“Just how
scared should we be of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood? In numerical terms, it
doesn't present much of a threat. Membership is in the low hundreds of
thousands, and in a fair election, the Islamists would not be expected to win -
in 2005, only 3% of the population voted for the Brotherhood.” Thus read a
piece on Time magazine in November 2010, just two months before the start of
the revolution that would topple Mubarak and, indeed, bring the Muslim
Brotherhood to power.
“The
Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group. They are a minority in
Egypt. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people, but they have a lot of
credibility because of liberal parties have been a struggle for thirty years.
They are in favor of a secular state. they are of –they are in favor of an
institution that have bread lines, they are in favor that every Egyptian have
the same rights, that the state is in no way a state based on religion. And I
have been reaching out to them.” (sic) Words of El Baradei, as published on the 30th
of January 2011, as protests were ongoing in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in
Egypt.
“There is no real danger that the revolution
will be just the opening that Islamists need to take control.” And “Now there
seems to be a concern that if President Hosni Mubarak leaves too soon, chaos
will ensue and the Muslim Brotherhood could emerge as the biggest winner. But
Egypt’s state structure is strong enough to withstand Mubarak’s ouster and
there is no reason to think the protests will turn violent again.” Amr Hamzawi said on the 10th
of February, 2011, one day prior to the announcement by then vice-president
Omar Suleiman that Mubarak has decided to step down.
Many have only recently started to realize how
wrong they were when they supported the Muslim Brotherhood, hailing them as leaders
on the forefront of a transition to democracy. Many analysts underestimated the
group’s power and popularity, most importantly, they belittled any fears and
worries about their threat. While many remain wary of loudly saying ‘mea
culpa’, things in post-revolutionary Egypt have already revealed a lot. The
Brotherhood’s undemocratic and illiberal practices are now being highlighted
more than ever.
In this context, an honest discussion is needed
in order to understand how and why so many got the Muslim Brotherhood wrong. It
is useful to take a step back and consider how the group managed to use events
to its advantage, convincing many that it was the right choice for those who
believed in the stated goals of the Egyptian revolution. If anything is to be
gained from Egypt’s failed democratic experiment, it should be an awareness of
how an organization such as the Brotherhood was able to project an image of
itself that later turned out to be a mere mirage. The goal is to avoid such
public displays of deception from succeeding in the future.
There are two sides to the story. On the one
hand, the Muslim Brotherhood has been able to fool both fellow countrymen as
well as foreign analysts and politicians with talk about its plans for
tolerance and inclusion. On the other hand, Western analysts have often thought
and written about Egypt in such a fundamentally flawed way, that they
themselves were particularly susceptible to being misled.
I shall discuss a few aspects of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s strategy while also highlighting why it succeeded and why it was
often received with such naiveté.
Firstly, the Muslim Brotherhood have a media
team focused on its communications to the outside world. Apart from its famous
Twitter account @Ikhwanweb, the Brotherhood also has a website in English which, contrary to what some might
think, doesn’t simply contain translations of what the Brotherhood’s Arabic-language
platform has to offer, but a tailored array of articles aimed to project a
certain image to the Western reader. A couple of Twitter users, aware of the
misleading nature of this arrangement, have recently started a new website in which they translate the actual Arabic
content from official Muslim Brotherhood online outlets. That website is full
of anti-semitic, sectarian rhetoric as well as a wide array of outlandish
conspiracy theories.
The problem
here is not simply that some analysts were ‘lost in translation’. People like
Sondos Assem and Gehad El-Haddad, who is also the executive director of the
Brotherhood’s “Renaissance” project, are supposed to represent a different kind
of Muslim Brotherhood. As journalist Nick Kristof said in December 2011: “First, meet my hostess: Sondos
Asem, a 24-year-old woman who is pretty much the opposite of the stereotypical
bearded Brotherhood activist. Sondos is a middle-class graduate of the American
University in Cairo [...]. She speaks
perfect English, is writing a master’s thesis on social media, and helps run
the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb.”
This export
brand of Muslim Brothers (or Sisters in this case) is meant to instate the idea
of the presence of a young, progressive, open-minded stream within the
Brotherhood. This idea has also been espoused by many within Egypt itself, but
the reality is that the older, traditional Brotherhood members are the ones who
run the show. Furthermore, it is questionable to even state that the younger
generation is more open-minded. Dissidents who fall out of line too much can
only seek their refuge in leaving the organization as opposed to ‘changing it
from within’. This has happened with numerous young members of the organization
as well as with one of its leaders, Abul Fotouh, who left to contend in the
presidential race.
The faces
of the revolution as they appeared in most media outlets, were young,
tech-savvy activists who were quite progressive and ‘West-friendly’. The
aforementioned image of younger Brotherhood members fit that narrative. All
these progressive, young Egyptians, no matter their political background, would
supposedly shed the bonds of patriarchy and embrace modernity and help Egypt
embrace democracy in the process. That is ultimately what many wanted to
believe and the Brotherhood simply catered to that wishful thinking.
Secondly, it is obvious how the Brotherhood
depended on the naiveté and lack of political experience of its opponents to
sway public opinion in its favour. In 2011, after the fall of Mubarak,
parliamentary elections were held which resulted in an overwhelming victory for
Islamists. Calling any opposition to the latter “elitist” or “in contempt of
(the will of) the people” or “islamophobic” became normal and widespread and
was sadly condoned, both explicitly and implicitly by Egypt watchers under the
guise of political correctness.
During and after Egypt’s first
post-revolutionary presidential elections, one of the strongest weapons used by
the Brotherhood was the word “felool” (remnant of the old regime). Slowly but
surely the word infiltrated all political discussions, lost its original
meaning and was used to discredit all opponents of the Brotherhood. In the
run-off round, accusations of being pro-Mubarak and “slaves of the (military)
boots” were hurled at anyone who dared not support the Brotherhood candidate.
Play on emotions was widely used as those voting for Shafik were said to be
signing their ballots with the “blood of martyrs” and committing high treason
against the revolution and the country.
But of course, as it would become clear later
on, those who voted for Shafik did so for many different reasons and they
weren’t all sympathetic to the Mubarak regime, let alone actual members of its
network. It was the belief that it was Shafik – and not Morsi – who was the
“lessor of the two evils” that played an important role in many voters’
decisions. Many had in fact predicted a lot of what the Brotherhood ended up
doing once it came to power and it turns out they chose Shafik for very
legitimate reasons after all. Yet all those valid concerns were successfully
discredited by the Muslim Brotherhood and as usual most people took the bait.
When the theory that SCAF would define the
outcome of the presidential elections by rigging them in favour of Shafik was
proven to be utter nonsense, a new distraction was sought. And so the theory of
the “deep state” as propagated by the Brotherhood started gaining momentum.
According to that viewpoint, the old regime was still in control of the state
through a presence in its institutions which it used to systematically fight
the revolution personified in president Morsi. This theory served as a
scapegoat which helped the Muslim Brotherhood escape responsibility for its
failure to make political or economic progress. It also became used as dangerous
justification for any of the president’s illegitimate decisions such as the
constitutional declaration issued in November 2012 and the consequent
presidential appointment of a new public prosecutor.
Thridly, the Brotherhood’s choice to help
perpetuate the revolutionary – “felool” paradigm was one of its best
strategies. The revolutionary group in Egypt, which includes the Muslim
Bortherhood itself, is a very diverse one, with no unified ideology. Muslim
Brotherhood, clear proponents of a religious state were able to bypass many
revolutionaries’ rejection of such a state precisely because of that. When it
comes to actually governing a country, there was no “revolutionary” way. After
Mubarak fell, the differences between revolutionaries came to light. Instead of
the revolutionary – felool dichotomy, alliances should have been formed based
on the kind of state each group wanted, based on ideology instead of slogans.
In that process, those who were against the revolution or those who were part
of the NDP for various reasons (without being implicated in any criminal
activities) should have been involved.
Finally, it is not acceptable for those
claiming to fight orientalism, neo-colonialism, Islamophobia and racism to
stifle criticism of the Brotherhood in the name of cultural relativism while
ignoring the organization’s blatant disregard for human rights and the rule of
law. You got the Brotherhood wrong because you allowed considerations of
political correctness to make you ignore the facts. You got the Brotherhood
wrong when you chose to see the world through the paradigms they propagated,
ignoring the complexity of the political situation. You got the Brotherhood
wrong when you agreed that their “illiberal democracy” is still a democracy
worth supporting.
