Inside the Muslim Brotherhood

In the 18 months since the Egyptian army swept (back) into power and forced out elected president Mohammed Morsi, there have been any number of speculations and conjectures as to why such events were able to take place. At the time, many liberals and leftists saw the army as riding a popular wave of anger and disillusionment against the Muslim Brotherhood, while Islamists were shocked and appalled at developments and staged sit-ins and protests to contest their removal from power. In the intervening period, as the military’s steely grip tightens around Egyptian society, average Egyptians have found themselves caught in a binary between what they see as two equally unpalatable solutions: military dictatorship or Islamist state. Choose the former, and risk having your rights curtailed under the guise of the security state and being thrown in jail for simply acknowledging the status quo; choose the latter, and face an imposition of sharia law and possible allegations of the thought crime of “insulting Islam”.

Dr Hazem Kandil, a lecturer at Cambridge University and specialist in political sociology, has an alternative narrative. While condemning Egypt’s descent into “a police state more vigorous than anything we have seen since Nasser,” Kandil is equally critical of what he calls “the Brothers’ complacency that alienated… the people” in summer 2013. But it his argument for the root causes of this “complacency” that really breaks new ground in the contemporary discourse surrounding the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – that it was ideology, and not politics, that led to the Brothers’ downfall.

In his latest book, entitled Inside the Brotherhood and published by Polity Press, Kandil purports to present “the first in-depth study of the Brotherhood from the inside” and to show how a doctrinal ideology based on what he calls, in the Marxist tradition, “religious determinism”, ultimately prevented the Muslim Brotherhood from clinging on to power.

“It was the Brotherhood’s incompetence at government and the fact that they had no concrete plan to offer that drove millions into the streets on June 30 [2013]. And it was the Brotherhood’s decision to turn a political clash into a full-fledged religious war, through an inflammatory rhetoric made convincing by dispersed acts of violence, that guaranteed the public’s blanket endorsement for their brutal repression.” (p. 141)

Kandil’s central point, doggedly argued and empirically supported, is that up until 2013 the vast majority of Egyptians – not to mention the entire international and scholarly community – had misconstrued the Muslim Brotherhood as a movement. Due to the constraints of restricted access, most analysts and scholars had hitherto based their interpretations of the Brotherhood on sources offering information about the movement’s external relations to society – such as written texts, interviews, charitable organisations, speeches, etc. What this effectively did, says Kandil, was to reproduce the discursively constructed vision of the Brotherhood that they themselves propagated; rather than delve beneath the surface to analyse the ideology of the Brothers themselves. Indeed, as Kandil himself puts it, the blanket assumption until very recently was that the Muslim Brotherhood – and other Islamist movements like them – are nothing more than pious practicing Muslims who wish to express their religiosity more freely in public; a conviction that the Brotherhood itself upholds.

Drawing on more than eight years of participant observation and interviews, Kandil argues instead that Islamism, and specifically the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, is not only deeply ideological but “far from being an expression of repressed religiosity in societies with a history of forced secularisation, Islamism is based on an unorthodox interpretation of Islamic history [that]… amounts to an inversion of the traditional understanding of Sharia.”

By this rather contorted statement, Kandil is referring to the Islamist mantra that “Islam is the solution”, which in his eyes is based on a religious doctrine that “obliterates the boundaries between the here and hereafter” and proclaims that “sharia is not just a set of duties imposed upon Muslims in this life in hope of reward in the next, but also a tool for worldly accomplishments.” In other words, according to Kandil, the Brotherhood believe that strict adherence to sharia law is literally “a way to solicit God’s help in advancing in this world” – Islam as a recipe for divine intervention.

It is this peculiar interpretation of Islam, Kandil argues, that ultimately proved to be the Brothers’ downfall, as they found themselves catapulted to political power in 2012 with no real political, social, or economic plan to turn the country around beyond waiting for God to intervene on their behalf. In this argument, Morsi and his followers believed political strategies to be unnecessary because they fully subscribed to the doctrine of religious determinism, the belief “that by obeying God, economic resources would be discovered, political factionalism and social tension would disappear, and … divine blessing would follow.”

It is this ideological underpinning to the Brotherhood’s political complacency that Kandil is able to use as justification for their continued bewilderment and trauma of the events of summer 2013. Moreover, he argues that the Brothers’ invocation of biblical imagery and jihadist slogans during the Raba’a sit-ins came as a profound shock to the wider Egyptian population – who had hitherto seen them as benign Muslims, not ideological Islamists – and contributed to the sanctioning of the massacre of nearly 2,000 people by the military.

“In truth, the jihad rhetoric and the symbolic acts of violence that accompanied it were ritualistic. Brothers never intended to launch an insurgency. They meant to spark a fight that God Himself will finish.”

According to Kandil, the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric of the Raba’a sit-ins, along with a few small sporadic acts of violence that were easily sensationalised and distorted by the military regime, actually served to alienate the mainstream Egyptian population from a movement they had until then seen predominately as a force for social good (and not divine justice); and lent unfortunate credence, however superficial, to the regime’s portrayal of the Brothers as a band of dangerous “terrorists”. The Brothers’ fatal mistake, he argues, was to overestimate the religious piety of the mainstream Egyptian population, and to assume that ordinary Egyptians, like them, subscribed to the doctrine of divine intervention.

Although Kandil’s novel approach to the Muslim Brotherhood and the intricacies of their ideological underpinnings is certainly compelling – and impressively argued – it does well to be sceptical of such one-dimensional interpretations of complex historical events. While it may be true that there remains a hitherto little explored doctrinal adherence to religious determinism by the Muslim Brotherhood that hampered their success in Egyptian politics, there are nevertheless pieces of the puzzle that refuse to fall into such a comprehensive picture. If the Brotherhood were indeed so politically incompetent, then why were they able to successfully garner public support immediately after the revolution; and why did the protests against the ousting of Morsi take the form of sit-ins and rallies (both recognised forms of tactical opposition politics) rather than all-out religious fervour? Also, if Morsi and his followers were so tied to the notion of divine intervention, then what explains him granting himself such unilateral and far-reaching political power in late 2012 – surely such a move speaks more to the motivations of a power-hungry politician than a meek follower of divine will?

Kandil’s analysis also begs the question that if the Brotherhood truly believed the events of 2013 to be on a par with an apocalyptic tragedy that destroyed the very foundation of their deeply-held beliefs, then what kind of come-back can be expected from a group so utterly defeated in both political and ideological terms? Kandil’s pessimism regarding the Brotherhood’s ability to bounce back seems to adopt a rather myopic view of history and ignores the various cycles of repression and defeat the Brothers have endured ever since they first emerged on Egypt’s political scene. Rather than simply disappear into the shadows, broken and defeated, it is more likely that the Brotherhood will be able to use this opportunity to regroup as a political movement and re-establish themselves, over time, as the beneficiaries of Egypt’s everyday sociopolitical life. The emphasis on ideology, in other words, ignores the very real possibility of human agency and the ability of the Brothers to adopt a pragmatic – and not wholly religiously determined – view of their political practice.

Nevertheless, despite the flaws in Kandil’s argument, the overall thrust of the book presents an interesting and plausible account of recent historical events in Egypt. But the real value of the work lies not in its ideological drive but in the richness of its empirical data and the rare glimpse of this well-known but little-understood religio-political movement “from the inside”.