Opinion | Columnists
New leadership, old politics
Egypt's leading opposition movement has elected a new leader, but Mohammad Badi means more of the same
- By Fawaz Gerges
- Published: 00:00 January 25, 2010
- Image Credit: Illustration: Ramachandra Babu/Gulf News
- The new leadership will refrain from provoking the Mubarak regime, which has recently cracked down hard on the Brotherhood and imprisoned hundreds of its members.
There is no better way to take the temperature of Arab politics than to examine the state of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful religiously-organised opposition movement in Egypt and the Arab world. With branches in several Arab and Muslim countries, the Brotherhood portrays itself as a more authentic, viable alternative to secular authoritarian rulers and religious extremists of the Al Qaida variety.
The recent election of a new leader, however, has utterly discredited those claims and exposed a serious rift within the 81-year-old Islamic organisation. After weeks of internal turmoil and infighting, the Brotherhood announced that it has chosen Mohammad Badi, an ultra-conservative veterinarian, as its eighth supreme leader since its founding in 1928, along with 16 members of its highest executive policy-setting "guidance bureau".
Members of the old guard like Mahmoud Izzat, secretary general and gatekeeper of the Brotherhood's finances and secrets, and Mohammad Akif, former supreme leader, who oppose opening up the organisation and democratising its decision-making, gained the upper hand. Ignoring the wishes of many younger members who called for transparency and respect for electoral rules, Izzat, Arif and their cohorts shoved the secretly-arranged results down the throats of opposition.
Resigning in protest, ex-deputy leader Mohammad Habib publicly accused the old guard of violating the Brotherhood's regulations and illegally engineering Badi's selection. "The future of the movement is at stake," said Habib in a revealing interview in the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm.
Habib's complaints revealed a deepening power struggle between conservative men in their 70s and 80s and a younger generation from the 1970s with reformist tendencies.
Badi's election shows clearly the dominance of the old guard a coherent but dwindling ideologically-inclined group of Muslim Brothers, most of whom were members of the late Saeed Qutb's 1965 paramilitary network. Qutb, master ideologue and theoretician of radicalism, was executed by the Nasser regime in 1966. The Brotherhood renounced violence in the late 1960s.
Many of Qutb's followers like Izzat, Akif and Badi spent about a decade in Egyptian prison camps and ever since their release in the mid-1970s have exercised a stranglehold over this influential social movement.
Although highly regarded as a professor of veterinary pathology, Badi possesses no intellectual and political vision to lead the outlawed Brotherhood in an open and inclusive fashion. His most notable characteristic is absolute obedience to the powers-that-be within the organisation (Izzat and Akif) and aversion to reforms. A low-key man with an awkward demeanour, Badi's election is designed to maintain the status quo.
The reformist wing, which calls for transparency and joining ranks with the small but active secular opposition has therefore suffered a major setback. In addition, reformist-minded heavyweights like Abdul Moneim Abul Futouh and ex-deputy Habib lost their seats in the guidance bureau, a hard blow.
Futouh is the most forward-looking, and someone on whom progressive young Muslim Brothers and outsiders had pinned their hopes for change. His removal shifts the balance of power further in favour of hardliners like Izzat who oppose a more active role in the political arena and wants to preserve the internal cohesiveness and unity of the organisation.
What this means is that in the next five years the Brotherhood will be more preoccupied with increasing its membership, already more than a million strong, than lending a helping hand to the opposition to bring about peaceful change in Egypt. The new leadership will refrain from provoking the Mubarak regime, which has recently cracked down hard on the Brotherhood and imprisoned hundreds of its members.
Olive branch
"We reaffirm that the Brotherhood is not an adversary to the regime," Badi said at a press conference immediately after the announcement, sending an early signal of reconciliation to the authorities.
In fact, the Mubarak regime is the main beneficiary of the triumph of isolationist hardliners within the Brotherhood. Sidelining itself, the Islamic organisation will no longer threaten the dominance of the ruling party in October's parliamentary elections, which will pave the way, many Egyptians say, for the succession of Mubarak's son, Jamal. Although banned and harassed, in 2005 the Brotherhood garnered a fifth of the 454 seats in the current Egyptian parliament. The next largest opposition party has six seats.
Despite its claims to the contrary, the Brotherhood leadership has failed the test of transparency and accountability. A political movement that is internally closed and authoritarian cannot be trusted to practice democracy, if and when it gains power. One would hope that reformists like Futouh will weather this painful defeat and save the Brotherhood from self-destruction.
A convincing argument can be made that the Brotherhood and the Mubarak regime are two sides of the same coin. The tragedy of Arab politics is that the secular ruling elite and the powerful Islamic opposition are illiberal and undemocratic. There is no viable third force on the Arab horizon that offers a light at the end of the dark tunnel.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Fawaz Gerges is a professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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