AMONG THE MUSLIM BROTHERS

Cairo

Two months after Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, Egyptian politics are a dervish of confused agitation. Each day, it seems, a new party forms to fill liberal, Nasserist, Marxist, Islamist and other niches. A joke has it that 10% of Egyptians plan to run for president.

“All Egyptians now think they are Che Guevara, Castro or something,” says Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, bursting into laughter. “This is democracy.”

Amid this political ferment, the Brotherhood is an exception: a well-funded, organized and established force. Founded in 1928, it’s also the grandaddy of the Mideast’s political Islamist movements. The Brotherhood was banned from politics 57 years ago and focused on business, charity and social ventures. But the secretive fraternity always aspired to power.

Now free elections due later this year offer the Brotherhood their best opportunity. The group says it believes in “Islamic democracy,” but what does that really mean? I spent a week with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it turns out the answers are far from monolithic, though often far from reassuring.

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Shortly before midnight on Monday, Mohamed Baltagi walks into his office in a middle-class Cairo apartment block and apologizes for the late hour. Brotherhood leaders are all over the place these days—on popular evening chat shows, at public conferences, setting up their new Freedom and Justice Party, or advising the military regime on the interim constitution. The revolution made Dr. Baltagi, an ear-nose-and-throat specialist, a prominent face of what might be called the Brotherhood’s progressive wing.

Dr. Baltagi, who is 47, led the group’s informal 88-strong caucus in Egypt’s parliament during a limited democratic experiment from 2005-10. He wears a moustache and gray business suit and expresses regret that U.S. diplomats shunned him and other Brothers during their time in parliament. The Brotherhood’s green flag—with the group’s motto “Islam is the solution”—sits on his desk next to the Egyptian tricolor. While the most senior Brotherhood leadership sat out the first few days of anti-Mubarak protests, Dr. Baltagi was in Tahrir Square from the start of the 18-day uprising. He was the only Brother on the 10-member revolutionary steering committee. “It’s not a revolution of the Muslim Brotherhood, or of the Islamists,” he says. “It’s the revolution of all Egyptians.”

Unprompted, Dr. Baltagi brings up the charge that Islamists prefer “one man, one vote, one time.” “As far as I know,” he says, Islamists in Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere were victims, not perpetrators, of repression. Iran’s theocracy, to him and every other Brother I spoke to, is a Shiite apostasy irrelevant to Sunni Muslim countries. The Muslim Brothers recently lost elections for student union posts at state-run Cairo University, which the group dominated in the past. “We accepted that,” he says. “We accept democracy.”

He says the revolution will change the Brotherhood. For the first time, his organization considers its goal in Egypt the establishment of a civic not a religious state, as close to “secular” as an Islamist group might come in words. After some internal wrangling, the Brothers said they could live with an elected Christian woman as president of Egypt—a merely symbolic concession since the odds of that happening are less than zero.

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The new environment has already exposed internal tensions. Any push for transparency runs against six decades of cloak-and-dagger Brotherhood habits. “We will be working openly in front of everyone,” says Dr. Baltagi, “talking openly about our members, programs, fund raising.”

So how many Brotherhood members are there? He gives a nervous, almost apologetic smile and says, “for now that is a secret.” He offers little more on funding beyond that members tithe and include generous businessmen.

Its conservative culture jars the younger, tech-savvy Brothers. The leadership announced that all members must support the new Freedom and Justice Party, angering especially the youth wing of the group.

A week ago Friday, the Brotherhood didn’t call out its supporters to join other anti-Mubarak groups in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the “January 25th Revolution.” Islam Lotfi, a 33-year-old lawyer, was one of numerous “young Brothers” who went anyway. The tensions inside the Brotherhood, he says, “are very normal. It is a gap between generations.”

Mr. Lotfi has a smoothly shaved, round face and works closely with youth activists across the spectrum. “We want wider opportunities to work inside” the hierarchical Brotherhood, he adds. “It’s not accepted by a culture that doesn’t believe in young people.” Two-thirds of Egypt’s 80 million people are under the age of 30.

Abdel Moneim Aboul Fatouh, a leader of the Brotherhood’s middle generation, last week refused to fall in line behind Freedom and Justice, instead backing another religious-leaning party. He wants to bring the discontented younger Brothers with him. Dr. El-Erian, a physician who sits on the group’s 15-member ruling Guidance Bureau, waves off the defection. “In Israel you have many religious parties,” he says. “You can have many Islamist parties [that] can cohere together and make alliances” in a future parliament.

The Brotherhood has seen splits before, with no serious consequences. Fifteen years ago, Abou Elela Mady, then the youngest member of its Shura Council, left to found the Wasat (or Center) Party. He says the Brotherhood’s new, tolerant positions are nothing more than “tactical” moves to reassure anxious Egyptians, the military and the West.

Mr. Mady, whose party will compete with the Brothers for the large conservative and poor chunk of the electorate, says he wouldn’t form a coalition with them. The Mubarak regime called Wasat a Trojan Horse for Islamists. He likens his group to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party.

Mr. Mady, who is 53, fits the profile of many current and former Brothers. Born into a lower-class family, he did well in school and got an engineering degree. He joined the Brotherhood in the late 1970s through the university unions. The Brotherhood seeks out ambitious outcasts—a sort of geeky fraternity for those who study hard and feel awkward around girls.

He left the party, he says, because “I wanted to be more open-minded. . . . I now can watch TV, listen to music and shake a woman’s hand without feeling you were doing something wrong. Most members frown on it,” he says. “The challenge of freedom for the Muslim Brotherhood is much more difficult than the challenge of an authoritarian regime. . . . They have to give concrete answers to difficult questions” about Egypt’s future political and economic course.

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Then there are Egypt’s adherents of Salafist Islam, which in its most extreme version is practiced by Osama bin Laden. After last Friday’s demonstrations, Salim Ghazor takes me to a large gathering in a lower-class Cairo neighborhood. A line of buses has brought the faithful from across Egypt to the Amr Ibn El-Aas mosque. Lit by a faint moon, bearded men in billowing gellabiyas walk past women in black niqabs into Egypt’s oldest mosque. “Islam is the religion and the country,” reads a sign.

The Muslim Brothers, who favor Western clothes and neatly trimmed facial hair, have clashed with the traditional Salafists, who looked down on political activity until the revolution. Mr. Ghazor, a teacher, once backed the Brotherhood but went over to the Salafists. “The Brothers care about politics more than the application of Islam,” he says. Yet Brothers tend to practice the Salafist brand of Islam—raising the possibility that their movement could become Salaficized.

Here’s a sampling. At the prayer meeting, the Salafist cleric Ahmed Farid calls out: “Those who refuse to abide by Islamic law will suffer and be damned.” Another, Said Abdul Razim, gives advice for the Coptic Christian minority, about 10% of Egypt’s population: “If they want peace and security, they should surrender to the will of Islamic Shariah.”

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On Sunday, I drive to Alexandria, the famed Mediterranean port, to meet the Brotherhood’s rising star. Sobhi Saleh, 58, is a former parliamentarian and lawyer whom the military picked for the committee that drafted a raft of amendments to the interim constitution. No other anti-Mubarak political group was represented on the body. In the next parliament, Mr. Saleh would likely help draft a permanent new constitution. “People will be surprised how open-minded we will be,” he promises.

Mr. Saleh rehearses the Brotherhood’s plans to “purify laws” and “implement Shariah” in Egypt. It wouldn’t, he says, be of the Taliban variety. Alcohol would be banned in public spaces. Women would be required to wear the hijab headscarf, but not the full-bodied niqab. These laws are intended to “protect our feelings as an Islamic society,” he says.

As for the rights of Coptic Christians, he says that “Muslims have to protect Copts”—a patronizing view held by many Islamists. (Dr. Baltagi, by contrast, had offered that Copts are “fellow citizens.”)

Having been a left-wing nationalist in his youth, Mr. Saleh waves away complaints about the Brotherhood’s possible dominance over political life. “I do not care about the opinions of secularists who are against their own religion,” he says. “If they were real liberals they should accept others and their right to express themselves.”

But aren’t the Brothers proposing to limit their right to self-expression? “We would ban activities in the public square, not in private space. Islam is against spreading unethical behavior and this is the difference between Islamic democracy and Western democracy. In Islam, everything that is against religion is banned in public. You”—meaning the West—”selectively ban behavior. We are only against those who are against religion and try to diminish it.” This view seems to allow limited tolerance of dissenting opinions or minority rights.

The Brotherhood abandoned violence against Egypt’s government in the 1970s, but it endorses Hamas and other armed Islamic movements. Every Brotherhood member I spoke to calls the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Camp David accords existing international law that a future government might reopen. Egypt’s liberals say the same.

“Israel treats us as enemies,” says Mr. Saleh. “If they are enemies for all its neighbors, why is it there?” Should Israel exist? “When they admit our peoples’ rights,” he says, referring to Palestinians, “we can study this.”

The appeal of the Brotherhood remains hard to gauge, with no proper polls, few parties or elections in living memory. The group’s candidates took 20% in a partially contested parliamentary poll in 2005, and it aims to win a third of seats this year.

The Brothers won’t field a presidential candidate, a savvy move to soothe nerves and avoid governing responsibility. They can wait. Anyway, the military seems to prefer an establishment figure like Amr Moussa, the recent chief of the Arab League. The secular parties are immature, numerous and elitist—not the best recipe for electoral success.

“No one needs to be afraid of us,” says Dr. El-Erian. “We need now five years of national consensus of reform, to boost the new democratic system, and then have open political competition.” How seriously one chooses to take such reassurances depends on whether the Brotherhood ends up as just another political party in a freer Egypt or stays a religiously-driven cause.

“Skeptical optimism” is a phrase often heard in Egypt these days. Religion wasn’t the galvanizing force in Egypt’s revolution, and the Brotherhood’s 83-year-old brand of political Islam looks its age compared to ideas of modernity and freedom that excited the crowds in Tahrir Square. You don’t find the fervency of religious extremism here as in, say, Pakistan. If the generals today or a future regime allow space for pluralism to flourish, Egypt could build on its weak foundations and accommodate a changed Muslim Brotherhood. That assumes, not altogether safely, that the worst instincts of would-be authoritarians in military, clerical or Brother garb are kept in check, and the Arab world’s most important democratic transition stays on track.

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A13