The New Middle East (10 page)

The generals had reasons to worry. Since 1979 the United States had given Egypt an average of US$2 billion a year, of which by far the most was military aid. The combined total made Egypt the second-largest recipient of US aid money after Israel.
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A Western diplomat told me his country believed millions of dollars of that military aid was siphoned off to plough into the army’s business ventures. No one knew for sure how much of the country’s economy it controlled. Estimates varied wildly from 5 to 30 per cent. Whatever the figure, everyone agreed that in a sea change the Egyptian army had much at stake. A new vindictive government would have a lot to get its teeth into.

Exactly 500 days after the army announced that Mubarak was stepping down, Egypt was about to be told who its new head of state was. There were once again tens of thousands of people packed into Tahrir Square. Yet in stark contrast to the crowds that waited for the announcement of the end of the Mubarak era, their chants rising up into the night air, the gathering on Sunday 24 June 2012 was disciplined and silent. This was the same square, but not the same sector of society that had basked in the earlier moment of triumph. The night Mubarak fell, Tahrir was packed with men, women and children. I met Muslims and Christians. There was the secular youth who started the revolution and the Islamists who helped finish it. There were the dirt-poor and the very rich. Throughout the protests I had always found the full spectrum of the country’s often chaotic society standing alongside me. On that cold February night Tahrir Square had belonged to all of Egypt. But on this hot summer’s afternoon a year and a half later it belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the end, after a tortuously self-indulgent preamble by Farouq Sultan, the head of the Presidential Election Commission and chairman of the Supreme Constitutional Court, the results were read out.

The Muslim Brotherhood was not a revolutionary organisation either by deed or design, but the voice droning over the loudspeaker system told its supporters that they had taken what spoils remained from an uprising they had not started. They erupted in jubilation. By nightfall what had begun as an almost exclusively Brotherhood party was again like the one that had celebrated the downfall of Mubarak. A broader mix of Egypt was now on the streets. But the new arrivals were not there because of the victory of the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. They had come to celebrate the failure of one of the ‘
feloul
’ (the Arabic word for remnants) of the regime. In the final round of voting Morsi had been up against Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq. Shafiq was seen as the army’s preferred candidate.

‘We always have Tahrir’ was the reaction to every setback the revolution faced. The Square had taken on a mythical role in the democratic process. So, late into the night, the crowd allowed themselves the luxury of forgetting that their voyage from dictatorship to democracy had won them a president elected to a post which a few days earlier had been stripped almost bare of its powers by the generals running the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, SCAF.

Egypt had staged the first free and fair elections for a head of state in its five thousand years of history. And yet, after the people had spent their lives, the country had a seemingly impotent presidency, no parliament, no sign of the long-promised constitution, and a military junta still in charge as it had been since the republic was created almost sixty years before.

The history of the long war between the generals and the Muslim Brotherhood is important because it has shaped modern Egypt and has often set the parameters for its engagement with the outside world. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is the most important non-state actor in the region. Its offshoots have fought battles against or formed alliances with every player in the Arab world. It introduced political Islam to the region, and it is this force that will fashion the New Middle East.

Until the revolution of 2011 the Muslim Brotherhood had survived for over eighty years by working within the boundaries set by the system. It had managed to navigate its way through the ocean of bureaucracy and oppression with which the state had surrounded it. It had emerged intact after the revolt, but its years of flexibility had also given it a reputation for slipperiness. This willingness to compromise on almost every issue, its trademark ‘pragmatism’, is a legacy of its founding father, Hasan al-Banna. What was beyond reproach though was the integrity and dedication to the cause of many of its ordinary members, including much of the leadership. Unlike the leaders of Ennahda in Tunisia, the vast majority had not escaped into exile. Over the years ten of thousands of its members had endured torture, imprisonment and persecution. None of the Brotherhood’s leadership in Egypt escaped prison. Most of the leadership were tortured. Until after the fall of Mubarak it had been an illegal organisation. Its presence in the lives of millions of people, either because of direct membership or through its social welfare programmes, was the worst-kept secret in Egypt. It was everywhere; it just wasn’t everywhere officially.

Despite being one of the most important movements of the last century, the Muslim Brotherhood is not very well understood outside the region. A poll carried out in 2013 found that the first word Americans thought of when asked about the Muslim Brotherhood was ‘terrorists’.
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Successive Egyptian governments cultivated the idea that it had a secret, dark agenda for world and local domination, a plan to restore an Islamic caliphate. That scare tactic played well both at home and abroad. It gained currency partly because the Brotherhood was forced by the regime to spend much of its existence in the shadows of Egyptian society, and partly because when it did pop its head up it rarely seemed able to provide a straight answer to a straight question.

Then the rise of al-Qaeda and 9/11 seemed to provide the elusive smoking gun, because, the wider world learned, the Brotherhood had links to some of modern history’s most notorious Islamist extremists. The inspiration for the ideology of al-Qaeda came from one of its members, Sayyid Qutb. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who took over from Osama bin Laden had also once belonged to the movement. The fact that the Brotherhood had decades earlier rejected the ideals of these figures was lost in the swirl of the post-9/11 era. Even so, the Brotherhood had not renounced offshoots like the militant group Hamas in Gaza, which though seen by the Arab world as participating in legitimate armed resistance to Israeli occupation, was seen by Western governments as a terrorist group. Tying the Brotherhood to the wrong side of the ‘War on Terror’ was not hard for those inclined towards that narrative, even if the world jihadi community actually mocked the Brotherhood, and Hamas, for conducting jihad ‘for the sake of territory’ rather than for the sake of Allah.
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But the rank and file of the Brotherhood today, as they were before 9/11, are no more inclined towards blowing up themselves, or anyone else, than Christian conservatives in the United States. In fact when it comes to social issues like the sanctity of marriage, alcohol, pornography, etc., these two groups largely share the same set of values, though they reached them via very different paths. The Brotherhood too draws much of its membership from the educated middle class.

I met Somaya Hamdy in Tahrir Square on the first anniversary of the revolution. She was trying to steer a large pram and two small children, Memma who was six and Sohail who was three, through a swarm of people. She was in her twenties and wore jeans, a tight white top, and had a fashionable denim handbag slung over her shoulder. Over her head she wore a long aquamarine-coloured scarf, which framed a pretty face devoid of make-up. She had come with the kids to celebrate the day. ‘[The Brotherhood] are not radicals as some people are saying about them,’ she told me. ‘This is all propaganda from the last government, they used to arrest them all the time and paint a bad picture of them but they are not like that.’ That may be largely true now, but it had not always been. The Brotherhood’s founder had set up a big tent in Egypt, and though the likes of Somaya had always been welcome inside it, so were those who wanted to return Egyptian society to the time of the Prophet and a form of Islam they saw as superior to that which had been polluted by modernity. That was an aim some members of the Brotherhood were once willing to kill and die for.

The generals and the Brotherhood had been battling it out for generations, long before Somaya was born. Not once during that time had the people who paid the price been asked what they wanted. In 2011 they had risen up against the old order and the people had decided that, for now, the Muslim Brotherhood was the lesser of two evils. A movement steeped in a ritual of compromise had finally abandoned its political traditions and sought to lead. It had gambled that now, finally, was its moment of triumph, but in an echo of past betrayals the generals had once again snatched it from their grasp. In the summer of 2012, by stripping all the newly elected institutions of their powers, a Western diplomat in Cairo told me, the Egyptian army had reached ‘the zenith of their powers’ and the Brotherhood seemed to have lost again.

Hasan al-Banna founded the Society of the Muslim Brothers, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, in 1928. At the time he was a primary school teacher in the city of Isma’iliyah. It was there al-Banna saw the humiliation heaped on Egyptians living under British colonial rule.
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Within twenty years his movement had become the biggest Islamic organisation in the country, with around half a million members.
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Much like the young Internet activists of the twenty-first century, al-Banna used the social networks of the day to spread his message and gather new recruits. Instead of the Internet he used grassroots activism and word of mouth in mosques, welfare associations and neighbourhood groups. The substance of their message was simple – ‘Islam is the solution’ – though it was never as clearly and publicly articulated as that until the Brotherhood coined the phrase for its 1987 parliamentary election campaign.

Al-Banna’s philosophy was aimed at turning Egypt, eventually, into a state governed by the teachings and values of Sunni Islam. Like the more radical Islamists who would follow, his movement was provoked by the culture shock of having Western values and ideas imposed on society, in Egypt’s case through the British occupation and their co-opted lackeys in the ruling class. Al-Banna wanted to change Egyptian society through teaching and persuasion, not force, though he was willing to bend his own rules under the weight of the Brotherhood’s more radical members.

Al-Banna was one of the greatest CEOs of his time. He created a fabulously successful brand, he was a brilliant organiser, and he was ready to adapt his product to suit the changing market. But just like many other CEOs, he found as his organisation grew that he needed help to run it, and then the ‘help’ began to have ideas of their own. Eventually the schoolteacher found he wasn’t radical enough for some of his pupils.

Militarism being the mood of the movement, it was inevitable that al-Banna would create a paramilitary wing. If he wanted to be relevant to young people he had to give them a sense that they were going to participate in the nationalist struggle for the liberation of Egypt and also the ‘liberation’ of Palestine, which became the cause of all causes in the Arab world in the late 1930s.
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Al-Banna created the Al-Nizam al-Khas, or Special Apparatus. It began carrying out violent attacks against the occupying British forces and assassinations of members of the Egyptian elite whom it saw as collaborating with the colonial power. The West would soon start making its mind up over what it thought the Brotherhood was. ‘El Banna . . . put together the tightest-disciplined assortment of cutthroats and idealists in the country, half a million fanatics . . . reaching into every wadi in Egypt,’ reported
Time
magazine in January 1954. ‘Objective of the Ihkwan el Muslimin: expel the foreigners, return Egypt to the simple brotherhood of primitive, eighth-century Islam. The Ihkwan battle-cry: “We will knock at the doors of heaven with the heads of the British.” ’
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A version of that view of the Brotherhood still exists around the world today.

By the late 1940s the Brotherhood was a formidable political power in the country. In 1948 members of the Ikhwan joined the five Arab armies that attacked the new state of Israel which had been declared on 14 May that year. The Brotherhood’s men took up arms hoping to find glory in the first Arab–Israeli war, but like the other Arab armies they were left reeling after being thoroughly beaten by the tiny nation they had assumed would be a pushover. The creation of the state of Israel and its subsequent hammering of the invading armies disgraced the leaders of the Arab world in the eyes of their people. It also left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as refugees. The collective shock at the time led to a group of young Egyptian officers, including a man called Gamal Abdel Nasser, setting a course that would eventually topple the country’s monarchy.

The first warning that King Farouk’s days on the throne were numbered came with the return of the Brotherhood’s fighters, who like the regular army placed the blame for their defeat on the battlefield at the door of the Palace and its government.
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