Review of Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22 (Washington, DC: The Century Foundation, 2023).
Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – July 3, 2023, marked the tenth anniversary of the military coup that removed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi from power, paving the way for the establishment of an autocratic regime led by the retired military officer Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. The overthrow of Morsi sent the Muslim Brotherhood, the sociopolitical organization that supported him, into what many consider its most severe crisis since it was founded in 1928 by the Egyptian teacher and imam Hassan al-Banna. Morsi had been elected president in June 2012 in the freest Egyptian elections up to date. The first experience of political power for the Brotherhood would last only a bit longer than a year, with the July 2013 coup forcing the members of the Brotherhood into hiding, exile, or, as in Morsi’s case, imprisonment. Morsi died in prison in June 2019 due to maltreatment.
In their collective work “The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22,” Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat present a historical overview of the Brotherhood before examining its trajectory during the last decade. Ayyash is a fellow at Century International, the US think tank that published the book. Meanwhile, ElAfifi is a PhD candidate at Syracuse University and Ezzat is an independent writer and researcher.
“Broken Bonds” greatly relies upon multiple interviews with former and current members of the Brotherhood. Overall, the authors see the Brotherhood as finding itself at the lowest point of its almost centennial history, and yet, as a resilient organization that will most likely bounce back thanks to the adaptability it has always shown in the face of crisis.
The Brotherhood’s relationship with the Egyptian state has historically been a complex one. Repressed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s, it managed to establish a solid presence in universities and syndicates in the 1970s when President Anwar Sadat initiated a limited political opening. Under Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood enjoyed a tacit non-aggression pact during the 1980s while it spread its conservative values among Egyptian society.
This tacit understanding collapsed in the early 1990s when Mubarak’s regime restricted the Brotherhood’s influence among university students and syndicated workers. In the context of Egypt’s neoliberal turn, the Brotherhood came to play a larger role in providing services and basic commodities to the most disfavored sectors of society. The Brotherhood expanded its membership in the 2000s, but its political role was limited to participating in protests allowed by the Mubarak regime, such as demonstrations against Israeli violence in Palestine or the US invasion of Iraq.
For an organization that had traditionally been repressed or, at best, tolerated, by the Egyptian state, its assumption of state power in June 2012 — although with the shadow of the army always looming over — was a profound change. The authors describe the Brotherhood’s decision to run for the Egyptian presidency as driven by two competing objectives. On the one hand, it sought to avoid prosecution at the hands of a new regime by controlling state power itself while showing an image of moderation. On the other hand, the Brotherhood wanted to prevent more radical Islamist groups and figures, such as Salafi preacher and presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, from gaining support among Brotherhood sympathizers. This, however, necessitated stressing the Brotherhood’s conservatism.
The Brotherhood’s simultaneous pursuit of these incompatible goals “led to contradictory policies and mixed messages to the public.”[1] Morsi’s foreign policy was also confusing, with the president’s frequent changes of course transforming “the Brotherhood’s tactics for seeking allies into a series of trials and errors.”[2] If the short period in power had been an agitated time for the Brotherhood, the July 2013 coup sent the organization into disarray, with the leaders that had avoided capture scattered in Egypt and exile, mainly in Qatar, Sudan, Turkey, and Malaysia.
Only three members of the Brotherhood’s Guiding Bureau remained in Egypt without having been imprisoned or gone into hiding — a small fraction considering the Guiding Bureau had twenty members at that point. These three members, who had all joined the Bureau after 2011 and were thus newcomers to the higher echelons of the Brotherhood, decided to create the High Administrative Committee (HAC) in 2014 to lead the Brotherhood from within Egypt. Mohamed Kamal emerged as the main figure of the HAC, which sought to include younger members of the Brotherhood in the new leadership structure.
The HAC also adopted an increasingly confrontational stance toward the Egyptian government, accelerated after a slim majority of the HAC approved plans to carry out limited violent attacks against the new Egyptian regime. The interviews with rank-and-file Brotherhood members conducted by the authors allow us to better understand the changes taking place after the Brotherhood lost power. An interviewee rhetorically asks: “What were we supposed to do, just let people, especially women, get beaten or arrested off the streets?”.[3]
The HAC’s escalation resulted in new crackdowns against the Brotherhood. Moreover, Kamal and his partners would soon find out that “changing a movement as vast as the Brotherhood is not an easy task.”[4] The historical leadership of the Brotherhood in Egyptian prisons and exile saw with concern their decreasing power over the Brotherhood’s actions, which was being directed by leaders with limited experience that had attracted numerous youth revolutionaries.
Mahmoud Ezzat, the Brotherhood’s acting general guide after the imprisonment of the general guide Mohammed Badie in August 2013, had gone into hiding and little was known about him. In May 2015, however, Ezzat issued a statement ordering the dissolution of the HAC and the creation of a new HAC that would be subordinated to the Brotherhood’s leadership in exile. The HAC contested Ezzat’s decision, but the acting general guide and the historical leadership in exile commanded most of the Brotherhood’s financial resources. They proceeded to cut funding to those regional offices in Egypt that supported the HAC and progressively imposed themselves. Kamal, who had co-founded the first HAC and become its leader, was killed by the Egyptian security forces in October 2016.
The Kamal-Ezzat split was followed by another period of internal tensions after the arrest of Ezzat in August 2020. This new conflict would show that “the historical leadership was far from united”, pitting two of its main figures against each other.[5] Mahmoud Hussein, a member of the Guidance Bureau who happened to be out of Egypt at the time of the July 2013 coup, had gained a dominating position over the communications between the Brotherhood in Egypt and the leadership in exile. The new acting general guide after Ezzat’s detention, Ibrahim Munir, accused Hussein of blocking messages sent from prison by the general guide Mohammed Badie to the leadership in exile.
Munir removed Hussein from his positions of responsibility in 2020, but the internal victory of the acting general guide was not consolidated until 2022. As the authors note, in contrast to the clash between Kemal and Ezzat, “the Hussein-versus-Munir split was not based on conflicting ideas and worldviews. Rather, it appeared to be about the power of controlling the organization.”[6]
Despite the death of Ibrahim Munir in November 2022, the Brotherhood seemed to have returned to relative stability quickly thereafter. The internal conflicts had left profound scars on the organization, though. The authors document the case of numerous members of the Brotherhood that decided to abandon the group. Some of them mentioned that the Brotherhood was no longer loyal to the ideals of its founder Hassan al-Banna, while others expressed their disenchantment over the Kamal-Ezzat split.
It is not only the Brotherhood that is undergoing a long crisis but Egypt itself. Al-Sisi’s period in power has been dominated by sham elections and continuous repression on the political front, and vanity projects and unmanageable amounts of debt on the economic front. Al-Sisi has continuously presented the Brotherhood as “an omnipresent nemesis to justify the state’s continued repression of Egyptian society,” writes Abdullah Al-Arian, an associate professor at Georgetown University.[7] Nevertheless, the Brotherhood will continue to be popular in Egypt, argue the authors of Broken Bonds, because the reasons behind the organization’s popularity “are intrinsic in the state’s failures in dealing with society’s problems.”[8]
If we are to highlight a shortcoming of the book, this would probably be its limited attention to how the international dynamics of Middle Eastern politics affected the Brotherhood’s fate. Whereas Qatar and Turkey accommodated members of the Brotherhood after the 2013 coup, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates backed al-Sisi’s anti-democratic repression of the Islamist group. As Matteo Colombo from the Clingendael Institute details, a key factor in the Brotherhood’s current crisis is the “increasingly repressive regional political environment supported by the power of the Saudi and Emirate states.”[9]
Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat’s Broken Bonds is an impressive piece of research and analysis. There are two main reasons for this. First, the authors succeed in making intelligible the labyrinthic internal politics of the Brotherhood to those who might only have a general understanding of Egyptian politics and history. Second, thanks to their access to senior leaders and rank-and-file members of the Brotherhood, the authors show a deep understanding of the organization that is both top-down and bottom-up. Broken Bonds constitutes a work that cannot be ignored to comprehend the convulsed trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the last decade.
[1] Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi, and Noha Ezzat, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22 (Washington, DC: The Century Foundation, 2023), p. 80.
[2] Ibid., p. 83.
[3] Ibid., p. 127.
[4] Ibid., p. 104.
[5] Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat, Broken Bonds, p. 109.
[6] Ibid., p. 112.
[7] Abdullah Al-Arian, “The Lasting Significance of Egypt’s Rabaa Massacre,” Middle East Report Online, August 23, 2022, https://merip.org/2022/08/the-lasting-significance-of-egypts-rabaa-massacre/.
[8] Ayyash, ElAfifi, and Ezzat, Broken Bonds, p. 157.
[9] Matteo Colombo, “Lost in Transition: The Muslim Brotherhood in 2022,” CRU Policy Brief (The Hague: Clingendael Institute, July 2022), p. 8. Retrieved from https://www.clingendael.org/publication/lost-transition-muslim-brotherhood-2022.
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