Mamoun el-Hodeiby, 83; Led Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood

Mamoun el-Hodeiby, leader of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood opposition group, has died. He was 83.

Officials of the fundamentalist group in Cairo said El-Hodeiby, who led the group for the last 14 months, died of natural causes late Thursday.

El-Hodeiby was the sixth “general guide” of the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates turning Egypt into a strict Islamic state and has been outlawed for 50 years. He was the son of its second leader, Hassan el-Hodeiby, who ran the group from 1951 until his death in 1973.

Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood picked their eldest member, Mohammed Hilal, 83, to be interim leader until elections are held in six months.

While once known for violence, the group says it now seeks change through peaceful means within the political process, and some of its members have been elected to Parliament as independents.

On Friday, 25,000 followers, closely watched by police, paid their final respects before El-Hodeiby’s burial in his hometown of Shibin el-Qanatir, 25 miles north of Cairo.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. It has grown into a vast movement with tens of thousands of supporters and branches in many other Arab nations.

The Brotherhood was outlawed in Egypt in 1954 and remains banned, although it officially renounced violence in the 1970s.

El-Hodeiby was jailed in 1965 until the late President Anwar Sadat pardoned political prisoners in 1971. El-Hodeiby was then allowed to retain his government job as a leading judge of Cairo’s Appeals Court.

El-Hodeiby served as the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy leader and spokesman in the 1980s, then was chosen as leader in November 2002 following the death of Mustafa Mashhour.