Mohammed Morsi being sworn in as Egyptian president, Supreme Constitutional Court, Cairo, June 30, 2012. Egyptian Presidency/ Ahmed Fouad/Associated Press
It was looking bleak for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The
region’s oldest and most influential Islamist movement had underperformed and
overreached in parliament, alienating leftists and liberals in the process.
When, in April, the Muslim Brotherhood announced that Mohammed Morsi would be
its presidential candidate, after its first choice had been disqualified, the
sense of policy drift was unmistakable. The Brotherhood was losing ground.
Predictions of its demise, however, were premature. Despite numerous missteps,
the movement has proved its resilience. It has not, to be sure, become what
many Egyptians hoped it might be—the leader of a unified, national movement
that would push Egypt, however haltingly, toward democracy. But by its own particular standards,
the Brotherhood has succeeded.
The organization (including its political arm, the
Freedom and Justice Party) does not operate as a traditional party might be
expected to. It cares, of course, about winning elections. But it cares even
more about the unity and integrity of the organization, in Arabic, tanzim. In the
early days of Egypt’s transition, the Brotherhood showed its more ruthless side—not
necessarily out of discomfort with internal democracy but out of its
longstanding concern, some would say obsession, with self-preservation. To the
extent that dissent within the Brotherhood undermined the tanzim,
it had to be quashed.
First, the Brotherhood leadership forbade its members
from joining any other party but its own. Those who joined other parties, or
started their own, were expelled. One of the group’s most prominent figures,
Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, was forced out after he insisted on running for
president against the Brotherhood’s wishes. Thousands of young activists who
joined his insurgent campaign had their memberships frozen.
Indeed, Egypt’s revolution was a threat as much as it was
an opportunity for a group that had grown accustomed to the unifying power of
repression. Without a clear enemy—the Mubarak regime—maintaining organizational
cohesion was becoming difficult. So it had to be enforced. Brotherhood
officials did not apologize for their increasingly aggressive tactics. For
them, it was a simple matter of respecting the institution of which they were a
part and to which they had pledged their lives. It was, after all, the group’s
policymaking body, the shura council that voted to ban members from joining other
parties. “All decisions are taken as an organization, with shura
(consultation), with democracy,” Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) deputy
leader Essam El-Erian told me at the time. “[The youth] are appreciated but
they are appreciated in the context of the organization and not outside of it.”
Dissent was permitted before a final decision was made, but not after.
From
the standpoint of organizational unity, the Brotherhood’s controversial
decision to run a presidential candidate, after pledging not to, was not so
surprising. In the early months of 2012, the group tried to find a sympathetic
consensus candidate whom they could support. They couldn’t. In the resulting
vacuum, Aboul Fotouh’s campaign surged. Soon enough, he was an unlikely
frontrunner, commanding support from an unlikely and diverse group of liberals,
leftists, Muslim Brotherhood youth, and Salafists. Despite his origins in the
Brotherhood—or rather because of them—Aboul Fotouh emerged as a grave challenge
to the tanzim and perhaps an existential
threat to the Brotherhood itself. Charismatic and with his own distinct sources
of legitimacy, Aboul Fotouh, as president, would have undermined the
Brotherhood’s once firm grip over mainstream political Islam.
To
understand the group’s at times overwrought paranoia, we can think of its
leaders as, to varying degrees, institutionalists. Individuals within the
Brotherhood derive their influence not primarily from their own political
talents but from the fact they are part of a gama’a, or group, one that is
presumably greater than the sum of its parts. In the past, whenever prominent
figures broke off from the organization to start new parties or movements, they
failed. Without the Brotherhood’s grassroots support and infrastructure, they
found themselves relegated to the political margins (see, for example, Al-Wasat,
founded in 1996, and the Egyptian Current Party, founded in 2011). This was why
Aboul Fotouh represented such peril: he was shattering, for the first time, the
idea that success can only come through the tanzim.
And so the Brotherhood opted to enter the presidential
race at the last moment. Despite an unprecedented smear campaign, which
included a widely circulated but obviously implausible rumor that Islamist
parliamentarians were trying to legalize necrophilia, and an underwhelming
candidate in Mohammed Morsi, the Brotherhood managed to secure a first-place
finish in the first round. Perhaps just as important, Aboul Fotouh finished a
disappointing fourth place. Still, the results suggested major vulnerabilities.
The Brotherhood was hemorrhaging support in its former strongholds in the Nile
Delta.
It
was the fight for the presidency in the runoff election that rejuvenated the
Brotherhood and unified Islamist ranks. The movement found a convincing enemy
in Ahmed Shafik, who was Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister and a seemingly
unapologetic autocrat. For decades, Egypt-watchers predicted internal splits in
the Islamist movement, which never came to pass. And after the revolution, the
Brotherhood, for all its mistakes, survived more or less intact.
The
Temptations of Power
Before
the Arab revolts began, there were six countries where the Islamist opposition
actively contested elections on a regular basis—Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain,
Morocco, and Yemen. Focusing on the last two election cycles, the average
portion of seats contested was a mere 35.9 percent.1 Islamist
parties were losing on purpose.2
This was, in part, a legacy of Algeria, and the sense
that Arab regimes and their international backers would never allow Islamists
to win. Islamist groups even coined their own term for this, the “American
veto.” In January 1992, Algeria’s largest opposition party—the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS)—found itself on the brink of an historic victory. In the
first round of elections, FIS won 47.5 percent of the vote and 188 of 231 seats
while the ruling party won a dismal fifteen seats. In the end, FIS was expected
to secure over 70 percent of the total 430 seats, more than enough to form a
government with members of its own party. But there were mounting fears that
the military was preparing to move against the Islamists. It was in this
context that FIS leader Abdelkader Hachani addressed a crowd of supporters. “Victory
is more dangerous than defeat,” he warned, urging them to exercise restraint
and avoid giving the army a pretext for intervention. Nonetheless, a few days
later, the military aborted the elections and instigated a massive crackdown
that plunged Algeria into a bloody civil war.
Islamists
across the region came to realize that winning before the time was right could
threaten to undo decades of painstaking grassroots work and organization
building. Hachani’s warning would soon evolve into a sort of unofficial
Islamist motto: “Participation not domination” (musharika wa laisa
al-mughaliba). If
there was any doubt about such an emphatic embrace of gradualism—to the point
even of timidity—the Algerian narrative was reinforced, this time in vastly
different circumstances, by the intense international opposition that Hamas
encountered after its unexpected electoral victory in 2006.
Nearly
five years later and after Mubarak’s fall, the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to
have learned the lesson. The group’s leaders had a mantra in those early days
of uncertainty—repeated over and over to anyone who would listen. They would
not run a presidential candidate. They would contest only one-third of the
seats in parliament. Soon enough, it increased to half of the seats, and
finally almost all of them. In the short span of a year, Egypt’s Islamists had,
with striking speed, adjusted their ambitions. The same sense of destiny that
led them toward caution before the revolution was now leading them in the
opposite direction. After eighty-four years of waiting, this was their moment.
They had been close before only for their gains to be snatched away. They
wouldn’t let it happen again.
What
becomes increasingly apparent is that an Islamist movement in opposition and an
Islamist party in power are two very different things. When Brotherhood
officials were promising not to run for president in March 2011, they were
still stuck in old patterns of behavior. In authoritarian settings, Islamists
either cannot win or do not want to win elections, as winning threatens their
organizational infrastructure (again, the matter of self-preservation). Most
political parties do not double as states-within-states, with parallel networks
of mosques, clinics, banks, businesses, day care centers, and Boy Scout troops.
Islamist parties do. They must therefore tread carefully to avoid provoking the
regime, as the costs of a crackdown on its social, educational, and preaching
activities—effectively the Islamist lifeline—are severe. Decades of
imprisonment, torture, and exile had produced a steely resolve and a sense of
confidence: one day their time would come and they would be ready. Until then,
they could wait, patiently. In interviewing Islamist leaders before the Arab
Spring, this was a consistent feature: a stoic sense of calm in the face of
considerable odds. Analysts sometimes mistook this to mean that Islamists would
always display such traits, even after circumstances changed considerably. The
point they seem to have missed is that the caution and calm were a result of,
and a reaction to, repression. Once the repression ceased, Islamists could just
as easily display a knack for political power, one that sometimes borders on
the cutthroat.
The
Making of Mohammed Morsi
Political
power is a delicate thing. And Mohammed Morsi did not appear the right man to
wield it. He was a Brotherhood loyalist and enforcer. By most accounts, he was
a competent manager who got things done. But it was unclear what other
qualities qualified him for the presidency.
Born in Sharqiya governorate in 1952, Morsi studied
engineering at Cairo University. He went on to earn his doctorate from the
University of Southern California in 1982, and served as an assistant professor
at California State University, Northridge. Two of his five children are
American citizens by birth. Upon his return to Egypt, he quickly rose through
the ranks of the Brotherhood, eventually
serving as the head of the group's parliamentary bloc from 2000 to 2005. Khairat
El-Shater, the Brotherhood’s initial pick for the presidency and its most
powerful figure, had plucked Morsi from relative obscurity to join the Guidance
Bureau, the organization’s top decision-making body. Morsi went on to serve as
the founding chairman of the Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and
Justice Party.
After
El-Shater was disqualified due to a prior criminal conviction, Morsi stepped
into the fray, almost by default. None of the Brotherhood’s other viable
candidates had the full trust of El-Shater and the rest of the conservative
leadership. Morsi did. He was quickly derided by the Egyptian media as the “spare
tire” candidate. He seemed to lack the stuff of presidents, the stature, the
charisma, and the respect. But, buoyed by the Brotherhood’s unparalleled
electoral machine, he soon found himself Egypt’s first freely elected head of
state and the Arab world’s first ever Islamist president.
There
are times when ordinary, pedestrian politicians become leaders. The moment can matter more than
the person. That became clear when Morsi gave a rousing address to hundreds of
thousands in Tahrir Square on June 29. Fifteen minutes in, he began repeating,
almost in chant-like fashion, “there is no authority above the people.” The bar
was low, but it was one of the better speeches—and certainly one of the most
impassioned—by an Arab leader in recent memory.
By
virtue of being the man who defeated Ahmed Shafik—and by extension the ruling
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF)—Morsi became the vehicle for growing
anger toward the resurgent old regime. For its part, the Brotherhood had always
seemed to perform better with its back to the wall. And here they were facing a
clear threat. That threat became all too obvious when the military—it too
drawing on Algeria’s legacy—staged a soft coup in June by dissolving the
country’s first democratic parliament, one that happened to be dominated by the
Brotherhood.
Morsi and the Brotherhood will need to manage their
fraught relationship with the military for the foreseeable future. The group’s
dual-track approach—threatening mass protests on one hand but negotiating
behind closed doors on the other—will continue. Despite occasional bouts of
impatience, Brotherhood officials remain gradualists, uncomfortable with the
disorienting nature of revolution in particular and sudden change in general.
The
broad strokes of what the Brotherhood wants are relatively straightforward. The
problem is the absence of a clear path to getting there. The first and most
obvious priority is economic recovery and its various constituent parts:
boosting employment, reducing income inequality, and combating corruption. The
economy is not just an end but a means. If the Brotherhood manages to reverse
the economy’s downward trend, then Egyptians will be more willing to tolerate
controversial interventions in the social and moral sphere (something which
Turkish Islamists came to learn over time). In addition, the Brotherhood will
use its growing role in the economy to bind Egyptians to it through
interlocking patron-client relationships. In this sense, penetrating the state
machinery, including in education and the media through the Ministry of
Information, helps the Brotherhood with its long game; further cementing the
organization’s role in public life.
The second priority is rolling back SCAF’s powers and
moving to a more balanced civil-military relationship. In the early days of the
transition, some mistook the Brotherhood’s indulgence of SCAF as something more
than it actually was. The Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party—driven
again by self-preservation—wanted to establish their legitimacy as political actors
before picking a fight. Securing a dominant position in the country’s first
freely elected parliament was the way to do that. After winning nearly half the
seats, they could plausibly claim both democratic legitimacy and a popular
mandate. Parliament, more than anything else, was a platform to challenge SCAF,
just as the presidency would come to serve a similar purpose six months later.
Challenging the military’s grip on power is exactly what Mohammed
Morsi did when, in July, he unexpectedly issued an executive decree calling
parliament back into session, just weeks after SCAF had dissolved it. While the
move had limited success – the parliamentary session lasted only a day and
triggered a heavy rebuke from the judiciary – it sent a strong
message: Morsi was going to be a tougher, more assertive president than many
may have expected. If there was any doubt, on August 12, Morsi surprised
Egyptians by sending the top-tier of SCAF, including Field Marshall Hussein
Tantawi, into early retirement. He also canceled the controversial
constitutional addendum which had stripped the presidency of many of its
powers.
Clearly,
the Brotherhood has bargaining power; and following Morsi’s dramatic moves, it –
or at least the presidency – has extensive executive powers as well. This is
not to say that Egypt’s generals, while weakened, have been defeated. Morsi’s
civilian “counter-coup” represents a significant episode in Egypt’s troubled
transition but it is far from a conclusive victory. In the short run, both
sides will need to learn to live with each
other and seek temporary accommodation, with each side compromising. Neither
side is strong enough to hand the other a decisive blow.
As for Islamization, it is still—and will always be—a
central part of the Brotherhood’s message as well as its appeal. The
Brotherhood’s strain of Islamism is not particularly well developed (theology
almost always takes a back seat to politics). To a great extent, the
Brotherhood simply reflects something that is already there. They are, after
all, products of their own society. By Egyptian standards at least, even the
movement’s most controversial positions fall firmly within the mainstream.
According to numerous polls, the Brotherhood’s illiberalism, including on
women, Christians, and personal freedoms, are widely shared by the broader
population. For example, in an April 2011 YouGov poll, only 18 percent of
Egyptian respondents said they “would support a woman president.” If Islamists
banned alcohol or inserted a stronger dose of religion in the educational
curriculum, it might enrage liberal elites but few others. In fact, since the
revolution, there is little to suggest that the Brotherhood lost significant
support because of its perceived religious conservatism. Rather, the criticisms
of the group have largely revolved around its underwhelming legislative
record in parliament, its incessant flip-flopping, back-room deal making, and a
tendency to put organizational self-interest above almost everything else.
If
the Brotherhood begins to perform, however one wishes to measure that, then
many of those criticisms will subside. For any governing party, the stakes are
considerable. For Islamist parties, the stakes are even greater. Graham Fuller,
in his book The Future of Political Islam,
wrote that Islamists run a “haunting risk: the association of failure with
Islam, or what has been called ‘the Islamization of failure.’” The reverse is
also true: the Islamization of success.
Islamists and the West
For
better or worse, success will depend on the help of others. Due to budgetary
constraints and a burgeoning deficit, there is only so much Egypt can do on its
own. It urgently needs billions of dollars in direct assistance, loans, trade
benefits, and investment. Despite their longstanding opposition to Western
cultural and political influence, Mohammed Morsi and the Brotherhood need the
United States and Europe more than they might like to admit.
The
economy is one area where there is likely to be less friction between the U.S.
and Egyptian Islamists. The Brotherhood, under El-Shater’s influence, has
become an unabashed proponent of the powers of the free market. Its economic
program can be best described as “Islamic Calvinism” combined with vague nods
to safety nets and social justice. The Freedom and Justice Party program states
its support for an “Egyptian economy built on the principle of economic
freedom.” Elsewhere in the program, it affirms that “the private sector has a
fundamental role to play in Egyptian economic life,” and that “values and
morals should not be separated from economic development, as they are two sides
of the same coin.”
On foreign policy, Morsi and the United States will
inevitably disagree, to put it mildly. But this has much less to do with the
Brotherhood’s Islamism than it does with the realities of a post-revolution
Egypt. Democratization means the conduct of foreign policy can no longer be
insulated from public opinion, as it had been for three decades. If Egyptians
dislike Israel, then elected politicians will have to dislike Israel too (at
least rhetorically). In a televised debate between Aboul Fotouh and another
presidential candidate, Amr Moussa, the two men got into a heated exchange over
whether to call Israel an “enemy” or merely an “adversary.” The most anti-Israel
of the presidential candidates was arguably not either of the Islamists but the
leftist Hamdeen Sabahi, who drew considerable support from the Cairene liberal
elite and was indeed the top vote-getter in the capital during the first round
of balloting.
Like
most other political actors, Morsi and the Brotherhood have affirmed their
commitment to the peace treaty, while reserving the right to review aspects of
the accord. Morsi, to the extent that the military and security establishment
allows him, will draw Egypt closer to Hamas. Morsi, who has a long record of
provocative foreign policy statements, is unlikely to stop now. His June 29
speech, for instance, included a call for the release of Omar Abdel Rahman, who
is serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his involvement in planning
terrorist attacks in the 1990s.
But
it is precisely the Brotherhood’s well-established anti-American bona fides that allow it a degree of
latitude to reach out to the West. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to
overcompensate with overwrought displays of nationalism. Increasingly, they
also fear that the United States in its halfhearted attempts to pressure the
military and promote a ‘full transition’ will continue empowering the
Brotherhood. This has, oddly, led to a situation where the most “Westernized”
liberals now routinely attack Islamists for being, of all things, American
lackeys. Before the presidential election results were announced, a coalition
of leading liberal parties held a press conference condemning the Obama
administration for supposedly backing Morsi’s candidacy. “We refuse that the
reason someone wins is because he is backed by the Americans,” said Osama
El-Ghazali Harb of the Democratic Front Party. (No evidence was provided to
substantiate the allegations.) After the August reshuffling of SCAF,
speculation was rampant that Morsi’s move may have been coordinated with the
Obama administration.
After
the short-lived unity of Egypt’s eighteen-day uprising, the Muslim Brotherhood’s
relationship with the leading liberal parties has steadily deteriorated.
Prominent liberals, perhaps reflecting their minority status, see the aggressive
majoritarianism of the Islamists as a frightening harbinger of things to come. “If
SCAF goes back to its barracks,” said Emad Gad of the Social Democratic Party, “the
Brotherhood will control everything.”
Much
of the speculation surrounding the Muslim Brotherhood’s “true intentions”
remains just that—speculation. For now at least, we are unlikely to find out
exactly what the Brotherhood would do if it had full freedom to act. Egypt is
not yet a democracy and will not become one overnight. Despite SCAF’s seeming
fall from grace, there is still a military, an unreformed bureaucracy and
security sector, and a judiciary that appears generally hostile to Brotherhood
designs. The presidency was the opening salvo in what will be a long and uneven
struggle for political supremacy. The longer that the struggle persists, the
more the Brotherhood will find itself under pressure, struggling to define the
proper balance between compromise and confrontation, and between moving to the
center and satisfying its Islamist base.
Under repression and under
threat, the Brotherhood tends to soften its rougher, more conservative edges in
order to reach out to liberal and leftist allies, as it did during the second
round of the presidential campaign and, afterwards, when it formed a government
of largely non-Islamist technocrats. Morsi and the Brotherhood feared that
going too far too soon would provoke more opposition than they could handle,
including from a then still dominant SCAF. So they moderated their ambitions.
But those ambitions remained.
(Editor's Note: This article updates an
earlier version in the Summer 2012 print edition of the Cairo Review of Global
Affairs.)
Shadi Hamid is director of
research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for
Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He can be followed on Twitter at @shadihamid.
1 This
figure does not include Morocco since, due to the particularities of its
electoral system, it is only possible to measure districts contested, and not
seats contested. Once a party decides to contest a district, it is required by
law to contest each seat in the district (through a party list). For example,
in a three member district, each party would need to put forward a list of
three candidates.
2 For
more on this phenomenon, see Shadi Hamid, “Arab Islamist Parties: Losing on
Purpose?” Journal of
Democracy 22 (January 2011):
68−80.