For the first time, the Muslim Brotherhood has released a draft document outlining a detailed political platform. The blueprint reveals the radical nature of the group and its goal of establishing an Islamic state in Egypt reminiscent of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s highly popular though officially banned Islamic fundamentalist group, has transformed its image in recent years from known terrorist organization to legitimate political group. It has increasingly presented itself as a reform movement. Secular pro-democracy advocates had held hopes that in the process the group would become more moderate.

However, the hard-line draft political platform released last month, the Brotherhood’s most concrete policy paper to date, dashes those hopes. Not only does it forbid Christians and women from holding the presidential office, but it also establishes a board of Muslim clerics to oversee the government.

“It establishes a religious state,” said Abdel Moneim Said, head of the leading Al Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies. “It’s an assassination to the civic state.”

“The proposed commission recalls the system in Iran, where clerical councils have final say on a wide range of political issues and can even vet candidates running for president and parliament,” the Associated Press reported (October 11).

Though the Brotherhood has been banned from government since 1954, it has gained a strong foothold in parliament by fielding its members as independents. In 2005 elections, Brotherhood members captured a fifth of parliamentary seats.

Just as democracy has facilitated the rise of Hamas, Hezbollah and other organizations rooted in terrorism, so has it opened doors for the Muslim Brotherhood. Domestic dissatisfaction with the autocratic rule of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, together with a general push by the United States for democratic reform in the Middle East, has enabled Muslim Brotherhood members to become the largest opposition group in Egyptian politics.

Bahy Eldin Hassan, head of the Cairo Center for Human Rights, said the new platform shows the Brotherhood has added “vocabularies of democracy and human rights [to their rhetoric]. But the content remains the same as the old generations.”

Still, as discontent with the political system in Egypt increases, the Islamists are increasingly being seen as a favorable alternative. This, together with Mubarak’s ailing health, means Egypt is being primed for political upheaval.

As the Brotherhood grows more powerful, watch for it to seek to align Cairo more closely with Tehran, a prospect that is in line with end-time biblical prophecies.