The problem with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is not sharia. Secularism is not my cause and sharia is not my fear but I am one of those Egyptians who are critical of the Muslim Brotherhood movement – one who made a point of not voting for the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party in the recent elections.
My cause is Egypt, the revolution, and seeing my country become a true democracy. My fear is the prolongation of military rule, of transformation to a system that gives the military special status above civil institutions, or one that grants the army and its budget immunity against parliamentary accountability. Khairat al-Shater. The Muslim Brotherhood - reading. Histories of a City: the many hands that shaped today's Cairo. One of Jean-Léon Gérôme's most famous Orientalist paintings, Prayer on the Rooftops of Cairo, is backwards.
The men in the scene are facing north in prayer, not south-east towards Mecca. Under the shadow of two Mamluk minarets with the mosque of Mohammed Ali in the distance, perched atop the Citadel, the Cairenes on the canvas pray just after sunset, with a sliver of the moon in the sky. It's an idyllic, invented scene that Gérôme, one of the most accomplished Orientalists of his day, painted in his studio in France, embellishing it to suit his viewers' desire for the exotic. Its inaccuracy was beside the point. "Islam" and "Democracy" in the Arab World. White Men Converting to Islam BBC Inside Out Jan 2011.flv.