Cairo Moving More Aggressively To Cripple Muslim Brotherhood

Mohammed Habib, the Brotherhood's deputy supreme guide, said that by offering an alternative, peaceful outlet for political Islam, "We have protected Egypt from waves of violence that possibly would have attracted thousands of young people."

Despite the ban, the Brotherhood has provided clinics, youth camps and other services that have won the organization support among the poor and provided a civic model for the armed Islamic movements Hezbollah and Hamas. The Brotherhood draws support among Egypt's middle class through its strong presence in technical and professional unions.

Brotherhood members are divided on how to react to the crackdown. In the Brotherhood's headquarters in a nondescript neighborhood of Cairo, Habib said he counseled calm.

"We don't want to be provoked, as plainly the government wants to do," said Habib. Like most Brotherhood leaders, Habib presented the avuncular demeanor, clean-shaven face and Western attire of a middle-age engineer or doctor. Short-sleeve shirts with plastic pocket protectors are popular among the Brotherhood.

"We do not function by an action and reaction policy," Habib said.

But some younger members are chafing. "The group remains silent and eventually we get rounded up," said Abdel Monem Mahmoud, a 27-year-old blogger.

Mahmoud courted his own arrest in August by publishing the name of a security official who Mahmoud alleges tortured him during his imprisonment in 2003 on a charge of belonging to the Brotherhood. "Silence does not stop the arrests," Mahmoud said. "We have to expose them because they are unfair and unjust, they are a bunch of thieves. Our long silence led to what we are facing today."

The government is also writing its crackdown into law. Constitutional changes pushed through by the government after the Brotherhood's strong showing in 2005 shut out its members in upper house elections this June. Next year, the government promises to present a new anti-terrorism code that the Brotherhood expects to be used for further crackdowns against it.

The administration's moves are "designed to basically institutionalize the campaign against the Brotherhood and make sure it will not be allowed to either compete with the ruling party or threaten Mubarak's new successor," said Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

Mubarak's age makes the matter urgent. Rumors that the Egyptian leader was dying or dead swept the country in recent months, forcing him to leave his Mediterranean villa for impromptu televised tours of a factory and office park.

Egyptians cite U.S. pressure in 2005 as the stimulus for a short-lived flourishing of democratic opposition. That year, President Bush challenged Egypt in his State of the Union address "to show the way toward democracy in the Middle East." Since making peace with Israel in 1979, Egypt has been the No. 2 recipient of U.S. foreign aid.

Mubarak allowed other candidates to challenge his 2005 reelection bid. Egypt's fragmented secular opposition groups made tentative alliances with one another, and with the Brotherhood.

By 2006, with Hamas's victory in Palestinian elections leading U.S. officials to have second thoughts about democracy in the Middle East, and the U.S. military presence in Iraq growing ever more troubled, American priorities in the Middle East shifted again, from promoting democracy to maintaining allies.

That year, Egypt picked off the secular opposition through arrests and intimidation. Ayman Nour, who came in a distant second to Mubarak in the 2005 presidential election, was sentenced to five years in prison on what supporters said were trumped-up charges of forging signatures on campaign documents. The third-place finisher in the race also was jailed but released.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egypt's best-known democracy advocate, went into exile this summer, saying he feared arrest after urging Bush to tie the more than $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt to the release of Nour and to democratic reforms.

The government is concentrating now on the Brotherhood, and on civil society.

Last month a judge ordered a year's hard labor for the editors of four leading opposition newspapers, saying they had made the ruling party, Mubarak and his son Gamal appear dictatorial. A judge last Monday ordered three more opposition journalists imprisoned for two years on grounds that their coverage had impugned Egypt's justice system.

One of the editors, whose newspaper reported on the pervasive but unproven rumors about Mubarak's ill health, is to stand trial in criminal court on Monday. The government last month also closed an Egyptian human rights organization that had been active in exposing allegations of police torture. This spring, it shut a labor organization involved in what rights groups said has been the biggest wave of strikes in Egypt in a half-century.

Egypt's leaders "feel that democratization means that they will leave their chairs and leave their positions, and they are not able to pay this cost," said Hafez Abu Seada Abu Se'da, of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.

Habib denied that the Brotherhood had any desire to lead the country after Mubarak. "Presidential candidacy is not on our agenda," he said.

But at the height of the arrests in August, Habib allowed himself to relish the suggestion that Mubarak's age meant Egypt would soon face a succession. "Maybe months!" Habib said, and laughed.

Special correspondent Nora Younis contributed to this report.