Many Egyptian social media activists and analysts opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood have taken a sharp line against Western analysts who appeared to be bigging up the Brotherhood during the latter period of the Mubarak years. You thought the Brotherhood were a cuddly bunch of moderate Islamists who would key to creating a new, more balanced, at-one-with-itself Egyptian political order after the brutality and stultification of Mubarak’s police state, they argue. Some of those analysts, of course, have continued to defend the Brotherhood in the post-Jan 25 political landscape, with a discourse that appears to complement the positive approach of the U.S. government, but the major part of the debate has focussed on the wider picture: did specialists misread the Islamist movement?
Marc Lynch offered a defence this week which said there had been by and large no misreading at all up to the point of the uprising against Mubarak, but that after that the Brotherhood had defied all sensible predictions and flummoxed everyone observing them closely. Seemed to me there was a exaggeration on both sides of the Jan 25, 2011 date: the reading was so right before, the Brotherhood have been so bad since. Perhaps the latter is overcompensating for the sins of the former: yes, the Brotherhood has behaved “badly” but there are clear reasons why they did what they did. That’s not to justify them or say that they couldn’t have acted differently, but their behaviour I wouldn’t say has been a mystery. They ran a presidential candidate when they became convinced that the military junta was set to hamstring the parliament they controlled. Add to that, one of their own had defied orders not to run on his own steam. Their president Mursi took those massive powers into his hands in November last year because of fear that the judiciary was on the point of disbanding the assembly writing the constitution.
Should it be surprising that the Brotherhood would do these things when cornered? Not at all. The guiding logic of the Islamist movement is that they represent the national-religious centre and that the various forms of secular ideologies and political players out there cannot by rights take pole position and occupy the central ground in governance. The Brotherhood believes it is correcting the mistakes of colonialism in returning a form of Islamic sanctity to the state and its institutions, not by taking the country back to 1798 when Napoleon landed, but in a new-fangled and not entirely worked-out manner that still, despite the fuzziness, in fact defines modern “Islamist” movements. In the Sunni polity, a temporal ruler – whether he is deemed caliph or otherwise – must ensure that the writ of Sharia dominates, that there is a logic which links laws, morals, institutions today to the early Islamic past and the elaborate system developed by jurists in the formative period of Arab-Islamic civilization. Parliament is there not just to pass laws but to make sure that laws conform to Sharia. The constitution empowers the modern judicial system to play its role in upholding Sharia. Now Al-Azhar has been added to the mix as another line of defence, or actor, rather, in the repatching together of a Sharia state in the post-colonial world.
This is what the Islamist movement is about and if they can’t do it in the shadows, like they seem to prefer in Syria at present, then they will come forward and act in the open. Of course, the whole policy schtick about quietist behaviour aimed at charity work and re-Islamizing society at the individual and community level is all relevant, but it was only ever a tactic in realizing a wider vision. Now that they finally got here, they are not going to give up and go back to just organizing hajj trips or running syndicates, or prison for that matter. Everything has changed.
Further, the role of external forces in buttressing the Brotherhood in Egypt of the Spring is being overlooked. This organization entered into the political fray after Mubarak stepped down with a massive advantage that others did not have, the backing of Qatar and its foreign policy adjunct Al Jazeera. No one has pinned Qatar for direct financing of the Brotherhood, but it’s clear that the organization has established an elaborate network of business interests and that Qatar has played a key role in this network. The Brotherhood has built a presence in Doha over decades, centred on the presence of Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi. After Mubarak fell, Qaradawi was exultant on Al Jazeera where he openly touted the Brotherhood as the devout people in whom governance should be entrusted and he made triumphant returns to Cairo to deliver sermons in major mosques like some kind of Omar entering Jerusalem. The extent of foreign meddling in Egypt – which includes Saudi backing for the Salafi movement as a move to counter the feared the Brotherhood – is such that one can really call into question the possibility of having fair elections at all in such an environment, never mind the issues of small-scale subterfuge in voting stations that were widely reported during the post-Mubarak votes.
Analysis of the Brotherhood should acknowledge these things: the movement was always at heart “majoritarian” and it has massive support from outside, giving it not only an unfair advantage but signalling a clear intent to be in this game to win.
