The Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Egyptian Islamist opposition group is plagued by rifts between young and old, reformist and hard-liner, and between big city deal-making politicians, and conservative rural preachers. Charles Levinson explains. 
 
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 CAIRO—Moaz Abdel Karim, an affable 29-year-old who was among a handful of young activists who plotted the recent protests here, is the newest face of the Muslim Brotherhood. His political views on women's rights, religious freedom and political pluralism mesh with Western democratic values. He is focused on the fight for democracy and human rights in Egypt. 
 
 A different face of the Brotherhood is that of Mohamed Badi, 66-year-old veterinarian from the Brotherhood's conservative wing who has been the group's Supreme Guide since last January. He recently pledged the Brotherhood would "continue to raise the banner of jihad" against the Jews, which he called the group's "first and foremost enemies." He has railed against American imperialism, and calls for the establishment of an Islamic state. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Guy Martin for the Wall Street Journal Activist Moaz Abdel Karim in Cairo 
 
 After Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on Friday amid the region's most dramatic grassroots uprising since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Brotherhood became poised to assume a growing role in the country's political life. The question for many is: Which Brotherhood? 
 
 It was Mr. Karim and his younger, more tolerant cohorts who played a key role organizing the protests that began on Jan. 25 and ultimately unseated a 29-year president. But it's the more conservative, anti-Western old guard that still make up by far the bulk of the group's leadership. 
 
 Mr. Badi, the current leader, wrote an article in September on the group's website in which he said of the U.S. that "a nation that does not champion moral and human values cannot lead humanity, and its wealth will not avail it once Allah has had His say." 
 
 He wrote in that same article that "resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it... We say to our brothers the mujahideen in Gaza: be patient, persist in [your jihad], and know that Allah is with you..." 
 
 On Monday, meanwhile, Mr. Karim stood shoulder to shoulder at a press conference with youth leaders from half a dozen mostly secular movements, to lay out their vision for how Egypt's transition to democracy should proceed and to praise the Army for cooperating. Their top demand: a unity government that includes a broad swath of opposition forces. 
 
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 The Brotherhood, whose leaders Mr. Karim butted heads with in recent weeks, put out a similar message on Saturday calling for free and fair elections. Seeking to allay fears that it would make a power grab, the Brotherhood also said it wouldn't run a candidate in presidential elections or seek a majority in parliament. 
 
 Both Egyptians and outsiders, however, remain wary. They are unsure about how the group will ultimately harness any newfound political gains and whether its more-moderate wing will, in fact, have lasting clout. 
 
 "It's never entirely clear with the Brothers," says Josh Stacher, a political science professor at Kent State University who spent years in Egypt studying the organization. "It's a big group, with lots of different points of view. You can find the guy always screaming about Israel and then you got the other guys who don't care about Israel because they're too busy worrying about raising literacy rates." 
 
 Israel, which shares a long and porous border with Egypt, fears that if a moderate wing of the Brotherhood exists—and many in Israel's leadership are skeptical that it does—it could be shoved aside by more extreme factions within the group. 
 
 The Brotherhood's conservative wing has for years put out anti-Israel comments and writings, and helped fund Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. It has also spoken out in support of attacks against U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
 
 "If the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, through elections or some other way, that would be a repeat of 1979 in Iran," when moderate governments installed after the shah gave way to the ayatollahs, says a senior Israeli official. "It's something we're looking at with great caution." 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Associated Press Mohamed Badi, from the Brotherhood's conservative wing, pledged the group would 'continue to raise the banner of jihad' against the Jews. 
 
 The U.S. appears to be taking a wait-and-see approach, with officials saying in recent days it should be given a chance. President Barack Obama, in an interview with Fox News, acknowledged the group's anti-American strains, but said it didn't enjoy majority support in Egypt and should be included in the political process. "It's important for us not to say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people," he said. 
 
 The outlawed Islamist opposition group is plagued by rifts between young and old, reformist and hard-liner. There are big city deal-making politicians, and conservative rural preachers who eschew politics in favor of proselytizing Islam. 
 
 Egypt's government has long highlighted the group's hard-line wing as a threat to the country. Yet its selective crackdowns have historically empowered the very hard-liners it has sought to undermine, analysts and Brotherhood members say. 
 
 The conservative leadership's autocratic leadership style within the movement, its lack of tolerance for dissenting opinions and its preference to conduct business behind closed doors have all contributed to deep skepticism among outsiders about the Brotherhood leadership's stated commitment to democracy. 
 
 In recent years, meanwhile, the group's pragmatic wing has forged a historic alliance with secular opposition activists. Their role in the unseating of Mr. Mubarak appears to have given them a boost in a struggle for influence with the Brotherhood's fiery old guard. 
 
 "The Muslim Brotherhood as a whole doesn't deserve credit for this revolution, but certain factions within the movement absolutely do, generally those that have more modern views," says Essam Sultan, a former member of the group who left in the 1990s to form the moderate Islamist Wasat, or Centrist, Party. "That wing should get a massive bounce out of this." 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Guy Martin for the Wall Street Journal Muslim Brotherhood youth leader Moaz Abdel Karim helped organize demonstrations against Mr. Mubarak. 
 
 Whether that bounce will be enough to propel the more-moderate Brothers to a permanent position of influence—or what their legislative agenda would actually be—is one of the key unknowns in Egypt's political evolution. 
 
 In many ways, this faction resembles conservative right-of-center politicians elsewhere in the Arab world. They espouse a view of Islam as a part of Egyptian heritage and argue that democracy and pluralism are central Islamic values. They are pious and socially conservative, and reject the strict secularism that is a feature of most Western concepts of liberal democracy. 
 
 On Wednesday, when it was still unclear whether Mr. Mubarak would step down, Essam el-Eryan, one of the only reformists currently on the group's 12-member ruling Guidance Council, said in a statement that the group didn't seek the establishment of an Islamic state; believed in full equality for women and Christians; and wouldn't attempt to abrogate the Camp David peace treaty with Israel—all tenets espoused by Brotherhood leaders over the decades. Mr. el-Eryan said those Brothers who had suggested otherwise in their writings and public comments in recent days and years had been misunderstood or weren't speaking for the organization. 
 
 Founded in the Suez Canal town of Ismailiya in 1928 by a 22-year-old school teacher, the organization used violence to battle the British occupation in the 1940s. 
 
 The group allied with some young officers to overthrow the king in 1952 and bring Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, only to become implicated in an assassination attempt on Nasser two years later. He responded with a fierce crackdown, sending the group's leadership to prison for years, and its membership ranks into exile. 
 
 The Muslim Brotherhood abandoned violence in the years that followed, formally renouncing it as a domestic strategy in 1972. But some of its offspring have taken a bloodier path. Some former members established the group responsible for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat in 1981, and others have allied with Al Qaeda. 
 
 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, an older generation of leftist and Islamist student activists battled each other violently on college campuses. Egypt's opposition grew increasingly ineffective, partially as a result of those rifts. 
 
 "We saw three successive generations of Brotherhood leaders fail to bring change, and we learned from their mistakes," says Mr. Karim, one of the leaders of the group's youth wing. 
 
 Brotherhood and secular leaders say the seeds of the cooperation that drove this year's protests were planted in the early 2000s when Israel's crackdown on the second Palestinian uprising and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq brought secularists and Islamists alike into the streets to protest a common cause. 
 
 Then, in 2005, the Brotherhood struck a key victory in the parliamentary elections, winning an all-time high of 88 seats. Though officially banned, the organization is tolerated and allowed to put up candidates as independents. 
 
 Many of the Brotherhood lawmakers were pragmatists compared to the hard-line members of the group who preferred to stay out of politics. They were more open to working with other groups to forge compromises, and won plaudits from secular opposition leaders by focusing their legislative efforts on fighting an extension of the country's emergency law. 
 
 They also stood up for the independence of the judiciary and pushed for press freedoms, and didn't work to ban books or impose Islamic dress on women—moves many critics had feared. 
 
 "In the past, Muslim Brothers in parliament sometimes made noise about racy books or the Ms. Egypt beauty pageant, and it made a lot of us uncomfortable," says Osama Ghazali Harb, head of the National Democratic Front, a secular opposition party. "They didn't do this in the last five years." 
 
 The regime responded to the Brothers' newfound parliamentary prowess with one of the most brutal crackdowns in the group's history. Instead of coming down on the organization's hard-line leaders, it focused on the movement's moderates. 
 
 "The government wants them to be secretive, hard-line, because it makes them fulfill the role of the bogey man that they're propped up to be," says Kent State's Mr. Stacher. "You don't want soft and squishy huggable Islamists, and you don't want sympathetic characters. You want scary people who go on CNN and rail against Israel." 
 
 Eighteen Brotherhood legislative staffers drafting education and health-care reform bills were among hundreds arrested. So, too, were the leading pragmatists on the movement's 12-man leadership bureau. 
 
 The power vacuum was quickly filled by conservatives, who in 2007 put out a platform paper walking back many of the group's more-moderate views. 
 
 It stated, for example, that neither women nor Christians were qualified to run for president. Casting further doubts on the organization's commitment to the separation of church and state, the paper called for a religious council to sign off on laws. 
 
 Rifts between conservatives and reformers in the group began to flare into the open. The group's moderates argued that the paper was only a draft and never officially adopted. 
 
 In the 2008 elections to the Brotherhood's Guidance Council, hard-liners nearly swept the field, according to people familiar with the group. Only one seat on the leadership council is held by a consistent reformist, say these people, as well as one of the two alternate members who would step in should someone be arrested or die. 
 
 During this same period, Mr. Karim, from the Brotherhood's youth wing, says his relationships with activists in other groups were being cemented through online networks. "The new media allowed me to connect with the other" activists in Egypt, he says. "And I realized that there are things we agree on, like human-rights issues and political issues." 
 
 Past partnerships between the Brotherhood and secular parties had been top-down short-lived agreements born of political necessity. 
 
 This latest alliance formed more organically, say several young activists who are working with the Brotherhood. 
 
 "We just got to know, trust and like each other, even—believe it or not—the Brothers," says Basim Kamel, a 41-year-old leader in Mohamed ElBaradei's secular movement. 
 
 As conservatives were gaining influence within the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership ranks, Mr. Karim and his fellow youth cadres were growing impatient. 
 
 He says they began arguing with their superiors, saying the group was losing credibility in the street because they weren't out protesting for democracy like the secular activists were. 
 
 In November 2008, the Brotherhood's then-leader Mahdy Akef called for "establishing a coalition among all political powers and civil society" to challenge the "tyranny that Egypt is currently witnessing." 
 
 Mr. Akef couldn't be reached for comment, but those familiar with the group's inner workings say the shift came as the leadership realized they risked losing their youth cadres, particularly after a series of high-profile defections by young Brotherhood activists. 
 
 When Mr. ElBaradei returned to Egypt in February 2010 to lead an alliance of opposition groups, many of them youth-driven, the Muslim Brotherhood backed him, formalizing a partnership that had already gelled among the rank and file. 
 
 The alliance was uneasy at times. When other opposition groups voted to boycott November's parliamentary elections, for example, the Brotherhood broke ranks and ran. 
 
 After the uprising in Tunisia in January, Brotherhood youth, including Mr. Karim, met with the leaders of other youth movements and decided to plan a similar uprising in Egypt. 
 
 A group of about 12 youth leaders, including Mr. Karim, met secretly over the course of two weeks to figure out how to plot a demonstration that would outfox security forces. 
 
 The Brotherhood's senior leadership refused to endorse their efforts at first. They ultimately agreed to allow members to participate as individuals—and to forgo holding up religious slogans that the Brotherhood might have used in the past, such as "Islam is the solution," or waving Korans. 
 
 —Summer Said in Cairo and Richard Boudreaux in Jerusalem contributed to this article. 
 
 Write to Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com ||||| Cairo, Egypt (CNN) -- Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood will apply to become a political party, it announced Tuesday. 
 
 The Brotherhood "envisions the establishment of a democratic, civil state that draws on universal measures of freedom and justice, with central Islamic values serving all Egyptians regardless of colour, creed, political trend or religion," it said in the statement. 
 
 Although officially illegal, the Muslim Brotherhood is regarded as one of the most organized groups in Egypt. 
 
 It has said it does not plan to run a candidate for president when elections are held to replace Hosni Mubarak, who resigned on Friday. 
 
 Although officially illegal, the Muslim Brotherhood is regarded as one of the most organized groups in Egypt. Experts estimate the group has the support of anywhere from 10% to 30% of the population. It has said it does not plan to run a candidate for president when elections are held to replace Hosni Mubarak, who resigned on Friday. 
 
 The group has sparked great controversy in the United States, where some see it as a non-violent, Islamic social welfare organization supportive of a democratic process while others call it a radical extremist group hellbent on creating a theocracy in Egypt. 
 
 President Barack Obama recently downplayed the prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood playing a major role in Egypt, saying it is just one faction in Egypt that doesn't have majority support. 
 
 "There are a whole bunch of secular folks in Egypt, there are a whole bunch of educators and civil society in Egypt that want to come to the fore as well," the president said in an interview with Fox News. "And it's important for us not to say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people." 
 
 Others, however, distrust the Brotherhood's ultimate intentions. 
 
 "They are a powerful force at present, but my fear is that Islamist groups outside Egypt, seeing the opportunity in the current chaos, will flood them with support if they back an extremist view," said CNN national security contributor Frances Fragos Townsend, who was President George W. Bush's counterterrorism advisor. 
 
 And former CIA Director Mike Hayden said the Muslim Brotherhood, as the best organized opposition group in Egypt, could "enjoy a disproportionate power in shaping the new government. The question is: Will it become more radical?" 
 
 Still, a current U.S. official characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as being "not as extreme as al Qaeda is." 
 
 "It's an organization that supports a civil state which is based in large part on Islamic law," said the official. "But they do tend to eschew violence and work within the political process." 
 
 The official cautioned about ambiguity when it comes to Egypt. "There are lots of unknowns now with Egypt," said the official. "You really can't make a call on anything, whether Mubarak is going or staying or how the Muslim Brotherhood figures into the political process. 
 
 And in a recent article in the Daily Beast, former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel wrote that Americans should not fear the group. 
 
 "They should not be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Living with it won't be easy, but it should not be seen as inevitably our enemy," said Riedel. 
 
 The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 to oppose British control of Egypt with Its goal the creation of an independent Islamic state. Although it allegedly engaged in assassination and other violence against the British and supported the coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in 1952, the Brotherhood has been illegal since 1954, when it was convicted of attempting to assassinated Nasser, charges the group denied. 
 
 Nasser ruthlessly suppressed the group, and his successors, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, continued the repression. The Brotherhood subsequently renounced violence, is engaged in providing social services to the populace, opposes the peace treaty with Israel and supports democratic elections. 
 
 On its English language website, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood calls for establishing an Islamic state in accordance with the provision of Islamic Sharia law. 
 
 Ed Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Muslim Brotherhood "ought to be a welcomed force within Egyptian politics" if it accepts full rights for women and for religious minorities. 
 
 But his colleague at the council, Isobel Coleman, said the group hasn't done that, pointing to statements by the Brotherhood that neither a woman nor a non-Muslim could ever lead Egypt. 
 
 But Republican Congresswoman Sue Myrick of North Carolina worried that the government did not see the danger. 
 
 "I'm very concerned that they're using the peaceful protests in Egypt for a power grab and that we in the government doesn't seem -- we don't seem to grasp that threat in the way it concerns me," she said at a congressional hearing last week. "The Brotherhood isn't a danger just because they're terrorists, but because they push an extremist ideology that causes others to commit acts of terrorism."' 
 
 The 83-year-old organization has never been placed on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist organizations and officially renounced violence in the 1970s. The organization was a minor player in the demonstrations that toppled Mubarak. 
 
 But the U.S. chief intelligence officer raised a stir when he referred to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a "largely secular" organization in response to a question from Myrick at the hearing. 
 
 "The term 'Muslim Brotherhood' is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam," said James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. "They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt." 
 
 Clapper's office later clarified the director's comments. 
 
 "In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood makes efforts to work through a political system that has been, under Mubarak's rule, one that is largely secular in its orientation -- (Clapper) is well aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular organization." 
 
 CNN's Pam Benson contributed to this report
– Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood promises not to run a candidate for president in the fall elections, but it made clear today it wants a voice in the new Egypt by announcing plans to form a political party, reports CNN. That's certain to get a charge out of the Brotherhood's worst critics in the West, who fear the rise of a virulent anti-American Islamist party. But as the Wall Street Journal explains, the same kind of youth movement that upended the old guard of the ruling party might have the same kind of effect within the Brotherhood. It contrasts two members of the group, one a 29-year-old pro-democracy activist named Moaz Abdel Karim who worked with other opposition leaders to coordinate the Tahrir Square protests. His focus is on human rights, not jihad. The other is a 66-year-old Brotherhood leader from the group's conservative wing named Mohammed Badi who rails against Israel and American imperialism. The once-banned Brotherhood is destined to play a sizable role in the nation's future. "The question for many," writes Charles Levinson, "is which Brotherhood?"