The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures

Ideological Hollowness

Compounding the problem of the Brotherhood’s willingness to sacrifice its ideology for political gain was the fact that the ideology itself lacked depth. Since its inception in 1928, the Brotherhood had been completely preoccupied with crafting strong reactions to perceived foreign and domestic threats to its existence and to Muslim identity in general. Building a nuanced and sophisticated ideology that embraced both the Islamic tradition and modernity in a creative way was never on the Brotherhood’s agenda.

Broadly speaking, the Brotherhood’s overall mission lacked a strong vision, and attempts to revise and clarify it were strictly deterred by the organization. Islamist critiques of Brotherhood ideology were always partial, such as jihadists belittling the feasibility of participatory political activism or Salafists decrying the Brotherhood’s lack of a rigorous methodology on religious law.

The Brotherhood’s famous charity networks helped it to develop a following but did not promote popular mobilization or awareness.¹² People were not invited to action except as voters on election days. Little attention was paid to the role of civil society and communal self-empowerment except as a supplement to the Brotherhood’s real goal of taking over the existing political order. Scarce attention was paid to contextualizing vague ideas about a broader “Islamic project.”

However, in some sense, the lack of a clearly articulated ideology was helpful to the Brotherhood, since it enabled the organization to mobilize and include wide segments of the population that could otherwise have been alienated. However, it also prevented the Brotherhood from providing thoughtful, ideologically rooted answers to the many questions that plagued Egyptian politics. At stake were issues of state-religion relations, society-religion relations, the role of Islamic law and jurisprudence, and the relationship between democracy, pluralism, and development. Answers to these questions were badly needed to build a coalition that embraced a new, post-2011 political culture.

The Brotherhood’s ideological hollowness was evident in its dearth of jurisprudential knowledge and scholarly analysis. The organization had developed a great deal since its establishment, but despite its capacity to survive, it lacked the ideological flexibility and creativity to forge its own pathbreaking political model.

Islamist movements in other countries offered much deeper models of adaptation and transformation. Both before and during Tunisia’s 2011 uprising, Islamists in that country, led by the Ennahda party, carried out a model for the pursuit of power through peaceful struggle within a democratic context. To a considerable extent, Ennahda embraced the values of liberal democracy and understood the balance of power in society. In Sudan, Islamists were highly pragmatic. They largely ignored Islamist doctrine and focused on action. They remained open to all possible political options, including democratic participation, cooperation with ruling regimes, cooperation with non-Islamist opposition movements, armed insurgency, and ascension to power through military coup. Moroccan Islamists, such as the Justice and Development Party, completely discarded Qutbist puritanical dogma. Instead, they pursued a path of gradual political participation at the municipal and parliamentary levels, cumulative reforms, and distinctive institution building rivaled only by the Turkish AKP.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, by contrast, remained tied to an eclectic combination of the old dogma of its founder Hassan al-Banna and former leading ideologue Sayyid Qutb and an instrumentalist mind-set that limited the organization to superficial adaptation to new circumstances. While some analysts have argued that the Brotherhood’s conservative, closed-minded worldview was the result of a process of “ruralization” in which leaders from rural backgrounds influenced the group’s ideological development, in reality the Brotherhood’s ideological deficiencies were more fundamental.¹³

At the root of these deficiencies was the puritanical dream of an “Islamic state” that would resuscitate the Islamic caliphate and lead members of the Brotherhood toward the realization of their Islamic identity, salvation, and empowerment. In reality, however, the Brotherhood’s concept of an Islamic state owes more to modernist ideas of a strong, authoritarian developmental state than to classical Islamic political thought. The concept of the Islamic state as the organizational embodiment of the Islamic order in the Brotherhood’s doctrine is actually quite different from the concept of government in Islamic law. Historically, Islamic government was checked by other nonstate actors and enjoyed much less disciplinary and regulatory power over the population than the modern state does.

The Brotherhood understood the concept of Islamic identity in two parallel but contradictory ways: first, as an immobile set of religious attributes and cultural characteristics that the Islamic state needed to guard; and second, as a living set of political, social, economic, and cultural paradigms yet to be realized by the Islamic state. The two understandings were incongruous, but both implied that the Islamic state was the true representative of Islamic identity and therefore had a vital role to play in the defense and designation of that identity.

Ironically, Brotherhood doctrine said very little about the institutions or structures of its Islamic state. In practice, the concept was reduced to signifying a state dominated exclusively by the Brotherhood itself. In this sense, the movement proclaimed a monopoly on the definition of Islamic identity and labeled itself the exclusive representative of Islam, effectively asserting that it was the Muslim group rather than simply one group of Muslims among many, despite rhetoric to the contrary.¹⁴ Its members considered the Brotherhood to be the ideal Islamic organization, pure of the filth that infected the rest of society. Particularly under Mubarak, the Brotherhood became a sect that bolstered its cohesion not only through religious doctrine but also by appealing to shared economic interests, social and family ties, and common personal experiences and lifestyles.