The Other Revolution in Egypt: An Interview With Mohammed Abbas of the Muslim Brotherhood

At present, the Narco News Advance Team is in the Mexican Southeast, preparing our coverage of the upcoming second stage of the Caravan of Solace and the movement against the drug war inspired by Javier Sicilia. From September 8 to 18 we’ll be accompanying Sicilia and other family members of drug war victims and martyrs through the states of Morelos, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, crossing the border into Guatemala – where Sicilia tells Narco News he plans to offer an apology to the people of Central America for the maltreatment of their immigrants in Mexican territory – then through

Zapatista territory, and the states of Tabasco, Veracruz, Puebla, the state of Mexico and, finally, in Mexico City. These are lands from where we’ve reported extensively for the past 14 years (11 of them via Narco News) and we can report to you already that there is a palpable excitement among many of the movements in the Mexican South for this upcoming visit, including yesterday’s communiqué from Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos reiterating “total support” for Sicilia and the movement (a statement that ought to be humbling to some who have accomplished far less yet who behave as more-radical-than-thou armchair critics of the world’s first ever mass movement to end the war on drugs).

How many news stories, essays, videos and other reports have you seen about the Egyptian Revolution that “began,” according to many breathless reports, on January 25 of this year and culminated in the February 11 resignation of the three-decade dictator Hosni Mubarak? And how many of those reports spoke in fearsome terms about an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood as if it were some monolithic force aspiring to impose an Iran-style theocracy on the country?

Especially while the revolution was going through those key moments, so many pundits warned that if Mubarak were to be removed then the Muslim Brotherhood would take over and bring something even worse. But when School of Authentic Journalism professor Greg Berger and I traveled to Cairo a month after Mubarak was driven from power, and teamed up there with Joe Rizk and other new friends and colleagues to interview, on video, the young people who helped organize that revolution, we gained a completely different perspective on the Muslim Brotherhood, in good part thanks to meeting Mohammad Abbas, the 26-year-old organizer who emerged from that organization and who narrates this video, above, part II in our series on The Daily Life of Egypt’s Revolution.

(If you missed Part I, narrated, in English, by Aalam Wassef, you’ll want to see that, too: Especially if you are a video or media maker, journalist or blogger with dreams of reporting or inspiring fundamental change in your own land: Egypt: How We Did It When the Media Would Not. In addition to everything else it teaches, Part I serves as an excellent guide to how to make your videos or media “go viral” and speak with far more people than you might otherwise reach. For example, if you are putting videos or blog entries online and only getting a few hundred viewers, you’re doing something wrong; Aalam explains how, in Egypt, it was done right.) …more