President Donald Trump and his cabinet are pondering an executive order to add the Muslim Brotherhood to the United States’ Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Yet such a designation would appear to have one critical flaw: it is hard to explain what the term “Muslim Brotherhood” precisely means.
In Egypt, for decades before 2011, the term “Muslim Brotherhood” was used to describe a religious and political group that had a specific structure, specific goals, and a specific role in Egyptian society.
Although the waves of change brought about in January 2011 disturbed the solid structure of the group, it managed to maneuver around this disturbance with huge success in the first 32 months after the revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood won a majority in all representative offices and ruled Egypt from the presidential chair. However, they failed dramatically, as their first – and only – year in power witnessed a big opposition movement to their policies and was ended after the army backed millions of people who demanded they leave power in June 2013, costing them their authority, their structure, their role in the society, and even their goals.
The crackdown on the Brotherhood, which started in June 2013, has happened in three dimensions. First, police forces used brutal violence against Brotherhood members and supporters who opposed the army’s ousting of former Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi. Second, police arrested the leadership of the group in Cairo – including Morsi – and carried out nationwide arrests of local leaders in the suburbs. These leaders often incurred long-term pre-trial imprisonment and were eventually handed harsh sentences, including the death penalty. Third, a crackdown was conducted on all Brotherhood media outlets, while pro-regime media simultaneously attempted to mobilize people against the Brotherhood and destroy their popularity.
For decades, the Brotherhood has played an important role in Egyptian society. One of the movement’s most influential moments came during the presidency of Anwar Sadat in the 1970s. At that time, Sadat had allowed more space for Islamists to gain influence and balance the communists’ dominance over Egypt’s socio-political discourse. The Brothers played a mediator role between the fundamentalist Islamists and the then-secular middle class. One one hand, this led to a change in the Egyptian middle class, moving it towards a more religious social appearance and Islamic political flavor. On the other hand, it led to a change in the Brotherhood’s goals, as the middle class’ socio-political demands – such as fighting government corruption and demanding social justice legislation – were adopted by the group and overshadowed the ultimate goals of reinstituting a caliphate system.
However, the Brothers abandoned this role during the first months of the 2011 revolution and tried to play a leading role among the entire Islamist current from the far right – a movement that includes groups such as al Jamma’ al Islameyam and other Salafist organizations. This effort blurred lines between the Brothers and the more fundamentalist groups in Egypt, allowing fundamentalist ideas to infiltrate the Brotherhood youth. This reality made the Brotherhood less appealing to the Egyptian middle class, which eventually revolted against them after only one year of ruling.
Today, the Muslim Brotherhood has lost its solid structure and is divided between two fronts: a youthful contingency calling for radical resistance against the regime and a traditional leadership trying to use the same old means and slogans. The Brotherhood has also lost its role in Egyptian society, rendering itself as just another Islamist group rather than a mediator. Its goals have been exploited by ISIS, which tainted the core ideas of the brothers, such as the establishment of a caliphate and the development of an Islamic state.
So, while in the halls of the White House, policymakers are debating the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, in Egypt, we are now facing a different organization from the one we knew for decades before 2011 – one that might dissolve completely or maybe rebuild itself under the same name but certainly will have to find for itself a new structure, new roles, and a new goal to survive.
