Muslim Brotherhood opens new headquarters in Egypt after 60 years

Sunday, May 22, 2011

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has opened its new headquarters in Cairo after 60 years of being banned, in a ceremony attended by officials from a Turkish Islamist party.

Felicity Party, or SP, deputy leader Hasan Bitmez and board member Oğuzhan Asiltürk were among the political figures from Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Somalia and Turkey that attended the opening ceremony in the Moqattam area along with Egyptian intellectuals.

“For 60 years we were considered an illegal group, we were raided and arrested by the police all the time, but now we have our headquarters legally and we even put the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood onto the chairs,” one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr. Ashraf Abdel Ghaffar, told the Hürriyet Daily News on Sunday.

Bitmez said the Muslim Brotherhood will play an important role in the future of Egypt, the Anatolia news agency reported. His colleague Asiltürk said it was very good that the Muslim Brotherhood now has a headquarters in Cairo after such a long time.

The chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr. Mohamed Badie, who presided over the opening of the headquarters, said the group’s aim was “to have a civilian government with a reference to Islam.”

Dr. Abdel Ghaffar said the Muslim Brotherhood now had offices in 26 cities and aimed to have one in every city in Egypt.

Founded by the schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in the Suez Canal town of Ismailia in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was one of the first and most successful movements advocating Islam as a political program in a modern context.

Within 20 years the movement grew to more than 500,000 members, with several branch movements in other Arab countries.

The Egyptian government banned the Brotherhood in 1954 after accusing it of trying to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a charge the group has always denied.

The movement had been using an apartment as its “communication center” until former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was toppled in January.

Source: Hürriyet.
Link: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=muslim-brotherhood-opens-its-new-headquarters-after-60-years-2011-05-22.