Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  But for the Americans, a dam had burst. Diplomats and politicians began beating a path to the Brotherhood’s newly opened Freedom and Justice Party. John Kerry never abandoned his suspicions of the Muslim Brothers, which became more consequential when he was secretary of state. But in December 2011, he became the first member of Congress to visit their new Cairo office. (The Brothers told me that they liked him already, because he had also been the first lawmaker to visit Gaza under Hamas.) “The United States needs to deal with the new reality,” Kerry told my colleague Steven Lee Myers in Washington after the trip.

  The Islamist Parliament was riddled with conflict from the start, on January 23, 2012, the day I watched the Brothers outside celebrating their victory and defending the chamber. Zyad el-Elaimy, the lawyer who hosted the Police Day planning meeting, was the only Tahrir Square organizer to win a seat in the Parliament. On the opening day he tried to squeeze “revolution” into his oath of office. So Salafi lawmakers tried to ad lib oaths to Sharia. Then a Brotherhood defector staged an insurrection.

  The defector, Essam Sultan, had left the Brotherhood fifteen years earlier to start a moderate splinter party, the Center Party. In retaliation, the Brotherhood’s leaders had gone to court alongside Mubarak’s lawyers to try to crush the breakaway party. But now Sultan, with a grin, announced his revenge. He had formed a strange-bedfellows coalition of Salafis, moderates, and non-Islamists to try to deprive the Brothers of a chance to choose the Parliament’s speaker. Islamists shouted down Islamists, and it took until nightfall for the Brotherhood to muster enough votes to beat back Sultan.

  “This is democracy,” the newly elected speaker, Saad el-Katatni of the Muslim Brotherhood, intoned wearily. “The people have grasped it.”

  Even after all the shouting, though, the Brotherhood-led Parliament never pried much power from the generals. Some complained that the Brothers did not try hard enough, afraid of confronting the military council. Others argued that any confrontation then could end only in allowing the military to tighten its grip. But in any case, without a new constitution or a new president, the generals made the rules. Defense Minister Tantawi still acted as head of state. His council still appointed the prime minister and Cabinet and issued the laws. The parliament of beards was noisy but impotent. A transition would wait until the election of a new president. In some ways, though, the Islamist-against-Islamist fracas on opening day was a fitting beginning to the presidential race, and, for that matter, a fair sample of the Brotherhood’s history.

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  One evening in 1974, a tall, slender medical student slipped into a busy shoe store on Qasr el-Aini Street, not far from the hospital where he worked as a resident. He did not need shoes; he was asked there to meet a Muslim Brother who had been released that year after twenty years in prison in Qena, a six-hour drive south of Cairo. The storekeeper was another Muslim Brother. Shoe shopping was a pretense to allow them to speak outside the earshot of the secret police.

  The medical student, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, was then the leader of a new and independent Islamist student movement that was sweeping campuses. He was a born politician, handsome and articulate, with a round face and a ready smile. He had grown up in an apolitical middle-class family in Cairo, and as a teenager he had been as enthralled as the rest of his generation by Abdel Nasser.

  Then Abdel Nasser’s promises of national greatness were shattered by his humiliation in the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967. As the depth of his defeat became clear, he called his ally, King Hussein of Jordan, to strategize about making excuses. “Shall we say the United States is fighting on Israel’s side?” Abdel Nasser asked over an unsecured phone line. “Shall we say the United States and England, or only the United States?”

  Both, the king agreed, as the world soon learned. Israel had recorded the two leaders scheming to lie, and played the tape over the radio in Egypt.

  Tapping into the disillusionment with Abdel Nasser in the years after 1967, Aboul Fotouh and his young Islamists had swept the Nasserites (and communists) out of student government for the first time since 1952. He became president of the student union at his university and built a national organization of student Islamists on campuses across Egypt. By then, successive crackdowns had all but eliminated the Muslim Brotherhood; it had almost ceased to exist outside the prisons. At the moment of the meeting in the shoe store, Aboul Fotouh might have been the most influential Islamist in Egypt, or possibly in the region.

  Sadat, who took power at Abdel Nasser’s death in the fall of 1970, had recently begun letting Islamists out of prison as a counterbalance to the left. The aging Muslim Brothers emerging from the jails looked enviously at the youth, energy, and numbers in Aboul Fotouh’s student movement, and they were eager to meet him.

  Moved by the determination of the newly released Muslim Brothers to resume his dangerous vocation, Aboul Fotouh eventually led the student leaders around him into the moribund Brotherhood. They revitalized it, just as the elders had hoped, and the shoe store meeting began its rebirth. Many Muslim Brothers of his generation referred to Aboul Fotouh as their movement’s “second founder,” and his life was transformed as well. He wrote decades later, “When I remember that meeting, I cannot stop crying.”

  Three years after the meeting, in 1977, Aboul Fotouh attended a televised forum at Cairo University with President Anwar Sadat, who was still riding high after Egypt’s “victory” over Israel in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The audience dutifully applauded, until Aboul Fotouh raised his hand.

  He wanted to know why Sadat’s security agents had barred a popular sheikh from speaking in public. Was it because he criticized the government? Mr. President, Aboul Fotouh told Sadat, you are surrounded by “sycophants” and “hypocrites.”

  “Stand right there, stop!” Sadat shouted. “I am the president of the family, the president of the country!”

  “I am standing, sir,” Aboul Fotouh replied evenly.

  Many had gone to prison for less. Aboul Fotouh became an Islamist icon. Video footage of the encounter was still circulating when I arrived in Egypt.

  When I met him in March 2012, Aboul Fotouh was fifty-nine years old. He had spent seven years in prison for organizing against Mubarak. He was sitting behind a schoolteacher’s desk in the small office he used as president of an umbrella group for doctors’ syndicates in the Arab region, and he had just filed papers to run for president of Egypt, in what promised to be the first free and fair presidential election in any Arab state. But he was not running as a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood. Aboul Fotouh was running against it.

  “You can say I am a liberal Islamist,” he said. “Compared to the Muslim Brotherhood, I am more liberal.”

  He had the classic look of a Muslim Brother, including a white beard trimmed to within a half inch of his skin. But his demeanor was surprisingly informal for a Brotherhood leader or any Egyptian politician. His suit jacket hung over the back of his chair, and he leaned forward on his elbows to gesture with his hands. I had the feeling several times that he was laughing at my questions.

  The Muslim Brotherhood had said during the uprising that it would not seek more than a third of the Parliament; then it had contested almost all the seats and won nearly half. Now the group had pledged not to field a presidential candidate. My Anglophone Egyptian friends were certain Aboul Fotouh was a stalking horse for the Brothers, feigning a break with them to run as their stealth candidate despite their pledge. I tried again and again to catch him out. But everything he said was not only left of Brothers. It was left of the Egyptian mainstream.

  He wanted a strict separation of religion and government. “When we mix religion and politics, they both get ruined,” he said. He would protect free expression and even blasphemy; he had once visited the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in the hospital to show solidarity after he was stabbed in the neck by a hard-line Islamist for writi
ng a sacrilegious novel (Aboul Fotouh still had the pen the author gave him). Aboul Fotouh wanted full equality for women and non-Muslims. He looked forward to voting for a woman or a Christian as president of Egypt. He criticized the Brotherhood for its all-male governing board, known as the guidance council. His wife worked as an obstetrician and supported their family. Their daughter practiced medicine in California. “I am very close to Western values.”

  But Aboul Fotouh was not only a liberal. He backed his positions with verses from the Quran or Hadith. “God told our Prophet, ‘You cannot control people, you can only advise them,’” Aboul Fotouh said. “‘If I obligate you to adopt some religion—to adopt some behavior—I shall charge you as a hypocrite.’ People must have free will.”

  Okay, then, how about gay marriage?

  Now I had him. “I am running for the president of Egypt!” he said, exasperated at last. “This is a question for the United States—it is just out of the question in Egypt!”

  Aboul Fotouh was forcing debate on the issues that had puzzled me since I first heard Muslim Brothers chanting their decades-old slogan, “Islam is the solution.” The solution to what? And what would that look like? No Arab government had ever allowed an open argument over how to apply the teachings of Islam in public and political life. No free election had ever tested the case.

  I would spend seven years studying debates about the true nature of the Brotherhood. What real agenda was it hiding behind its slogans? I learned that that question was all wrong. There never was a single, essential character of the Muslim Brotherhood, because the Brothers themselves never fully agreed with one another about any of these issues. Their ideology was not just ambiguous to the public; it was ambiguous even to them. Vagueness and flux, in fact, were the keys to the endurance of their movement.

  Hassan el-Banna, who was born in 1906 and founded the Brotherhood at the age of twenty-two, had a knack for paradox. He was the son of a rural imam who owned one of Egypt’s first phonograph shops, and both father and son had a keen interest in Sufi mysticism—even though both Sufism and music were deemed heretical by the most orthodox Sunni Muslims. The son trained as an Arabic teacher and worked in state schools. But he also briefly took over publication of the flagship of Abduh’s Islamic modernist movement—Al Manar, or the Lighthouse. More than anything else, he dedicated the Brotherhood to Abduh’s idea that returning to the roots of Islam was the only way to catch up with the West in rationalism and progress.

  Into that core concept Banna mixed themes of Islamic traditionalism and anti-Western nationalism borrowed from some of Abduh’s intellectual successors. Then Banna harnessed their abstract ideas to his own zeal for organizing.

  “If the French Revolution decreed the rights of man and declared for freedom, equality and brotherhood, and if the Russian Revolution brought closer the classes and social justice for the people,” Banna once wrote, “the great Islamic revolution decreed all that thirteen hundred years before.”

  Would it be a movement for spiritual renewal or political power? Militant or peaceful? Egyptian nationalist or pan-Islamic? Democratic or authoritarian? Banna took both sides of every argument, and he bequeathed to his acolytes decades of internal debate over their goals.

  He was drawn to politics but insisted that the Brotherhood was much more than a party—“an athletic group, a cultural-education union, an economic company, and a social idea,” among other things. He made deals with the British-backed king to restrict prostitution and alcohol sales. But Banna maintained that real change could come only from below, one believer at a time. “Eject imperialism from your souls,” Banna often promised, “and it will leave your land.”

  He pledged to work for a new caliphate and declared that the “Quran is our constitution.” But he made clear that he regarded the caliphate as only a gauzy, end-of-history paradise. He denounced theocratic rule and “ecclesiastical tyranny.” At times he said the best model for Islamic government was a democracy with the sort of written constitution found in the West.

  What might an Islamic state or society look like in practice? Banna mostly avoided the question, or insisted that the answer would vary with time, place, and public consensus. (That is part of the reason Brotherhood-inspired groups differ from one country to the next.) His bylaws demanded absolute obedience, but the first internal rebellions, splits, and defections broke out within four years of the founding. They were still roiling when I lived in Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood was tethered to a core vision and history, to be sure. But it was always changing and never monolithic.

  Should I fear the Muslim Brothers? Their reputation for violence was so pervasive in the West that I took special care to understand that legacy. Banna had talked avidly of jihad, martyrdom, and “the art of death” in defense of Islam. For a few years in the 1940s he went so far as to create a secret paramilitary wing—the so-called “special apparatus.” But Cairo in the ’40s was lousy with paramilitary outfits. Every faction had one—the nationalists, monarchists, and so on. Banna, in that sense, was keeping up with his times. The Brotherhood’s special apparatus cooperated with Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers to fight against the fledgling state of Israel and to plot against the British occupation. Anwar Sadat was the Free Officers’ liaison to train and equip the Brothers.

  Then the special apparatus appeared to go rogue. On November 15, 1948, King Farouk’s government arrested all the Brotherhood’s leaders, severing its chain of command. But the foot soldiers of the secret apparatus remained at large. On December 28, a twenty-three-year-old student veterinarian who belonged to the Brotherhood’s paramilitary dressed up as a policeman and snuck inside the Interior Ministry when the prime minister, Mahmoud el-Nuqrashi, was visiting. The impostor saluted, shot the premier in the back, and then finished him off with a bullet to the chest when Nuqrashi turned to see what hit him. An older veteran of the secret apparatus was arrested two weeks later for attempting to bomb a courthouse holding the records of a case against the Brothers.

  Banna denounced the perpetrators and their actions. “They are neither Brothers, nor are they Muslims,” he declared in an open letter. In a second letter he pleaded with other wayward “young ones” to shun threats or weapons. Nonetheless, successive Egyptian rulers for decades seized on Nuqrashi’s assassination as evidence of the Brothers’ true character. After the uprising of 2011, Egyptian journalists and intellectuals opposed to the Brotherhood still cited the 1948 killing of the prime minister to explain their fear of the movement.

  Banna himself was assassinated by an agent of the king barely eight weeks later, on February 12, 1949, as he got into a taxi off Ramses Square in downtown Cairo. His successor as the Brotherhood’s general guide was a former judge, Hassan el-Hudaiby. He made it his top priority to purge violence from the organization and eradicate its secret apparatus. But a decade later, in the early 1960s, a small circle of Muslim Brothers tried again to reestablish another secret paramilitary unit, in defiance of Hudaiby.

  Inspired and led by the Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, this new circle conspired to smuggle weapons from Sudan and talked of using them for retaliatory assassinations (justified as self-defense) if Abdel Nasser moved against them again. But they were too slow. Abdel Nasser learned of the scheme, broke up the plot, and, in 1966, executed Qutb.

  Supporters of the regimes that ruled the Arab world over the next half century remembered Banna and Qutb as terrorists who were killed for their treason. To Islamists, they were martyrs. Banna had always warned that they would face persecution.

  Some of Qutb’s ideas—specifically about the apostasy of dictatorships like Mubarak’s—became a starting point for the thinking of Salafi jihadists like Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al Qaeda. (Jailed for a time with al-Zawahiri, Aboul Fotouh once watched him pick a pointless fight with a guard just for the sake of the conflict and bloodshed.) But the Brotherhood leadership redoubled its commitment to nonviolence, codifying its position in a trac
t by their imprisoned general guide, Hudaiby. The tract, “Preachers, Not Judges,” became a pillar of the Brotherhood canon.

  The main Brotherhood-inspired organization of Palestinians, Hamas, has carried out violence against Israel, including attacks that have killed Israeli civilians. The United States has designated Hamas a terrorist organization. And the leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood applauded Hamas. But they regard it as a special case. They consider Hamas resistance to an illegal occupation, and thus justified under international law in the use of violence to defend Palestinian independence.

  But from Qutb to 2011, historians have found no evidence that the leadership of the Muslim Brothers ever again plotted violence in Egypt. Instead, those inclined toward militant jihad, like Ayman al-Zawahiri, left the Brothers in frustration. The Bitter Harvest was the title of his book-length jeremiad against the nonviolence of the movement.

  Aboul Fotouh had started out in the 1970s as censorious as a Salafi. One of his proudest achievements as an Islamist student leader was segregating men and women in lecture halls. His Islamist students sold inexpensive head scarves to encourage women to cover up. They frowned on music, drama, movies, and almost any other entertainment. “We did not have any view of art except that it was forbidden,” he later wrote.

  But the Muslim Brotherhood loosened him up. The third general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Omar al-Tilmisani, also released from prison in the early 1970s, shocked Aboul Fotouh by announcing that he listened to Om Kalthoum and even performed music. Tilmisani said the founding generation of Muslim Brothers had organized art, film, and theater teams to elevate the culture. His wife wore her hair without a veil. Most important, Tilmisani convinced Aboul Fotouh and other students to shun violence at a time when others in their generation were joining the Salafi jihadi insurgency centered in southern Egypt.

  “Some people said to me, ‘You made a fatal mistake, Aboul Fotouh, because you made those Muslim Brothers our leaders,’ and they still say it,” Aboul Fotouh told me. “But I said to them, if we separated from the Brotherhood, you may have taken the option of violence.”