Osama morsi

MOHAMED MORSI’S FATHER wasn’t wealthy, but he was unusually determined that his eldest son receive an education beyond the family’s wheat, rice, and cotton fields. According to Alhadi Mohammed, a French teacher and neighbor, Morsi was one of a select few children who were sent to the secondary school in the village of Hehya, outside Al Adwa. When winter rain turned the roads to mud, Morsi’s father packed him on a mule each morning so the boy wouldn’t soil his clothes. “Our father was not educated, but he wanted it for his children,” Said Morsi, Mohamed’s younger brother, told me as we sat together beside the family farm, water buffalo guzzling from a trough behind us. And yet his father’s commitment to secular education in no way diminished his piety. Similarly, Morsi would excel in science at school while remaining a committed Muslim.

This was a delicate balance that the Egyptian state never mastered. At the time of Morsi’s birth in 1951, Egypt was a Westernbacked monarchy under the rule of King Farouk I. But the country’s most potent political force was the Muslim Brotherhood,

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