what I said. I was misquoted. What I really said was, uh... something else... Ah, hell! What's the use of being a Muslim if you can't oppress somebody?" Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-11-15 |
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