Will they repeat the group’s creed? “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
(CNN) — Sondos Asem has butterflies, formulating answers to questions she expects to be asked and practicing her diction with the devotion of a high school debate champion. The gentle 24-year-old graduate student at the American University in Cairo is in a hotel room in downtown New York, figuring out what to wear on national television. (“This blazer would look good, right?” “Should I wear more color?”)
Like many young Egyptians, she’s been tweeting the fallout after the 2011 uprising that brought down former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The stakes are higher than 140-character dispatches might suggest. Asem has emerged as an unlikely unofficial spokeswoman for the Muslim Brotherhood, helping to run its English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb, and in turn revamp the group’s image in the West.
This week, Asem and five members of the Brotherhood are in New York as part of the group’s first delegation in the United States, the face the Brotherhood thinks perhaps would be well received in the West. Asem is part of a worldly, urban generation. She shops at Egypt’s flashy mega-malls. She brushes her eyelids with a modest dash of sparkly eye shadow and wears designer head-scarves. She has an affinity for cosmopolitan cities and uses American teen parlance like “You rock” and “Yeaaah, girl.” She seems very unlike the kind of person who has historically been loyal to the Brotherhood.
Founded in Egypt in 1928, the group is the oldest and largest Islamist movement in the world. It has affiliates and branches throughout the region and adherents in Europe and the United States. Mostly made up of middle-class doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, the Brotherhood has sought a more traditional Islamic society by building extensive networks and social services across the country, often filling in gaps left by the neglect of sclerotic, corrupt regimes.
The delegation that Asem is part of is meeting with Pulitzer-prize-winning journalists and the editorial boards of prestigious papers. The Council on Foreign Relations is hosting them in New York for a talk and they’re meeting with the Carnegie Endowment and the Brookings Institution in Washington, with a lot of coffee-talk in between. The goal: to alleviate the fears of a still-suspicious American establishment.