The MB of Egypt: The Crisis of an Evolutionary Movement in Revolutionary Times (part 1)

The narrative of decline and reality of ascension  

Before discussing what I believe to be the predicament of the Muslim Brothers, a few words on the dominant narratives about the Islamists are in order. It has become a habit in certain circles of Arab intelligentsia after the recent coup in Egypt to promote the idea of a fatal mistake that the Muslims Brothers has committed. The ‘mistake’ is thought to be so fatal that it not only precipitated the fall of Morsi’s regime, but also made possible for one to speak of a dawn of post-Islamists era. Of course, preaching either an imminent collapse of Islamism or declaring it a fait-accompli is nothing new. These assertions were in vogue for much of late 1990s and early 2000s (one gets a sense of this from the number of books with titles such as ‘Islamist impasse’, ‘Islamist Dilemma’ and the ‘Failure of Political Islam’). But all these assertions  were wrong. They were wrong because (although some of the preachers of this Islamist doom theory were experts of Islamist thoughts and tactics) their predictions were based on wishful thinking, not sound social analyses. The persistence of Islamist thoughts, the rise of their appeal, and the ability of their advocates to weather severe storms of violence and campaigns of deliberate political cleansing in the 1960s and earlier, mattered little to those who gleefully spoke of an end of Islamism. Concerted efforts (military, mediatic and academic) by actors in the West and clients in Muslim societies were thought to be sufficient to stem the ‘dreadful contagion’ of indigenous political and tactical platforms inspiring hope within a cultural and social milieu beset by the dominance of shallow secularist currents, imparting a heavy dose of cultural self-doubt and self-negation. The inauspicious alliance of eastern and Western dictators, invaders, brain-washed Muslims, self-loathing Arabs, spies in journalist garments, journalists with mindsets of prison guards and, of course, the fine, well-spoken, well-groomed and presumably thoughtful Middle Eastern academics-- whose belief in academic integrity is as genuine and transformative as the conversion of Arab leftist fascists to liberal democrats--have managed to crisscross in its long promenade a deux the anyhow thin borderline between rigorous social analysis and foggy daydreaming.   

That the dream of the disappearance of Islamism has taken a life on its own independent of facts and factors on the ground is clear in its ability to self-generate and its adherents inability to learn from past mistakes.

But the Islamists’ doom is not something created ex nihilo. It often rested on a misreading of contemporaneous events. Jail sentences, tortures, assassinations of Islamist leaders, and closures of their headquarters are often interpreted to mean the death of the ideology. If history teaches us anything, it is that this manner of confusing the fate of ideas and those of their authors is shallow. Ideas have a life of their own. The material triumph or defeat of their carriers seldom plays a determinative role in whether they  get buried in the past or journey to posterity.  What hasn’t been learned so far is that, while jails, torture, barring from participation in the political arena do impact the Islamists, they help proliferate Islamism. Islamism is not attractive because the Islamists have been in power. To a large extent, it is the opposite.

Islamism derives its appeal, on the one hand, from a number of socio-cultural and economic factors, most significantly the disenchantment with the project of modernization and the belief in the redemptive power of a return to Islam--Islam which refuses to be unseated by modernity either as a locus of a cosmic view or even a repository of worldly success.  On the other hand, Islamism attracts considerable segment of the society because of a promise of a certain desired outcome (an independent Muslim rule reinforcing and reinforced by a Muslim meta-narrative) should a key central condition be fulfilled. That this promise hasn’t been delivered upon is significant, but that that the condition on which it is premised continued to be elusive, largely due to the subversive behaviors of local and international actors, awards it a meta-reality and meta-ideology status, and hence renders it immune to both radical internal reform, and the splintering central to the ‘modernizing’ instinct of the ‘age,’ the conducive environment to the propagation of a homogenizing history of wilful self-adulation and self-servitude.

A half century ago when political Islam was in its infancy in most Muslim lands, its adherents weren’t only in the minority, but were---more importantly-- seen at best as gullible youth playing with some vague postulates about the correlation between governance and public morality, or worse, as cunning agents of foreign culture like other ideologues. Islamists have made inroads into most strata of the society and are increasingly gaining a mainstream acceptance in their societies. Their distance from positions of leadership has been for sometime now an artificial reality, one whose protection requires the continuous monopoly and deployment of brute force.

That their detractors succeeded either in preventing them from ascending to power or remaining therein for any meaningful time is a statement not so much about the Islamists’ decline as it is testimony of their detractors’ paranoia of unstoppable Islamist contagion. But all this efforts are indeed futile and counterproductive. The longer a credible test of Islamist democratic experiment is delayed, and the clearer the footprints of those subversive elements behind its postponement reveal themselves, the more likely that it will transform into a collective doctrine rather than a partisan promise. This process seems to have began, although not without some challenges. It is not clear that it is reversible, however.

The Islamist very simple solution formula to their societies’ complex realities is protected by an environment congenial to its growth and proliferation. It is also further aided by conditions created and aggravated by the conducts of the very agents whose manipulative endeavors meant to abort Islamism but--more often--reinforce its preponderance . This is a central conundrum for detractors of political Islam, and their rising awareness of it will do little to change their attitude as the conceived immediate political and economic interests are so massive as to veil those who entertain them from seeing or seeking an alternative. The dread of losing those immediate interests-- and some must be lost as the history which houses them is redefined as histories-- are further compounded by a frightening portrait of Islam from that very history.    

As long as these conditions persist, the demise of Islamism will remain a misleading thought and an elusive goal. All detractors of political Islam could do is to disturb the translative process (the dialogue between Islamism meta-reality and reality itself) and hence indirectly help firmly ingrain it as a metareality, and drive near its precipitous arrival as a history incapable of seeing other histories but as anomalies to be rectified. Philosophically, this is unnecessary, but human history is not philosophically viable.  

The mistakes which are none

It is useful to point out at the beginning what I am not talking about. I am not speaking of the common accusations against Morsi’s government, such as the ikhwanization or the Islamization of the Egyptian state, or the charge of spying for Hamas, or the accusation of selling Egypt to Qatar. Nor do I take seriously the lesser charge of spying for the US. But I will address each one of these briefly below.

We have all heard from members of the current regime, including one famous judge, how the US is funding the Ikhwan and how Obama’s brother is a member of the international organization of the ikhwan.  All these allegations have no bearing on what transpired in Egypt, although the charge of ikhwanizing the system was used as a part of a massive scare-mongering campaign, which cast its spell on many inside and outside Egypt.

1- Hamas

The charge that the Muslim Brothers or the president Morsi was spying for Hamas may seem at first glance a laughable charge since most Arabs, even those who are not particularly enamored with Hamas, perhaps see no harm in providing assistance or advice to one of the few movements that still resist the Israeli occupation. It is true, that military confrontation has become intermittent and that truces are the most common feature of the current phase of struggle. This is not necessarily a negative development, although some Arab intellectuals do see it that way, understandably because of the general state of despair and distrust of any rhetoric of resistance.

For over a half century the word resistance has become a vacuous rhetorical device used by many regimes to justify repression and keeping Arab societies under an iron clad. Used to intense but short spikes in rhetoric where war would seem imminent and then suddenly quiet down, the Arab mind has grown skeptical of any rhetoric not accompanied by tangible military moves.  The long presumed war with Zionism in Palestine has been conducted in a way that neither provided a promise of victory, nor nurtured a culture geared toward long term management of the conflict.  The psychological conditioning of the masses toward accepting a long term conflict (where neither total surrender is possible, nor is technical parity required for resistance) is what distinguishes most central islamist movements (i.e., MB, on-violent Islamist movements in the Maghreb, the Islamists of Turkey and so on) from the rest of the political and ideological actors in the Arab and Muslim world. Of course, this is a direct result of the experience of these central movements with repression, long jail periods, torture, and assassinations. It is also-- in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular-- a result of a careful reading of the various rounds of that conflict.

Although this is not the main topic here and only tangentially related, one can safely conclude that Hamas’ approach to truces so far has been complex. The movement doesn’t see truces in the same way that many Arab countries have seen them in the past. While interested in maintaining them, Hamas sees truces as periods to prepare for new rounds of conflict in the same manner that their Israeli counterparts view them. Truces are not seen by Hamas as periods for rest but rather for work. The qualitative improvement (despite the air-tight siege) of their weapons and tactics in every new new encounter with Israel is the best testimony to that approach--it matters little whether the improved weapons were locally manufactured or imported from Micronesia.

Now we return to the charge that Morsi was working for Hamas. This is no random accusation, but rather the apogee of a defamation campaign whose base consists of depicting the ikhwan as a movement obsessed with its international project, using its local presence and resources to bolster its international standing. The opposite isn’t generally held to be true: the criticism of the movement doesn’t often allow for the possibility that the movement may use its international connections to help Egypt as a country or the movement’s standing therein except in some very rare cases and often counterproductive ways.

This is a central point in the smear campaign against the MB, as it stripes them from the sacred patriotic garment in an advanced process toward stripping them from their humanity. The accusation of spying on behalf of Hamas has to be read in this context. Hamas is a very good choice for such allegation. Hamas doesn’t only share the Muslim Brothers’ ideology, but it is also the only armed movement which controls a territory in a state-like fashion. Hamas has also defeated Fatah, an important corrupt ally of the corrupt fulul now in power Egypt.    

Of course, the allegation is ridiculous. One has to be from another planet to believe that spying on behalf of Hamas is something that a president of Egypt would do or that such an act--if he in fact volunteered to undertake--constitutes any danger of any kind to Egypt. Not only does Hamas have a bigger adversary to deal with, but Egypt hardly features in Hamas future territorial ambitions. More importantly, Hamas is a small Palestinian resistance movement which controls an impoverished, besieged and crowded enclave whose sole lung is Egypt.

2- Qatar

The other charge is the sale of Egyptian estates and institutions to the rich oil-potentate, Qatar. This charge was frequently cited on Egyptian tv shows and was the fodder of a mock-fest targeting Morsi and his regime by the ‘part time’ (or, more likely, the one-time) comedian Basim Yousef, who rose to fame in the last days of Morsi’ reign and lapsed to oblivion thereafter. Basim is one of many Egyptian liberals who seem, in the best of circumstances, to have taken a one-way road to ethical self-destruction. He neither possesses the courage to acknowledge his role in toppling an elected president tolerant of excessive comic criticism, nor is his comedy welcome under a nervous military dictatorship with closed minds and open prisons.

In his recent outings in the Egyptian press since the coup, Basim reflected both the trepidation of a coward and the malice of a scoundrel. He expressed neither adequate empathy with the victims of recent massacres, nor contempt for their callous perpetrators. Like many Arab liberals, Basim is either a liberal who had no values or one who sold them.

Despite being frequently cited in Egyptian media, the sale of Egyptian estates and assets to Qatar had no major impact. Since Khedive Isama’il, the Egyptian society has become used to extensive deals between the regimes, on the one hand, and foreign countries and organizations on the other hand. These are deals that often give the latter wide concessions and the former some immediate cash to squander on projects which seldom benefit the masses.

The few who were alarmed by the story of the sales of Egyptian estates to Qatar, perhaps played a marginal role in the ousting of president Morsi.

3- America

The charge of spying for the US is the least impactful. Since the signing of the Camp David Accord, serving American interests, and by extension those of Israel, has become l’ordre du jour for anyone taking over the seat of the pharaoh. A charge of this nature had as much effect on public opinion as did the more damning revelation that Sissy spoke for hours on daily basis over the phone with US secretary of defense as they debated the details of the July 3rd coup.

The MB deadly mistake is one of habit

The MB mistake is one that they cannot help but commit. The mistake is their gradualism. Gradualism is the movement main source of strength, but it is also their main weakness.  It was their gradualism which brought Morsi’s government down in the time and the manner we saw, and it would lead--unless they rethink it, which I doubt they would--to the failure of the ongoing endeavor to challenge the coup.

The MB main strength lies (in addition to being well-organized and disciplined movement) in its doctrinal gradualism. This gradualism is to a large extent a product of the painful experiences where the movement found itself several times in the past sixty years in confrontations with a sizeable segment of the society and in existential war with a number of regimes. This is not an argument that gradualism is something the movement has never left. To be sure, it was derailed as a general course a few times. But these were the exceptions not the norm. Violent or revolutionary acts committed by affiliates of the movement tended naturally to be committed by those members who are either new to the movement or in the process of leaving it. Gradualism and extreme aversion to risk-taking is a mentality whose origin could be traced back to Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the movement. In his days, Banna consistently warned--in late 30s and early 40s of the past century--that some of the movement’s youth might attempt to harvest ‘the fruit’ of the movement’s labor prematurely. In a number of letters and speeches Banna strongly rebuked such inclination. In fact, he expressed his categorical disavowal of any revolution by anyone, under any guise, insisting that Egypt “had her fair share of revolutions” and that they had all brought her no good.

In the periods after Nasser’s ruthless crackdown on the movement during the 50s and 60s of the last century, the MB started to approach politics with a greater level of caution compared to any prior period, and would ever since accept to move within very limited margins, which expanded at times and shrank at others.

Regardless of how small or big these margins became, the MB was keen on working within whatever framework  the strong man in Cairo establishes, without attempting to affect a major or radical change. In its cautious approach the movement was in part driven by a desire to avoid any major conflict with the existing regime, which could lead to a destruction of the various organs of the movement which its members laboriously rebuilt after the era of Nasser.

True, the MB showed a good deal of resiliency and compromised on tactics, but not long term objectives. When those objectives were at stake, its members often preferred jail over conciliatory moves, but more importantly over armed resistance as well. With this attitude dominating their politics, it were often regimes who initiated clampdown campaigns, and it were the Brothers who reacted, often peacefully. It is true that the MB was accused of a number of terrorist attacks, and it is possible that they may have carried out some of these. But the number of these incidents and the likely chance that they were orchestrated by those in power to justify a crackdown on the movement lend credence to the conclusion of the peaceful and gradualist nature of the movement. The movement’s detractors have more credible ammunition when referring to the rhetoric of certain members of the movement or when they use such rhetoric to make a futuristic assessment of a possible change of heart on the part of the movement should it come to power. In assessing its current or past position, all allegations to violence rest on very thin, if any, foundations.

During the years of Mubarak, the MB learned to deal with fraudulent elections as a participant whose main goal was to remain a recognizable player in the scene, a player who derives benefit from, and contributes to the reputation of the movement as a social and religious network. Even during the times when Mubarak's regime embarked on major campaigns of repression against the movement, the MB exercised a good deal of restraint and showed flexibility in dealing with the maltreatment of its members, mostly battling the regime through legal and civilian means.

But whether being jailed or killed, the brothers’ response has primary centered on showing their desire to continue to challenge the regime without resorting to any move that would radically jeopardize their interests  or undermine the adversary in the short term. In the past and at times of clampdowns, the MB would try to leave parts of their assets outside the conflict to ensure the smooth management of the movement massive structures. This tactic is not completely unheard of in the modern Arab history. It is, mutatis mutandis, the tactic of most Arab regimes vis-a-vis foreign powers that seek to undermine them. The difference, of course, is that the MB do this in a local context where their peaceful reaction to repression could be marketed as a sacrifice for the greater good of the community: to avoid turning the local scene into a civil war zone.

The generations of MB’s leaders who outlived the bloody onslaught of Nasser on the movement in the 60s and other subsequent brutal crackdowns during the era of Mubarak developed unrevolutionary intellectual and tactical habits.These habits led the ikhwan (who openly opposed Mubarak and who were frequent visitors of his jails during, but sometime outside, election seasons) to make no major public fuss about the prospect of Mubarak staying in power just months before the revolution. This unrevolutionary habits have also led the ikhwan to stop short of officially joining the revolution against Mubarak, and left the matter to the discretion of their members. Of course, that was a tacit approval from the movement to its members to join, which they did. But the reluctance was clear and noteworthy.It would constitute a ground later for MB opponents to claim that the movement didn’t participate in the revolution.To be sure, the charge was bogus. Video and audio records from the early hours of the revolution show leading members of the movement including Muhammad al-Baltaji among the crowd at the Tahrir Square and other protest locations.The organisational skills that the Movement brought to bear in support of the anti-Mubarak movement in the later and more critical stages of the revolution is not subject to dispute.

But in Egypt allegations of this sort are not that unusual. Back in the 50s of the past century when the time was ripe for Nasser to embark on a character assassination of  then president Muhammad Najib, the first smudge thrown on his national suit was his lack of participation in the revolution against King Faruq. He was to be accused later of far more serious crimes, such as working with the MB, the British and regressive forces worldwide. The charge that MB didn’t participate in the revolution against Mubarak is simply a modern version of the Nasser’s accusation to Nagib. In Egypt, the country with ancient history, there are no new lies. Most are simply brought back and repackaged to fit a new context.

Even after the fall of Mubarak, the evolutionary, gradualist temperament remained the dominant feature of the MB thinking. Right after the ‘success’ of the revolution there was indecision about whether the movement should or shouldn’t participate and about whether it should compete only for limited number of seats or for all. Some then praised the MB declaration that they opt for musharaka (participation) and not for mughalaba (competition), as this policy was termed. These and other would harshly critique the MB later for not upholding that commitment. While rescinding the offer of not competing for all seats was a mistake and has given a fodder for their critiques, it is the promise itself that was unwise. But it was only the the first of a series of blunders. There was first again the announcement that they will not compete for the highest office, which would be rescinded later when it was clear--it would seem-- to the MB that the army’s candidate can easily win the election.  

Regardless of whether the principled and opportunistic criticism of the MB’s vacillation (which came from different segments of the egyptian articulate class) has some validity, and regardless of whether the MB deliberately misled the Egyptian people or had simply a genuine change of heart, the fluctuation is the product of an internal struggle between some amongst the revolutionary youth within the movement and the old guards who are by very nature very aversive to revolutionary ideas.

Indeed, the hesitation was in part a product of the circumstances in which the movement found itself. Like any political movement, MB was caught off guard by the speed and scale of the January 25th revolution, which raised both the hope of opportunities to come, but also fear of uncertain future. The movement, especially the old guards were not sure how to handle the new situation. The MB in general is better at dealing with crises once they are confronted with them than reading the political scene or predicting its fluctuation. Of course, the old guards are in general disinclined to take risk. Lack of risk-taking is really not unique to the MB, but rather a part of a falah mentalite, which typifies the attitudes of all political players in Egypt and the Arab world in the moder era. The main difference is that some local organizations such as the MB, Hizbollah and Hamas have the ability to quickly regain balance and recover from any major knock out. The Arab mind has for long time lost what I shall call risk-taking intelligence and developed in the best of circumstances the ability to refocus and patiently persevere in the face of difficulties.  All Arab wars with Israel speak to this fact: The Israelis would often take the initiative, whether in terms of starting the war or in terms of how, when and where battles are fought (A the 1973 war presents a small exception to this fact, but even then the only risk-taking involved was one that everyone should have predicted). The Arabs, both rulers and ruled, would react. The only thing that has so far changed in that equation is what some Arab revolutionary forces and some ordinary Arabs no longer run in fear of Israeli threats or real actions as their fathers did.

The MB, like other Islamists, has one advantage: the moral and psychological training of their cards which glorifies self-sacrifice and ties any conflict with a meta-narrative whose boundaries transcend the physical world, thus rendering any material imbalance with the adversary a mere nuisance, which one can continue to militate against even if one cannot entirely bring to equilibrium. This helps them maintain morals, accept losses and exhaust the enemy, even in relatively non-militaristic confrontations.

In the struggle as to whether to field a candidate in the presidential election, those with revolutionary credentials won against the gradualists and the movement named a candidate. Once a decision is taken, it matters little who voted for it or against it. Everyone follows whatever the goal maybe. This is indeed one aspect of the MB which instils fears in the hearts of other political parties in Egypt because no other entity, not even the Egyptian army, has the kind of dedicated cadres and disciplined followers who can engage on a short notice in a massive and sustained grassroots campaign.

to be continued