from
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/30/egypt-sisi-muslim-brotherhood-history-repression-nationalism-democracy-opposition/

An expert's point of view on a current event.

Egypt’s Sisi Rules by Fear—and Is Ruled by It
By falsely labeling all critics as Muslim Brotherhood shills, the
Egyptian president shows how scared he really is.

Cook-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist4
Cook-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist4
Steven A. Cook
By Steven A. Cook, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico
Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council
on Foreign Relations.

A close-up image shows Sisi's face with a serious expression.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi takes part in a meeting on the
second day of a European Union-African Union summit at the European
Council Building in Brussels on Feb. 18, 2022. JOHANNA GERON/AFP VIA
GETTY IMAGES
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AUGUST 30, 2023, 12:08 PM
According to Nashat al-Daihi, the host of an Egyptian television program
called “With Pen and Paper,” I am in the pay of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He was not the only Egyptian outraged over my last column, which was
about how Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ruined Egypt. Sisi’s
online supporters poured forth an endless amount of whataboutism and
personal insults on my Twitter—er, X—timeline for what seemed like days,
revealing once again that all hope for thoughtful debate on social media
was lost long ago.

The claim is absurd on its face. There is simply no way that the Muslim
Brotherhood would pay me for anything based on who I am and what I have
written about them. I don’t believe the group’s shtick and never have.
They, like others in Egypt, are adept at leveraging the discourse of
political reform in pursuit of an anti-democratic agenda.

Moreover, I am skeptical of the mythology that the Muslim Brotherhood
has created around the immediate post-Hosni Mubarak era. There was more
Brotherhood electoral chicanery and intimidation that went into its
candidate Mohamed Morsi’s election to the presidency in 2012 than anyone
cares to admit. Even if the Brotherhood had been less incompetent in its
attempt to gain control of the state, I doubt Egypt would have been an
Arab Spring success story.

Having written about Egypt for years, I’m used to this sort of thing by
now, and my practice is usually to ignore such bile. But al-Daihi’s
comment caught my eye. That’s because the accusation that Sisi’s critics
are employees of the Muslim Brotherhood is symptomatic of two related
problems that the Egyptian leader and his supporters have, for which
they do not have any answers.

First, as I wrote in my previous column, there is a large, growing, and
noticeable divergence between what the government promises Egyptians and
how they experience everyday life. When people have the temerity to
point this out, they are branded as supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood
or, in the case of a large number of Egyptians, subjected to
imprisonment and physical abuse. This ferocious response is a measure of
how much Sisi and his supporters know and fear that there are many
Egyptians who recognize this gap and its potentially destabilizing nature.

Second, and more important for our purposes here, is that despite Sisi’s
best efforts, he still can’t get rid of the long shadow the Muslim
Brotherhood continues to cast over Egyptian politics and society.

Of course, even well before the Sisi era, it was common for Egyptian
officials to alternately appease and repress the Brotherhood. In the
early 1940s, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahhas bent to the Brotherhood’s
political pressure and cracked down on alcohol and prostitution while
allowing the organization to publish its newspapers. A few years later,
a new government cracked down on the Brotherhood—before yet another
government resumed placating the group.

Gamal Abdel Nasser imprisoned thousands of Brotherhood leaders and
members, let some of them out, and then imprisoned them again. His
successor, Anwar el-Sadat—a onetime fellow traveler of the
Brotherhood—released them and gave them the opportunity to publish and
preach. However, they fell out over Sadat’s peace with Israel, and
Egypt’s jails filled up with Brothers once again.

After Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Mubarak afforded the group the
opportunity to resume its activities, believing that a higher profile
for the Brothers in publishing, education, and civil society would draw
support away from the extremists who had murdered Sadat. After about a
decade, Mubarak determined he’d had enough and ordered the security
services to bring the group to heel. Throughout this pattern of
accommodation and confrontation, the Muslim Brotherhood remained an
important political, social, and cultural actor in Egypt.

In recent years, both the repression of the Brotherhood and the
allegation that the government’s critics are members of (or otherwise in
the pay of) the group have become more pronounced and dangerous. That is
because Sisi has sought to recast Egypt’s nationalist narrative by
writing the Muslim Brotherhood out of it.

Nationalism doesn’t just occur spontaneously. It is conjured and
imagined—and it is the result of concerted political projects. It is
thus periodically subject to reinterpretation to suit political leaders’
needs. This is precisely what Sisi has done to portray the
Brotherhood—whose origins, prestige, and worldview are firmly rooted in
the Egyptian experience—as both violent and alien to the society from
which it was born.

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After the coup d’état that brought Sisi to power, parallel to the
state-led media campaign that sought to create and sustain a reservoir
of support for what was called Egypt’s “second revolution” was a drive
to portray the Muslim Brotherhood as “fifth columnists.” The Brothers
were routinely depicted as being agents of either the Qataris and/or the
Turks.

At the same time, Sisi justified the violence he employed to suppress
the Brothers on the grounds that the group was a terrorist organization.
There was a time when the Brotherhood maintained a so-called secret
apparatus or armed cadres, but they were dismantled long ago. Still, the
Egyptian government made a direct link between the Brothers and Islamic
State-like extremism. When analysts questioned the government’s
narrative and its use of violence, they were routinely depicted in the
Egyptian press as instruments of the Brotherhood. Put 100 Western Egypt
watchers in a room and ask for a show of hands of people who have been
accused of shilling for the Brothers, and I am certain a majority would
respond affirmatively.

This brings us back to the leadership’s second problem for which it has
no answer: Try as Sisi might to rewrite Egypt’s nationalist narrative,
his effort to banish the Brotherhood from it is malarkey. The Brothers
played an important role in some of the most important nationalist
episodes of the 20th century. They agitated against the British
occupation, and although they were initially positively disposed toward
the Egyptian monarchy, they opposed King Farouk throughout much of the
1940s and early 1950s.

The Brotherhood was among the first groups to raise the alarm over
Zionism and Jewish migration to Palestine. In the 1948 war between the
new state of Israel and its neighbors, the Brothers fought (albeit
ineffectively) against Israelis near Beersheba, Bethlehem, and
Jerusalem, though they did distinguish themselves by aiding thousands of
Egyptian soldiers and officers stranded in the Faluja pocket—near the
Gaza Strip—in the last stages of the conflict.

There was, however, another critical political dimension to the
Brotherhood’s activism regarding Palestine. The group, consistent with
Islamic reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, believed
that the weakness of Muslim societies invited foreign intervention.
Inasmuch as they and many others regarded Zionism an instrument of
European colonialism, the Palestinian struggle against Israelis was seen
as the same nationalist struggle that Egyptians were waging against the
British.