There have been a lot of primers on the Muslim Brotherhood recently, owing to the protests in Egypt and the fact that Americans know very little about the internal politics of Arab countries. The increased interest in the MB also dovetails with longstanding elaborate conservative conspiracy theories about their beliefs, capabilities, and behavior that largely replicates red-baiting paranoia during the Cold War. In the interest of responding to those issues without sugarcoating the MB’s very real flaws, I’ve written this post.
History. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the 1920s in Egypt. It was nearly by the crackdown against Islamist groups following the attempted assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser. A number of its members were radicalized during that time, and some of their members justified the use of violence as a political tool. After years of repression, the group renounced violence, and riding the intensity of a religious revival that swept the Arab world in the 1970s and 1980s, the MB’s ability to deliver social services and “articulate a narrative of defiance” against the regime of Hosni Mubarak and the West has helped them become the most prominent opposition group.
“They are very good at providing social and educational services, they are sort of a state within a state, they have a whole set of parallel institutions, mosques, banks, businesses…You name it the Brotherhood does it,” explains Shadi Hamid, Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Center. “So in that sense even if [Egyptians] don’t agree with their ideology, they might support the Brotherhood because they feel the Brotherhood is good at helping everyday Egyptians, and the Brotherhood tends to be efficient and less corrupt than the government.”
Compatibility with democracy. Much of the concern of the Muslim Brotherhood is over whether or not they are “compatible” with democracy. The MB has stated outright that they’re committed to civil democracy, but it’s impossible to know how they’d behave as democratic actors, because they haven’t had the chance yet. Nevertheless, as Carrie Rosefsky Wickham notes, the MB has shown the ability to work in coalition with secularists, writing that the MB has “worked with secular democracy activists on such projects as creating a civic charter and a constitution, preparing for the time when a new democratic government came to power.”
Potentially more predictive, Hamid says, is the way they have acted in unions and professional associations, “smaller democratic laboratories” where the MB has shown a willingness to adhere to democratic norms. “It seems the Brotherhood understand the basic premise of democracy, that people vote you in, they sometimes vote you out,” says Hamid. “There’s no way to prove without a doubt the Brotherhood’s commitment to anything without giving them a role in government.”
Violence. The Muslim Brotherhood renounced terrorism and violence in the 1970s, at least partially because of brutal repression from the Egyptian government. “They’ve since become a much more benign organization despite their history,” says former Navy Intelligence Officer Malcolm Nance, author of An End to Al Qaeda.
But while the Muslim Brotherhood has condemned the 9/11 attacks, has continues to justified violence against Israel and against American troops in Iraq. The problem is, as Marc Lynch noted in a report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, that those views are squarely within the Arab mainstream:
For instance, an opinion survey from spring 2009 found that 83 percent of Egyptians approved of attacks on American troops in Iraq (as did the MB), but only 8 percent approved of attacks on American civilians in the United States (as did al‐Qa’ida).
Isolating the MB as “extreme” for these views obscures a much more disturbing issue–that those views aren’t all that “extreme” at all in their own context. Any diplomatically elected government of Egypt is likely to be more hostile to Israel and the U.S. for this reason, whether or not the MB are in charge.
Al-Qaeda. The Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda hate each other. The former view the latter as terrorists, and the latter view the former as traitors to the cause. Critics of the Muslim Brotherhood often cite a common ideological ancestor of both the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb, to draw connections between both groups. But this obscures the depth of the literal, ideological, and religious gulf between the two. The willingness of the MB to pursue their goals through legitimate democratic means, without violence, is precisely the point–and precisely why the Egyptian uprising threatens more extreme groups even if it empowers the MB.
“The entire bin Laden jihad is about the triumph of Islam over democracy, that only Islam can bring about what we’re seeing in Egypt,” Nance says. By acknowledging the legitimacy of civil society, the MB is committing a kind of heresy that for their extremist rivals, is unforgivable, and the reason why the two groups hate one another.
“The radicals, including Al Qaeda, consider them to be unbelievers, because they have accepted the legitimacy of democratic elections, and when you do that it means that you’re abrogating the sovereignty of god for the sovereignty of people,” explains Hamid. “That’s one of the red lines for radical Islamist groups.” That line hasn’t been erased even where self-identified branches of the MB like Hamas have engaged in terrorism–Hamas has crushed attempts by al-Qaeda affiliated groups to gain a foothold in Gaza.
Conservatives point out that some former MB members have become terrorists–but the need to form extremist splinter groups also highlights the lines the MB has refused to cross. As Lynch notes, “Its hostility to al‐Qa’ida is not based on a desire to please the United States—which makes it more, rather than less, valuable.”
Organization. The Muslim Brotherhood is often portrayed by conservatives as a massive conspiracy with unlimited reach and unlimited resources, quietly perpetrating a massive Islamist revolution all across the globe. The reality, Lynch writes, is that “The “global” organization is more a theoretical construct than reality, with Cairo exercising little operational control over its like‐minded member organizations.”
What that means is in practice, MB branches have behaved differently. In Iraq, the MB branch, the Islamic Iraq Party, participated in elections. While Hamas has deployed violence against Israel, there is a branch of the MB that has seats in the Israeli Knesset. Suffice it to say that there’s no one person pulling the strings, that the notion of a global conspiracy is far-fetched, and possibly not even relevant to the question of their future in a potentially democratic Egypt.
No, they’re not liberals. The point of this post isn’t to give the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood should give everyone the warm fuzzies. Members of the MB leadership hold some truly awful beliefs about Jews and Israel, and as Lynch notes, both the MB and al-Qaeda “want to Islamicize the public domain and create Islamic states ruled by sharia.” But the MB’s willingness to play by the rules of a democratic society is more than a disagreement over “tactics,” it is the difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy. Even if the U.S. could dictate the outcome in Egypt, a democracy in which the MB was not allowed to participate would probably do more to marginalize pragmatists and empower the MB’s extremist rivals than it would to make the MB more moderate.
“They aren’t even talking Islamic state anymore,” says Hamid. “Their priority right now is having freedom to operate, freedom of movement, and if a secular government provides that, then that’s precisely what the brotherhood wants at this juncture.” Their alliance with Mohammed ElBaradei seems to support this point.
The MB, despite its ultimate religious mission, has shown itself to be amenable to moderation. As Wickham writes, “Although the Brotherhood entered the political system in order to change it, it ended up being changed by the system.”
“There’s a broad realization [in the MB] that they’re going to have to compromise on Israel when push comes to shove,” Hamid says of speculation regarding a role they might play in a future Egyptian government. “Democracy is messy. You’re not going to have a democracy, a pro-american government, a pro-israel government, liberals all at the same time. That’s not how it works.”
