The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures

Introduction

With attention in Egypt focused on the current political situation, it is critical to look back and understand how the country arrived where it is today. Crucially, this entails a serious examination of the failures of the Muslim Brotherhood. Just three years ago, in 2011, the Brotherhood looked to be a major political player and inheritor of power after the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak. Today, however, the group has been pushed aside and largely discredited in the eyes of many Egyptians. What happened?

In the wake of Egypt’s 2011 uprising, the Brotherhood faced the challenge of balancing its Islamic principles with popular demands for democracy and socioeconomic reform. The group failed to rise to the occasion and ended up failing both as “conservative democrats” and as Islamists. Its only real success was the preservation of organizational unity, but this came at the cost of perpetuating the movement’s lack of a sustainable ideology and political project.

Prior to the Brotherhood’s rise to power, many believed that its political inclusion would lead to its democratization and moderation. However, this view appears to have broken on the rocks of reality, and its collapse was the result of a series of the Brotherhood’s political, ideological, and organizational failures. The group was also unable to read the real balance of power and the post-Mubarak social and political realities and act accordingly.

Politically, the Brotherhood’s bid for domination failed to effectively appease or confront the institutional power bases of the old state, which was the real power holder in the country throughout the post-Mubarak transitional period and even after the election of a Brotherhood-affiliated president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2012. Brotherhood leaders were also unable to appreciate the profound changes in Egyptian society that the 2011 uprising had produced. Ideologically, the Brotherhood failed to develop a nuanced platform that was attentive to political needs and rested on both Islamic legitimacy and democratic correctness. It proved too willing to compromise its already-hollow core ideology for the sake of short-lived tactical political victories. And organizationally, the rigidity of the Brotherhood’s structure, which lacked meritocracy, inclusiveness, and transparent decisionmaking, contributed to the movement’s inability to adapt to a rapidly shifting political landscape. These combined failures made the Brotherhood end up seeming to many Egyptians as a vestige of the old system rather than a herald of a forward-looking new Egyptian polity.

Political Failures

From early 2011 to the middle of 2013, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood failed to lead an inclusive democratic transition, appreciate the full diversity of Egyptian society, and understand the need for a completely reinvented political culture. Brotherhood leaders did not marshal the resources, networks, and knowledge necessary for the implementation of effective reform policies. These failures were the result of a complex relationship with the state and a series of tactical blunders on the part of the organization’s leadership.

For the political inclusion of the Brotherhood to lead to the group’s democratization, two conditions were necessary. First, post-Mubarak Egypt required a consensus on new rules of the political game. Second, the Brotherhood needed to undergo an ideological and organizational transformation, including by embracing the principles of democracy, pluralism, individual freedoms, citizenship, and equality before the law. Neither of these conditions was fulfilled.

The uncertainties of the post-2011 political sphere are partly to blame for the lack of consensus on new rules of the game. Wrangling between those political actors striving for major institutional changes and those much stronger actors eager to preserve the status quo contributed to a complex political space unamenable to agreement. But the Brotherhood’s own political failings cannot be discounted, given the group’s dominance over Egypt’s post-2011 elected institutions.

The Brotherhood and the State

The Muslim Brotherhood has had a complicated relationship with the modern authoritarian state in Egypt. Historically, the state sidelined the Brotherhood and other Islamist movements, but they nevertheless blossomed in the vacuum created by the state’s socioeconomic ineptitude. The death of politics brought about by the state’s authoritarianism left only religion as a refuge. The Brotherhood filled the gap left by the state, accumulating considerable social, cultural, and economic capital in the process.

The Brotherhood cherished the idea, deeply embedded in Egyptian politics, that the state—the most modern and potent institution in society—was the principal instrument through which all ideological and political movements could realize their own goals. The conquest of the old state, with its three main features of elitism, authoritarian guardianship, and structural violence, therefore became the Brotherhood’s central long-term goal.¹

The movement deemed control over the old state necessary to enact its broader political vision. Brotherhood leaders believed that all they needed was a process of elite turnover to gain control of the existing state institutions, which they could Islamize once they had consolidated power. They aimed to position themselves in the long run to be able to capitalize on such an opportunity. The thirty years of Mubarak’s rule gradually witnessed the full integration of the Brotherhood into Egyptian politics. Over time, the group developed into a massive political movement that crowded out social alternatives but lacked the flexibility to challenge the status quo.