There's been a fair bit of
commentary to the contrary. But it's not clear it's even a hammer-blow for the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
A supporter of Egypt's ousted President Mohamed Morsi
stands in the shadow as he reads Islam's holy book Quran in Nasr city, Cairo,
Friday, July 12, 2013. Thousands of supporters of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood
group rallied in a Cairo city square, waving pictures of the ousted president
and chanting anti-military slogans.
Hussein Malla/AP
When the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was
elected president in June 2012, many wondered if it heralded a transformational
shift for Egypt, and perhaps for the whole region. After all,
Egypt is the Arab world’s most populous country and is home to the Muslim
Brotherhood, the granddaddy of the modern Islamist movements that emerged in
the early 20th century.
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Staff writer
Dan Murphy is a staff
writer for the Monitor's international desk,
focused on the Middle East. Murphy, who
has reported from Iraq,
Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen
other countries, writes
and edits Backchannels.
The focus? War and international relations,
leaning toward things
Middle East.
|
The
Brothers' victory, amid a time when old secular dictatorships seemed consigned
to extinction, could prove that 'Islam is the solution' (the Brotherhood's
slogan) after all, and many articles and commentators predicted their brand of
political Islam would come to the fore across the Arab Middle East.
A little
more than a year later, of course, Mr. Morsi is under house arrest, senior
Brotherhood leaders arebeing hounded by the Egyptian military and court
system, and millions of Egyptians who voted for Morsi appear to have turned on
him. The coup was prompted by street protests against the Brotherhood that
dwarfed the ones that convinced the top brass to dumpPresident Hosni
Mubarak in February
2011, and the speed with which support bled from the Brotherhood was indeed
stunning.
A
headline in the Turkish Newspaper Milliyet (translated by Al-Monitor)
last week asked, "With Fall of Political Islam, Are Fault Lines Emerging
in Moderate Islam?" The day after the coup, the London Review of Books
carried a post titled "The End of Islamism?"
and the author answers "yes" to his question:
"It
turns out that Morsi’s tenure was a blessing in disguise. If he had lost the
presidency, Islamism would have remained the path not taken. But today,
millions of Muslims have voted with their feet against Islamist rule. Those who
grieve over this affront to ballot box democracy forget that Egypt, like any
new democracy, has every right to seek popular consensus on the basic tenets of
its future political system. Revolutionary France went through five republics
before settling into the present order, and America needed a civil war to
adjust its democratic path. It is not uncommon in the history of revolutions
for coups to pave the way or seal the fate of popular uprisings. Those who see
nothing beyond a military coup are simply blind. I asked the old, bearded man
standing next to me in Tahrir Square why he joined the protests. ‘They promised
us that Islam is the solution,’ he replied. ‘But under Muslim Brotherhood rule
we saw neither Islam nor a solution.’ The country that invented Islamism may
well be on its way to undoing the spell."
Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad has,
of course, been overjoyed at Morsi's fall, locked as he is in a war for
survival with rebels whom he has consistently sought to paint as Islamist
terrorists. "What is happening in Egypt is the fall of so-called political
Islam," Assad told a state newspaper on July 3. "This is the fate of
anyone in the world who tries to use religion for political or factional
interests."
Well, maybe. But is this really the death of
political Islam, a modern ideology that has proven itself robust and adaptable
over 80 years of frequently violent repression? Or even the death of the
Egyptian Brotherhood? Despite a number of articles speculating so, this strikes
me as not only a premature but unlikely conclusion.
A fickle mood
In
Egypt, the public mood has been fickle. Mass protests in 2011 and 2012 decried
military and police abuses, the use of military trials for civilians, and the
military's running of the country for 16 months after Mubarak's downfall.
Today, millions of Egyptians are singing the military's praises and cursing the
Brothers as terrorists, traitors, and worse. All but forgotten was the murder of Khaled Said in 2010 by
corrupt cops in Alexandria, an event that became a symbol of abuse
and impunity under Egypt's long-running military dictatorship and proved the
galvanizing factor in the street protests that drove Mubarak from power.
Who's to say, if Egypt's economy continues to
deteriorate in the next year, that whatever amalgam of senior officers and
civilian appointees are in charge won't be blamed for the country's troubles,
and the crowd will look back toward the Brothers with rose-colored glasses? And
while Morsi's year in power was by any measure a failure, it was only a year in
power, and he inherited a mess that was decades in the making. It will be easy
for the Brotherhood to argue that it failed not because its ideology was wrong,
but because it wasn't given enough time.
“This had to play out this way, but it’s
frustrating to me, as someone who is not a fan of the Islamist project, for
Islamist rule of Egypt not to be allowed to completely fail on its own,” says
Will McCants, a scholar of Islamist movements at the Center for Naval Analyses.
“I worry that the coup has kind of short-circuited the process of the Islamists
kind of hoisting themselves by their own petard and demonstrating that the
ideology isn’t really fit for governance.”
And regionally, the impact of Morsi's election
was probably always overstated.
While the Syrian brand of the Muslim
Brotherhood has struggled, with Qatari support, to rebuild itself during the
civil war (it was destroyed by Bashar al-Assad's father Hafez in the 1980s),
jihadi groups who favor a much more authoritarian style of political Islam have
made enormous inroads.
In Turkey
and Tunisia,
Islamists aren't going away
Turkey, where the Islamist AKP has faced
protests of late, has nevertheless prospered under a decade of Islamist rule,
and while Prime Minister Erdogan's party may suffer at the next election, the
party isn't going anywhere.
Michael Hanna, a fellow at The Century
Foundation in New York who closely follows regional politics, points to how
Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party handled Morsi's fall in Egypt.
"If you look at some of the reaction, I
think the most instructive one is Ennahda," he says, pointing out that
while they opposed the removal of Morsi, they took great pains to distance
themselves from the Brotherhood. "You know, 'we decry this usurpation of
the democratic process and, by the way, we here in Tunisia are nothing like the
Muslim Brotherhood, we are inclusive, we listen to the people.' [Ennahda's]
reaction reflected a sense that the Brotherhood had messed up and they’re not
the Brotherhood."
Tunisia's
leading Islamist party has been having problems of its own,
but has also been far better at adaptation and compromise than Egypt's
Brotherhood. The Tunisian Islamists don't appear to be going away any time
soon.
In Syria, Hanna says members of the local
Muslim Brotherhood were privately telling him last year that the arrogant
manner in which Morsi and Co. were running Egypt was hurting their cause
locally, since it was getting in the way of forming coalitions with religious
minorities. But Salafi groups, backed with heaps of cash from donors in Gulf
monarchies like Saudi Arabia and a battlefield zeal unmatched by other rebel
units, continue to thrive.
In Egypt, too, the Brotherhood is not the only
option. The Salafi Nour Party, which won about 7 percent of the seats in the
2012 parliamentary election, was largely cut out of power by the Brotherhood,
and when the time came supported the removal of Morsi. Unlike the Muslim
Brotherhood, they remain untarnished by any failings while in power.
"It’s been fascinating to watch
particularly in Egypt, but across the region, the Salafis really enjoy playing
spoiler and sniping from the wings because they don’t have really any pretense
towards a mass political party," says McCants. "My hope is that the
Egyptian Broterhood looks at what happens and says 'OK, the big mistake we made
was not being inclusive enough.' They didn’t even include Nour, which would
have made a good ally if they’d given them some cabinet appointments, and they
didn’t."
Mr. McCants says his concern is that the
Brothers will go the other way. "What they’re going to do I’m afraid is
conclude that what’s better for us is to be much more serious about
implementing Islamic law" and perhaps start building alliances with
militant groups.
"My worry is that they learn to be far
more intransigent, they learn to more strenuously cultivate ties to violent
actors so they provide a credible threat to their opponents and state security.
I don’t think they go back to grassroots, sort of (preaching and social
outreach). I think I worry that it’s going to be a far harder Brotherhood that
emerges out of this than the one we've seen in the recent past."
