Torn bonds... The existential crisis of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (2013-2022)

The book, which was published a few days ago in English, entitled "Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood" is part of many efforts that try to provide an "interpretive framework" for understanding 3 important moments presented Her Brotherhood in Egypt over the past decade:

• First: The revolution of January 25, 2011, which was a revealing moment for the interaction of a socially and politically conservative organization with an uprising that dreams of a broad change in the overall conditions of Egyptians.

• Second: The Brotherhood’s rule of Egypt (2012-2013) for the first time in their history, the central state in the region with a large population and traditions of rule built up over decades.

• Third: The unprecedented repression that followed, and the resulting crises resulted - mainly - from the absence and erosion of the hierarchical organization that occupied a central position among its members, and which is no longer able to adapt.

There is a fourth moment that the book did not deal with - even if it was referred to quickly - which is the moment of changing the geopolitical environment in the region resulting from the reformulation of arrangements and alliances between the countries of the region after 2013.

The three researchers (Abdel-Rahman Ayyash, Amr Al-Afifi and Nohi Ezzat) - who represent a new generation of young researchers who have taken an interest in the phenomenon of Islamists, and their work is characterized by sobriety and novelty in the concepts used to analyze the phenomenon - assumed that the organization suffers from 3 major crises and challenges;

While it was exacerbated by the post-2013 crackdown, it was not necessarily caused by it:

• Identity crisis.

• Legitimacy crisis.

• organic crisis.

However, the researchers were not able to adequately clarify the relationship between the three crises, and how they interact with each other and their repercussions overlap in a way that affects the Brotherhood's dealings with the three moments that we referred to.

It is true that they have tried to build this relationship between the three crises by exposing the nature of the organization: "The Muslim Brotherhood has been misunderstood as a political, ideological or even military organization."

"We argue, based on our reading of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood over the past decade, that the organization is properly understood as an elitist social organization, with a small but deeply committed membership."

They add,

Hence the strength and weakness of the book at the same time.

His strength came from the fact that he dealt with each of the three crises separately, allowing researchers to track and analyze them and explain their repercussions on the organization’s dealings with one of the three moments, and not all of them. Like this with the three moments?

Perhaps this weakness finds its explanation in the absence of research methodology.

The introduction was devoid of any reference to it - even if it included a biography of one of the three researchers - which included developments in his relationship with the organization.

The absence of methodology was affected from two angles: the first, which we referred to, is the absence of a relationship between crises of identity, legitimacy, and membership.

The second: It is the repetition of hadith on the same topic in different chapters, although it could have been collected in one topic.

As in the issue of violence, which was distributed between the second and third chapters of the second section.

the use of violence by a section of the Brotherhood after 2013;

It would have been a good "case study" to study the interaction of the three crises with what resulted in this form of political rather than religious violence (when the word resistance was used, not jihad) and non-ideological (when pragmatic preambles were used to justify it).

The organization's vague and loose ideology also contributed to a conflict over its use, and last but not least;

The absence or erosion of the organization's presence among its members in light of unprecedented repression that the group could not adapt to has allowed part of the organization to adopt the use of violence.

And if I were to suggest a restructuring of the book;

I suggest devoting a chapter to the explanatory framework that examines the relationship between the three crises of identity, legitimacy, and membership. Then, the following chapters are devoted to analyzing how we can understand the multiple phenomena, which are here:

• phenomenon of violence

• Administrative disputes

• Leadership conflict

• Brotherhood in exile

• And by the Brotherhood and January

• Finally the Brotherhood is in power.

The researchers could have used the conclusion to explain the explanatory framework, which would be of greater importance not only in terms of its analytical ability;

But also for its predictive power of the future behavior of the Brotherhood and other social movements operating in a repressive environment.

The book was divided into two parts, the first of which was devoted to providing a definition of the Brotherhood throughout its history, while the second section was divided into 3 chapters.

Brotherhood and the doctrine of the fortress / castle

The book introduces us to the concept of the "fortress doctrine" to understand the Brotherhood's political behavior in dealing with January or in power, "which allowed it to consolidate its existence as a social organization along the fault lines of the Egyptian nation-state, but forced it to abandon its institutional identity, as a national political party." .

In explaining this concept, the researchers add: “

The advantage of the concept is its connection to the nature of the political economy of the Mubarak period (1981-2011), in which the informal economy increased to reach 60% of the GDP - according to estimates by the World Bank - in addition to the nature of the role of the Egyptian state during this period, which withdrew from many areas to devote itself to control. On the political and economic center - as indicated in the chapter - and last but not least;

The bureaucratic shift in the Egyptian state, which is also represented by the Brotherhood.

Despite the importance of the concept of the fortress/castle doctrine, which could also have been used to analyze and understand the legitimacy and membership crises, despite its high explanatory capacity;

However, this explanatory power could have been increased if it was integrated with the following elements, one of which was quickly referred to in other chapters, which bore the title:

We are facing an organization that has a number of characteristics and features, most notably:

The separate organization of its membership

This organization, which was built to organize the nation within it and seeks to reformulate it according to its ideals and values;

social groups that were marginalized during the Mubarak era, and was able to fill the fields from which the state withdrew

.

Politics in Mubarak's Repressive Regime

Politics under Mubarak was cultural in nature and had only a limited impact on realpolitik.

(See my article: "Religion and the Republic of Controversy." This led to the phenomenon of secular Islamic debate that spanned a quarter of a century of Mubarak's rule. The book captured these points, although it did not put them in an integrated analytical format. "There was an obsession with secularism, instead of tyranny." and,

The relationship between the Brotherhood project and the national state

This relationship led them - in the words of Mahmoud Hadhoud in his important chapter on the Brotherhood in the book Self-Criticism of the January Revolution issued by Dar Al-Maraya in Egypt 2020 - to the radical alienation that reached the Brotherhood.

Not only the rejection of the national state and transcendence above it, but the attempt to rebuild the Egyptian nation itself on the basis of a new identity and legitimacy.

According to this saying, it is possible to understand why the Brotherhood was unable to play a national political role after January?

The Brotherhood's crack speech

The Brotherhood's discourse suffered from a number of features that affected its ability to practice it within a national framework - as indicated by the book - as this discourse was characterized by morality, the predominance of the protest in presenting alternative policies, and the ambiguity characterized by pragmatism, and the disguise of a religious, not a political, advocacy.

(See a detailed discussion of this in my article on the Brotherhood and the Social Question)

The pages of the book expressed these characteristics in what he called:

The end result - as observed in the chapter - is that her true intentions remained unclear to a large segment of educated Egyptians, even those who sympathized with her on the basis of religiosity.

Here is a note worth noting, which is that a broad segment of Egyptians dealt with the Brotherhood on June 30, 2013 as a political organization, not a religious one.

These and other characteristics have produced what we can call "the politicization of the Brotherhood without owning a national political project to rule Egypt." I wrote about the inflation of the political component in the Brotherhood's project, warning against it in the late eighties of the last century, and here it may be useful to follow up on the controversy caused by Ibrahim Mounir's statements. The acting guide, may God have mercy on him, told Reuters about the Brotherhood's withdrawal from the competition for power in Egypt.

I remember when I was in prison in 2018 when leaders from the Guidance Office and middle leaders surrounded me in the cells, how they were stunned when a newcomer, a member of one of the administrative offices in Cairo, came and told them that the organization had completely evaporated, and this phenomenon stopped me for a long time because an investment that lasted for half a century (from the early 1970s) of the last century) - his goal was to maintain the organization as an end in itself - how could he evaporate!

Brotherhood and violence

Regardless of the details, the book discusses what he calls the post-2013 institutionalization of violence;

As it reveals the crisis of legitimacy among the Brotherhood;

The next chapter deals with it, but from the perspective of membership.

The fortress doctrine can be used to explain the turn of a section of the Brotherhood towards violence.

The absence of broad mass mobilization around their project, with the confiscation of peaceful protest by the regime and making its cost high, in addition to the unprecedented transgressions to confront the protests, pushes in one way or another to adopt violence.

But it was in part a struggle over who has the correct interpretation of the Brotherhood's ideology, which became a clear feature of the Brotherhood dispute after that.

Where the dispute has become over who represents the Brotherhood and expresses the legitimate leadership of the organization, and not as was previously the case with the dismissal or withdrawal of members and leaders who disagree with the organization.

We return to the issue of the explanatory framework of violence, which we can find its roots in the doctrine of the fortress / castle, as I presented, but the other factors that we enriched the concept with in our comment on the first chapter can be recalled here as well, and the book referred to some of them, although not with this clarity, and added elements to them New here we can refer to:

First: the ambiguous nature of the Brotherhood's ideology

This nature makes it open to multiple interpretations imposed by the challenges of reality.

The ideas of the Brotherhood bear faces, and the face that prevails is what the historical leadership of the group presents in a specific historical circumstance, and what is meant by this leadership is those who were subjected to steadfastness in the face of Abdel Nasser’s oppression and prisons.

Second: One of the requirements of the fortress doctrine

One of the requirements of the fortress doctrine is that the organization becomes an objective in itself.

These historical leaders considered the Brotherhood an end in itself.

The effectiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood was not the issue for them, only its survival, and this mentality was reflected in the leadership's decisions and statements.

They seem more focused on the Brotherhood's internal dynamics and how to keep the hierarchy and membership in place than on addressing external challenges.

The book pointed to some new points that enrich and develop our interpretive framework, including:

First: The criterion for success when organizing is social/religious, not political

In this way, it is possible to understand the organization’s apostasy to the religious component, or what I called it in a previous article, its soft religious ideology, to ensure the preservation of the organization and its relationship with the broader public, which it benefited from the idea of ​​a comprehensive organization entrusted with the performance of multiple roles.

If the political field is closed, it will move to the religious one in order to preserve its internal and external effectiveness - as I mentioned.

Second: The composition of the organization's membership is from the professional middle class that believes in gradual change

The movement was formulated according to this logic for years, so it was difficult to turn broad within it towards violence, and as the book indicates, "

Third: Conflict of legitimacy

The book refers to the conflict of legitimacy within the leadership level in the organization that was formed on sacrifice during the era of Abdel Nasser.

However, he did not discuss in detail the ongoing transformation of this legitimacy based on historical grievances and sacrifice on the part of historical leaders who are now in prisons and surrounded by many new generations other than these leaders.

Can we witness new constituent legitimacy and a dispute over it after these cadres are released from prisons?

Lack of organization and membership crisis

In one of its chapters, the book discusses the experience of members, whether in prisons or outside prisons, or in exile, in the absence of an organization that occupied all of their personal, family, and social lives.

This is what he called

I remember when I was in prison in 2018 - when I was surrounded by leaders from the Guidance Office and middle leaders in the cells - how they were stunned when a newcomer came - a member of one of the administrative offices in Cairo - who told them that the organization had completely evaporated, and this phenomenon stopped me for a long time because an investment that lasted for half a century (from early 1970s)—his goal was to preserve the organization as an end in itself—how could he evaporate!

This fact of “fraternal erosion” that was so pronounced in exile begs the question whether this sense of impunity that the Brotherhood used to promote is in fact more of a myth than reality.

The book attempts to provide us with the features of an initial explanatory framework that needs to be worked on to develop it, and the importance of having such a framework that allows us to predict the future of the organization and its likes operating in a repressive environment.

First: The ability to adapt to calculated or limited oppression.

As for unlimited oppression, it led to a hierarchical and educational void for members who were accustomed to hierarchical central guidance.

This hierarchical central directive guarantees the control and hegemony of the historical leadership over the joints of the organization and the members at the same time, so any attempt to focus on decentralizing decision-making that gives a voice in the decision-making process to the local and regional offices of the Muslim Brotherhood is worth pursuing.

Hence the importance of the experience of Muhammad Kamal - a member of the Guidance Bureau who adopted violence and was killed outside the framework of the law - who adopted decentralization, which was "of paramount importance in how the Brotherhood succeeded at that time. Decisions moved from the system of obeying orders to working within the realm of general guidance" – As indicated by the book.

Second: The vacuum left by the organization led to the absence of any comprehensive strategy for the organization in light of new contexts that it no longer deals

with

Third: the transition from patriarchal to institutional authority;

The Muslim Brotherhood is an organization that is not led by internal systems, but by patriarchal authority - and if regulations and systems exist, they are integrated into the patriarchal authority mixed with historical legitimacy.

Under the Brotherhood, the structures were very rigid, and conflict between the different groups and how it was managed by all led to “much of what the Brotherhood continues to contend with today: competing legitimacies, the absence of coherent and consistent internal processes, and the contradiction between an organization that has mechanisms of representation but builds its legitimacy on less than representative means."

Fourth: The chapter discussing the membership crisis

points to a problem that should have been tracked down, which is that “there is a sense that the tools the Brotherhood developed at one time to preserve itself as an organization have grown into the same tools that led to divisions and separation,” because these tools were developed Under a certain type and level of security risks, but under a new dynamic of state violence, the organization and its members were unable to adapt.

Fifth: Erosion of the concept of brotherhood;

If the organization fills the entirety of the member's personal, family, social and educational life - as I have presented - then the concept of brotherhood among members represents an essential foundation for the social capital on which the group is based.

Especially since individuals and their families lived lives of their own.

And this fact (fraternal erosion) that was so pronounced in exile begs the question as to whether this sense of impunity that the Brotherhood used to promote is in fact more of a myth than reality.

Finally: the future of the Brotherhood

Instead of allocating the conclusion to gather all the fragments of the book into a single explanatory framework, the researchers provide us with an analytical approach.

Although it is interesting and worthy of follow-up, its relationship to the study is not clear to me, and it is an idea that I have already dealt with in a previous article, which is the denial of exceptionalism that supporters of political Islam groups and their opponents alike try to deal with through it, and by the way, the idea of ​​exceptionalism finds its roots in part of Western view of the area.

Here, the conclusion draws parallels between the behavior of the Brotherhood and their leadership and the behavior of Sisi and his regime after 2013, prompting researchers to say:

and yet;

This review sought to engage with the book not according to a logic that traces the important details it contained, but with the aim of exploring and extracting the explanatory framework that lies within it, in a way that allows us in the future to study social movements that deal with authoritarian and oppressive regimes.