The Weekend Interview With Khairat Al Shater: The Brother Who Would Run Egypt. Why Khairat al-Shater is running. Too clever by half? I have no particularly privileged insight into the inner decision-making of the Muslim Brotherhood, other than meeting with its leaders, including Khairat al-Shater, on a regular basis and seeing rank-and-file and former members quite often too. As someone who has followed the group for almost a decade now, I don't think the answer to why they decided to run Shater now lies mostly within the organization and its logic.
It has to do with the political environment and developments in Egypt's transition in the last few months, and especially the fact that this ill-thought out transition (for which the Brothers deserve a good part of the blame) is coming apart as it reaches its end with the presidential election and the drafting of the new constitution. I talk about that in my latest column for The National. Shater's candidacy is something that has been envisaged for six months at least — since the beginning of the end of the entente cordiale between the MB and SCAF. Profile: Egypt's Khairat al-Shater - Middle East. Khairat al-Shater, who was nominated on Saturday by Egypt's powerful Muslim Brotherhood to stand for president, is the group's key financier and its long-time chief whip. Described in some Arab media as the Muslim Brotherhood's "hawk" or "enforcer", the 61-year-old professor of engineering will be a candidate in the first presidential election in the country since a popular uprising ousted veteran leader Hosni Mubarak in February last year.
Born on May 4, 1950, in the Nile Delta province of Daqahliya, Shater earned an engineering degree from Alexandria University and a master's in engineering from Mansura University. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1981, after years as a student activist, and was promoted to its executive bureau, known as the Guidance Council, in 1995.
"The success of the Muslim Brotherhood should not frighten anybody: we respect the rights of all religious and political groups," he wrote. Party influence. Khairai al-Shater. Khairat Al-Shater: Fulfilling Egyptian Revolution’s Demands Top Muslim Brotherhood Priority. Khairat Al-Shater, deputy chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), reiterated that the Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the MB’s political arm, rank fulfilling the revolution’s demands as their top priority in post-Mubarak Egypt. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, published in its Friday edition, Al-Shater said that "The FJP puts on top of its priorities meeting the demands of the revolution, clearing all state institutions of the former president’s cronies, and the renewal of the executive committees, as well as restructuring of the Ministry of Interior and the police, which were the main authorities suppressing the Egyptian people before and during the Revolution".
"At the political level, the transitional phase should come to an end. The first step has been taken, in the shape of elections of the People's Assembly (PA). Furthermore, Shura Council elections are to be held in the next few days. The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers. All revolutionaries want their stories told to the world, and no one has conveyed the hopes and dreams of Egyptians more vividly than Alaa Al Aswany. The dentist turned author rose to fame with his 2002 novel, The Yacoubian Building, which charted Egypt's cultural upheaval and gradual dilapidation since throwing off its colonial shackles. Aswany used his prominence to help found the Kefaya political movement, which first articulated the demands that would energize the youth in Tahrir Square: an end to corruption, a rejection of hereditary rule, and the establishment of a true democratic culture.
For his political activism, Aswany was blacklisted by Egypt's state-owned publishing houses, and security officials harassed the owner of the cafe where he met with young writers. How times change. Aswany was a fixture in Tahrir Square during Egypt's uprising -- he was almost killed three times, he said, during the running battles between demonstrators and pro-Mubarak thugs. John Ritter. Muslim Brotherhood Leader Rises as Egypt’s Decisive Voice.