| 摘要 | Part 2 of a series on political Islam in Egypt
The current turmoil in Egypt—including social strife, polarization, and violence—has cast shadows on the potential for Islamist integration as well as the regime’s ability to achieve political stability. Shifting external and internal dynamics of Islamist organizations indicate five possible scenarios for the future of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its path will have far-reaching implications for political Islam and democratization in Egypt.
Possible Future Scenarios
- The regime remains committed to the goal of eradicating the Brotherhood, even though it lacks the resources to effectively do so. The Brotherhood continues to face a ruthless crackdown by the regime, including arbitrary arrests, frozen assets, and violent confrontations.
- Through ongoing protests that rattle the regime and begin to generate greater popular support, the Brotherhood returns to Egyptian politics in triumph.
- Islamists and the regime negotiate a return to the political formula under former president Hosni Mubarak—limited political inclusion of the Brotherhood within certain regime-determined redlines.
- The Brotherhood splits into two main fragments: moderates who view conventional Brotherhood policy as too confrontational, and hardliners who view current policy as too compromising and also ideologically incorrect.
- The organization recognizes the failures of its current protests and withdraws from political activity, focusing on an internal ideological reinvention.
Implications for Egyptian Society
El-Sherif was a nonresident associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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It is uncertain which of the five scenarios for the Brotherhood’s future will come to pass. The old state and the Brotherhood are currently committed, respectively, to the Brotherhood’s total eradication or its triumphant comeback. The unlikelihood that either of these scenarios will be fulfilled might force the regime and Islamists to be more open to other options, particularly reconciliation. Yet for the near to medium term, reconciliation, fragmentation, and reinvention remain unlikely.
The Brotherhood has proven to be more resilient than initially assumed, leaving political Islam as a force in Egyptian politics for the immediate future. The rise of post-Brotherhood politics would require the end of old-state authoritarian politics, economic development, and religious reform as well as the establishment of participatory democratic movements, none of which is currently foreseeable.
Current dynamics do not bode well for a future democratic Egypt. Any path for democratic political and social change has not been welcomed by the old state or the Islamists, who remain unwilling to engage with other actors or to foster renewed democratic thinking. This leaves political Islam, like the old state in Egypt, part of the ongoing problem rather than the solution.
Introduction
Is political Islam in Egypt finished? Many analysts began raising this question following the dramatic change of fortune experienced by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt starting in 2013. After the ouster of then president Mohamed Morsi on July 3, the Brotherhood quickly fell from grace, losing not only the presidency but also control of the parliament and the constitution it had promulgated. A bloody regime crackdown followed, reaching its height when the interim government that followed Morsi’s administration designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization on December 25.
The Brotherhood now faces the daunting challenge of introducing the transformations necessary to better address popular demands for an inclusive, pluralist, and egalitarian political space.
The Brotherhood’s course of action throughout these events has been largely reactive and haphazard, lacking both a mission and a coherent strategy. Indeed, the Brotherhood now faces the daunting challenge of introducing the transformations necessary to better address popular demands for an inclusive, pluralist, and egalitarian political space. The Brotherhood has failed at this challenge over the last three years, and it is unclear if the group can succeed going forward. Even if the still-intact Brotherhood does succeed, its ability to maintain unity of purpose and of ranks over the longer term and to attract other Islamists is increasingly questionable.
What happens to Egyptian Islamist organizations like the Brotherhood will undoubtedly depend on structural factors outside of their control, including state policies toward Islamists, the internal cohesion of the regime, and the regional context. Although Islamist organizations face seemingly insurmountable crises, they are far from finished and retain considerable agency. Islamism’s future not only depends on external factors but also on how Islamists themselves respond—particularly the degree to which Islamists are willing to engage in a serious process of intellectual and ideological revision.
In some ways, Egypt might be witnessing the creation of a new epoch of political Islam, more ideologically fluid than ever before. The boundaries between centers and peripheries have become blurred, and shifts in the Brotherhood reflect considerable generational differences. Some factions are engaging in serious ideological soul-searching, while many on the right adopt increasingly polarizing, populist, radicalized, and intransigent critiques.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is a useful case study for exploring the shifting external and internal dynamics of Egyptian Islamist organizations. The Brotherhood’s current status and future path has implications for Islamists and democratization in Egypt.
The Brotherhood Since Morsi’s Ouster
Under Increasing Pressure
The military-backed regime that took power after the ouster of Mohamed Morsi cracked down ruthlessly on the Brotherhood, arresting supporters, leading trials, and dispersing demonstrations and marches with force. On August 14, security personnel forcibly cleared pro-Morsi sit-ins at Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda Squares in Cairo, resulting in the killing of almost 1,000 people.1 The events in Rabaa were part of increasingly violent confrontations between Islamists and the regime: confrontations that have left thousands of Islamists and hundreds of security personnel dead, the supreme guide of the Brothers and many supporters sentenced to death by courts, more than 20,000 Islamists in jail, and thousands of Islamist fugitives.
The regime’s violence against the Brotherhood following the coup reinforced Islamists’ belief that they are fighting an existential battle against the old state in Egypt. As the scale of violence increased significantly, the possibility of Brotherhood acquiescence became increasingly slim.
The Brotherhood’s decisionmaking was heavily influenced by ideological factors and short-term reactive calculations, lacking strategic cost-benefit analysis. Coming to power was a sort of “end of history” for the group that made irrelevant its trademark pragmatic flexibility and opportunism. Conceding political defeat, whether through electoral loss, popular rejection, or acknowledging post-coup realities, would admit the end of the Brotherhood project and a return to the old formula of limited inclusion under the old state’s guardianship that they faced under the rule of former president Hosni Mubarak.
The Brotherhood’s actions were also influenced by operational considerations. In the aftermath of the July 3 coup, the group had hoped to copy the model of the January 2011 uprising. However, this was a serious overestimation of the group’s ability to mobilize and its societal reach.
In addition, the Brotherhood believed that de-escalation could be counterproductive based on the precedent of February 1954, what is referred to as the “Abdel-Qader Ouda complex.” In 1954, Ouda, then deputy supreme guide for the Brotherhood, prematurely ended the group’s protests against the government. Some Brothers believe Ouda missed a historic opportunity to undermine the newly instituted and still-fragile military regime, particularly since the military regime cracked down on the group a few months later. To prevent a similar outcome, the Brotherhood had little option other than escalation, at least in its own thinking.
The unprecedented intensity of confrontations taking place in 2013 and 2014 has shown no prospect of abating anytime soon. Violence perpetrated by jihadist groups in the Sinai Peninsula has escalated since Morsi’s ouster. While the Brotherhood has not been directly involved in these attacks, some see its theocratic ideology and Morsi’s toleration of radical Islamist groups (in the hopes of broadening his political base) as proof of the organization’s key role in the ongoing violence.
The military regime has utilized such accusations to broaden its crackdown on the Brotherhood. While the designation of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization—the first time in the organization’s long history that it has been formally branded as such—is legally and practically disputed, its political consequences cannot be underestimated. The regime moved to confiscate many of the Brotherhood’s economic investments, believing successful control over the organization’s finances could paralyze its activities. Though some have been allowed to resume operations, 1,055 religious charities had their assets frozen by the interim government in December 2013 and became subject to ad hoc government management. The regime cracked down on dozens of businesses owned or run by Brotherhood activists.2 In August 2014, the organization’s political party was banned by court rule.
In addition to controlling the Brotherhood’s economic and political bases, the regime has undertaken a campaign to control the organization’s religious activities. Al-Azhar, Egypt’s premier religious institution, and the Ministry of Religious Endowments, the agency that oversees religious affairs, have dramatically curtailed the public religious space in the country, appointing preachers and dictating the provision of charity by mosques. Themes of the Friday sermons have become strictly standardized by the ministry—a Mubarak-era practice that is now pushed to extremes. Thousands of imams and preachers have been dismissed. Though officials cite the lack of a required license as the reason, many see the dismissals as retaliation for Islamist connections. The ministry’s new leadership dissolved the boards of directors for mosques that the ministry had installed under Morsi.
State control over the religious sphere in Egypt is hardly new. But the wide scope of current policies and the regime’s goal of eliminating the Brotherhood are significant.
State control over the religious sphere in Egypt is hardly new. But the wide scope of current policies and the regime’s goal of eliminating the Brotherhood are significant. Given the shortage of qualified preachers and the existence of hundreds of thousands of unregistered small mosques all over the country, it is yet to be seen if al-Azhar and the ministry can develop the manpower and mechanisms necessary to carry out such a campaign.
External actors have also played significant roles in the regime crackdown. On March 7, 2014, Saudi Arabia included the Brotherhood on its list of terrorist organizations, strangling the group’s local support and suppressing potential threats from jihadist fighters in Syria and Iraq. The unwavering support for the Egyptian regime from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates reflects their fear of the Brotherhood’s political and ideological ascendancy in the region.
Organizational Changes in the Brotherhood
As a result of the dramatic events since Morsi’s overthrow, the Brotherhood has undergone a series of organizational and ideological changes.3 The regime’s ongoing suppression of the group has forced the Brotherhood to decentralize. The arrests of most high-level leaders and activists in the first to third tiers of the group’s leadership—including members of the Guidance Bureau (the group’s top decisionmaking authority), the Shura Council (the group’s parliament), and heads of governorate administrative bureaus—broke hierarchical links in the organization. It gave increasing leverage to lower tiers of leadership on the local level, including junior officials in administrative bureaus who now organize and lead protests along with semiautonomous local networks.4 Micro-organization has become the preferred tactic for the time being.
The Brotherhood’s structural changes nationally have been replicated at the neighborhood, regional (mantiqa), and zone (shuba) levels. Hierarchical structures have been replaced by cluster-type structures. For security reasons, the size of the basic local unit in the organization (the usra) has been reduced from around seven members to around three. Communication is conducted through creative and safer methods, such as encrypted text messages, social media, and e-mail. Except for activities related to the rearing of Brothers’ children conducted in members’ homes by the juniors department, usra meetings are often held while walking in the streets and at random coffee shops instead of in homes, which are subject to security surveillance and attacks. Demonstrations are discreetly organized to prevent infiltration by security informants, and false dates for the gatherings are posted on social media to mislead security forces monitoring the Brotherhood’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.5
Women and children related to Brotherhood members have also mobilized. Women, in particular, have engaged in the current “anti-coup struggle” on a larger scale than in the past, challenging many Islamist taboos regarding female activism.6 For the first time, the Brotherhood’s female members are suffering a significant portion of the regime’s crackdown. Women have been sent to jail and subjected to torture and physical abuse.7
Whenever possible, the Brotherhood has replaced arrested activists with individuals who are put in charge of organizing demonstrations, communicating instructions and messages, and boosting morale. In response, the regime has started to refine its policies, having recently released some detainees and refocused its energies on Brotherhood cadres directly involved in the organization and student activism. The Brotherhood has continued to replace its activists, but although this adaptation helps the organization survive, the political effectiveness of such a strategy in the long term is questionable.
Assessments of the scale and success of the Brotherhood’s transformation differ among local affiliates. Complaints regarding the low caliber of local leaders and their dubious efforts to safeguard protesters against police violence are plentiful. But the situation is ostensibly better in quality of caliber in many other cases.8
In addition to these affiliates, the Brotherhood has founded more informal entities that correspond to existing departments within the formal Brotherhood organization. These entities spread the group’s political message, lead protests, and advocate for the restoration of Morsi’s presidency. They included the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy (NASL), Anti-Coup Students, Anti-Coup Youth, Anti-Coup Scholars, Anti-Coup University Professors, Anti-Coup Professionals, and the Ulama Scholars Front. The Brotherhood’s grass roots have demonstrated remarkable solidarity and perseverance—particularly in areas like Helwan, Kerdasa, Haram, Alf Maskan, Nasr City, and al-Matariyyah in Greater Cairo; Sidi Bishr, al-Raml urban slums, Abu Suleiman, Borg al-Arab, and Agami in Alexandria; many parts of Upper Egypt and the countryside in the north; as well as among students at al-Azhar and Cairo Universities. Fresh young recruits, infuriated by ongoing repression and inspired by the Brotherhood’s resistance, have also been joining the cause.
Decentralization has proven to effectively preserve the proselytizing activities and networks of the Brotherhood and distract the regime from repressive activities, but its efficacy in protests is doubtful.
Elections for a provisional guidance bureau, in charge of the day-to-day functioning of the group, were reportedly conducted in secret a few months after the coup. The elected officials partner with the remaining veteran Guidance Bureau members to act as replacements for the imprisoned and exiled bureau members. The Guidance Bureau currently issues general guidelines while local administrative bureaus make practical decisions about implementation, a decentralized mode of operation that the provisional body supports.
In general, decentralization has proven to effectively preserve the proselytizing activities and networks of the Brotherhood and distract the regime from repressive activities, but its efficacy in protests is doubtful. This mode of operation serves to confuse security forces and weaken the impact of the regime’s heavy-handed policies. Some analysts argue that the current mode of operation represents a sharp change from the top-down discipline and command-and-control mechanisms that have traditionally characterized the Brotherhood’s operations. But the shift has in reality been facilitated by an existing rule of organizational conduct that was adopted by the Brotherhood for security reasons during the Mubarak years. That rule called for centralized decisionmaking and decentralized implementation. The focus on local protests has provided flexibility and resilience.9 However, it also limits the Brotherhood’s ability to mobilize resources nationwide and maintain cohesion since the group can no longer coordinate across Egypt. In addition, decentralization undermines the organization’s ability to exert formidable pressure through concentrated protests in key urban centers.
The Brotherhood’s outreach efforts have varied in their success rates. The group’s political committees, particularly active between 2011 and 2013, are almost nonexistent as of 2014 because they have been rejected by society (or at least wide segments of society). Further, there is a dearth of committed young cadres—many young Islamists have become increasingly cynical about electoral politics. The Brotherhood’s charity committees have diminished financial resources because most of their money goes to support families of detained members. Meanwhile, interest in the educational and religious committees has increased following Morsi’s ouster. Reproducing the ideological and religious character of the movement is of paramount importance to the organization, and religious rearing (tarbeya) is central to this process.
Ideological Shifts
These organizational changes have led to ideological shifts as well; most notably, Brotherhood members have returned to relying on traditional doctrine as their source of identity.
Traditionally, the Muslim Brotherhood was a religious group whose supporters were a political tool for the leadership’s designs and mission. Following Mubarak’s overthrow, Brotherhood leaders devoted most of their energy and resources to political activities and charity at the expense of proselytizing activities, which was necessary to win votes. While this strengthened the Brotherhood’s electoral power, it damaged the ideological character of the Brotherhood as an institution.
Developments since Morsi’s overthrow have reversed this trend. The group is falling back on its doctrinal core to reassert its character and stand up to what it sees as an existential threat.
The Brotherhood has been quick to tactically adapt but slower to reformulate its strategy, and it lags behind when it comes to intellectual and doctrinal revisions.
But the next step forward is unclear. Will the Brotherhood revive its historical urge to cultivate society’s sympathy or will it isolate itself from a society it views as anti-Islamist, submissive, and hopelessly deviant? Will the Brotherhood continue to use social activism to pursue political power or will activism be an end unto itself? The choice will define the Brotherhood’s future course.
The Brotherhood’s ideology effectively solidifies the group’s perseverance on religious bases, but it is less effective at facilitating political initiatives. The organization has been quick to tactically adapt but slower to reformulate its strategy, and it lags behind when it comes to intellectual and doctrinal revisions. Furthermore, in the protests following Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood has not only retained its ideological ambivalence on the major questions of violence and tolerance of the political and religious other, but it has also become more vague, to the point of indefensibility.10
Yet, the Brotherhood is now in a better position to deflate the charges of religious deviance long mounted by Salafists before and throughout the 2011 uprising. Salafists (particularly the politicized activists, known as haraki, and jihadist Salafists) used to downplay the Brotherhood’s politics as religiously incorrect and politically compromising on the Islamist cause. Moreover, the Brotherhood believes that the continuous confrontations with the regime, despite being futile so far, sharpen its ideological consciousness and experience to make it fit for the new post-coup conditions. In the words of a Brotherhood activist, “It is a learning process.”11
Finally, the religious component of the Brothers’ activities is important. Many of the Brothers assess protests not in terms of feasibility but rather as a religious duty to combat injustice and what they perceive as the “war against Islam” led by the military regime and its international patrons.12
Future Scenarios
There are five likely scenarios for the Muslim Brotherhood in the future:
- total eradication by the new regime,
- triumphant comeback,
- reconciliation with the regime,
- fragmentation into various factions as a part of Islamist fluidity and mobility, and
- reinvention accompanied by a process of deep soul-searching.
Total Eradication
After Morsi’s ouster, signs had indicated that the new regime would have no qualms with the Brotherhood’s inclusion in the road map for the political transition as long as the Brotherhood respected the new rules of the game.13 Those rules were clear: the Brotherhood would recognize the legitimacy of the new system, cease protests and demonstrations, stop demanding that Morsi be returned to the presidency, and accept legal punishment for leaders involved in social strife. The Brotherhood would also accept military-imposed redlines on issues related to national security and identity, limit its sectarian activities, and refrain from additional bids for electoral and political domination.
This, in essence, would have subordinated the Brotherhood, making them no more than junior partners to the military in the new political system. Acceptance of these conditions was perceived by the Brotherhood as full political capitulation that would undermine the solidarity of the organization—unjustifiable in the eyes of its religiously mobilized, Islamist grass roots—so it chose to continue resistance. In the face of the Brotherhood’s intransigence, the regime seeks the group’s decapitation and its total destruction if possible.
However, the chances of doing so are slim. The regime’s ability to freeze financial assets is greatly restricted by the sheer size of the Brotherhood’s domestic and regional economic networks, cultivated over decades and able to both relocate quickly and operate in hiding.14 The state further lacks the capacity to compensate for the Brotherhood’s and other Islamists’ charitable operations. The Egyptian state is still in many ways mired in inefficiency and incompetence, which makes it even more difficult to counter an organization that has hundreds of thousands of adherents and bases of support in regions marginalized by the regime.
Furthermore, the destruction of the Brotherhood could hurt the regime, given that it has built much of its legitimacy on an anti-Islamist platform. Moreover, Algeria’s recent history—often considered a case in which an Islamist movement was successfully destroyed—may serve as an additional warning. In the 1990s, the Algerian state’s conflict with armed Islamists, such as the Islamic Salvation Front militants, relied on the selective inclusion of other more moderate Islamist factions, like the Algerian Muslim Brotherhood. That conflict ended with a political resolution that effectively meant the destruction of Islamists would no longer be a policy option. Later, the regime’s poor political and economic performance further encouraged new al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist groups to blossom.
Some anti-Islamist elites in Egypt still view the regime’s strongman President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, elected in June 2014, as the country’s Atatürk, the father of modern-day Turkey, who would be capable of purging Egypt of Islamism. These elites often point to former president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s efforts to eliminate the Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, this narrative has its shortcomings. The state’s patronage of vast social-welfare programs and development projects, in addition to its anticolonial successes, indeed gave Nasser free rein to pursue authoritarian, anti-Islamist policies. But such a strategy is far from replicable today because the state lacks the resources and is retrenching. Furthermore, within a few years after Nasser’s death, the Brothers had rebuilt the organization. Aided by Israel’s catastrophic defeat of Egypt in 1967, Anwar Sadat’s (Nasser’s successor’s) relative tolerance of the Brotherhood in the 1970s, and a favorable regional context, the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups attracted the support of thousands of young Islamists, who had been raised in the supposedly secular atmosphere of the Nasser era one decade earlier. The economic hardships and absence of competitive pluralist politics also led to Islamic revivalism in the 1970s and 1980s.
Given the sociopolitical and economic situation in Egypt today, a similar Islamist comeback is not unlikely, though it is a distant possibility given current polarization.
Given the sociopolitical and economic situation in Egypt today, a similar Islamist comeback is not unlikely, though it is a distant possibility given current polarization. While some believe that the old state will establish a democracy after achieving its victory over Islamists, Sisi’s regime has proven to be just as authoritarian as its predecessors. The economy will not improve unless key societal actors agree to far-reaching structural reforms that none have been willing to carry out meaningfully thus far. And the current political vacuum is unlikely to be filled by fresh ideological alternatives with clear constituencies anytime soon.
The forcible overthrow of Morsi and the continued crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood may be providing the organization the solidarity and increased outside sympathy necessary for its survival.15
Triumphant Comeback
A second scenario would involve not only the Brotherhood’s survival but its triumphant return to Egyptian politics. Such a scenario would be based on multiple assumptions: that Brotherhood protests sufficiently destabilize the regime, popular attitudes shift in favor of the Brotherhood because of the regime’s economic and political failures, and the organization has a consistent and powerful strategy moving forward to overcome the clear imbalance of power with the old state. This narrative also has its shortcomings.
The Brotherhood has taken concerted steps toward destabilizing the current regime. It founded the NASL as a Brotherhood-dominated, multipartisan political entity that sought to restore Morsi as the legitimate president by organizing regular demonstrations, facilitating a more revolutionary Egyptian civil society, encouraging criticism of the brutalities and the economic failures of the regime, and influencing international public opinion. The Brotherhood’s past mistakes were discussed as mere operational pitfalls, and the language of the NASL’s discourse was carefully distanced from Islamism, instead revolving around themes of political justice and democracy. Protests following the coup against Morsi were remarkably large at first in the southern governorates of Fayoum, Beni Suef, Minya, and Asyut—in addition to sympathetic regions in Cairo, Giza, and Alexandria. In practice, the protests eventually returned to Islamist discourse because of the decentralized way the group is organized and the need to attend to Islamist constituencies.
The potential effectiveness of the protests has been undermined by various factors. The NASL has failed to build bridges to key groups in society, such as the working class, professionals, informal economic actors, peasants, and the nonideological middle class. Protests have become largely ineffectual due to the regime’s successful media propaganda; the frequently sectarian and Islamist discourse of the protests has not helped attract much-needed sympathy from non-Islamist Egyptians.
At the heart of this failure was the inability of the Brotherhood to situate the group’s grievances within a broader political agenda and to use discourse relevant to non-Islamist social segments. The Brotherhood’s efforts to destabilize the regime have been increasingly associated with violence, instability, and terrorism, and therefore are seen as equally culpable as the state for Egypt’s economic misfortunes. The Brotherhood’s overemphasis on the regime’s failures without proposing hopeful alternatives may only be increasing people’s fears of the radicalism at protests. People might prefer the status quo to the uncertainties of protests that don’t furnish credible and attractive alternatives.
Some Brotherhood members counter that continuous protests are useful in that they obstruct the state of political normalcy and stability that the regime is eager to enforce on society, thereby pres |
