Critics of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak are expressing concerns that he appears to be positioning his son, Gamal, to take over as president. Such a move, were it to occur, would surely provoke a massive backlash among Egypt’s populace, which is already deeply disenchanted with Mubarak’s overlong and overbearing reign.
Ayman Nour, an Egyptian politician imprisoned by Mubarak last year, published an article in April criticizing Mubarak for steps he is taking to secure his son’s presidential succession, and forecasting additional steps he expects to be taken in the coming year. That article prompted Egyptian authorities to ban Nour from writing anything more.
Though Nour has been silenced, other critics are spreading his message. Mohammed Habib, deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Brotherhood—the hard-core Islamic group that managed to secure a six-fold increase in its number of parliamentary seats in Egypt’s last election despite the government’s strong-arm tactics to squash it—says the same thing: that Gamal will likely take over for his ailing father within a year.
The public protests that swept Egypt last year, with multitudes storming the streets chanting the slogan “Enough!” to the Mubarak regime—as well as the clear public support for the radical policies of the Muslim Brotherhood, which contrast starkly with those of the secularist Mubarak—suggest that, if the trend toward democracy sweeping the Middle East is to prevail, the days of a Mubarak presidency are numbered. Any move by the elder Mubarak to shoehorn his son into office would surely turn up the volume on the public’s cry of “Enough!” and could even turn to violence.
Egypt is clearly trending toward radicalism. As discontent with present politics increases, we can expect to see Islamists continue to grow in popularity. The Trumpet views their eventual assumption of power in Cairo as an inevitability. That political change, followed by a cementing of ties between Egypt and the dominant Islamic power in the region, Iran, is strongly implied in biblical prophecy. As editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote a decade ago in The King of the South: “Daniel 11:42 implies that Egypt will be allied with the king of the south, or Iran. This prophecy indicates that there would be a far-reaching change in Egyptian politics!” A Gamal Mubarak presidency wouldn’t represent a far-reaching change—to the contrary, it could very well provoke it.