Attacks in Street Number 10 The headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood used to be subject to bugging and break-ins by state security, but today it attracts the anger of activists “What were we supposed to do? Were we supposed to allow the [activists] to burn down the headquarters? We did exactly what anyone would have done had his office been subjected to the threat of being burned down: we blocked the attempt with the help of neighbours who are sick and tired of the attacks on the headquarters of the [Freedom and Justice] Party [the FJP] and those of the Muslim Brotherhood, because ultimately these attacks harm public and private property,” Ahmed Bassam, a member of the FJP in Alexandria, said. Bassam was commenting on the “civilian arrests” of a few activists who had been apprehended by the FJP and the Brotherhood while they were on their way to the FJP offices in Glim. Eventually, the activists concerned were taken to the Ramla Police Station in the city for questioning. The incident led to anger from sympathisers of the activists, who started a sit-in in front of the Ramla Police Station and started protesting. At this point, riots started, all these events taking place on 29 March and just one week after the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Muqattam district of Cairo had been subjected to attacks by angry activists. In the attacks, the three-storey building and the Brotherhood and FJP members around it were attacked in what was claimed to be retaliation for the “humiliation” and attacks against activists demonstrating in front of the same offices a week earlier. According to lawyers present during the Ramla interrogation, Bassam's account of what had happened was not correct since the alleged attackers had been arrested simply for walking around the streets where the FJP offices are located. “Personally, I firmly avoid the road in which the office is located, as I don't know what might happen if I went there,” said Hassan, an electrician who works near the Brotherhood offices in Muqattam. “But what we saw [two weeks ago on Friday 22 March] was horrifying. People were being attacked based on claims of their identity, and there was a lot of violence and anger.” The incident in Alexandria was not the only attack against Brotherhood and FJP offices on 29 March. On the same day, several other attacks occurred in several other governorates. “What we saw were sporadic attacks in several governorates. They might not have been as violent as they were last week or three months ago, but we are certainly not over the attacks yet,” said Ahmed Ghanem, deputy editor of the FJP paper. Speaking from his office on Al-Malik Al-Saleh Street, Ghanem admitted that the signs of the paper's presence had been removed by staff. “We did it ourselves a few weeks ago because we wanted to avoid attacks and because the residents of the building asked us to do so, saying they felt threatened by the continuing political turmoil,” he said. The small apartment of no more than 150 square metres where Ghanem works was until recently the office of the Guidance Bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was itself forced to use this small space in the second half of the 1990s following a period of persecution against the 85-year-old group and now organisation. The move to the Al-Malik Al-Saleh Street offices came from the Brotherhood's more spacious offices in Al-Tawfikiya Street in the heart of downtown Cairo, which are now the offices of Ikhwan Online, the modern voice of the oldest political Islam group in Egypt. The persecution of the mid-1990s included the arrest and imprisonment of one of the most controversial figures in the Brotherhood, Khairat Al-Shater, and it was the beginning of a campaign that aimed to tarnish the image of this well-organised and arguably well-financed group that had often been seen by political commentators as a potential alternative to the then regime of ousted former president Hosni Mubarak. In the period between the day Mubarak was forced to step down after 18 days of protest across the nation starting on 25 January 2011, and the day that Mohamed Morsi, the first-ever Muslim Brotherhood, and, indeed, the first-ever civilian and freely elected, president was sworn in on 30 June, 2012, the eighth supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie, inaugurated the group's three-storey headquarters in Muqattam in May 2011. An impressive number of public figures turned out to watch the event, including the then presidential election front-runners who were courting the support of the group in the hope of a deal that could secure so-called “organised votes” to help their ascent to power. “It was a big day, which I clearly remember. The building, swiftly built, was inaugurated with a heavy media presence, and there were many important people who came,” said Nadia, a resident of Muqattam. Today, like many other residents of this otherwise quiet neighbourhood, Nadia, who lives about 10 minutes from the Street Number 10 headquarters, is joining with other residents to try to get the Brotherhood to remove its offices from the neighbourhood. “It has become difficult to tolerate: there is always a sense of anticipation that something will happen. We fear for our families and for our property,” said Saad, another resident who lives about a five minute walk away from the Brotherhood building, which is now permanently surrounded by a heavy security presence. According to Saad, “it would have been better to count on the protection provided by security rather than to garner supporters from all over the place who end up getting into clashes with protesters.” Hassan said that the security presence around the offices was always “huge”, especially on days of high alert like those two weeks ago on 22 March. Yet, according to Ghanem and Bassam, the security presence around the hundreds of offices of the Brotherhood and the FJP in the country is not always sufficient. “You have to take into account the fact that the police is very reluctant to physically prevent demonstrators from attacking the offices and that some of the people who come along with the demonstrators are armed and there again the police does not like to get hurt — not on our account, anyway,” said Ali Khafagui, a FJP member from Giza. Next to the entrance of the Giza FJP office stood Sanaa, a mother in her mid-30s awaiting her son from a nearby school. Sanaa said that she had never previously had a problem with the close proximity between her son's school and the new FJP offices, but now things were changing. “I don't have a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood or with anyone else,” she said, adding that she had never taken part in any elections either before or after the 25 January Revolution. “I just fear that one day the office will be attacked by angry people and that my son will be hurt.” Sanaa's fears augmented after she saw the assaulted Muslim Brotherhood members two weeks ago. She asked herself how the attackers knew that these particular individuals were members of the group. If the anger could get out of hand, she thought, to that extent, there was no telling what could happen in further attacks and counter-attacks. The first attacks against Muslim Brotherhood offices started about five months ago with the protests against a constitutional declaration announced on 22 November provisionally granting the president extra-judicial powers. “Ever since then, we have been under attack. It is all very sad, and it is all very new to us in the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Ghanem. According to Mahmoud, a worker in a bakery next to the Tawfikiya offices, it was indeed very new. Now nearly in his 60s, Mahmoud said that he could not believe some of the things he had heard in the media about “what the Muslim Brotherhood is said to be doing”. “I listen to these things, and I ask myself, are these the same people who were here in this building? Those people were good people. Could they really be the same,” Mahmoud asked.
The future of the Brotherhood It is still too early to forecast the future of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt, argues expert on political Islam Khalil Al-Anani A specialist on the Middle East at Durham University in the UK, Khalil Al-Anani is the author of many articles and books on the history of the oldest political Islam movement in Egypt and the Arab world, the Muslim Brotherhood. His book The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: an Ageing Organisation's Fight for Survival offers criticisms of the archaic structure and methods of this eight-decade-old group and suggests the need for its rejuvenation. However, Al-Anani is unwilling to endorse what he says may be the too early forecasts of the failure of Brotherhood rule in Egypt, or for that matter the end of the group itself. According to Al-Anani, it was not unexpected that the country's first Muslim Brotherhood president, also the first elected president after the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in the 25 January Revolution, should encounter problems. Any assessment of the Brotherhood's performance in office should take into account two factors, he says. The first is “the exclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood from public office over the past six decades. Brotherhood members and cadres were barred from access to public institutions under Mubarak. This is something that could explain their incompetence in running the country over the past nine months.” He does not want to argue that the Brotherhood “lacks the technocratic and governance aptitudes that could enable it to run a big and complex country like Egypt”. But the “main role and activity of the Muslim Brotherhood since its emergence eight decades ago has been how to oppose, protest, and challenge the existing regime, not how to rule and govern.” It has been “hard for such a hoary movement to shift its mindset and behaviour from being the subject of the regime to being the regime itself”. The 25 January Revolution took the Brotherhood “by surprise and pushed it from the back seat to being the ruler of Egypt in just a few months. It will take time for the Brotherhood to adapt to this massive change in its position,” and this adaptation period is bound to experience teething problems. The second factor that Al-Anani argues should be taken into consideration in assessing the performance of the Brotherhood in office is “the heavy legacy of the former regime, which has had a tremendous impact on the new regime regardless of its ideological colour”. This is something “that should not be underestimated at all,” he said. “Many problems inherited from the Mubarak era, which were the causes of the revolution in the first place, will take years to fix. These problems have put a lot of pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood-led government, coupled with its inexperience as mentioned earlier,” he added. As “a highly ideological movement,” Al-Anani said, the Brotherhood has had “to attend to the expected hiccups in the transformation from broad slogans to specific policies and programmes”. Such problems have not only confronted the Muslim Brotherhood. They have also been typical of all ideological movements when they take office. As a result, Al-Anani suggests that the Brotherhood is battling between keeping itself “a broad socio-religious movement” and turning itself into “a ruling force with different functions and roles”. This said, Al-Anani does not question “the impact of Morsi's presidency on the image of the Muslim Brotherhood”, something that he does not necessarily see as negative. “It can be viewed as an opportunity, or a burden and a threat,” he commented. As an opportunity, Morsi's rule is perhaps the culmination of the political career of the Brotherhood. The question remains, now that the Brotherhood has successfully gained power, of what comes next. Today, Al-Anani says, the Brotherhood needs to decide whether it should go further in achieving “broad and vague goals like building an Islamic state”, or whether it should opt for a more modest programme. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood may be considering simply turning itself into a ruling party much like any other. “I don't think that the Brotherhood's leaders have an answer to these dilemmas yet,” Al-Anani said. The priority should be how to rule the country, since current problems are likely to lead to further socio-economic frustration. In any case, the choice between whether the Brotherhood is a “socio-religious group” or “a ruling political party” may now have become inevitable, and the answer that the organisation gives is likely to decide the next moves of Morsi's presidency, as well as the fate of the group as such. In Al-Anani's view, the fate of the organisation is “open and uncertain”, which is not to say, he promptly adds, that the end of this 85-year-old group is around the corner at the end of the first year of Morsi's presidency. “We're talking about an entrenched social movement that has a solid and potent social network nationwide,” Al-Anani said, adding that the appeal of the group as a religious movement also persists. While “people might disagree with and protest against the Brotherhood as a political force, they are still likely to believe in the group as a favourite religious choice,” he said. This does not negate the fact that should the failure of Morsi be final the public image of the Brotherhood is likely to suffer, especially if the organisation's leaders feel affected by this failure and attribute it to “conspiracies” rather than to the group's own failures to meet the challenges facing it. Could the Brotherhood experience a sort of a “new birth” that would bring its traditional status into contact with the new political reality? According to Al-Anani, this is a “pretty hard prediction to make”. “Any changes in the Muslim Brotherhood's perceptions, mind-set, or strategy could lead to unexpected changes that might shake up the balance of power within the movement,” he explained. “The costs of change will be high [for the organisation], and the current leadership is unwilling to pay those costs at the moment.” Another thing that could handicap any new birth of the Brotherhood is the fact that “the movement is entirely under the control of the so-called conservative wing that has taken over the movement over the past decade,” he said. The so-called reformist current in the organisation has all but faded out recently, especially as a result of the wave of dissent associated with the 25 January Revolution that saw the exit of most of the reformist figures, along with that of many young people who were hoping for reform. At the moment, the group's non-reformist leadership is using the pressures to which the group is being subjected in relation to the performance of Morsi as president to subdue any possible calls for reform. “The more you press them, the less they are likely to change,” Al-Anani said. As a result, “the moment of change within the Brotherhood is still far away.” Al-Anani cautions against attempts to forecast the failure of the Morsi-Muslim Brotherhood experience in office, because even if this failure becomes obvious it will not necessarily bring better chances for non-Islamists who remain too fragmented and disorganised to pick up the pieces from Islamist rule. In fact, should Brotherhood rule fail in Egypt, it may serve only to usher in a more radical version of Islamism, whose allies would jump to protect the Islamist project. Uncertain as the fate of the Muslim Brotherhood might be, political Islamism “is one of the most visible factors that will shape the future of Egypt, something which is itself uncertain,” Al-Anani concluded.
Unity before policy? In a recent study researcher Ibrahim Al-Houdaiby asks how well the Muslim Brotherhood is adjusting to power Now that it has not just been freed from state persecution but is also at the helm of the state, how can the Muslim Brotherhood move forward when it has to re-channel attention from its internal identity politics to more challenging state policies? This is the question that political researcher and commentator Ibrahim Al-Houdaiby has attempted to answer in his recent study “From Prison to Palace: Muslim Brotherhood Challenges and Responses in Post-Revolutionary Egypt”. Published on the eve of the 85th anniversary of the foundation of the group by Hassan Al-Banna, Al-Houdaiby's study moves beyond the surface question of assessing the performance of the Muslim Brotherhood while in power to the deeper dilemma of the relationship between its religious identity, its identity politics, and its policies while in office. For the Brotherhood today, Al-Houdaiby indicates, the challenge may be how to embrace alternative policies, perhaps at the expense of the group's identity politics and thus of its already challenged organisational unity. Acknowledging that Egypt's 25 January Revolution transformed the Islamist landscape in the country, including that of the “mother organisation” that has since sustained deep changes including splits and internal conflicts, Al-Houdaiby argues that the Muslim Brotherhood cannot overlook the need to “formulate alternative policies” as a result of its almost unexpected ascent to power. According to his study, this will be a daunting task for the organisation, since it confronts its leadership with a knot of hard-to-answer questions with regard to the “relationship between state and religion,” the shift “from identity politics to policy questions,” the debate over the dichotomy between “political relevance and religious authenticity” and “the balance of power between the organisation and its members”. One reason that makes this task particularly daunting, he says, is the history of this organisation that started in the late 1920s with a commitment to the mainstream of modernist-traditionalist Islam and evolved in the second half of the 1960s, following a wave of harsh state persecution, to a more radical Qutbist-Salafist reading of Islam before incorporating Salafist-Wahhabi influences in the 1970s and later. These touched the entire society, Al-Houdaiby indicates, leaving little room for diversity. Qutbism, a reference to Brotherhood thinker Sayed Qutb, emphasises the need to develop a vanguard group that focuses on recruitment and ways to empower the organisation as a whole while postponing strictly theoretical questions for later consideration. This conceptual transformation, carried out in the 1960s and later, was coupled with a shift in the nature of the Brotherhood from an organisation with a middle-class backbone into one made up largely of businessmen, many of whom made their way into the group's influential Guidance Bureau and Shura Council. The group has also undergone a process of ruralisation by attracting members from outside its traditional constituencies, particularly in the 1990s. Without saying so directly, Al-Houdaiby's study suggests that these developments have made the challenge of moving from identity politics to policy questions more difficult, as the stage has been firmly set to emphasise organisational unity over theoretical or policy reflection. It is perhaps this supremacy of organisational unity, the reader of Al-Houdaiby's report may conclude, that has made any suggestion that the group could transform itself from a “social movement”, as it was before the 25 January Revolution, to a fully-fledged political party more difficult, since this would entail moving from one set-up, an oppositional association, to a larger movement requiring approval from the state. This perplexing development has also been needed at a time of “excessive politicisation,” Al-Houdaiby writes, given that the group started running for parliament, and thus explicitly presenting itself as a political actor, in the 1980s. However, as the study reveals, the Brotherhood has thus far survived such transformations, always offering itself, to its members as well as to a wider audience, as a group that embraces Islam as an all-encompassing system, rejects violence and accepts democracy — “principles that are accepted by Egyptians as a whole.” Yet, bringing together these difficult to syncronise pressures, though possible before the 25 January Revolution, may not have been so easy after it started, all the more so after the toppling of former president Hosni Mubarak, as Al-Houdaiby writes. “Overall, the 18 days prior to Mubarak's fall had a deep impact on the Muslim Brotherhood. Most significantly, they pushed the group beyond the borders of identity politics alone,” he states. While identity politics provided the necessary glue for organisational unity before the revolution, it imposed a stumbling block on the road to the otherwise inevitable confrontation with delayed intellectual questions that in a post-revolutionary context could not be further sidelined with vague appeals to “loyalty, duty and trust”. Things became more difficult, as the study details, with the ascent of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), whose establishment “reflected a major shift in the group's political thinking”. The election of Mohamed Morsi as president meant that the group could no longer postpone hard thinking about domestic and foreign policy issues ranging from democracy in Egypt to Palestine. The cost of the postponement inevitably had to be paid, with that price being levied from the group's tight organisational scheme. Leading figures from the Brotherhood — intellectual rather than organisational, so to speak — exited the stage, with Mohamed Habib and Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh being two main examples. Then came the splits in the Brotherhood's youth movement, which embraced a new form of Islamist activism and chose to join a diversity of new Islamist-oriented political parties, with some endorsing the presidential campaign of Abul-Fotouh at the expense of Brotherhood wishes. Nevertheless, as Al-Houdaiby admits, it was not long before the Brotherhood was able to recover some of its equanimity as a result of the traditional safe haven of identity politics, with the referendum over the amendments to the constitution in March 2011 polarising society between Islamists and secularists. But this was a provisional and not exactly watertight protection, and the Brotherhood was forced to address the wider public rather than just its members, offering “a civil state with an Islamic frame of reference”, something that Al-Houdaiby says distinguishes the group from the Salafis who promote an Islamist state. Readers of this book are likely to want to see more emphasis placed on the significant differences between the modern nation-state and a pre-modern Islamic society. Yet, “From Prison to Palace: Muslim Brotherhood Challenges and Responses in Post-Revolutionary Egypt” does shed light on the policy deficit that the ruling group-party is suffering from. It shows the origins of this deficit and, just as significantly, indicates the difficulties the group may have in overcoming it, especially with a leadership that is still evading an all-out confrontation. The challenge is not an easy one, as Al-Houdaiby's study reminds its readers, as it entails a tough choice between organisational unity and serious policy questions. It is, however, a choice that the Muslim Brotherhood will have to make, maybe sooner rather than later. “If the Muslim Brotherhood wants to survive and not be replaced by more sophisticated Islamist activism,” the author writes, it will need to waterdown its obsession with unity at any price.
‘I was over the Brotherhood' The memoirs of former members of the Muslim Brotherhood always make interesting stories, adding to the many narratives about this influential organisation As a result of his best-selling two-volume account of joining and then quitting the Muslim Brotherhood, Tharwat Al-Kherbawi, a lawyer by profession, has successfully established himself as one of the most famous names in the long and to an extent still mysterious history of dissent from the oldest political Islam group in the Arab world that has now itself become an association. Al-Kherbawi's At the Heart of the Brotherhood — though he was never really at its heart — and The Secret of the Temple — though he never really had access to any secret information — will entertain any reader having an interest in what is now Egypt's ruling group. However, beyond that the two volumes, over 10 editions of each of which have been printed so far, fall short of unveiling much that could not have otherwise been expected. According to Al-Kherbawi, the Muslim Brotherhood has a tight structure, and its hierarchy is hard to challenge. It adopts a convoluted mix of Islam and politics that seems more tuned to serve the empowerment of the organisation than the interests of society at large, he says, though it is the belief of the organisation, at least at leadership level, that the two are not mutually exclusive. However, beyond this narrative there are many other layers to the story of dissent from the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead of being a single episode, it is more like an unfolding saga, whose first step came with the establishment of the group in the late 1920s by its founder and first supreme guide Hassan Al-Banna. From the early dissent of Ahmed Al-Sukari during the days of Al-Banna to the no less dramatic and maybe more consequential dissent that took place under Mohamed Badie, the eighth supreme guide, of Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, who quit the group to run independently for the presidency and contested the candidate of the now ruling Muslim Brotherhood, dissent has been a pattern in the organisation. There has been much speculation about what prompts it, and it is far from being confined to top figures, since it has recently also included many members from the younger generation. Brotherhood leaders like Kamal Al-Helbawi and Ibrahim Al-Zaafrani have spoken publicly of their dismay at a decision-making process that fails to reflect the views of the wider membership, now said to be anywhere between less than one million and well over three million. Both men have contested, as Al-Sukari did some eight decades ago, what they see as the confusion of politics and daawa (preaching) and at times the precedence of the former over the latter when they say it should be the other way around. “I joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a university student because it offered an avenue for political activism, something that was not there anywhere else, not even with the [then ruling] National Democratic Party. The latter was more a matter of bringing in supporters for the state than pursuing a political cause,” said journalist and former Brotherhood member Ahmed Samir. It was at the beginning of his 20s that Samir joined the group and entered the opposition to the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak, which he describes as one of the most unjust regimes that has ever ruled Egypt. Yet, by his early 30s, and with the beginning of the 25 January Revolution, Samir was over with this “old and ageing” group. As a result, he opted for other avenues that were not available earlier but that soon appeared after the revolution. The move, Samir suggested, was “simple and spontaneous. I just stopped going, and they stopped calling me. I did not resign, and I was not expelled. Things just ended with almost the same kind of mutual consent that they had started with. I was over with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood was over with me.” The main reason Samir quit seems to be the same reason as the one he used when he originally joined: he wanted to be politically involved in mapping out the present and future of the country. Before the 25 January Revolution, being in the opposition seemed to suffice to do this job. But this was not the case after the revolution, when, Samir suggests, the Muslim Brotherhood has been prepared to adopt the same policies that the Mubarak regime applied: unilateral rule with a garnish of a tame opposition. For Mohamed Al-Kassas, another former member of the younger generation of the Brotherhood who was expelled “and then learned about it from the newspapers”, the Muslim Brotherhood in the post-revolutionary phase, more than during the pre-revolutionary one, has not been willing to accommodate opposition, not just from outside the group but also from within. “To be accurate, I should say that the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood has been acting in a very dictatorial way. This does not of course include all the leadership, and it certainly does not include all the Muslim Brotherhood, whose younger generation and in fact whose wider base has been more willing to open up and integrate into the wider post-revolutionary Egypt,” Al-Kassas said. What both Samir and Al-Kassas missed was exactly what someone like Mokhtar Nouh from the middle generation of the Brotherhood also missed after he decided to end years of commitment to the group, a commitment that had even sent him to prison. What Nouh missed was the ability on the part of the group to reform and modernise from within. “Supposedly, the Muslim Brotherhood was established to try to fix things, so reform is in fact fundamental to its cause. In a political context you need to upgrade, especially if you are no longer in the open-ended opposition but are in fact ruling the country,” Nouh, a lawyer, said. Nouh has since joined the Strong Egypt Party established by Abul-Fotouh whose presidential campaign has been joined by Samir. Al-Kassas also helped to establish the Egyptian Current Party. Both the Strong Egypt and the Egyptian Current Parties have an Islamist base, but this, Al-Kassas and Mohamed Othman, another former member of the Muslim Brotherhood who now sits in the political bureau of the Strong Egypt Party, is not only Islamist. “I would not deny our Islamist associations, but I would say we are more of a national party that has an Islamist affiliation than a simply Islamist one,” Othman said. This is not very different from what Al-Kassas suggested, and it is what Haitham Abu Khalil, a former Muslim Brotherhood member and author of a book entitled The Reformist Muslim Brotherhood, argues needs to happen to give the Brotherhood a new lease of life. In his book, Abu Khalil suggests the need for reform to this oldest political Islam group started in the 1980s and has gained ground since then, despite attempts on the part of some in the leadership who have resisted calls to modernise. Abu Khalil's book puts a good part of the blame for the systematic and worsening resistance to reform despite the pressing need for modernisation on the new political topography introduced after the 25 January Revolution by the second-strongest man in the group, Khairat Al-Shater. The latter ended the membership of many younger Brotherhood members, including Al-Kassas, when they demanded reform. Unlike the two volumes by Al-Kherbawi that dwell on personal reflections, Abu Khalil's book offers a framework in which the stories of people like Samir, Al-Kassas, Othman, Nouh and Abu Khalil himself fit. The book presents an organisation that is becoming out of touch and that could end up falling altogether. According to Abu Khalil, the blueprint for much-needed and overdue reform is there, however. But it is being kept at bay by the aging leadership that is not just losing touch with the political momentum of the society, but is also losing touch with the political mood of the wider part of its younger base. The latter might remain faithful to the group and the cause it was established for in the late 1920s, but they are also getting more frustrated by the day in what might prove to be a new round of dissent, he says.
