Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, 2013-22

By Abdelrahman Ayyash, Amr ElAfifi and Noha Ezzat

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is today being pushed to the limits of its adaptability-and perhaps its utility. After a brief year in power, the organization's leaders now languish in prison or exile, while its followers face greater state repression than ever before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Century Foundation
• Release date: Feb 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9780870785634

Book preview

PART I

An Introduction to the Muslim Brotherhood

On June 17, 2019, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a member of the Brotherhood, fell dead in a Cairo court. After years of near-total isolation and medical negligence, he lay in the courthouse for some time before the presiding judge, Mohammed Shereen Fahmy, ordered an ambulance.1 Two years later, on July 29, 2022, Ibrahim Munir, the interim general guide of the Brotherhood, told Reuters that the Muslim Brotherhood would not compete for any political positions in Egypt.2

The two years following Morsi’s death had been consequential.

The Brotherhood’s support—both domestically and internationally—had dwindled. With Morsi gone, countries that had hosted the Brotherhood for years accelerated steps (which may have been inevitable) to warm to the Egyptian government and turn against the organization. Both Turkey and Qatar resumed relations with Egypt to some extent, and asked Brotherhood members and leaders to leave.

Today, an organization that has successfully adapted to decades of repression is being pushed to the limits of its adaptability—and perhaps its utility.

In an interview we conducted with Munir shortly before his death in November 2022, we asked how the organization conceived of its political trajectory amid changing regional and global dynamics. Munir responded by referring to verses in the Quran in which God tells Moses’ mother to cast him in the river and not worry.3 We understood Munir to mean that his movement ought to do what it believes is right—by maintaining its ideological and religious beliefs and its peaceful opposition to the government—and not worry about the results. It is hard to ascertain how serious Munir’s fatalism was, or whether he was posturing. But what is clear is that, years after being forced to become a transnational organization because of its leadership’s expulsion from Egypt, the Brotherhood is now at an even more complex crossroads. Its old strategies for managing its relationship with the Egyptian state, and maintaining a quasi-clandestine presence in Egypt, are no longer relevant. To weather this new crisis, the Brotherhood is being forced to rethink its strategies—and it must do so in the absence of the vast majority of top cadres, who are either in exile, dead, or in jail.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been misunderstood as a political, ideological, or even military organization. But we argue, based on our reading of Muslim Brotherhood history over the last decade, that the organization is properly understood as an elite social organization, with a small but deeply committed membership. We argue that the organization itself misunderstood its own nature, mistakenly believing that in an open competitive political environment the Brotherhood would manifest as an ideological organization with mass mobilizing capability. To the contrary, the chain of events from the Egyptian revolution of January 2011 to the exiled Muslim Brotherhood’s internal administrative rifts in 2022 reveals an organization of elite cadres more embedded in a social milieu than in a political or ideological