Though the current upheavals in the Middle East were not initiated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist parties in Egypt, as in Tunisia and Libya, have been the chief beneficiaries of the collapse of long-standing authoritarian repressive regimes across North Africa. In Egypt itself, the two largest Islamist groups, the Brotherhood and the Salafists, won about three-quarters of the ballots in the second round of legislative elections held in December 2011, while the secular and the liberal forces took a battering.

The Brotherhood, an organization founded by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan el Banna back in 1928, has never deviated from its founder’s central axiom: