Arab Fall

How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days

Eric Trager

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781626163638
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How did Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood win power so quickly after the dramatic "Arab Spring" uprising that ended President Hosni Mubarak's thirty-year reign in February 2011? And why did the Brotherhood fall from power even more quickly, culminating with the popular "rebellion" and military coup that toppled Egypt's first elected president, Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013? In Arab Fall, Eric Trager examines the Brotherhood's decision making throughout this critical period, explaining its reasons for joining the 2011 uprising, running for a majority of the seats in the 2011–2012 parliamentary elections, and nominating a presidential candidate despite its initial promise not to do so. Based on extensive research in Egypt and interviews with dozens of Brotherhood leaders and cadres including Morsi, Trager argues that the very organizational characteristics that helped the Brotherhood win power also contributed to its rapid downfall. The Brotherhood's intensive process for recruiting members and its rigid nationwide command-chain meant that it possessed unparalleled mobilizing capabilities for winning the first post-Mubarak parliamentary and presidential elections.

Yet the Brotherhood's hierarchical organizational culture, in which dissenters are banished and critics are viewed as enemies of Islam, bred exclusivism. This alienated many Egyptians, including many within Egypt's state institutions. The Brotherhood's insularity also prevented its leaders from recognizing how quickly the country was slipping from their grasp, leaving hundreds of thousands of Muslim Brothers entirely unprepared for the brutal crackdown that followed Morsi's overthrow. Trager concludes with an assessment of the current state of Egyptian politics and examines the Brotherhood's prospects for reemerging.

1
Late to the Revolution

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Mohamed al-Qassas was a rising star in the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest and best-organized opposition movement. The son of an Azhari sheikh, al-Qassas grew up in Cairo’s upscale Heliopolis neighborhood and joined the Brotherhood as a student at Cairo University during the 1990s. Within the organization, the charismatic al-Qassas developed a strong following among younger Muslim Brothers, so the Brotherhood leadership tasked him with recruiting university students to the organization.

Given that the Brotherhood was arguably the greatest political threat to Hosni Mubarak’s regime, al-Qassas’s Islamist activism came at a personal price. He was arrested four times, once stood before a military court, and faced various professional restrictions. But al-Qassas’s outreach work on university campuses also had a major upside: It enabled him to break through the Brotherhood’s rigidly insular internal culture and meet a broad range of relatively young opposition activists from across Egypt’s political spectrum.

It was through these contacts that al-Qassas learned on January 15, 2011, that opposition activists were planning major protests against the Mubarak regime ten days later. He immediately publicized the demonstrations on his Facebook page and coordinated with peers in other—mostly non-Islamist—groups to spread the message.

But al-Qassas knew from prior experience that social media activism didn’t always translate into protesters on the streets. Getting a significant turnout required convincing the Brotherhood’s executive bureau, known as the Guidance Office, to mobilize the organization’s hundreds of thousands of members to participate in the demonstrations from the moment they started.¹

That, it turned out, was a tall order.

• • • • • • • •

By early 2011, popular frustration with the Mubarak regime had been building for many years. Despite posting an impressive average 5.9 percent real GDP growth from 2005 to 2010, there was limited trickle-down, and a 2010 Gallup survey found that only one-fifth of Egyptians believed that economic conditions were improving.² Meanwhile, following the 2008 global economic crisis, unemployment rose from 8.7 to 10.1 percent during the next two years,³ and youth unemployment was especially high at 23 percent, including 60 percent among women fifteen to twenty-four years old.⁴ The final decade of Mubarak’s rule also witnessed a surge in labor strikes, with over two million workers participating in nearly 3,400 strikes and other collective actions.⁵

Egypt’s calcified autocracy exacerbated these frustrations. To many Egyptians, Mubarak’s apparent attempt to anoint his younger son Gamal as his successor was a throwback to the pharaohs. The severely rigged 2010 parliamentary elections, during which Mubarak’s ruling party won over 86 percent of the seats, and rampant governmental corruption added to popular distrust of the regime.⁶

Yet, even as Egyptians frequently warned that mounting anger might yield a popular infigār—an explosion—there appeared to be no party or group that could channel this distress into an impactful anti-Mubarak movement. After all, Egypt’s legal opposition parties were small and thoroughly co-opted by the regime.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was Egypt’s largest and best-organized opposition group, feared greater repression if it challenged the Mubarak regime too directly.⁷ So the Brotherhood downplayed its political ambitions. It instead focused on building relationships among other sectors of society through its involvement in the professional syndicates and spreading its Islamist message through the social services it provided in Egypt’s neediest areas. It also appealed to the public by occasionally organizing anti-Western protests, which was a useful tactic for criticizing the Mubarak regime’s cooperation with the United States and Israel without challenging the regime’s political legitimacy directly.

Like many of his colleagues, al-Qassas had participated in these protests since his earliest days as a Muslim Brother. His first political act was marching in a Brotherhood-organized, pro-Palestinian demonstration in 1992, and he increasingly participated in organizing these protests as he emerged as a Brotherhood student leader at Cairo University during the 1990s. In the process, al-Qassas befriended leftist activists who disagreed with the Brotherhood’s Islamism yet flocked to the Brotherhood’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations at a time when few other outlets for protest activity existed.⁸ Away from the heat of the protests, al-Qassas spent long evenings with these leftist counterparts, debating a wide range of political, social, and philosophical questions. Before long, they located various points of agreement and, in 1996, formed the Committee on Collaboration among Political Forces, which protested the Mubarak regime’s prosecution of Brotherhood leaders before military courts.⁹

Al-Qassas continued his campus activism even after he graduated from Cairo University in 1998. He remained one of the Brotherhood’s foremost student recruiters at the university and continued organizing protests as a mechanism for raising the Brotherhood’s campus profile. Al-Qassas’s network of opposition youth activists thus expanded considerably, and a loose coalition of Muslim Brothers, socialists, communists, and Nasserists coalesced amid the various waves of protest that emerged in the years that followed.

The first protest wave began in late 2000, shortly after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada. The intifada engendered mass sympathy for the Palestinian cause within Egypt, and al-Qassas worked through the Brotherhood to organize campus protests against Israel, which the regime initially tolerated.¹⁰ But as these demonstrations increasingly criticized Mubarak’s relations with Israel, the regime began cracking down. Central Security Forces (CSF) police would surround the protests, clash with demonstrators, and detain activists by the dozens.¹¹

Egypt’s response to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 intensified the activists’ ire. While the Mubarak regime publicly criticized the invasion, it nevertheless permitted US warships to pass through the Suez Canal.¹² In an apparent attempt to contain the mounting popular outrage in the run-up to the war, the regime permitted the Brotherhood to hold a major antiwar protest at Cairo Stadium on February 27, which over a hundred thousand reportedly attended.¹³ But it was to no avail. On March 20, the day after the US invasion began, tens of thousands of protesters occupied Tahrir Square before CSF police beat them back. The massive outpouring included strong denunciations of the Mubarak regime’s foreign policy, and protesters tore down a Mubarak poster hanging outside the ruling party’s downtown Cairo headquarters.¹⁴

Then in late 2003, a coalition of older Nasserist, leftist, and Islamist political opposition figures jointly established the Popular Campaign for Change, which ultimately became known as Kefaya, meaning “Enough.” The campaign demanded a variety of political reforms, including competitive presidential elections.¹⁵ From December 2004 through the spring of 2005, Kefaya held a series of antiregime protests in downtown Cairo, representing the first sustained antiregime protest activity.¹⁶ Al-Qassas participated in Kefaya, and the movement’s ideological diversity made it another important meeting ground for Islamist and non-Islamist activists. But the ideological diversity of Kefaya also contributed to its downfall: Its leadership failed to offer a coherent political program beyond opposing Mubarak, and it fizzled due to regime pressure two years later.¹⁷

The youth activists who joined Kefaya, however, soon built other, often narrower anti-Mubarak movements. These included Haqqī (“My Right”) and Gami’atunah (“Our University”), which protested the heavy police presence on campuses.¹⁸

But the most successful of these movements was April 6 Youth, which took its name from the date of a 2008 labor strike at Egypt’s largest textile factory in Al-Mahalla al-Kobra, during which workers confronted riot police for two days.¹⁹ In the run-up to these strikes, youth activists created a Facebook page to express their solidarity with the workers. The page rapidly attracted over seventy-six thousand members and thus became an important forum in which young Egyptians vented their frustration with the Mubarak regime.²⁰ Al-Qassas had met April 6 Youth founder Ahmed Maher during the Kefaya protests, and the two continued their collaboration through the mostly small protests that April 6 Youth organized in the years that followed.

Yet, as al-Qassas’s involvement with non-Islamists became more frequent and visibl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Rapid Rise, Faster Fall
• 1 Late to the Revolution
• 2 An Islamist Vanguard
• 3 Postrevolutionary Posturing
• 4 Preparing for Power
• 5 The Road to Parliament
• 6 Powerless Parliamentarians
• 7 The Road to Ittahidiya Palace
• 8 The Power Struggle Continues
• 9 Power, Not Policy
• 10 The Power Grab
• 11 In Power but Not in Control
• 12 The Rebellion
• Conclusion: Broken Brothers
• Appendix: Interviews
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author