The Muslim Brothers in Pursuit of Legitimacy

Power and Political Islam in Egypt Under Mubarak

Hesham Al-Awadi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780764306
• eBook ISBN: 9780857735645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Following the 25th January revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the most organised and successful political force in Egypt as they cashed in on decades of grassroots mobilisation and growth. Through dominance in syndicates and unions, the provision of social services and participation in elections, this the Brotherhood steadily expanded under Mubarak. Hesham Al-Awadi's lucid and original argument frames this period as one of struggle over legitimacy between the regime and this then banned organisation, charting a cycle of accommodation and coercion. The Brotherhood failed to secure the recognition of the state, but gained an informal legitimacy as it occupied the spaces opened up by Mubarak in an early attempt to shore up the credibility of his regime. This social legitimacy became a threat to the regime, haunted by the regional rise of Islamists and a failure to legitimate its leadership, and ushered in an era of coercion.
Through these complex dynamics of the conflict and control, and drawing on interviews with key figures such as Abdul Mun'em Abu Al-Futuh, Esam Al-Aryan and Mustafa Al-Fiqi, Al-Awadi sheds light on the Mubarak era and the Muslim Brotherhood that have risen out of it.

1

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps no one expected that the revolution of 25 January 2011 would topple President Mubarak in 18 days, after having ruled Egypt for 30 years. The authoritarian and brutal regime could not have imagined that a spontaneous, youth-led demonstration could morph into a popular revolution forcing the army to deploy in the streets and impose a curfew, and that chants of ‘Bread, freedom, and human dignity’ would soon change into the Tunisian slogan of ‘The people want to overthrow the regime’. But even more dramatic was the Muslim Brothers’ unexpected ascension to power, after winning Egypt’s first free presidential elections in May 2012. Their sudden rise to power, after years of exclusion and oppression, was as surprising as the end of the military regime that had ruled the country since 1952. The Muslim Brothers’ candidate, Mohammad Morsi, won by a narrow margin (51 per cent) over Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister under Mubarak. Remnants of the old regime, the state’s apparatuses, including the media, as well as many Copts preferred Shafiq, while the majority who voted for Morsi did so because they identified Shafiq with the old regime, and realised that if he came to power the revolution would be doomed.

But to many Egyptians, and not necessarily those affiliated with the movement, the Muslim Brothers were more than just an alternative. Since the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the movement had gained increasing popularity as a result of its impressive social services, which surpassed those of the regime, and despite its lack of formal state recognition the group enjoyed a popular base of social legitimacy. Although the Brothers’ performance in power was not as impressive as when they were in the opposition (after just a year in power there were already public demands for Morsi to step down as President), it remains important to study and analyse this period, which enabled the Brothers following the 25 January revolution to emerge as the most organised force in Egypt.

On the extraordinary morning of 11 September 2001, I happened to be in the London office of the Muslim Brothers conducting interviews for this study. The faces of everyone in the office reflected the shocking scene of aeroplanes crashing into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Although the identity of the perpetrators was initially unclear, there were early fears that radical Islamists from Al-Qa‘eda might be involved. The Brothers in the office were clearly uncomfortable about the potential implications. If Islamists were indeed involved, such an event would certainly heighten the fears of the Americans, and of the West at large, against Islam and Muslims, and would give more credibility to Huntington’s notion of the “clash of civilisations”. In the midst of these legitimate Western fears, the significantly visible line of differentiation between moderate and radical Islamists would become blurred or irrelevant. Not only would this register as a seriously mistaken attitude on the part of the United States and the West towards the sophisticated Islamist phenomenon, but it would encourage authoritarian Arab regimes to quell all Islamists indiscriminately, on the basis of would-be conventional wisdom that “all Islamists are potentially dangerous”.

Egypt’s President Mohammad Hosni Mubarak was among the Arab leaders who had already launched coercive campaigns against Islamists, both moderates and radicals, since the early and mid-1990s. His campaign reached its peak in 1995, when 95 civilian Islamists who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, were put on trial in military courts, charged with belonging to an illegal organisation and conspiring to overthrow the government. But 11 September 2001, and the international anti-terror climate it created, certainly encouraged the regime to arrest and imprison civilian Islamist figures far more frequently. Atef Ebeid, the Egyptian prime minister, proudly invited Western countries to learn from Egypt’s experience of dealing with Islamists instead of criticising its record on human rights, as they had done for the last 20 years. Ebeid’s over-confident tone reflected the new realities of the post-September international and American mood. Whereas staff from the American Embassy would have been sent to observe the trials of opposition figures in the days prior to 11 September, more recent arrests of Islamic opposition figures drew no complaints or comments from the Embassy in Cairo.¹ Similar anti-terror measures taken in Britain and America eventually led Mubarak to boost that his military trials and other emergency measures against Islamists were always the “right policy”.²

It is of course misleading to assume that Mubarak’s relationship with the Islamists was characterised by coercion and repression alone. The policy of the state might indeed have been to use repression against such radical Islamists as Al-Jihad and Al-Jama‘at Al-Islamiyya, but it was not used against the Muslim Brothers, who constituted the moderate wing of Islamism in Egypt. For much of the 1980s the movement was tacitly tolerated. (Not only were Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimin allowed to function from their publicly-known headquarters in Ramsis Street in the crowded centre of Cairo, but they were also permitted to contest formal parliamentary elections in 1984 and 1987 under the banner of “Islam is the Solution”). Repression against the movement did not occur until the 1990s, when the movement’s impact on Egypt’s politics and society became an undeniable reality.

My intention is to examine the reasons behind the change in Mubarak’s relationship with the Muslim Brothers, and to assess the extent to which it was linked to Islamic terrorism and conspiracies to overthrow the government. My argument concerning this change of attitude is not based on the fact that it simply characterised the nature of most authoritarian Arab regimes, which refused to tolerate Islamic opposition. Nor is it based on perceptions related to the impressive performance of Islamists in providing welfare services, albeit merged with religious rhetoric, and the threatening impact this has had on the regime. Both accounts are indeed accurate, but have been dealt with elsewhere and will not be duplicated here.

Instead, I seek to understand the change in the relationship between Mubarak and the Muslim Brothers by focusing on the state’s persistent denial, in legal terms, of the Muslim Brothers and the impact of this on the movement and on its religious, social and political development during the 1980s and 1990s. Studies on the authoritarian nature of the Egyptian regime and the impressive social performance of the Brothers in syndicates, student unions and so on, are not sufficient on their own to explain Mubarak’s change in attitude towards the reformist Islamists without the important dimension of the absence of state recognition and its implications. Moreover, the concept of legitimacy is significant not only for the Muslim Brothers but is equally important to Mubarak. Thus, while the Brother’s impact on politics and society can be explained as one that is significantly governed by a desire for formal recognition by the state and its legal and political institutions, Mubarak’s attitude towards reformist Islamists can equally be explained in the context of his desire to be recognised by society as a ‘legitimate’ ruler. The relationship between Mubarak and the Muslim Brothers has therefore been shaped largely by their simultaneous pursuit of legitimacy, each on different terms.

Furthermore, while Mubarak tolerated the Brothers during the 1980s because he assumed, as a new leader, that such a policy would bolster his political legitimacy, he repressed them in the 1990s because he had by then redefined his pursuit of legitimacy. This pursuit was not compatible with a policy based on tolerating Islamists, especially when the Brothers were seen as a source of threat to his legitimacy. The Islamists’ threat was not simply based on their effective social performance, but on how this performance was conducted and the impact it had on Mubarak’s regime. Mubarak was threatened by the fact that, despite their denial by the state, the Brothers were able to pursue an alternative “resource of legitimacy” based on recognition of society rather than on recognition of the state, and that this legitimacy was used in mass mobilisation. Such mobilisation was intended not to ‘overthrow the government’, as the regime often claimed, but ultimately to impel the state to grant formal recognition to the Islamists. I will return to this theme later in the chapter, but at this point it is important to discuss what I mean by the concept of legitimacy and its ‘resources’.

Approaches to Legitimacy

The debate over legitimacy, its definition, scope, relevance and various modes, is an ongoing one, which is why it becomes difficult, and perhaps unrealistic, to explain the attitude of particular political regimes in such controversial terms, especially when looking at authoritarian regimes or explaining state-society relations in the Arab world. Legitimacy or shar‘iyya is a complex term and difficult to define, partly because the definition varies according to the ideological orientations and professional biases from which the definition has developed. For instance, the legal approach to legitimacy sees legitimacy as an extension of legality, which means that a legitimate regime is that which upholds and respects the rule of law.³ The political approach to legitimacy tends to perceive legitimacy in connection with concepts such as power and authority. Although power, or quwa, is sometimes used interchangeably with authority, or sulta, the latter usually connotes a more formal legalistic meaning, which is why authority and its subsequent institutions are used to ‘legitimise’ power.⁴ Furthermore, for a political authority to be legitimate (i.e. for its exercise of power to be acceptable) there must be a shared belief, on the part of both ruler and ruled, that a given political arrangement is valid.⁵

The connection between power and legitimacy was discussed in the work of Arthur Stinchcombe, who viewed legitimacy as a form of ‘power reserve’ located in ‘strategic power centres’, which in turn were located in notions such as public opinion, national myths, religion, etc.⁶ According to Stinchcombe a good indicator of the legitimacy of any regime was to see how often this regime had to draw upon the ‘power reserve’ when carrying out particular decisions. A second indicator would be how frequently the regime felt compelled to resort to physical force or other obtrusive means of compulsion when implementing its decisions. Legitimacy was therefore connected to a process of consent without the need to resort to coercion, unless the stability of the regime was threatened – the case with most authoritarian regimes.

Max Weber has remained an influential contributor to the theme of political legitimacy and its forms. He famously spoke of the three forms of legitimacy, namely charismatic, traditional and rationally-based legitimacy. Charismatic leadership stemmed from ‘extraordinary qualities’ that evoked an immediate personal consent from the masses; traditional leadership comprised the rule of traditional forces and institutions, such as elders, tribes, customs and religions; while rational leadership referred to a type of authority, dependent on the acceptance of certain formal rules and procedures that were rationally valid and legally binding.⁷ Further, a political regime generally established its rule using one or more of these kinds of legitimacy, but in time, and as challenges developed, a regime might adapt itself and rearrange its basis of legitimacy. For example, a ruler who might have based his legitimacy on charisma when he assumed power would often attempt to shift to impersonal or rational norms and procedures. Thus, a charismatic ruler ‘routinised’ his leadership in a constitution or particular codes of law and practice in an attempt to sustain his regime. The ultimate shift to rational norms was one reason why Weber viewed the rational–legal mode as the most grounded, in comparison with charisma and tradition.

Another important approach to legitimacy was that of David Easton.⁸ Like Weber, Easton provided a useful classification of legitimacy modes, which he called personal, ideological and structural legitimacy. Personal legitimacy, “where the behaviour and personalities of the occupants of authority rule are of dominating importance” could become an important component in the overall legitimacy formula, to the extent that a leader “may violate the norms and prescribed procedures of the regime”.⁹ Easton’s categories of legitimacy might appear essentially similar to Weber’s, but are considered slightly broader. While Easton’s ‘personal’ legitimacy included Weber’s ‘charismatic’ legitimacy, it covered a wider range of leadership phenomena. As for ideologies, these were: “Articulated sets of ideals, ends, and purposes, which help the members of the system to interpret the past, explain the present and offer a vision for the future.”¹⁰ Easton’s third category of legitimacy was the structure of the political system, as seen in the institutions and offices that made the political system functional. These institutions were the ‘frameworks’, where, to use Weber’s expression, ‘accepted norms and procedures’ were preformed in a manner that bestowed legal legitimacy upon the system.

Structuring, or institutionalising, the system links with Samuel Huntington’s concept of institutionalisation,¹¹ which he defined as “the process by which organisations and procedures acquire value and stability”.¹² This institutionalisation was very much connected to the process of bureaucratic development and expansion. In addition to the works of Weber and Easton, there have been various Western attempts to argue for other modes of legitimacy.¹³

However, a practical problem remains – how can one ‘measure’ the legitimacy of a particular regime? There are two main approaches to measuring legitimacy: one based on assessing the efficacy of the system itself, and the other focusing on measuring public opinion. At the system level, legitimacy is viewed from above, where the focus is very much on the ability of the regime to establish opportunities for wide public participation. The emphasis is not so much on what people believe, but on the presence of attributes in the regime itself, such as accountability, efficiency and procedural fairness (e.g. majority rule, frequent elections, minority rights, etc.).¹⁴ Of course the weakness of this approach is its tendency to concentrate on formal structures and aggregate processes, as well as its inadequate recognition of the complementary need to observe the “subjective” aspects of the political system.¹⁵

The second perspective, which views legitimacy from the grass roots level, focuses on the individual’s beliefs and sentiments. This approach was made possible by the development of survey research methodology after World War II. It measures legitimacy based on questionnaires and surveys that ask citizens about their political interests and involvement, and probe their beliefs about social relations relevant to collective action, and their level of optimism about the responsiveness of the political system.¹⁶

The Legitimacy of Arab Regimes

How useful or relevant is the concept of legitimacy in explaining Arab regimes and the manner in which they control power? The answer to this important question is essential to the argument ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Regime and the Social Contract
• 3 Mubarak in Pursuit of Legitimacy
• 4 The Islamist Social Contract
• 5 The Power of the Tanzim
• 6 The Politicisation of Legitimacy
• 7 The Dismantling of Islamist Power
• 8 Legalised Exclusion of the Islamists
• Conclusion
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography