In the beginning, Islamism was an “idea”. Then it acquired the garb of an “organisation”. The “organisation” — the Muslim Brotherhood and the jihadist groups that branched off of it —experienced many trials and tribulations in the context of the conflict over power. But the “idea” had not reached the testing platform until the Muslim Brotherhood attained the platform of power in Egypt. I stress Egypt here even though the Muslim Brotherhood managed to seize power in Sudan many years before. Egypt is the country that nursed the idea since its birth, and to Egypt goes the credit (if this is indeed a credit) for exporting it to other Arab countries. Therefore, the distinctive traits of the organisational performance of the Muslim Brotherhood branches in other Arab countries are derived from the original Muslim Brotherhood experience in Egypt. If the Muslim Brotherhood organisation sustained painful blows in the course of its conflict with the ruling authorities in Egypt, the most debilitating occurred when the very idea that the Muslim Brotherhood was based on was shattered. The idea was encapsulated in the organisation's oft-cited campaign slogan, “Islam is the solution,” and it was put to the practical test during president Mohamed Morsi's year in office, and failed. But does this mean that “the group” will fade from the maps of the future? Was a single year in power sufficient to drive back the idea among those who had believed in it? Were the successive blows delivered to the Muslim Brotherhood organisation in Egypt, and at the regional and international levels, sufficient to put an end to it and, hence, destroy or at least contribute to destroying the idea on which the Muslim Brotherhood built itself? Starting with the last of these questions, the one that is most connected with the situation today, we must first acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood organisation in Egypt survived several traumatic setbacks in its history since 1928. Chief among these were the assassination of its founder, Hassan Al-Banna, in 1949, the security clampdown against the organisation in the wake of the assassination attempt against President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954, and the blow that was delivered against the organisation of Sayyid Qutb in 1965. After this, some groups that stemmed from the Muslim Brotherhood, consisting of a few dozen or sometimes hundreds of members, attempted to reorganise themselves in networks of small cells that carried out militant operations against the Sadat regime and targeted the president himself. Among these were the Gamaat Al-Tahrir Al-Islami (the Islamic Liberation Group) of Saleh Sirriya, responsible for an attack against the Military Technical College in 1974; the Takfir wal-Hijra organisation led by Shukri Mustafa, which murdered an Islamic scholar and former government minister in 1977; and the Jihad organisation led by Abdel Salam Farag, which assassinated Sadat in 1981. Although these groups' attacks triggered massive security clampdowns, these measures did not succeed in eliminating the Muslim Brotherhood organisation. I would not go so far as to say that they strengthened the organisation, but they did furnish a soil conducive to the spread of the group's ideas among the poorer Egyptian strata by capitalising on the idea that they were being “persecuted”. In all events, the organisation grew tangibly in the 1980s and 1990s. During this period, the Muslim Brotherhood also benefited from its curious relationship with the Mubarak regime, which swung between crackdowns and accommodations in the framework of the regime's carrot-and-stick approach to the organisation. But even confrontations with the security apparatus worked to yield a positive payback for the Muslim Brotherhood, who were able to trade on their “victimhood”, as mentioned above, especially among the poor and disenfranchised who, themselves, were victims of various degrees of injustice. At the same time, confrontations had a negative impact on the government as a result of the attrition caused by the adversary's scope of dissemination and diversionary tactics. This meant that the most important key to confronting the Islamist challenge resided in “the idea” rather than “the organisation”. The Islamist idea revolves around an ideological orientation and a slogan. The former sees the “caliphate” as the basis of the system of government in Islam while the slogan is “Islam is the solution,” which signified that a return to the faith would save the country from the grip of backwardness and underdevelopment and lead it to progress and civilisation. It would be imprecise to date the emergence of the Islamist idea to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. In fact, its origins can be traced considerably further back. It would be more accurate to date its rise to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. At the moment that the Ottoman caliph declared Ahmed Orabi a rebel, the notion of the “caliphate” was re-entrenched in the minds of those who had parted ways with the officer who had spearheaded the drive to repel the British occupation. It is a straight line from here to that fundamental thesis espoused by many nationalist leaders who, in pressing for the British evacuation from Egypt, argued that Egypt was subordinate to the Ottoman caliphate. A major figure to cite this argument is Mustafa Kamel, who was also an advocate of the concept of pan-Islamism and the unification of all Islamic countries beneath the banner of the caliphate. The members of the royal dynasty (the offspring of Mohamed Ali Pasha) had a similar vision for ridding Egypt of the British occupation, a vision that was effectively a product of that occupation. Ahmed Lutfi Al-Sayyid recalls in his memoirs that it was Khedive Abbas Helmi who conceived of the idea of the National Party that was established by Mustafa Kamal and headed by the Khedive. Lutfi Al-Sayyid adds that after meeting with the Khedive, “I met with Mustafa Kamel and some of our colleagues in the home of Mohammed Farid, [including] Aide-de-Camp of the Khedive Said Al-Shimi, and Mohamed Othman (the father of Amin Othman).” Mohamed Hassan Heikal, in his Memoirs on Egyptian Politics, recalls: “It was likewise natural that Mustafa Kamel support the pan-Islamist movement under the banner of Sultan Abdel Hamid because he rests his demand for [British] evacuation and Egyptian autonomy on the international rights that Turkey has in Egypt.” Heikal adds that when Turkey and Britain fell into a dispute over Taba, with Turkey claiming that Taba belonged to it while the British held that it fell in Egyptian territory, “the two newspapers, Al-Mu'ayyid and Al-Liwa' sided with Turkey and decided that Egypt has no objection to Taba being Turkish.” If we now fast forward to events a century later, and specifically to that year of Muslim Brotherhood rule, we will recall that the Muslim Brotherhood supreme guide took considerable liberties when he spoke of handing over a piece of the Sinai to the people of Gaza. This was much in the vein of Mustafa Kamel's willingness to grant Taba to Turkey. The fundamental idea was that these pieces of land would not be granted to “strangers” but rather to fellow Muslims. The concepts of the state, national boundaries and the sanctity of national territory simply do not exist in the minds of those who ruminate in the pastures of “political Islam”. They operate from the conviction that the caliphate is a cardinal principle of Islamic government and that this sanctions certain liberties, such as sacrificing chunks of land. Although many of the figures that laid the first bricks of Islamist ideology shared an admiration for the West, they nevertheless saw it as a challenge and therefore sought to underplay its material and technological agreements on the grounds that it lacked “spiritual values.” Ahmed Lutfi Al-Sayyid, in his memoirs, recalls that Sheikh Gamal Al-Din Al-Afghani told him when inviting him to smoke: “Do you not see that human beings, from their birth to the present day, eat, drink and dress in different ways in different ages, but the essence is one? What is new since mankind elevated himself in the past two centuries and discovered steam and electricity? I do not think there is anything new but the custom of smoking smoke, so smoke, my son, smoke!” Al-Afghani was a major proponent of pan-Islamism. He enjoyed close relations with the Ottoman sultan and the concept of the caliphate was a crucial component of his thought. Like Sheikh Mohamed Abduh, Al-Afghani held that a return to the pure fundamentals of the faith was an essential precondition for escaping the clutches of backwardness. Both Al-Afghani and Abduh shared a considerably more enlightened view of the role of religion in life, but they ultimately paved the road to the rise of Islamist fundamentalism and the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which sapped the “Enlightenment” from the idea and turned it into a opiate in the form of its slogan “Islam is the solution.” I do not believe that a single year in power is sufficient to dispel an idea that has taken root over many decades. It may have encountered some formidable resistance, but the negative realities experienced in some Arab societies have often lent it support and granted it a degree of resilience and durability. The writer is a professor of journalism at the Faculty of Mass Communications, Cairo University.
