The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures

Other Islamist Political Models

The Brotherhood in Egypt was particularly fascinated by the Islamist model of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Based on this model, the Brotherhood believed that it could come to power via the ballot box and lead a majoritarian procedural democracy. It also maintained that it could consolidate its power through a series of international arrangements and domestic economic achievements based on a flexible combination of Islamist ideology, conservative culture, and economic liberalism.

However, the Brotherhood failed to successfully replicate the AKP model in Egypt due to its lack of a strategic vision, qualified cadres, and political expertise compared with the AKP.³ The Brotherhood was unable to spur economic development, failed to build a society-wide center-right coalition to back it in its struggle with the old state, and did not bring about the genuine ideological revision necessary to produce a version of the AKP’s “Islamic liberalism.” Instead, the Brotherhood reduced itself to being just another conservative political faction, squandering its decades-long historical claim to be a leader in the struggle against “imperialist designs.”

Another Islamist model that likely caught the attention of Brotherhood leaders was that of Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s. In that country, Islamists gained power through an alliance with the military. Any attempt to replicate the Sudanese model, however, was unrealistic since the Brotherhood failed to build an effective relationship with the military in Egypt.

Confronting the Old State

Key to the Brotherhood’s failed bid for political domination was the group’s inability to forge a working relationship with the state institutions in charge of “legitimate violence” and rule making: the military, police, and judiciary. A conflict between the Brotherhood and the old state was most probably unavoidable in the long run given the historical rivalry between them and the incompatibility of their respective interests and worldviews. But such a conflict did not have to happen so quickly. Had the Brotherhood played its cards better, it could have postponed the eventual confrontation. The organization’s postrevolutionary shift in relations with the old state, from a failed policy of appeasement to an even more failed policy of confrontation, contributed to the ultimate outcome.

Overall, the Brotherhood’s bid for domination misunderstood the balance of power in Egypt. Brotherhood leaders overlooked the fact that the real levers of power still rested in the hands of the old state. The military lay at its core, but the old state also encompassed a number of other institutions, including the police, ministerial bureaucracies, public-sector companies, the judiciary, municipalities, and all these institutions’ related patronage networks. Taking on these well-entrenched institutions would be a heavy lift even if all opposition forces acted together, but the Brotherhood’s decision to go it alone made the challenge even more difficult.

Throughout the post-Mubarak transitional period, the old state maintained its inherent traditional hostility toward Islamists. The institutional actors of the old state particularly abhorred the peculiar character of the Brotherhood and its international extensions, which they saw as a parallel state that threatened their interests. The Brotherhood did not fall into line with the old-state actors’ worldview and their self-ascribed role as the “guardians of the national interest and identity of the country.” Furthermore, the old state presided over a network of players with vested economic interests that were sensitive to the emergence of new power seekers like the Brotherhood.

Regional factors were also significant. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were concerned, not just by the rapid ouster of their ally Mubarak, but also by the increasing prominence in Egyptian politics of the Muslim Brotherhood—a group supported by their regional nemesis Qatar. The potential domino effect of the Brotherhood’s ascent in Egypt was threatening to these conservative Gulf regimes, which were already suspicious of their own domestic Brotherhood organizations. Thus, they were determined to throw their political, economic, and media weight behind the anti-Brotherhood camp in Egypt, including the old state and the opposition. The political, economic, and financial support provided by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and to a lesser extent Kuwait to the July 3 military coup that ousted then president Morsi and the caretaker regime it installed was indispensable to its survival.

Nevertheless, between 2011 and 2013, the old state chose to cooperate with Islamists, including the Brotherhood, to neutralize the revolutionary mood in the country and cast all revolutionary forces as unreliable and irresponsible actors. This tactical decision ultimately paid off for the old state. The radical wave of the revolution waned, and the Brotherhood made enemies of the revolutionary youth movements and lost the support of average voters as a result of policy failures.⁴ After that, it was much less costly for the old state to confront the self-isolated Brotherhood.

By contrast, the Brotherhood did a poor job of its tactical engagement with the state. Unlike its counterpart in Turkey, the group lacked experience in bureaucratic administration, and the well-entrenched existing bureaucracy defied the Brotherhood’s attempts to exert control over it.⁵

Failure to Include Other Revolutionary Factions

The Brotherhood underestimated the level of anger among revolutionary and reformist factions. These groups reacted negatively to the Islamist electoral landslide and the Brotherhood’s overt attempt to dominate the process of establishing the foundations of a new political system. The tech-savvy youth movements that were at the heart of the January 2011 uprising despised the Brotherhood’s protofascist dream of establishing cultural domination based on “Islamist common sense.” Also, secular elites’ fundamental opposition to Islamist ideology and their unwillingness to live with the Brotherhood’s surprise electoral victory weakened the position of the revolutionary and reformist blocs, which paved the way for the subsequent comeback of the old-state hegemony.

The Brotherhood believed that a strong victory at the polls was enough to stamp its newly acquired dominant political position with popular legitimacy. But this proved to be a serious miscalculation. Liberal, nationalist, and leftist elites might not have had the same electoral clout as the Brotherhood and the Salafists, but that did not mean that they would easily accept the unexpected and unsettling electoral outcome of a Brotherhood takeover of Egypt’s parliament, presidency, and constitution-drafting process.

The elites’ opposition to the Brotherhood was rooted in the fundamental incompatibility of secular and Islamist worldviews. That made the elites hypersensitive to the threat of an Islamist takeover that they believed would undermine their liberties, economic interests, and way of life and, no less dangerously, split the country and ignite social strife. While these elites could likely have lived with a gradual movement of the Brotherhood into politics, their fears were justified by the group’s swift and exclusivist approach, which constituted an imminent threat that the elites refused to accept.

Despite their lack of strong electoral support, these well-educated, secular elites remained politically relevant since they represented the core of the privileged classes who ran the country. These urban classes refused to accept the idea that they needed to forego their lifestyles and social status and submit to the uncertainties of intolerant, divisive, and hate-based religious politics just because the Islamists received strong electoral support in Upper Egypt and rural parts of the Nile Delta. In a country like Egypt, where relations between religious institutions, the state, and society were historically quite unsteady, commanding electoral victories were not nearly enough to secure political and social legitimacy. Deeper agreements about the place of religion in society had to be forged to assuage concerns and establish Islamist legitimacy in the eyes of non-Islamist Egyptians.

The Brotherhood attempted to rely on patronage to secure support within the traditional bastions of the old state, but such patronage did not help allay the concerns of these other influential secular actors.⁶ To make things worse, the far-from-clear relationship between former president Morsi, while he was in power, and the group he belonged to (the Brotherhood), with its secretive, opaque structure and regional extensions, raised fears among already-suspicious non-Islamist observers.

The huge Islamist demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on July 29, 2011, which embraced slogans about Islamic identity and sharia, effectively negated the possible radicalization of street politics in the wake of the January 2011 uprising. Hundreds of thousands of Islamists, including Salafists, Qutbists, and jihadists, poured into Tahrir Square from all over Egypt. Their frightening theocratic discourse raised serious concerns among many Egyptians that radical democratic politics aimed at dismantling the old state could pave the way for a takeover by sectarian, intolerant, and reactionary Islamists. In a sense, the fantasy that a new radical democratic political culture was easily achievable in Egypt came to an end that day.

The presidential campaign of radical Islamist firebrand Sheikh Hazem Salah Abu Ismail sent shock waves throughout secular circles that feared the rise of an Egyptian version of Iran’s Ruhollah Khomeini. The Brotherhood’s trademark conservative self-restraint and refined standpoints, which could have soothed fears, were absent in the rhetoric of this radical Islamist cleric and his anti-state revolutionary populism. Rather than the elite-based terrorist activities of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden or jihadist military operations against selected regime targets, Abu Ismail’s source of inspiration was the anti-regime protests embraced by the masses that were at the heart of Khomeini’s “comprehensive Islamic revolution” in Iran—a phenomenon even more terrifying than al-Qaeda-style terrorism.

Practically speaking, an Egyptian version of Khomeinism had no real chance of success. Even the Brotherhood and Salafist Call, another Islamist group, were unhappy with Abu Ismail’s rhetoric and have worked with the old state and the social mainstream to counter it. Still, the presence of such rhetoric served only to strengthen popular support for the old state as the sole line of defense against extremism and disorder.