Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood

Self, Society and the State

Mustafa Menshawy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030278595
• eBook ISBN: 9783030278601
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book offers a processual and discursive perspective on how individuals exit the Muslim Brotherhood. The framework is based on an interaction of 'micro' psychological and emotional factors, 'meso' organizational factors and 'macro' political developments linked to the specific case of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt during the Arab Spring. Based on interviews conducted in Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the United Kingdom, the author traces in-depth narratives of exiters while they return to their private life or resort to political activism of another stripe. This work examines thought-provoking patterns pertaining to elements long under-explored in the scholarship and stands out as it systematically identifies this unexamined subset of Brotherhood members: peaceful leavers.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. MenshawyLeaving the Muslim BrotherhoodMiddle East Todayhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27860-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Mustafa Menshawy¹

(1)

Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Doha, Qatar

Mustafa Menshawy

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

On 13 November 2014, Zainab El-Mahdy, a 22-year-old woman and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, committed suicide after a series of difficulties she experienced following her disengagement from the group. She had removed her headscarf, and adopted daring hairstyles whose colors she would sometimes change. She also joined the campaign team of a presidential candidate, former Brotherhood leader ’Abdel-Mon’im Aboul-Futouh, who faced the Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, in the 2012 elections. I was so struck by the tragic loss of this lovely, active young girl, that I arranged to speak with her friends who had first announced her suicide. One of them attributed it to the ‘emotional pain’ and ‘psychological pressures’ that El-Mahdy had endured since her disassociation from the group.¹ This was my first clue that there is something about the Brotherhood and the demands it makes on members that can make the experience of disengagement personally very difficult.

I became further attracted to disengagement as a research topic as I noticed a growing number of people departing from the group. Through further preliminary research and initial interviews, I became aware of how many people belonging to various levels of membership had left the Brotherhood after 2011.² There were a number of high-level officers among them, including Mohamed Habib, Ibrahim El-Za’frany, Kamal El-Helbawy, and Aboul-Futouh, who were all members of the organization’s Shura or Guidance Council (the group’s legislative and executive bodies, respectively). The list of leavers also includes many who are part of the middle and lower levels inside the group. The wave of departures sounds as a general phenomenon. Most departures occurred between 2011 and 2015, and those who left came from all over Egypt. Beginning with the group’s foundation in 1928, there had been noted cases of prominent leaders departing due to some disagreement.³ This recent wave was different from all of these cases, as it involved persons of disparate backgrounds from every level of the organization. What needs to be explained is not an action, but a pattern.

Seeking to trace this pattern, it is hard to speak by numbers. While it may seem that cases of disengagement before 2011 were few in number, exact figures are unavailable, just as it is difficult to know the precise number of persons who are, or were at any given time, members of the Brotherhood.⁴ Adding to these uncertainties is the organization’s secrecy. In 2008, as I began studying the Brotherhood at the University of London, I innocently asked a Brotherhood leader, Sa’d El-Katatny, after a lecture he had given, how many members they had. Laughing, he turned to those around him and remarked, ‘He is asking me about figures that only God knows.’ El-Katatny had a reason to keep this information secret. Officially banned yet sometimes tolerated, the Brotherhood always feared that disclosing information could jeopardize its security.⁵ Nevertheless, by 2011, this earlier caution had somewhat dissipated, allowing for figures on disengagement to be estimated. The reason was a new ‘documented’ publicity, which awaited deeper research and more investigation.

This ‘documented’ publicity is evident in the cases of those who have exited the Brotherhood. Beginning in 2011, disengagements from the group began to be publicly announced on television or in resignation letters sent to newspapers.⁶ Dozens of ex-members described their involvement with, and departure from, the group in autobiographies or on television, while sometimes analyzing the conduct of former comrades in the process. In Egypt, much attention was given to the manner in which ex-members explained their participation in the so-called ‘spectacle of disclosure’ drawn on their departure from the group. Some autobiographies by those ex-members even topped the bestsellers list.⁷ The ‘spectacle’ frequently involved former members deliberately revealing various organizational secrets publicly, which was again a new phenomenon in the organization’s history and its interaction with the outside world.

Still, what drove me more into deciding to research the topic was the gaps in the literature on the Muslim Brotherhood, which was the founding Islamist group from which other such groups have emerged in recent decades. Many scholars drove their interest toward the Brotherhood as a ‘social movement,’⁸ which means analysis gets further limited to its ‘collective actions’ and politicized ‘networks and resources’ made available to face its ‘political opponents.’⁹ Missing from these analyses is the individual as a member of the group. As an exception, the mostly individual-based analyses gave researchers the opportunity to reveal some of the ideological and internal workings of the group in terms of relationships between members and leaders. Nevertheless, such works still restricted their enquiry to who and what is inside the Brotherhood.¹⁰ This literature, as informative and insightful as it is, ends up discriminating against dissenting voices inside the Brotherhood as it focuses on what is ‘visible,’ ‘common,’ and ‘ordinary’ about the group.¹¹ Strikingly, and perhaps ironically, the Brotherhood itself reacted to the wave of dissent through a ‘symbolic annihilation,’ which included condemning or trivializing the dissidents, or even denying that they had been members of the group in the first place. The focus of the scholarly literature on ‘what and who is inside’ inadvertently supports the Brotherhood’s attempts of ‘omission.’

In light of these gaps in the literature and based on my interest drawn on the growing number of disengagements at different levels, this study seeks to understand:

• How do individuals leaving the Brotherhood describe and explain their disengagement?

I consider disengagement to be a discourse , including narrative episodes as tools of description, and comprised of ‘frames’ that determine the meaning of the objects and events represented, and ‘macro frames’ that broadly function to organize the whole experience and guide the action of exiting the group.¹² The study investigates reasons which former Brotherhood members give for departing the group and discern recurring patterns that appear in the explanations of those leavers.

As accounts are analyzed into patterns of frames and patterns making up the ‘discourse of ex-hood,’ as to be detailed in the methodology section below, the book seeks to set another related goal: Understanding disengagement as a process . Tracing this process while it unfolds through interactions and interpretations manifesting in discourse is necessary for three main reasons. First, I can avoid any claims of causality when it comes to inferring from the data I am using and which are mainly subjective and admittedly biased narratives of members who specifically left the group within a specific 2011–2017 time frame. Second, there can be no inference about a cause (e.g., ‘why’) as there’s no comparison of current Brotherhood members (i.e., those who remain). In other words, and as it is important to be clear about the book’s claims, I am not concerned why members exit the Brotherhood at a certain time more than any other times, or why certain members exit it while others do not (which could be legitimate goals in future research). Third, the analysis stops short of throwing any of these claims of causality on the case under analysis. I do not compare the Brotherhood with other movements that witness similar, larger, or smaller waves of disengagement. Rather, the research situates the Brotherhood itself equally as the phenomenon of disengagement from it: Being a process. No time, effort, or space wasted on validating or questioning descriptors for the movement itself as other scholars have done, for example, as ‘terrorist,’ ‘radical,’ ‘violent radical,’ ‘moderate’ or ‘extremist,’ ‘pro-democracy,’ or ‘anti-democracy.’¹³ All these classifications are problematic since they treat the Brotherhood as unitary, which has not been the case since 2011, when the group has been factionalized and its dominant discourse fragmented and destabilized. Furthermore, this holistic approach also traces the movability between states which the Brotherhood has gone through such as ‘moderation’ and ‘radicalism’ within a linear causality and on the basis of particular structural, social, and political criteria such as electoral participation, and it thus ignores the individual inside or outside the group. In the book, what does matter is the Brotherhood the process, that is, interactions, dynamics, tactics, routes, relations, and rules affecting engagement and disengagement from it.¹⁴

As part of discourse construction and process tracing drawn on it, disengagement includes ‘stages’ analyzed as these three (methodologically distinguishable) levels of micro-, meso-, and macro:

• The micro-level stage focusing on what I call ‘affective disengagement’: the emotions, sentiments, and moods related to the disengagement process and dis-identification from the tight social circles, sometimes considered family, in which the engagement of individuals was embedded.
• The meso-level stage that I call the ‘ideological’ disengagement, including changing understandings of pre- and post-disengagement of the Brotherhood’s ideology, as set by the organization’s founder, Hassan El-Banna, and subsequent and current leaders. Relevant here are the ways the group’s organizational style affects an individual’s man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Affective Disengagement
• 3. Ideological Disengagement
• 4. Political Disengagement: Exiting the Brotherhood in 2011 and Afterwards
• 5. Pre-2011 Disengagement: A Comparative Analysis of Change and Continuity
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter