““So effective has their propaganda been that an American official was moved to describe the Brotherhood as “a loose network of secular groups.”27 This kind of ignorance in the West about Egypt presents the Brotherhood with a tremendous opportunity for media manipulation. Scratch the surface, however, and you find a detailed political platform published in 2006. The president cannot be a woman because the post’s religious and military duties “conflict with her nature, social and other humanitarian roles.” A board of Muslim clerics would oversee the government. The freedom of association guaranteed civil organizations in the West would, in an Islamist Egypt, also be conditional, once again on their adherence to the strictures of Islamic law. Egypt would have a shura (consultative assembly) system, whereby a body of compliant old men nod through whatever the leader, who is assured “veneration,” sees fit, while a Supreme Guide presides benevolently over the personal morality of the masses.28 In Saudi Arabia and Iran, that system exists now.””
