The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures

Ideology-Performance Gap

There is a considerable gap between the Brotherhood’s ideological claim to Islamic authenticity and its actual practices, which adhere to Western secular modernist paradigms of state-centric politics and market-based economic policies. These practices are not compatible with traditional understandings of Islamic sharia. The Brotherhood’s election to the Egyptian parliament and presidency exposed this inconsistency in the eyes of the general public and, more importantly, in the eyes of the Islamist power base.

Islamists who hoped for the return of an Islamic caliphate and the institution of Islamic rule saw a purportedly Islamist president advocating the same policies that had been in place for years. These included the accommodation of the interests of domestic institutional power bases; neoliberal economic policies, pursued in consultation with the International Monetary Fund and dependent on rent-based economic activities; and conventional pro-Western foreign policy positions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Syrian civil war, and Persian Gulf geopolitics. These policies rendered talk about the application of Islamic sharia obsolete. The Islamic character of the Brotherhood regime was effectively reduced to talk of the “religious president” and “religious Brotherhood statesmen” who could establish order on the basis of their personal piety.

The Brotherhood’s overall ideological hollowness therefore seemed particularly acute when viewed in the context of its policymaking. It was easy for the Brotherhood, while in opposition, to disseminate general principles that could garner public support on religious and cultural bases. But it was far more difficult for the group’s leaders to express specific viewpoints on divisive policy issues, including the economy and social welfare. When confronting these issues, it became clear that the Brotherhood could not reconcile its Islamist roots with its behavior in power. Indeed, the political tools employed by the Brotherhood were actually rooted in secularism. Ideology, which remained the Brotherhood’s greatest motivator, collapsed when confronted with bureaucratic and economic realities.

This dissonance made it difficult for the Brotherhood to locate itself on the political spectrum. Brotherhood leaders often liked to depict themselves as centrists but always did so in religious terms, locating the Brotherhood in between the literalism and extremism of the Salafists and the secularism of the liberals and leftists. This religious definition of centrism, however, is not the one commonly accepted in the modern political vocabulary. It was therefore hard for the Brotherhood to stake out clear positions on the left-right political spectrum on a host of policy issues.

The inclusion of Islamists within a democratic political system could have limited the negative impacts of this ideological dissonance. Various types of Islamists could have been differentiated on the basis of socioeconomic and regional interests. A variety of Islamist factions might have emerged, including libertarians, communitarians, neoliberals, and social democrats. The Brotherhood could have halted and reversed decades of domination of its leadership by a small-town mind-set and a semirural conservative worldview. Voices of the Brotherhood’s more urban members, especially those who came out of the group’s student movement active in the major universities in Egypt, could have gained status within the organization.¹⁵ Ultimately, none of this occurred. But to be fair, the Brotherhood’s forced short tenure in power handicapped any such possible development.