It has become clear that the Brotherhood was more profoundly shaped by its inability to actually win power than has generally been recognized. Almost every aspect of its organization, ideology, and strategy was shaped by the limits Mubarak placed upon it. The revolution removed those boundaries — and the Brotherhood has struggled badly to adapt. Its erratic, incompetent, and often incomprensibly alienating behavior since the revolution comes in part from having utterly lost its bearings in a new institutional environment. The chance to rule forced it to confront a whole range of contradictions that Mubarak’s domination had allowed the group to finesse.
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... I recall sitting in Deputy Supreme Guide Khairet al-Shater’s office in late 2011 being shown what appeared to be comprehensive, detailed plans for economic development and institutional reform. It seemed plausible at that point that a Brotherhood government would quickly get things moving again and establish itself as a centrist Islamist majority party, like Turkey’s ruling AK Party. Yet it has utterly failed to do so. What went wrong?
One part of the answer lies in something else the academics got right: factional politics inside the Brotherhood. Put simply, the years immediately preceding the Egyptian revolution had produced a Brotherhood leadership and organization almost uniquely poorly adapted to the challenges of a democratic transition. The regime cracked down hard on the Brotherhood following its electoral success in 2005, arresting a wide range of its leaders (including currently prominent personalities such as Morsy and Shater), confiscating its financial assets, and launching intense media propaganda campaigns.
This took a toll on the internal balance of power inside the Brotherhood as advocates of political participation found themselves on the defensive against the more conservative faction, which preferred to focus on social outreach and religious affairs. In 2008, conservatives were declared the winners in all five seats being contested in by-elections to replace empty seats on the Brotherhood’s highest official body, the Guidance Council; reformists cried foul. The next year, in new elections to the council again marred by serious procedural violations, the most prominent reformist member, Abdel Monem Abou el-Fotouh, and a key intermediary between the factions, Mohammed Habib, lost their long-held seats. Supreme Guide Mohammed Mehdi Akef, an old-guard conservative who had nonetheless maintained a careful balance between the factions, later stepped down and was replaced by little-known conservative Mohammed Badie. Over the next few years, a number of leading members of the reformist faction left the Brotherhood or were excluded from positions of influence.
When the revolution broke out, then, the Brotherhood had already driven away many of its most politically savvy and ideologically moderate leaders. Its leadership had become dominated by cautious, paranoid, and ideologically rigid conservatives who had little experience at building cross-ideological partnerships or making democratic compromises. One-time reformists such as Essam el-Erian and Mohammed el-Beltagy had made their peace with conservative domination and commanded little influence on the movement’s strategy. It is fascinating to imagine how the Brotherhood might have handled the revolution and its aftermath if the dominant personalities on the Guidance Bureau had been Abou el-Fotouh and Habib rather than Shater and Badie — but we’ll never know.
