Was participating in the presidential election a mistake by the Brotherhood?

It was as if he had never said any other sentence in his life. Ibrahim Munir, a senior member of the international organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood, apparently commented that the movement made a mistake by running in the Egyptian presidential election.

The implication is that the Brotherhood made a mistake and is now paying the price for it. In effect, it was not wronged by the coup; it wronged itself. Did the Muslim Brotherhood really make such a mistake?

I do not know the context in which Munir made his claim and if he really meant it or if he was simply being courteous, which is his nature. Indeed, he is so courteous that I was surprised by the measures taken against him during Mubarak’s rule, when he was accused of being a terrorist leader. I once worked alongside him in the same studio for 10 days for over 2 hours a day and never thought that this man was as dangerous as the security services claimed. Once I had read their claims, I was afraid of him retrospectively.

There is a story behind this. I was invited to be a guest on Al-Mustaqila TV in London on a multi-episode programme discussing the “Arab alternative” to the current regimes. I was representing the liberal approach and Munir was representing the Muslim Brotherhood. There were also representatives for Wahhabism, the Baath Party and the Nasserites.

I had to engage in a verbal war on all fronts against these representatives collectively and individually. In the heat of the discussions, I discovered Ibrahim Munir’s tolerant nature, even with the Nasserites. He declared his appreciation and respect for the leader of the Nasserite Party, Diaa Al-Din Dawoud, who was still alive at the time (this was in 2008). The episodes ran until early 2009.

I admit that over several episodes, the Wahhabi representative was less heated with me. Whenever we had a Wahhabi viewer calling the show, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia, Dr Mohammed Al-Saeedi would apologise on their behalf if they had a go at me.

Dr Mohamed Hechmi Hamdi, the programme presenter, spotted this and said that he had noticed a Wahhabi containment process. He added, however, that a certain journalist, Selim Azouz, was uncontainable.

With every one of my attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood, Ibrahim Munir would embarrass me with his tolerance, but he did not embarrass the Nasserite representative on the show, who attacked the Brotherhood the whole time. However, Munir was embarrassed by the Wahhabis’ criticism for well-known reasons; during Mubarak’s time in office, Saudi Arabia was a red line, despite the historical dispute between Abdel Nasser and Riyadh. However the Nasserite Party in Egypt was part of the official opposition during Mubarak’s rule.

The tone of the Nasserite criticism of the Brotherhood did not change even after Munir gave myself and the Nasserite Party leader a tie each as a gift. He also tasked someone to take us sightseeing in London, which ended in a lunch invitation, as he had lived there for years and regarded us as guests. When the ousted regime then treated him like a Mafia leader, I thought that maybe he had a different nature unknown to us and that he treated us the way he did because we were “influential figures”.

I do not know if Munir actually meant his statement about the election or if it was coerced out of him by exploiting his tolerant nature. There is a campaign calling on the Islamic group to apologise for everything it has done; perhaps the April 6 Movement will accept the apology and re-establish its alliance with the Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to run in the presidential election was not a unanimous decision, that much I know; it was agreed by a comfortable majority, but not an overwhelming majority. The previous refusal to run in the elections makes it natural for those who continued to reject such participation to voice their opinion that the Brotherhood made a mistake, especially now that they are paying the price for that decision. It is true that all those who rejected the coup and supported legitimacy are paying for it at varying levels, but the Muslim Brotherhood is paying the dearest price, suffering arrests, persecution, defamation, murder, displacement and confiscation of assets.

Based on all of this, the question remains: Was the Muslim Brotherhood wrong to stand in the presidential election?

I would like to reiterate that I did not vote for Dr Mohamed Morsi in the first and second rounds. I wrote against his candidacy and continued to criticise him except in a few instances, beginning with the deposition of Hussein Tantawi and Sami Anan, then the Constitutional Declaration and the removal of Mubarak’s General Prosecutor. Then I attacked a number of his opponents because in their opposition to Morsi they were biased towards the counter-revolution; this included the likes of Adel Hammouda and Tahani Al-Jabali.

All of the revolutionary forces, I hoped, including the Muslim Brotherhood, would rally in support of Dr Mohamed ElBaradei as president. He was the only one with strong foreign links who could contain the Military Council and its evils. Only he and the rebels around him, some of whom were from the Muslim Brotherhood, could have pushed the military back into their barracks. I still stand by this opinion, even though I have also said that ElBaradei is not the person I thought he was initially.

The Brotherhood washed its hands of ElBaradei early on, even when it had decided not to participate in the election. He was not on its list of alternative candidates for the presidency. I do not know the reason for that position; did the Brotherhood leadership get a hint or statement that the Military Council, which controlled the situation, did not want ElBaradei on the scene? That was the case with regards to Sheikh Hazem Abu Ismail, as Field Marshall Tantawi said that if he was a presidential candidate, the election would not be held. This was due to the fact that everyone believed he would dominate the campaign from the first round.

It was noted that the leaders of the revolutionary coalitions who considered ElBaradei to be their spiritual leader did not commit to the idea of his candidacy either. Did they receive signals from the Military Council as well?

Those who want to evaluate the Brotherhood’s decision to run in the presidential election must now return to the context in which the movement went ahead. It was clear from the beginning that there was a plan to keep the group away from the political scene, either by derailing the parliament, in which it had a majority representation, or by dissolving the parliament, as announced by Prime Minister Kamal Ganzouri before the leaders of the People’s Assembly. He also said that the constitutional rule to dissolve the parliament was in his desk drawer months before the decision was made.

What happened is that the Brotherhood’s victory in the presidential election delayed the confrontation and made it more costly. However, it also revealed the size of the plot to the world and this is better than the “death in vain” it would have suffered. The Brotherhood’s strength would have driven the military, Mubarak’s legacy, to work on eliminating it from the political scene by any means necessary, even if the military did not rule directly and opted instead to rule through a civilian president.

Nevertheless, which was better for the Egyptian revolution and its demands, the nomination of Dr Mohamed Morsi or the Brotherhood refraining from nominating anyone?

In my opinion, in the absence of a Brotherhood candidate we would have had two options: either the president would have allowed the military to rule indirectly, which would have been the most dangerous option; or the president would refuse to be a puppet and a coup would be staged. In that case, there would be no one to revolt against the coup and the deposed president would have to agree to military rule and his ouster would have no serious consequences. The revolution would have been murdered with no blood money payable. One reason behind President Morsi’s steadfastness is that he has his supporters, his party and his group still behind him; they are the reason that he continues to fight and insists that what happened in 2013 was indeed a coup. He will not let the thieves who stole Egyptian democracy enjoy their plunder.

With all due respect to Ibrahim Munir, therefore, the Brotherhood’s decision to run in the presidential election was one of the best decisions it has ever made and was purely in favour of the revolution.

Translated from Arabi21, 12 January, 2105

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.