What happened to the Muslim Brotherhood?
A short, incisive and deeply informed look inside the shattered remains of Egypt's Islamists.
My ostensible weekly book review essays continue to follow no schedule, rhyme or reason.
Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi and Noha Ezzat, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22 (New York: The Century Foundation, 2023).
Some fifteen years ago, I met a group of young Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood bloggers in Cairo. I had been following most of their blogs before I met them for the first time, blogs where they talked about life inside the Brotherhood and sometimes even criticized the organization’s leaders and strategy. That was all new and exciting at the time, and I ultimately wrote this piece for MERIP about them. While those bloggers ultimately failed to transform the organization, they were then - and remain today - an impressive group which defied caricatures of Brotherhood members and offered critical window into the organization in all of its strengths and failings. Most members of that group of Brotherhood bloggers ultimately left the organization along the way, and many have gone on to accomplish great things in politics, academia and journalism. One of those young bloggers - so young! - was Abdelrahman Ayyash.
Last week, Ayyash, along with Amr ElAfifi and Noha Ezzat, published a short but rich book (download free here) with Century International about the trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood since the 2013 military coup and the Raba’a massacre It’s a fascinating piece of work, based on the authors’ own experience with the organization as well as with internal documents, public and media products, Arabic-language books and articles, and hundreds of interviews. The political science theory is understated but critical to the analysis, highlighting the organization over religion and social bonds over political ideology. Broken Bonds offers incisive and revealing insights into the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization, offering clear and compelling explanations for its political choices and failings over the course of decades — and a deeply informed, detailed and up-to-date portrait of how the organization rebuilt itself in the wake of ferocious state repression and near total leadership decapitation.
Updating our understanding of what the Brotherhood is today is vital. Much of what academics know about the Muslim Brotherhood is based on an earlier era, the pre-2011 organization which combined a large network of social services, a well-oiled political machine, and a fairly clear set of ideological foundations. Since 2013, that organization has been eviscerated by unprecedented state repression; I’ve written about the implications of those transformation here, as have some others such as Khalil al-Anani, Victor Willi, Lucia Ardovini; also see the contributions to this outstanding Middle East Law and Governance special issue edited by Ardovini and Erika Biagini and this one edited by me and Jillian Schwedler). Read alongside that academic literature Broken Bonds stands out for its finely grained reading of the internal schisms and problems within the post-2013 Muslim Brotherhood, the extent of its post-coup transformation, and the continuities between the present and its historical organizational structures and decisions.
Broken Bonds identifies three major challenges which the Brotherhood confronted following the coup, arguing that each of them had roots long pre-dating 2011: an identity crisis, a legitimacy crisis, and a membership crisis. Many of their observations and critiques will be familar to those who follow the literature on the Brotherhood. Their careful tracing of the internal organization of the Brotherhood mirrors other studies. Like others, they show how the hiearchical, top-down leadership structure suppressed creativity and internal dissent, while the leadership’s obsession with protecting the organization at all costs produced cautious, incremental strategy that proved wildly out of touch with the demands of the 2011 revolutionary moment.
But their careful attention to the internal schisms and the experiences of (mostly) younger members and former members produces fresh insights about both the pre-2011 period and the dizzying transformations which followed. One key insight is the extent to which the Brotherhood should be understood not as a political mass movement, but rather as an “elite social organization, with a small but deeply committed membership.” They show the powerful socialization effects not only of the weekly family meetings and educational curriculum, but also of the economic opportunities and marriage arrangements that locked together the elite cadres of a parallel Islamist milieu. Being a Brotherhood member in the Mubarak years, they note, carried real risks: job insecurity, surveillance, arrest, torture, even death. Those risks helped cement the social bonds and shared identity of members, bonds which the authors suggest mattered more than the details of ideology, political practice, or even religion.
The authors argue that the Brotherhood failed to understand its own elite status, mistaking the broad Islamization of society which they helped to construct over the course of decades with actual support for their organization. As the Brotherhood built its parallel informal economy and Islamic financial institutions, they argue, it transformed “into a relatively secluded socioeconomic sphere for a thin upper-middle class, loosely connected to marginalized groups through a plethora of services along the fault-lines of the nation state.” The growing religiosity of Egyptian society and state over decades was a very real development, one which the Brotherhood helped to drive but did not create or control. What they term an identity crisis could particularly bee seen in the entanglement with Salafism, a rival Islamist project which emerged in 2011 as a powerful challenger on the Brotherhood’s right flank. The Brotherhood assumption that religiosity meant a guaranteed vote was, they argue, a “relic of the 1970s” which fundamentally misread the political scene in the 2000s.
Much of the narrative of Broken Bonds focuses on the internal dynamics of the organization, before and after the 2013 disaster. In the years leading up to the 2011 revolution, they paint a picture of an organization dominated by conservative organization men, obsessively focused on preserving the institution and resistant to new ideas or strategies. They bring out fascinating first-person details of the experience of young bloggers and university students who attempted and failed to renew the organization. And they seek to explain the Brotherhood’s erratic, conservative and yet polarizing political strategy through the massive disconnect between those older leaders and a rapidly changing political scene.
The post-2013 story, by contrast, is one of near total organizational breakdown following the Rabaa massacre, the mass imprisonment of most of the organization’s leadership and many of its members, and the flight into exile of others. Here, Broken Bonds offers fascinating new insights into and evidence of the efforts to reconstitute the organization under impossible conditions. It shows how local leaders, often younger members, initially had to figure out the response to the crackdown on their own, with most of the known leadership gone and communication severed, leading to high levels of mobilization but little coherent strategy. It traces the emergence of a new leadership which attempted to revive the organization through confrontation with Sisi's regime, only to see key members of the old leadership emerge from hiding to forcibly retake control over the organization. And, in one of the most intriguing sections, it traces the frustrations of Brotherhood members with their treatment in exile and the decisions by many to leave the organization. All of this provides an indispensible look inside the Brotherhood during the most profound vertical schism and open leadership conflict in the organization’s history.
The Brotherhood’s grappling with the question of violence in responding to horrifying state violence and repression runs through the chapters of the book, with the authors offering a nuanced take on the decisions and attitudes of the Brotherhood as an organization and as individual members. They carefully distinguish between the official position of the Brotherhood and decisions made by local chapters and by individuals, most of whom were traumatized by Rabaa and the coup, who had seen their friends and family members killed or arrested (they suggest that emotion and local context had more to do with individual decisions on violence than did ideology, doctrine or organizational positions). The official position was hotly contentious. In the summer of 2014, after a year of rejecting calls for retaliation, the alternative Brotherhood leadership endorsed ‘qualitative operations’, referring to the use of targeted violence against those implicated in the killing of Brotherhood members. That endorsement sparked significant internal controversy and a public rebuke by senior Brotherhood leaders, and was reversed with the restoration of the old guard and their reassertion of a commitment to non-violence. That position too was controversial, with the authors tracing the chasm between the cautious senior leaders in exile and the angry, mobilized young cadres facing extreme repression on the ground. The definition of violence in terms of bloodshed alone did a lot of work in those debates, with non-violence expanding to encompass attacks on infrastructure and government facilities as well as carrying arms to protect protests.
Broken Bonds makes a strong, useful, and original contribution to the study of the Muslim Brotherhood. It nicely supplements and expands upon the best of the existing scholarship (such as the works noted above), deepening its empirical foundations and refining key theoretical assumptions about the nature of the organization. Its conclusions about the likely future revival of the Brotherhood may surprise some readers, given the critical perspective of the rest of the book, but their arguments are compelling (and not dissimilar to my analysis in this recent article). Broken Bonds is required reading for understanding the current state of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and how it got there, and should be picked up by anyone interested in broader questions of Islamist politics.