The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Failures
Other Products of a Problematic Organizational Structure
The Brotherhood’s rigid, hierarchical structure led the group to hold on to certain ideas that negatively impacted its political trajectory, particularly after it assumed power. These ideas were fourfold.
First, the organization showed a reductionist understanding of history. Brotherhood leaders selectively read Islamic and modern Egyptian history to serve their ideological project.
Second, the Brotherhood demonstrated a ghetto mentality. Facing regime repression, the Brothers sought refuge in their closed organization. Over time, an opaque society was created that engulfed its members and shaped their lives. More than simply a political party, social association, or religious order, the Brotherhood became a society that supported its members through both vertical religious guidance and horizontal social solidarity, including the provision of takaful (Islamic welfare). As a result, the group became inward-oriented and unable to relate to outsiders. This proved to be politically costly for the Brotherhood in power, as it raised suspicions and resentment among many people.
Third, the movement displayed a conspiratorial mind-set. Despite gaining political power, Brotherhood leaders remained paranoid and consistently complained about opposition conspiracies. The Brotherhood’s political failures, including Morsi’s inability to fulfill his promise to achieve a “renaissance project” within his first hundred days, were blamed on “enemies” such as old regime remnants, a politicized judiciary, the deep state, and a hostile opposition. Such rhetoric about enemies and conspiracies invited calls for street mobilization to face these threats.28 This proved to be a good recipe for temporary group solidarity, but it seemed strange for a movement that was no longer in opposition. At the same time, the Brotherhood’s incompetent political analysts misled its leaders about the size of the opposition, the balance of power with the old state, the policy objectives of the old state, and the Brotherhood’s dwindling popularity.29
Fourth, the Brotherhood showed a lack of reflection. The group adopted a mind-set that suggested no option of turning back. It consistently believed that the only way out of whatever problem it faced was forward. Instead of critically understanding how and why things went wrong, addressing the roots of previous problems, and embarking on fresh, new paths, the Brotherhood resorted to a policy of escapism. The Brotherhood’s usual approach to crises was to raise other, more contentious issues as red herrings. For example, in November 2012, when the Brotherhood faced intense opposition to Morsi’s controversial presidential decrees, it diverted attention from them by calling for a popular vote on the newly drafted constitution in December. The move worked in the short run, but it cost the Brotherhood long-term credibility.
Loss of Popular Support
After coming to power, the Brotherhood quickly lost support among the main recipients of its social welfare network: the poor. Several factors help explain this phenomenon. The Brotherhood’s relationship with the poor was entirely clientelist and was concerned exclusively with creating an electoral base as opposed to developing a more substantive ideological or political relationship. In 2012, the Brotherhood’s charity committee discussed the idea of adding educational aspects to its social support system to introduce welfare recipients to Brotherhood ideology and values. This idea went nowhere, however. In addition, except for the Brotherhood’s schools, its social welfare projects were affiliated with local Brotherhood leaders rather than with the wider organization. Much of the Brotherhood’s funding went to support political activities after the revolution, at the expense of social welfare programs. Ultimately, the Brotherhood did not care about social empowerment or sustainable development. Rather, it preferred to reproduce poverty as long as it translated into welfare recipients and, by extension, loyal voters.
As a result of its increasingly limited social outreach, the Brotherhood lost its claim as the sole representative of the popular will. The Brotherhood’s choice to belittle the opposition as “conspirators” and “Islam haters” reflected an inability to engage with other viewpoints to build a broader support network. The Brotherhood increasingly shifted to the far right, strengthened societal polarization, and pandered exclusively to their Islamist base.30 At the same time, Brotherhood leaders continuously reminded the public and the old state that they were the only line of defense against the threat of Islamist extremism. These moves led only to intensifying social strife.
Conclusion
A perfect storm of Brotherhood failures precipitated its demise and the emergence of today’s political landscape in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s inability to placate the institutions of the old state or win over the hearts of the people made its leadership politically untenable.31 The movement’s ideological hollowness and opportunism undermined its claims to a legitimate “Islamic democratic project,” while the group’s closed, opaque sect-type structure rendered it inaccessible to possible allies and led to distrust among state actors, political movements, and the general population. As a result, the Brotherhood failed to transform its electoral domination into sustainable political hegemony. The Brotherhood’s ultimate shift from the failed policy of containment of the old state to the even more failed policy of confrontation with it paved the way for its ouster in July 2013.32
But did this series of events signify the end of political Islam in Egypt? Yes and no. Islamist movements will remain key political actors with an ideologically committed constituency and decades of accumulated social capital. This key position will remain strong given the obvious organizational incompetence of the opposition and its lack of political resources. If allowed to participate in elections, Islamists will gain a portion of the vote that will, at a minimum, include its sizable core constituency.33
It is also clear that the regionally supported state defiance and societal rejection have stopped the Muslim Brotherhood’s pursuit of an Islamic state and political hegemony. The Brotherhood’s tenure and overthrow represented the end of the utopian idea that “Islam is the solution.” Among Islamists and non-Islamists alike, it became evident that Islamic slogans were irrelevant when it came to the Brotherhood’s capacity to deliver substantive policy achievements.
Perhaps more significant than their impact on the fate of Islamism in Egypt, the three years following the 2011 revolution firmly invalidated the idea that Islamist movements, if included in a democratic system, will moderate and democratize. This proved not to be the case for the Muslim Brotherhood, which remained unwilling to undergo necessary ideological and organizational transformations and lacked a favorable political context for democratization. Yet current events in Egypt will likely equally invalidate the idea that it is possible to finish off Islamism by force or establish an Islamist-free political sphere. Ironically, the same coup and subsequent crackdown that dealt a lethal blow to the Brotherhood’s dreams of an “Islamist electocracy”34 has also furnished the movement with a new narrative of victimhood capable of sustaining it in the future.
Notes
1 See Ashraf El-Sherif, “Egypt’s Post-Mubarak’s Predicament,” Carnegie Paper, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2014, http://carnegieendowment.org/files/post_mubarak_predicament.pdf.
2 In the months following Mubarak’s ouster, the Brotherhood repeatedly confirmed its unwillingness to assume full responsibility over the country since it did not believe it could confront Mubarak’s “legacy of failure” alone. Strangely, however, it subsequently assumed this responsibility anyway.
3 The lack of Brotherhood political cadres cannot be attributed just to the regime’s decision to sideline the Islamists and exclude them from governmental apparatuses or to the overall death of politics. The Brothers themselves, while investing very much in building a tight and disciplined organization under Mubarak, did not care equally about educating their qualified cadres in the arts of modern government, politics, and economic management. Nor did they provide them with adequate learning and training processes abroad. Of course, the regime’s restrictions deterred such steps. But it is equally true that the Brotherhood’s vision was limited from the outset. The ideal Brotherhood qualified cadre was the engineer or doctor who could astutely make it to the syndicate board through the provision of services, accumulating popularity and social capital for the group that could win it votes in future parliamentary elections. The Turkish case was a completely different story. AKP leaders and cadres have decades-long experience of political learning through participation in municipal, parliamentary, and executive politics. Turkey’s more democratic context furthered this tendency, as a matter of fact.
4 Policy failures under Morsi included fuel shortages, power blackouts, ongoing insecurity, and a high crime rate.
5 See Al Jazeera’s interview with Ossama Yaseen, youth minister in Morsi’s government and a Brotherhood leader: “Without Borders,” Al Jazeera, March 7, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJy9FyjoFgU.
6 The Brotherhood tried to curry favor with the traditional large families of Upper Egypt to win their votes in addition to the classical payoffs of sectarian voting in Upper Egypt. The 2011 and 2012 election results demonstrate that this strategy was somewhat successful. The Brotherhood also created local networks of its own members in the Delta to mimic traditional village councils, strengthen group solidarity, and win recognition and votes. However, these actions were insufficient to confront deeply entrenched traditional political actors in these regions in the longer run. Moreover, Islamist groups like the Brotherhood, by definition, subverted the family-based societal structures in these traditional regions.
7 Morsi began his presidential term with an administration that represented a relatively wide range of political allies. His decision to sack the prominent Supreme Council of the Armed Forces generals Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and Sami Hafez Anan in August 2012 was accompanied by rhetoric appealing to Egypt’s revolutionary youth. But the Brotherhood’s moves toward more exclusive political control soon overshadowed these initial gestures. Key milestones include Morsi’s dictatorial presidential decrees in 2012, the two cabinets of Prime Minister Hesham Qandil in 2012 and 2013, the 2012 constitution-writing and voting process, clashes between Brotherhood and opposition supporters in 2012 and 2013, and the 2013 government appointments.
8 The Salafists of the Nour Party, whom secularists would hardly have described as anti-Islamist, were frustrated by what they saw as the purposefully weak representation of their party in Morsi’s cabinet and its exclusion from decisionmaking in general. Another issue of concern was the Brotherhood’s concerted attempt to dominate the religious public sphere and its proselytizing. The Nour Party saw the Brotherhood’s bid for a monopoly over Egyptian Islamism as inconsiderate of the Salafists’ contributions to Islamists’ political success throughout the transitional period. Furthermore, it believed the Brotherhood’s actions threatened the party’s existence as an independent Islamist political actor. (This information is based on an author interview with Younes Makhyoun, the head of the Nour Party, in December 2012.) On January 30, 2013, the Nour Party proposed a compromise initiative to reconcile the conflicts between Morsi’s government and the opposition, but it was rejected by Brotherhood leaders, who saw it as a betrayal by a supposedly Islamist partner.
9 European Christian democratic parties are somewhere in between liberals, socialists, and conservatives.
10 Author interview with Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a renowned former member of the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau, public activist, and presidential candidate, Cairo, November 2008.
11 Prominent Islamist ideologue Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi found this development alarming and dangerous. See Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, al-Tafseer al-Seyasi lil-Islam (The Political Interpretation of Islam) (Cairo: Afaq al-Ghad Press, 2010).
12 Hassan al-Banna pointed to the shortcomings of charity, which might be religiously rewarding but is hardly a route for the social and political change to which Islamists aspire.
13 Hossam Tammam, a researcher of Islamic movements, has written about the “ruralization” of the Brotherhood. Hossam Tammam, The Brothers and the Pre-Revolution Years (Cairo: Dar al-Shorouq, 2012).
14 This reading of the Brotherhood as the Muslim group is evident from the writings of Sayyid and Muhammad Qutb, Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid, Fathy Yakan, Said Hawwa, Mustafa Mashhour, and Munir al-Ghadban. These are key Brotherhood thinkers, and their literature is central to the group’s indoctrination program.
15 Hossam Tammam argued that the “ruralization” of the Brotherhood was fully established by the 1990s. However, the role of the small-town and semirural elites in shaping the group’s worldview began much earlier than that.
16 As the Brotherhood came to power, this creeping authoritarianism became clear in the less-than-democratic 2012 constitution it drafted, the restrictive draft laws it adopted on social associations, protests, trade unions, and media, the hate speech it directed at the opposition, and its continuation of the repressive policies toward political activists initiated under Mubarak and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
17 U.S. philosopher John Rawls, for instance, raised the concept of “overlapping consensus.” He suggested that a principled institutional foundation of a multicultural democracy can be sought in a strategic way when the followers of different totalistic normative doctrines in the same community (including religious, moral, cultural, and ideological systems of belief)—which ostensibly advocate incoherent conceptions of justice—conform to specific principles of justice and concur on similar judgments of political correctness and its outcomes in the form of legislations and policies. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
18 Historically, this golden rule can be traced back to the thirteenth-century Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyyah.
19 The Brotherhood’s rival, the Salafist Call, claims it does the exact opposite.
20The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood created a political party, the Islamic Action Front, which was technically separate from the group but depended on its resources and leadership in practice. The party became the political arm of the group. A more progressive model could be found in Morocco, where the Islamist Justice and Development Party disassociated itself on an organizational level from the Islamist group that founded it. Other models existed in Algeria, where the whole Muslim Brotherhood turned into a political party, and in Yemen, where the Brotherhood united with other social and tribal groups to form a big-tent political party.
21 The Brotherhood’s organizational divisions were modeled on the Egyptian state structure, including governorates, cities, towns, and villages. In addition, the group’s departments were designed as parallel to existing government ministries and segments of civil society, including departments for finance, students, professionals, preaching, youth, women, and politics.
22 Brotherhood leaders invoked religious verses obligating obedience to state leaders to justify their absolute unquestionable power over Brotherhood members. Distinctions between the state and the Brotherhood organization were blurred considerably.
23 Political analyst Abdallah al-Nafisi presented the most articulate arguments in this vein. But the most visible contribution came from Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh.
24 Ibrahim al-Hudaiby, a political activist and former Brotherhood member. Unpublished manuscript.
25 The list is lengthy and cuts across different generations. It includes clerics, such as Muhammad al-Ghazali and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and political and social activists and academics.
26 The Brotherhood issued a document in 1994 entitled “A Statement for the People.” The document explained the Brotherhood’s endorsement of pluralism, democracy, and gender equality in a clear and detailed way for the first time in its history.
27 Though the regime’s iron fist disappeared after the 2011 uprising, the Brotherhood did not undertake the necessary process of organizational restructuring to achieve better societal representation and more transparent internal decisionmaking processes. Discussion of organizational reform was generally limited to talk of changing the group’s bylaws and disregarded the more important need for reform in organizational mentality and administrative structure.
28 As happened on December 1, 2012, when Islamists organized a mass demonstration in front of Cairo University in Giza.
29 In a meeting on June 23, 2013, between the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau and other Islamist leaders, including leaders of the Salafist Call, to discuss the upcoming protests expected on June 30, the Brotherhood downplayed the expected scale of the protests. One member of the guidance bureau said, “Under Morsi we have had 25 major opposition demonstrations. This will be the 26th, and nothing will change.” Author’s interview with a Brotherhood guidance bureau member, July 2013.
30 The mass demonstration in Giza on December 1, 2012, under the banner of “legitimacy and sharia” was just one example. The Brotherhood’s media discourse became more intolerant and sectarian over time, and it offered room for extremists, such as Safwat Hegazy, Assem Abdel Maged, and others, to spread hate speech. The climax was the “Support for Syria” conference in Cairo Stadium, where Morsi remained silent as some of his Islamist followers, most notably the Salafist Sheikh Muhammad Abdel Maqsoud, invoked takfiri discourse against Morsi’s opponents, accusing them of apostasy.
31 The 2012 constitution, which the Brotherhood drafted, granted the military unprecedented privileges, including the lack of any parliamentary oversight of the military budget and the exclusive right of the military-dominated National Defense Council and National Security Council to make strategic decisions related to war and peace and national security. The Brotherhood also avoided any serious discussion of restructuring the police force or bringing police officers to justice for past crimes.
32 See El-Sherif, “Egypt’s Post-Mubarak’s Predicament.”
33 It is difficult to give an exact figure for this Islamist core constituency, given the different results in the parliamentary elections and the two rounds of presidential elections. However, the number is likely around the 5.8 million voters who cast their ballots for Morsi in the first round of the presidential election, given the depiction of Morsi as the only Islamist candidate in the race. This represents about one-quarter of the electorate in Egypt.
34 For the definition of the term, see El-Sherif, “Egypt’s Post-Mubarak’s Predicament.”
