Members of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of the ousted Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, rallied at Cairo University on Thursday to protest the military’s moves. Narciso Contreras for The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and BEN HUBBARD Published: July 4, 2013
CAIRO — Sheik Mohamed Abu Sidra had watched in exasperation for months as President Mohamed Morsi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood bounced from one debilitating political battle to another.
“The Brotherhood went too fast, they tried to take too much,” Sheik Abu Sidra, an influential ultraconservative Islamist in Benghazi, Libya, said Thursday, a day after the Egyptian military deposed and detained Mr. Morsi and began arresting his Brotherhood allies.
But at the same time, Sheik Abu Sidra said, Mr. Morsi’s overthrow had made it far more difficult for him to persuade Benghazi’s Islamist militias to put down their weapons and trust in democracy.
“Do you think I can sell that to the people anymore?” he asked. “I have been saying all along, ‘If you want to build Shariah law, come to elections.’ Now they will just say, ‘Look at Egypt,’ and you don’t need to say anything else.”
From Benghazi to Abu Dhabi, Islamists are drawing lessons from Mr. Morsi’s ouster that could shape political Islam for a generation. For some, it demonstrated the futility of democracy in a world dominated by Western powers and their client states. But others, acknowledging that the takeover accompanied a broad popular backlash, also faulted the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood for reaching too fast for so many levers of power.
The Brotherhood’s fall is the greatest in an array of setbacks that have halted the once seemingly unstoppable march of political Islam. As they have moved from opposition to establishment, Islamist parties in Turkey, Tunisia and now Egypt have all been caught up in crises over the secular practicalities of governing like power sharing, urban planning, public security or even keeping the lights on.
Brotherhood leaders — the few who have not been arrested or dropped out of sight — have little doubt about the source of their problems. They say that the Egyptian security forces and bureaucracy conspired to sabotage their rule, and that the generals seized on the chance to topple the Morsi government under the cover of popular anger at the dysfunction of the state.
Their account strikes a chord with fellow Islamists around the region who are all too familiar with the historic turning points when, they say, military crackdowns stole their imminent democratic victories: Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954; Algeria in 1991; and the Palestinian territories in 2006.
“The message will resonate throughout the Muslim world loud and clear: democracy is not for Muslims,” Essam el-Haddad, Mr. Morsi’s foreign policy adviser, warned on his official Web site shortly before the military detained him and cut off all his communication. The overthrow of an elected Islamist government in Egypt, the symbolic heart of the Arab world, Mr. Haddad wrote, would fuel more violent terrorism than the Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And he took aim at Western critics of the Islamists. “The silence of all of those voices with an impending military coup is hypocritical,” Mr. Haddad wrote, “and that hypocrisy will not be lost on a large swath of Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims.”
In Egyptian Sinai just hours later, thousands of Islamists rallied under the black flag of jihad and cheered widely at calls for “a war council” to roll back Mr. Morsi’s ouster. “The age of peacefulness is over,” the speaker declared in a video of the rally. “No more peacefulness after today.”
“No more election after today,” the crowd chanted in response.
After a night of deadly clashes at Cairo University that accompanied the takeover, some ultraconservative Islamists gathered there said their experiment in electoral politics — a deviation from God’s law to begin with — had come to a bad end.
“Didn’t we do what they asked,” asked Mahmoud Taha, 40, a merchant. “We don’t believe in democracy to begin with; it’s not part of our ideology. But we accepted it. We followed them, and then this is what they do?”
In Syria, where the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood once hoped to provide a model of moderation and democracy, some fighters battling President Bashar al-Assad now say it is the other way around. Egyptian Islamists “may have to pursue the armed option,” said Firas Filefleh, a rebel fighter in an Islamist brigade in Idlib, in northern Syria. “That may be the only choice, as it was for us in Syria.”
In the United Arab Emirates, where the authoritarian government just sentenced 69 members of a Brotherhood-linked Islamist group to prison in an effort to stop the spread of Arab spring revolts, Islamists said the crackdowns were driving a deeper wedge into their movement.
“The practices that we see today will split the Islamists in half,” said Saeed Nasar Alteneji, a former head of the Emirates group, the Islah association. “There are those who always call for centrism and moderation and peaceful political participation,” he said. “The other group condemns democracy and sees today that the West and others will never accept the ballot box if it brings Islamists to power.”
“And they have lots of evidence of this,” he said, now citing Egypt as well as Algeria.
Other Islamists, though, sought to distance themselves from what they considered the Egyptian Brotherhood’s errors.
As the military takeover began to unfold, Ali Larayedh, the Islamist prime minister of Tunisia, emphasized in a television interview that “an Egypt scenario” was unlikely to befall his Ennahda movement because “our approach is characterized by consensus and partnership.”
Emad al-din al-Rashid, a prominent Syrian Islamist and scholar now based in Istanbul, said that he “expected this to happen” because of the Muslim Brotherhood’s style of governance. “The beginning was a mistake, a sin, and the Brotherhood were running Egypt like they would run a private organization, not a country,” he said. “They shouldn’t have rushed to rule like they did. If they had waited for the second or third elections, the people would have been asking and yearning for them.”
Hisham Krekshi, a senior member of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood in Tripoli, Libya, said the Egyptian Brotherhood “were not transparent enough. They were not sharing enough with other parties. We have to be sure that we are open, to say, ‘We are all Libyans and we have to accept every rainbow color, to work together.’ ”
Even among Egyptian Islamists there have been signs of dissent from the Brotherhood leadership. The largest ultraconservative party, Al Nour, had urged the Brotherhood to form a broader coalition and then to call early presidential elections, and it finally supported the takeover.
Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a relatively liberal former Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate popular among many younger members, also urged Mr. Morsi to step down to defuse the polarization of the country.
But, said Ibrahim Houdaiby, a former Brotherhood member, “the feeling of exclusion might actually lead to the empowerment of a more radical sentiment in the group that says, ‘Look, we abided by the rules, we were elected democratically, and of course we were rejected, and of course by a military coup, not by popular protest.’ ”
Reporting was contributed by Mayy El Sheikh and Kareem Fahim from Cairo; Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Robert F. Worth from Washington.
Where Does the Muslim Brotherhood Go From Here? Reckoning with Morsi's failure
.. though we've all seen many 'What now for MBs?' and know after the Morsi overreach set-back, they have no real recourse except to adjust, one question is how they might adjust .. this one adds something hopefully new here .. one option, leave politics to the FJP .. then, if .. then what?
"the issue is not only what the Brotherhood learns; the issue is also what Islamists are taught."
BY NATHAN BROWN
The final, desperate hours of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president ousted by the military .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/world/middleeast/egypt.html?hp&_r=0 .. on Wednesday, were in one sense merciful, but also pathetic. After a brief feint that called to mind the image of Salvadore Allende picking up a gun to defend his presidency, Morsi resorted instead to a series of increasingly desperate verbal signals, including ineffectual crises about his own legitimacy and attempts to grasp expired offers of compromise. The result made him seem less like a martyr than a property owner waving his deed at a wrecking-ball operator who has already destroyed his home.
Waving that deed—or, less metaphorically, attempting to fall back on constitutional text and electoral legitimacy—would have much to persuade a neutral observer if any such creature still exists. Yes, it is true that the Brotherhood did well in elections; that it was not able to govern fully but still saddled with responsibility for Egypt’s insurmountable problems; that important state actors never accepted its authority; that its opposition was unified only by a desire to make the Brotherhood fail; and that Egypt’s rumor mill transformed preposterous rumor into established fact with breathtaking speed.
But it is also undeniable that Morsi and the Brotherhood made almost every conceivable mistake—including some (such as reaching too quickly for political power or failing to build coalitions with others) that they had vowed they knew enough to avoid. They alienated potential allies, ignored rising discontent, focused more on consolidating their rule than on using what tools they did have, used rhetoric that was tone deaf at best and threatening at worst. Had they hired a consultant from the Nixon White House, they would have done a more credible job, at least by being efficient.
The Morsi presidency is without a doubt one of the most colossal failures in the Brotherhood’s history. What lesson will the movement learn from it, if any?
In studying Islamist movements over the last decade, I generally found that the most rewarding time to speak to leaders was about a year or so after an election. During the heat of the political battle, they made decisions like most politicians do (on the fly, often overreacting to yesterday’s headlines) and spoke like most politicians do (providing glib spin than reflective analysis). But at calmer moments, they spoke less like politicians and more openly. And there was a reason why: The movements prided themselves (justifiably) on an ability to learn.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its sister organizations represent the most successful non-governmental organizations in Arab history. No other movements have been able to sustain, reinvent, and replicate themselves over so much time and space. And there are two secrets to that success: a tight-knit organizational structure that rewards loyalty and the ability to adjust and adapt.
And those two features led to the experiment with political Islam that is now in such grave crisis. The organizational tightness of the Brotherhood made it more able than any other potential opposition force to organize for campaigns: In many countries, they were the only political party worthy of the name (even in places where they were banned from calling themselves a party). And their adaptability allowed them to take advantages of the cracks and openings that appeared in Arab authoritarian orders over the past few decades.
When the uprisings of 2011 occurred, the Egyptian Brotherhood had become sufficiently adept at the political game that it hit the ground running far faster than any possible competitor. And the organization had also evolved over the past couple decades to place politics at the center of its agenda. Founded as a general reform movement that carried out charity, self-improvement, education, mutual assistance, preaching, and politics, the Brotherhood had become a primarily political creature.
But just as its political project seemed poised to realize full success, it suddenly and ignominiously collapsed. The immediate reaction among its members will be to complain that the Brotherhood was cheated. And in a sense it was, but complaint will not substitute for reflection forever. What will be the movement’s more studied reaction? In a conversation two months ago with a Brotherhood leader Amr Darrag, I made a bold prediction that in ten years, the organization will regret having sought the Egyptian presidency in 2012. He politely disagreed. In retrospect we were both wrong: The regret will likely set in over the next several months.
And what will this reflective organization regret?
From the vantage point of this week's events, I see three answers.
The Brotherhood made bad decisions. Those arguing for such a path will have quite a smorgasbord at their disposal. But what they will likely focus on was the process in 2011 and 2012 in which the organization went from wishing to be a leading political actor to being the dominant party. They did so, I am convinced, not as part of a well thought-out strategy but because they reacted to various events—perceived slights, unexpected opportunities, and confusing signals. I saw the evolution of the Brotherhood’s thinking in a series of meetings with Brotherhood leader (and reputed chief strategist) Khairat al-Shatir in the year after the uprising. In March 2011, he spoke of governing as something that might be in the Brotherhood’s future after he had retired; by the following January he was beginning to edge toward his own presidential bid (one that he was forced to cede to his colleague Mohamed Morsi when al-Shatir’s conviction under the old regime led to his disqualification).
Those who favor this answer might wish to return to the political game but play it a bit more cautiously and judiciously. It will be a long road back, however, since the Morsi presidency will leave a residue of profound distrust and even hatred toward the organization in large parts of the society that had merely been skeptical before.
As some within the Brotherhood have nervously felt, the organization did not make these mistakes by accident. The tight-knit organization built for resilience under authoritarianism made for an inward-looking, even paranoid movement when it tried to refashion itself as a governing party. In fact, the organization was led by figures (Morsi himself, al-Shatir, and Brotherhood General Guide Muhammad Badi‘) who were themselves pure creatures of the organization, but the best of them tended to be fairly inexperienced at dealing with the world outside of it.
This diagnosis might lead to the Brotherhood leaving the political game to the political party it spawned, the Freedom and Justice Party. It might even lead the movement to decide to free its members to join any party they like, a position favored by a small number of young activists back in 2011. Either path would be extremely difficult for the current leadership—raised on hierarchy, coordination, and discipline—to follow.
The problem lay in the choice of a political strategy. The Brotherhood’s mistake in such a view would be that it thought it could win and govern. But the experience of the Islamist FIS in Algeria in the early 1990s (where the military intervened to prevent an Islamist victory), Hamas in Palestine in 2006 (where a coalition of international and domestic actors sabotaged the Islamists’ ability to rule) has now been joined by that of Egypt’s Brotherhood.
This diagnosis may be seem very persuasive in the long term, but it could lead in very diverse directions—to the movement abandoning political work; to individuals abandoning the Brotherhood; or to the Brotherhood determining that it will play politics but no longer by peaceful rules.
Which lesson will the Brotherhood learn, and how will it apply them? The organization first needs some time to think, and it is not yet clear how the disparate coalition that has destroyed the Morsi presidency will react to the Brotherhood’s continued role. In this respect, it would be wise for those who are now victorious in Egypt to remember that the issue is not only what the Brotherhood learns; the issue is also what Islamists are taught.
Nathan J. Brown is professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for international Peace. He is author of When Victory Is Not An Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics, Cornell University Press, 2012.
Powerful Rebel Groups in Syria Announce Creation of Umbrella Alliance
By BEN HUBBARD and KARAM SHOUMALI Published: November 22, 2013
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Seven of Syria’s most powerful rebel groups said that they had forged a new Islamic force seeking to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad and replace it with an Islamic state.
The new alliance, the Islamic Front, was announced in a video .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QVZmtity7A shown on Al Jazeera television on Friday and featured some of Syria’s most widely recognized rebel commanders. [insert embed]
While some rebels and opposition activists hailed the new group’s formation as a major step forward for the anti-Assad insurgency, it remained unclear to what extent the announcement reflected a true reorganization of rebel forces or what difference it would make in practice.
Most of the participating groups, while maintaining their own command structures, have long cooperated in battle. And through two and a half years of civil war, new rebel formations have been announced frequently, many of them faring no better against government forces than those they preceded.
Some rebels said the unification was also meant as a show of force by mainline rebel factions against one of Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliates, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/world/middleeast/extremists-take-syrian-town-on-turkeys-border.html , which has recruited thousands of foreign jihadists, seized patches of territory and clashed with other groups for resources.
The statement announcing the Islamic Front described it as “an independent political, military and social formation that seeks to completely topple the Assad regime in Syria and build an orthodox Islamic state.”
A spokesman for Al Tawhid Brigade, which joined the group, said by telephone from northern Syria that it was formed after months of discussion among rebel leaders who sought an alternative to the opposition’s nominal leadership, the Syrian National Coalition .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/world/middleeast/syrian-opposition-groups-sign-unity-deal.html , which many fighters consider out of touch.
“The opposition coalition gets its legitimacy from the civilians and fighters inside Syria, so if the coalition can’t fulfill their wishes, it should admit that,” said the spokesman, who gave his name as Abu Harith.
He said the Islamic Front would work to integrate all the forces that joined it and create a single office to receive and distribute military aid. Competition for financing and arms has long created rifts among rebel groups.
Abu Harith denied that the Islamic Front was formed to challenge ISIS, but said it would oppose the group if it oppressed civilians.
“The Islamic Front was born to defend the Syrian people and to achieve their goals of freedom and a decent life,” he said. “So if people complain about ISIS’s behavior, we will have their complaints solved.”
The formation of the Islamic Front is another blow to efforts by the United States and other powers to organize talks aimed at ending the war. It also highlights the increasing irrelevance of the rebels’ Supreme Military Council, formed last year under pressure from the West to bolster more moderate fighting groups at the expense of extremists.
A number of the Islamic Front’s founding brigades were members of the Supreme Military Council. Although it was unclear if they had officially broken with it, none have spoken of the military council as a major source of support.
A spokesman for the council, Louay Mekdad, said that the groups had not quit the council and that he supported all efforts to unify the rebels.
“We see this as a new stage with the formation of this large, respectable group, and we hope that all the forces on the ground will unify,” he said. “The umbrella doesn’t matter to us; the principles of the revolution do.”
Yet a high-ranking member of the military council who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the new group’s formation could harm the rebellion by further splitting support for the fighters.
“If the support we used to get is split between the S.M.C. and the Islamic Front, this means less effectiveness for both sides,” he said.
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, and Karam Shoumali from Istanbul.
A version of this article appears in print on November 23, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Powerful Rebel Groups in Syria Announce Creation of Umbrella Alliance.
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