The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures

An intellectual revolution was necessary for the Brotherhood to endorse democracy, pluralism, individual freedoms, and human rights within the confines of its ideological worldview. Any democracy must rest on a notion of civic ethics or a set of principles that structure relations among members of the community on the basis of political equality and mutual respect. Religion, including Islam, can be a major source of these ethics.¹⁷ The Brotherhood, however, pushed for its own interpretation of religious doctrine that did not treat all citizens equally and discriminated against the religious, doctrinal, and sectarian other. Brotherhood leaders did not necessarily advocate violence or engage often in outright hate speech, but the discriminatory tone of their rhetoric was unmistakable.

The Brotherhood’s “golden rule,” established by early Islamic intellectual Muhammad Rashid Rida and propagated by al-Banna, was that members should forgive one another for what they disagree about and cooperate with one another on issues where they agree.¹⁸ But while the Brotherhood applied this golden rule to Islamic theology, the group sternly dismissed it when it came to politics, particularly in the post-Mubarak era.¹⁹ The Brotherhood’s unwillingness or inability to lead a process of major intellectual revision within the Islamist movement left a widespread impression among the Egyptian public that the state was under threat from a movement that provided no legitimate democratic alternative. The old state manipulated this concern to justify its rule and guarantee the support of non-Islamist elites. Since they believed a process of popular democratization could open the door to Islamist theocracy, these elites preferred to reproduce the authoritarian old state, viewing it as the lesser of two evils.

Organizational Failures

In addition to its political missteps and ideological deficiencies, the Brotherhood’s unique structure also contributed to its ultimate downfall. Its hierarchical, sect-like organization led the Brotherhood to prioritize loyalty over competence and unity over diversity, and to employ religion in a polarizing way to win political battles. Favoritism and clientelism dominated an organization already tarnished by the mysteriousness of its internal structure. A zero-sum approach to political conflicts and the overextension of its organizational capacities sapped the Brotherhood of its adaptive flexibility.

Furthermore, the group’s elitist hierarchical system of control discouraged grassroots initiatives. The organizational model of the political party that the Brotherhood founded after the 2011 revolution resembled the conservative one employed by Jordanian Islamists.²⁰ The Brothers also lacked a meritocracy in running the government. Instead of realism and the creative, flexible, smart policies that were badly needed to face the complicated Mubarak legacy, the Brotherhood confined itself to ideological lethargy and organizational rigidity. The movement proved incapable of restructuring its organization to ameliorate problems associated with its lack of internal democracy and transparency.

The Brotherhood’s Parallel State

During its time in opposition, the Brotherhood focused on the creation of a parallel state of its own—a strong hierarchical organization that rested on ideological adherence to Islamist principles and a tight network of supporters and sympathizers. The Brotherhood was not content with self-isolation; rather, it sought to expand the reach of its parallel state within society. The Brotherhood’s true moment of triumph would be when its parallel state expanded to represent the majority of the country.²¹ This parallel state, however, suffered from an inflexible structure and leaders who were intolerant of differences and dismissive of criticism. Brotherhood leaders bluntly invoked religious texts to justify their demands for blind obedience and cast critical voices as religious sinners.²²

To strengthen its parallel state, the Brotherhood focused on ideological acculturation and religious education, establishing youth camps, learning centers, and a structured pyramidal organization. The group’s belief system was standardized through ideological education and religious propaganda. Despite shallow attempts to craft the appearance of internal discussion, the movement discouraged independent thinking, intellectual diversity, and critical debates. The aim was to create a strong, unified organization ruled by a politicized elite yet with a mass following based primarily on religious and social values.

The larger Islamist project that the Brotherhood advocated had arguably succeeded prior to the 2011 uprising. As far back as the early 2000s, some minor voices within the group started raising the idea that the Brotherhood in its original form had become obsolete as a result of its own success. Since the movement had already managed to Islamize the societal mainstream in Egypt—the original objective of the Sahwa, or Islamic Awakening—these voices believed it was time to dissolve the group and create new, specialized organizations, including political parties.²³ But their calls were unheeded.

Muting Ideological Differences

The Brotherhood faced the real problem of internal socioeconomic diversity.  Discrepancies existed between the tastes of the wealthier, more cosmopolitan urban Brotherhood bourgeoisie and the group’s much more culturally and socially conservative, lower-middle-class and lower-class grass roots based in rural areas and small towns. Even as rural middle-class activists ascended to the second and third tiers of Brotherhood leadership, the businessmen in the guidance bureau continued to dominate the upper echelons of power within the organization. Yet many of these urban businessmen and professionals retained a conservative religious flair, creating internal friction and more complex cleavages beyond a simple rural-urban divide.

Nevertheless, for a long time, the Brotherhood managed to mute the impact of these internal conflicts using three main tools.

First, the Brotherhood presented an ideology broad enough to accommodate multiple irreconcilable ideas. To this end, any serious intellectual effort to strengthen the Brotherhood’s ideological consistency was intentionally avoided. Ideological ambivalence was deliberately employed as the organization focused on vague political causes that ignited grassroots enthusiasm, such as the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, the struggle for Palestine, and the struggle against Western imperialism.

Second, the Brotherhood centralized all decisionmaking and made policies adopted by top elites binding across the entire organization. The responsibility for implementing these policies, however, was placed on the organization’s local units. The Brotherhood was thereby able to maintain group unity while ensuring that the organization could still function freely on the local level in a decentralized way, even in the face of regime repression.

Third, Brotherhood leaders used Islamic concepts including sharia, the “interest of Islam,” the “interest of the group,” and “religiously ordained necessity” to religiously justify all decisions they made. In general, those decisions were made on the basis of the Brotherhood’s political interests, and religious justification was only provided afterward. This process opened the door to significant ideological manipulation.²⁴

However, while these tools were successful in limiting intra-organizational conflict, they led many of the Brotherhood’s fresh talent, who were unwilling to fall into line with the movement’s rigid ideology and structure, to abandon the group. The approach also restricted the organization’s ties with Islamic intelligentsia outside the Brotherhood.²⁵ As a result, self-criticism, including critical reflections on past involvement with violence and terrorism, was absent within the Brotherhood’s internal organization.

Even in 1994, when the Brotherhood began speaking out in favor of democracy, pluralism, and human rights, it was the outcome not of deep ideological revision but of pragmatic considerations.²⁶ Since the Brotherhood sought ideological justifications for its actions only after they were taken, it is not surprising that these justifications were superficial. Overall, the Brotherhood’s organizational mechanisms and bylaws were tightly controlled to ensure the survival of the group’s parallel state. The movement put off key reforms related to its legalization, transparency, funding, and leadership.²⁷

Organizational Introversion

The Brotherhood’s indoctrination was aimed at insulating members from the corruption of society. To this end, the group offered members a closed circuit of religious and social services apart from the influences of the rest of society. This structure, however, did not fit with the Brotherhood’s other main goal of setting an example for the rest of society to follow. As a result, the organization embraced two conflicting tendencies: one that stressed the dangers of societal corruption and the need to separate oneself from it, and another that attempted to engage society by setting a positive example.

The Brotherhood’s political failures led its leaders to believe that societal corruption was more intense than expected. To combat this, they concluded, Brotherhood members needed to develop additional skills through self-improvement. “Individual reform is necessary for social reform” was a core Brotherhood motto—and one that other Islamists embraced as well. The more the group failed to achieve substantive social reform, the more this motto was internalized. By embracing increased introversion, however, the Brotherhood left societal corruption to fester and widened the gap between its movement and the rest of society. The Brotherhood’s methods were therefore self-defeating. As long as individual reform remained unfinished, failures remained excusable, and the assumed solution was to perpetuate the same failed policies and strategy.