Egypt: Ramadan Television and the Muslim Brotherhood · Global Voices
Tarek Amr

Eyad Nassar playing Hassan El Banna's role in El Gamaa. Image taken from Lokmet Eish blog
If we are to list the main characteristics of the Holy Month of Ramadan in Egypt and in the Arab World, they are – other than fasting and praying – oriental desserts, soap operas and TV series. And this year the Egyptian TV decided to produce a series about the opposition party Al Ikwan Al Muslemeen (The Muslim Brotherhood), who are also referred to by the Egyptian regime as El Gamaa El Mahzoura or the Illegal Group. The TV series, which is called El Gamaa, tries to shed light on the history of group and it's founder Hassan El Banna; however it was criticised by many bloggers that it reflects nothing but the regime's point of view.
Tarek Shalaby compared the series to Nazi propaganda:
Hussein Ossman criticized El Gamaa here, claiming its writer is biased to the regime and to the the state security intelligence's point of view:
Raafatology also criticized the writer of El Gamaa and described him as a police-writer:
Other bloggers, who also found it biased, believed that the series – unintentionally – did Al-Ikwan a big favour.
Maggie Osama and Nawara Negm, for example, said that the Jordanian actor playing Hassan El Banna's role is handsome enough to let people like El Banna and his group instead of hating them.
And Nawara wrote in her blog how the ones responsible for the casting of this series have shot themselves in the foot:
And another user on Twitter posted a link showing how the series raised people's interest in learning more about Al-Ikhwan's founder as the increase of searches on Google show:
This graph shows the increase of number of searches for Al-Ikhwan founder Hassan El-Banna
Ibrahim Mohamed, on the other hand, liked the series, and wrote in his blog “Hanany” how he found the script and information offered satisfying:
The series is also attracting attention outside Egypt. Lebanese Naeema tweeted:
And finally, Abdel Monem Mahmoud wrote in his blog (Ana Ikhwan), about the other series that Ikwan were going to produce themselves, but about a year and a half has already gone and it hasn't seen light yet: