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The Muslim sisterhood was set up as a chapter of the Ikhwan, as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic, a few years after the founding of the movement in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. A pious schoolteacher who believed that adhering to Islam in every aspect of life was the path to defeating colonialism and overcoming social injustice, he created what would become the world’s most important Islamic movement. Though the Brotherhood once had a military wing (one of its later ideologues, Sayyid Qutb, inspired jihadi ideology), it evolved into a movement that rejects violence and argues – some say unconvincingly – that democracy can be compatible with its ideal of an Islamic state.

Muslim sisters prepare to hand out leaflets on the streets of El Taba, one of Cairo’s poorer neighbourhoods

The sisters tell me that everything they do, whether helping people in need, teaching Islam or campaigning for office, is in the service of God. I met a group of young sisters who are part of a new Brotherhood-backed student organisation on the leafy campus of Cairo’s Ain Shams university. They were huddled on a bench listening to 21-year-old Aya Mustafa reading and explaining a Koranic verse about loyalty. “Ikhlas [loyalty] means to do something for god and not ask for praise in return or for monetary compensation,” says Mustafa.

She explains that the new organisation, Nour, assists students with religious education and university life, launching campaigns for better accommodation and more security on campus. Before the revolution she used to distribute leaflets about Islam and food parcels during Ramadan, but would be harassed by security guards who accused her of wanting to overthrow the Mubarak government. “Egypt was destroyed by Mubarak and, while the men have the biggest burden, we have to help. I felt the weight of responsibility to join Freedom and Justice now that we can have parties because, for us, Islam cannot be disassociated from politics.” When Mustafa mentions that Nour is organising a conference about women leaders, I ask her for examples of such figures. “People like Oprah [Winfrey], for example, but there are also many in Islamic history who even participated in wars and were teachers to some men.” We also talk about love and relationships, and the limits on Islamist girls. They tell me Islamic teachings make them feel precious. “A woman is a very special thing in Islam, her body and her heart is for one man only, it is not a commodity. So we need to protect ourselves,” says Mustafa.

The older sisters are for the most part educated, middle-class women who wear their hijab conservatively, letting it hang down their shoulders over loose clothing. They are taught not to wear make-up or jewellery that might attract the attention of men other than their husbands, and nor do they pluck their eyebrows, something they say is forbidden by a saying of the prophet.

“The goal of each [sister] is to learn about Islam because it can change her life and improve it and then share and clarify that to people,” says Oumayma Kamel, the most senior woman in the Ikhwan, and an adviser to the president. “So you learn the texts and you practise them and spread them and this takes time and training, it’s very applied.”

Being part of the Ikhwan is an all-encompassing project – “it is who you are, how you are brought up and how you identify with others,” as Asem puts it. The building block of the organisation is the usra. The word means family in Arabic but in this context it refers to a group of Brotherhood members of similar ages, often from the same neighbourhood, who form a unit that meets every week to study religious texts, and organises outings and charitable activities on a regular basis. The Brotherhood also runs religious and social programmes for every age, starting with toddlers and moving on to teenagers, with the girls being prepared for their roles as wives and mothers. For adults too, members of an usra help each other, with jobs or financial support.

If your child is misbehaving or your marriage is in trouble, the Brotherhood can come to the rescue. The political party, which is now taking on some of the movement’s mainstream activities, also offers Irshad Osari, or family guidance. I attended a session in which women were being trained as family (and marriage) counsellors to be stationed in FJP offices across the country. The instructor prods the women to express their feelings – one rambles on about how she stares at the Nile and feels the water washing away her troubles and another tells of how she knew from an early age that she had the gift of solving other people’s problems. The instructor is trying to focus women on the fact that they have abilities and masses of energy that should be channelled for the benefit of others. “What’s important is not to rest but to feel satisfied,” Ghada Hashad, the organiser of the meeting, tells them. “You are all special because you have so much energy.”

In its early days, the sisterhood was made up of the wives and female relatives of members. It acted as a quiet addition to the Ikhwan until repression took the men away, leaving the women to carry the flame. Although scholars of the Brotherhood have written about several women leaders, the one that stands out is Zaynab al-Ghazali. She was the strong-minded, charismatic activist who was a central figure after the assassination of al-Banna in 1949, when she held secret meetings to reorganise the movement and helped the families of those arrested. She too would be detained in 1965 and tortured. Ghazali documented her experience in the jails of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late Egyptian president who had turned ferociously against the Brotherhood, in her book Return of the Pharaoh.

Hassan al-Banna. Founder in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Banna believed it would help to defeat colonialism

Ghazali is held up as an inspiration to sisters of all generations. Azza al-Gharf, a 48-year-old member of parliament for the Brotherhood, studied under Ghazali and became attached to her, taking up the preaching and charity work that has made her one of the most high-profile sisters. Gharf told me that Ghazali had picked her husband, another Brotherhood member, whom Gharf married when she was 18 before they both went to university. Gharf’s own work has been in getting women involved in grassroots activities, including educating others. “Instead of sitting in front of the television, women should engage in social work,” she says.

It was during the Nasser years that the sisters, who still had freedom of movement, became more active. “When the sisters’ branch was first created, the role of the woman was still in the home, she raised the children and she was the biggest support for her husband. But when the men were repressed, when they were away, and the families had financial strains, the women helped, they could still interact with society, still go to charities and to mosques,” explains Amal Abdelkarim, who heads the FJP women’s section in the governorate of Giza.

The 1970s were kinder to the sisterhood, as Nasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, eased the pressure on the Brotherhood, and political activism flourished at the universities. “Sadat was opening up a bit and politics were thriving at the universities. That’s when I joined – the Muslim Brotherhood seemed closer to my views because it taught that Islam was a way of life,” says Jihan al-Halafawi, a prominent sister who recently suspended her membership in the Brotherhood after her husband, one of the group’s leaders, clashed with other senior figures.

©Kube Publishing Ltd

Zaynab al-Ghazali. A key Brotherhood activist following the assassination of alBanna, Ghazali was imprisoned and tortured in the 1960s

Halafawi made history in 2000 in Alexandria as the first female Brotherhood candidate for parliament. Sadat had been assassinated in 1981 and Hosni Mubarak was president. His attitude towards the banned Brotherhood oscillated between tolerance and repression. “When I ran, the world was turned upside down, within the Brotherhood but also within the regime,” recalls Halafawi, a small 60-year-old woman whose shy appearance belies her fiery spirit. We are in her cluttered Cairo apartment, and she sits with her arms crossed. “It was a big crisis for the regime, which was saying that the Brotherhood was a backward organisation.” The regime conspired to deny her a victory even though she received the highest number of votes in her district. But she nonetheless set the Brotherhood on a new course. “A step had been taken and the Muslim Brotherhood could not go back. It opened up to women candidates.”

Halafawi is among the sisters who have been asking for official positions for women in the Brotherhood – something which she says has become possible since the revolution. She tells me that some women are demanding representation in the guidance bureau, the highest structure in the organisation, under the supreme guide.

It was not until last year’s parliamentary vote, however, that candidates associated with the Brotherhood reached parliament, with four women elected in December (the assembly has since been dissolved). But while the sisters acknowledge that most women in the Brotherhood still vote for male candidates, they have proved their value as activists in campaigns and in mobilising the female vote. “When men saw what we could accomplish in elections, they started to change the way they look at us,” says 35-year-old Nermeen Hassan, a professor at Cairo University’s medical school. “I remember how in 2005, in the first rally by women during an election campaign, the men were giving us instructions all the time, telling us not to lose our temper, not to appear too emotional. But then they were impressed – the sisters carried their children with them and marched, and we were clever in how we dealt with the street, we didn’t even disrupt traffic.”

Fatma al-Zomor, the hyperactive assistant head of the teachers union, is known for her campaigning skills. She came from a modest family consisting mostly of loyalists to the Mubarak regime but joined the Brotherhood at 17, after benefiting from the free after-school lessons they provided in her village (the tutoring ranged from mathematics to the Koran). “I read the letters of Hassan al-Banna and other books and I believed in their principles,” she says. She would later run a Brotherhood-backed charity that distributed food in poor neighbourhoods and start two charities on her own, sending monthly stipends to 150 families. The charities were shut down when the authorities discovered who was behind them. She now teaches Arabic and Islamic studies and only told her students she was from the Muslim Brotherhood after the revolution. So she had numerous people to call on when the movement decided to put up Mohamed Morsi for president. “We can work under any pressure,” she says.

The limelight, however, is not always favourable for the Muslim sisters. As the cause of women emerges as the main battleground between liberals and Islamists in new democracies in the Middle East, some of the most prominent sisters are seen as an integral part of a sinister Brotherhood plot to Islamise the state and undermine women’s rights. At a time when liberals are seeking to limit the encroachment of Islamic law on a new constitution, a stream of accusations have depicted the Muslim sisters as supporters of lifting the ban on genital mutilation and of lowering the marriage age for girls from the current 18.

The sisters insist that neither they nor the party intend to change the marriage age or the anti-genital mutilation laws, whatever the constitution says. But some acknowledge that ambiguous statements from Brotherhood officials, both men and women, have muddied the debate and left the movement vulnerable to liberals’ accusations.

drafting the new constitution, at a demonstration in support of the protection of women’s rights" align=bottom width=250 height=375 border=0>©Giulia Marchi

Liberal activist Manal Tibe, who resigned from the panel drafting the new constitution, at a demonstration in support of the protection of women’s rights

Many liberal women, however, consider the sisters and their ability to influence mainstream society as a bigger threat than the Brotherhood men. “I can’t claim to understand them 100 per cent but I think they have undergone some kind of brainwashing,” says Hoda Badran, chairwoman of the Alliance for Arab Women, a liberal women’s group.

I hear more dread at a Cairo demonstration where liberal women are protesting against a constitution drafting process that is overwhelmingly influenced by the Brotherhood. “What scares me is that the sisters are all about obedience and loyalty – the commands come from high above and they just follow,” says Zeynab Abdel Rahman, a 40-year-old veiled woman who runs a charity and supports a liberal party. “If the Brotherhood writes the constitution, they will rule according to their sharia.”

To be sure, the Muslim sisters live in a peculiar world, with the strict interpretations of Islam leaving them with convictions that seem at odds with fast-changing modernity. For decades, they have been cocooned in a society that sustained itself by looking inwards and guarding its secrets – Brotherhood families have often intermarried, for example. Although there is much debate within the movement, once a decision is taken by the guidance bureau, such as the move to field a presidential candidate, which the Brotherhood had promised Egyptians it would not do, discussion ends.

The sisters argue that respect for leadership decisions is one of the greatest assets of their movement. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s biggest strength is that they have very dedicated young people ready to implement the democratic decisions even though they might not agree with some of them. That’s why we win elections,” says Asem.

Oumayma Kamel, the senior sister who sits on the panel drafting the constitution and who has been at the receiving end of much criticism, says that the liberals are zeroing in on issues that are simply not priorities. What about women’s education and the fight against illiteracy, she asks, which is still rampant in rural Egypt? What about the struggle against poverty in a country where nearly half the population is impoverished? “Is it equality or equity? That’s the issue. What the liberals care about is women’s freedom. But women’s condition won’t improve without education,” she tells me. “Men and women have the same rights and responsibilities but I know that there are differences between men and women, it’s biological. Being a mother is a woman’s most important job, it’s fundamental, and so we speak of the protection of motherhood and child and the liberals don’t like it.”

In reality, however, some sisters admit that the Brotherhood has never given much thought to women’s rights. A patriarchal organisation, it has also left issues that are important to women to be decided by the men. Nor has there been much pressure for a rethinking of positions because Egyptian society is, in any case, largely conservative. A woman need not be in the Brotherhood to be warned by her parents against confrontation at home and told to seek the counsel of her husband.

Within the sisterhood, however, you can glean a diversity of views, with some of the younger sisters seemingly more attuned to women’s rights, and more empowered by last year’s revolution. With time and greater political participation perhaps their voices will be better heard.

“The waters are stirring and we have started to think about what we know about women’s rights,” says Nermeen Hassan, the medical professor. She teaches a course to other sisters about preparing for marriage. In the past, the course instructed the girls to look nice and not pester their husbands. “Now there is no longer language that says you should be obedient but more emphasis on complementing each other and that there should be no power struggle between men and women,” she explains. “We also talk about housework and say that sharia does not oblige a woman to do it, that men and women should discuss it and if no agreement is reached, then the man must provide a servant.”

Not quite a revolution yet – nor would such recommendations benefit poorer families – but, as Hassan says, it is all part of a “natural” evolution in the Brotherhood. One, however, that is not fast enough or radical enough for nonIslamists.

Roula Khalaf is the FT’s Middle East editor

Supercomputers - Speed within reach at affordable prices

By Jessica Twentyman December 2, 2008 3:58 pm Financial Times

This has been a milestone year in supercomputing. These high-performance machines, engineered to cope with the most mathematically intensive tasks, have hit new heights of power and performance, while becoming more widely available to businesses.

Twice yearly, in June and November, the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world are ranked by Top500.org, a group of supercomputing experts from the Universities of Mannheim and Tennessee and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In June, IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer, based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, became the first machine to achieve the long-coveted goal of breaking the “petaflop” barrier, processing more than one million billion calculations per second.

In November, Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also passed that milestone. In the most recent rankings, Roadrunner and Jaguar notched up performances of 1.105 petaflops and 1.059 petaflops, respectively.

These are giant leaps. “When I started out in the supercomputer industry 25 years ago, we were all talking about the megaflop barrier – millions of operations per second,” says Margaret “Peg” Williams, senior vice-president of engineering at Cray, an established supplier in the field. “These days, that’s just dull and we’ve broken the gigaflop and teraflop barriers along the way to today’s petaflop performance.”

Today, even the cheapest PC runs at gigaflop rates yet it is only 11 years since the US government spent about $33m to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve one teraflop.

The rate of progress equates to a 1,000-fold increase in processing power roughly every 10 years, says Dave Turek, vice president of IBM’s Deep Computing group, and that in turn has led to “enhanced fidelity”, or more refined analysis, in terms of output.

“We’re now getting to the point where a supercomputer isn’t just used to model the behaviour of a single component in a jet engine, for example, but whole collections of components, working together in an integrated system.

“Or we can model different processes on a much smaller or larger scale, from the effect of a new drug on a disease at a molecular level, to the impact of human behaviour on climate change over hundreds of years. And we can perform these tasks far faster, too.”

This ability, he says, is largely down to parallel processing – breaking a large computing task into logical components and processing them simultaneously on a vast pool of multiple processors.

The more chips added to a machine, the quicker they can process large tasks, as long as the application is engineered to run in parallel, rather than sequentially.

Since parallel processing became available to commercial organisations in the early 1990s, the line has blurred between traditional supercomputing, geared to solving complex scientific problems, and high performance computing (HPC), which aims to deliver bulk processing power.

Indeed IDC, the consultancy, has redefined its supercomputer category to include HPC systems costing more than $500,000.

Sales of such systems, it estimates, grew by 24 per cent in 2007, to reach $3.2bn.

But as the technology takes on an increasingly important role in industry and government, as well as academic research, it is increasingly the low end of the market, for HPC systems costing less than $250,000, that is the real engine of growth.

The road to such growth began in the 1990s, when high-end computing systems started using standard components in place of proprietary technology.

“Twenty years ago, a supercomputer was built from exotic components that made it blindingly fast and blindingly expensive as well,” says John Barr, an analyst with the 451 Group, an industry research company.

Today’s supercomputers, he says, use commodity chipsets from Intel and AMD and interconnect technologies based on the widely used Ethernet and Infiniband standards. Prices have dropped and smaller organisations are now able to take advantage of the processing power.

Arguably the most striking example of this came in September with the announcement of a partnership between Cray and Microsoft, which has made rapid advances in the sector with its HPC Server operating system.

The two companies launched the Cray CX1, touted as ”the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered”, with prices starting at $25,000.

Vince Mendillo, director of HPC for Microsoft, says the CX1 is aimed at organisations in industries such as life sciences and financial services that are exploring supercomputing and do not have the in-house expertise or resources to run a fully fledged supercomputer.

The partners also hope to lure scientists, and researchers with discretionary IT budgets, to use the system to run workloads locally, creating ”supercomputing on the desktop”, rather than on huge, centralised machines.

A similar model is offered by chip maker Nvidia, which in November announced a “Personal Supercomputer” design, that will enable other manufacturers to build high-performance computers that look like traditional workstations.

Already, a number of PC vendors, including Dell and Lenovo, have signed up to offer workstations based on this design, at prices starting below $10,000, according to Andy Keane, general manager of GPU computing at Nvidia.

These machines, he says, will enable researchers to conduct at least some of their research at their desks.

“Now, researchers tend to write the code on a standard notebook and then take it to the supercomputer in order to deploy it,” he says.

Carrying out research at a workstation will reduce the time it takes to work on problems and crunch data, he adds.

The growing availability of HPC capabilities, however, raises questions about environmental impact: they consume enormous amounts of energy.

Mr Turek of IBM points out: “Energy efficiency has become as important as raw performance for the modern supercomputer. Now, it’s all about how much computing you can get out of each megawatt consumed.”

New York subway devastated by storm

By Robert Wright in New York Last updated: October 30, 2012 3:52 pm Financial Times

New York City’s subway system faces the most devastating disaster in its 108-year history after the storm surge from post-tropical storm Sandy flooded seven of its 10 tunnels under the East River, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chief executive has said.

There was also severe damage to other commuter transport infrastructure, including flooding to a Long Island Railroad tunnel under the East River, flooding on a Path train tunnel under the Hudson and flooding to the Brooklyn-Battery road tunnel.

Although Joseph Lhota, the MTA’s chief executive, declined to put a date on when service would be fully restored, it looks likely to be weeks before service on key commuter routes returns fully to normal.

“The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night,” Mr Lhota said. “Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on our entire transportation system in every borough and county of the region. It has brought down trees, ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots.”

New York’s public transport networks appear to have suffered some of the most severe damage in the region affected by Monday night’s storm, the largest in decades to hit the US’s eastern seaboard. New Jersey transit services remained suspended on Tuesday and Chris Christie, the state’s governor, said all routes had suffered “major damage”. All large New York area airports – including JFK, Newark and La Guardia – also remained closed.

However, the Washington Metro, the US’s second-busiest mass transit system, was able to announce plans for a partial restoration of service from 2pm on Tuesday.

It is likely to be the damage to New York City’s underwater rail tunnels that takes longest to rectify. Mr Lhota told New York’s WNYC public radio that he would be unable until later in the day on Tuesday even to estimate how long restoration of service in the affected tunnels would take. However, in a report following last year’s Hurricane Irene, Klaus Jacob, a professor at Columbia University, told WNYC that a “best-case scenario” for reopening a flooded subway tunnel would take 29 days.

Mr Lhota told WNYC he was going to try to get the subway running again “as quickly as I possibly can”. But the challenge was likely to be not only that the tunnels had been inundated but that the flooding had involved saltwater entering delicate electrical systems.

“Water and electricity never mix properly, but when you add salt to it, once the water is gone, the salt leaves a film,” Mr Lhota said. “The way electronics work on the subway system is two pieces of metal running together conducting electricity. And if there’s anything in between those two pieces of metal – like film left over from salt – that needs to be cleaned off because the connections need to be clear.”

Mr Lhota stressed, nevertheless, that the subway system was flexible and that it would be possible to reroute some services. Two of the system’s East River crossings are by bridges, which appear to have suffered little damage.

On other key commuter services, Mr Lhota said the Long Island Rail Road yards by Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, as well as its East River tunnels and much of the network in suburban Long Island, had all been flooded. Tracks on the Metro North railroad connecting Westchester County and Connecticut to New York City had suffered damage from “hundreds” of trees on the track, he said.

On non-MTA services, the Path service – operated by the New York New Jersey Port Authority and linking New York City and parts of New Jersey – remained suspended. There were pictures of water flooding into the foundations of new buildings at the site of the World Trade Center, which connect to a Path train station, and reports that Path’s tunnel under the Hudson by the site was flooded.

China is making rapid advances in technology, but without reform in the education system and a culture tolerant of failure, it won't produce the next Steve Jobs, says technology entrepreneur Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with the BBC, as part of a series of features on challenges for China's new leaders.

What was the technology scene like in China when you went there in the late 1990s?

In 1998 I returned to China to work for Microsoft and start up technology research labs. Young Chinese people I met while in the US showed a lot of potential and were very hungry for success, very hard-working. I felt with my experience that I could help them realise their potential as well as to do great things for my employer.

How much has it changed since then?

In the late 1990s business leadership was lacking. Companies were being built, but leaders did not have enough experience to run them. Industries were much smaller and it felt like a backward country.

Fourteen years on, we see a very vibrant economy with powerful and successful companies led by leaders with experience. At that time, many companies were about pure manufacturing and now there are quite a few in the hi-tech sector. They are not in the forefront of the world, but they are capable companies with decent technology portfolios.

What capacity does China have to develop a truly creative technology industry?

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  Kai-Fu Lee is a Chinese-American technology entrepreneur
  
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  He is currently the CEO of China-based Innovation Works, a venture capital firm for Chinese technology start-ups
  
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  In 1998 he went to China to set up Microsoft Research Labs.
  
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  In 2005 he became founding president of Google China and stayed as its chief there until 2009
  

Companies like Apple and Google are innovative from their very roots, built to change the world and with people willing to take big risks. The US has a culture tolerant of failure, driven by individual passion. Companies are not started to make money or make the founders a billionaire, but to build great technology.

China is in a state where entrepreneurs' major desire is to gain influence and wealth. It is still in a place where Chinese companies are understanding user needs and filling them rather than understanding user needs that users can't even articulate.

Before China gets to that level of innovation, it has to overcome a lot of issues that are cultural and about education, where there is emphasis on discipline and obedience. Silicon Valley, on the other hand is innovative, passionate, rebellious and fearless. Because of such differences, it will be difficult to produce a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg in China.

Can there be true innovation when society and politics is so top-down? What about censorship?

Innovation is a key part of the current as well as the next five-year plan so the government will have the opportunity to put resources into venture capital incubation, universities and research.

But there are some questions: you cannot force or decree innovation out of funding or planning. I think the current five-year plans will drive China to South Korea's level but it will probably fall short of reaching the true innovation that people like Jobs and Zuckerburg pioneered.

Censorship is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it limits what people can do but it also creates an environment where many American companies cannot or choose not to enter, thus reducing competition - so the market is open to local players.