The People’s Assembly sits behind tall iron gates a short and shady walk south of Tahrir Square, east of the British and American embassies and near the fortified headquarters of the Interior Ministry, which is as imposing as the Parliament. The white-domed assembly building, with neoclassical columns and papyrus-flower capitals, was built in 1923 by King Fuad as a monument to Egypt’s nominal independence. But he remained a British puppet. The Parliament never held real power. And the pell-mell urbanization during the Abdel Nasser era all but buried the edifice in tenements, storefronts, gas stations, and carts of fuul (the slow-cooked beans beloved by Egyptians). In my first year of running around Cairo, I had never noticed the building.
The newly elected lawmakers convened nearly a year after the uprising, on January 23, 2012. If the Salafis’ claim to a quarter of the seats in Parliament was the surprise of the election, the Brotherhood was the undisputed winner. Its candidates captured nearly half the chamber. Between the Salafis and Brothers, Islamists of one stripe or another accounted for three quarters of the votes. The liberals, leftists, social democrats, the Tahrir Square activists, and ruling-party incumbents each took a small share of the remaining quarter; they had all washed out at the polls.
The founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan el-Banna, had set his sights on a seat in the Parliament within a decade of starting his movement, in 1928. Now, after eighty years of struggle in the shadows, his heirs were poised at last to lead the assembly. I arrived by 8:00 A.M., and hundreds of Muslim Brothers were already there.
For a supposedly secret society, they were easy to spot. Where Salafis favored the unruly beards of storybook wizards, the Muslim Brothers kept their whiskers fastidiously trim. The archetypical Muslim Brother was middle-aged and middle class, perhaps with the slight potbelly that comes with age and kushari—but never with the kind of protruding abdomen that might suggest gluttony or indolence. He wore chinos and a button-down shirt with a button-down collar, never the traditional galabiya of a sheikh or a peasant. A pen or a mechanical pencil might protrude from a pocket. The Brothers—the Ikhwan—were upright, confident, sometimes arrogant, perhaps patronizing. They were professionals, small-business owners, or senior vice presidents of sprawling multinationals. Physicians and engineers filled the leadership; medical school and the hard sciences offered the surest paths to prestige for the strivers of the Egyptian middle class. Mohamed Badie, the general guide, was a veterinarian.
The image varied somewhat in rural villages, of course, and there were also university students and recent graduates—drawn by faith, fellowship, or the vision of a better, alternative Egypt. But even among younger Brothers, the outline of the older archetype was discernible: pleated pants, wire-rimmed glasses, argyle sweaters, and thinner, collegiate beards. Ikhwany, Egyptians sometimes called the look—Brotherhoodish.
Outside the assembly, Muslim Brothers and Sisters held hands and danced in the street. They sang religious and patriotic songs from the forties and fifties. I watched middle-aged men lift onto their shoulders portly lawmakers in suits and neckties, like a high school football squad hoisting a winning quarterback. Grown men cried tears of joy. “This is the most important day in our lives,” said Abdel Moneim el-Tantawy, a sixty-seven-year-old mechanical engineer.
The celebrations followed weeks of deadly, on-again, off-again clashes in the streets abutting the People’s Assembly. But as in most such protests over the previous year, the Islamists had stayed out of them. The battles had pitted riot police against liberal or left-leaning protesters demanding civilian rule. (There were three camps now: the security forces, the Islamists, and those self-described “revolutionary” activists.) The street cops were still missing in action. And the riot police did more to provoke than to disperse. Their signature tactic was picking up rocks and throwing them back at the civilian protesters. Just a month before, a makeshift missile a policeman had thrown from the top of the cabinet building had hit my left boot, sending me limping off to look for a helmet. Having successfully ended the weeklong melee before Thanksgiving by building a wall across Mohamed Mahmoud Street, the army had erected no fewer than five more cement barricades across streets around the neighborhood to stop other brawls between the riot police and protesters. Three more went up in February. The stately neighborhood of Garden City was becoming a labyrinth of walls. On one, graffiti artists had painted a trompe l’oeil image of the streetscape behind it.
It seemed clear enough to me that the generals were loath to cede power to an Islamist-led Parliament. To address that question, a barrel-chested general with a white crew cut had summoned me and eight other journalists from Western news organizations for a special briefing before the swearing in, on December 7, 2011. Egyptian news outlets were excluded.
Do not worry about the Islamist electoral victories, the general, Assistant Minister of Defense Mokhtar el-Mulla, told us. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces would still name the prime minister. The army would still control the government. In fact, the generals had decided to oversee the writing of a new constitution—a job that all the candidates for Parliament had campaigned on as the chamber’s main responsibility.
“In such unstable conditions, the Parliament is not representing all the Egyptians,” Mulla explained. “So whatever the majority in the People’s Assembly, they are very welcome, because they will not have the ability to impose anything.”
Islamists, he insisted, could never represent the true Egypt. “Do you think that the Egyptians elected someone to threaten their interest and economy and security and relations with the international community? Of course not!”
Besides, he said, the Mubarak constitution was mostly just fine. “A lot of legislators are saying that we have a very good constitution, and a very unique one, except for only Chapter Five, about the presidential elections, so we will only amend this chapter.” He promised that under the military’s supervision, a committee of jurists could do the job in less than a month. Just three weeks had passed since the generals had dropped their overt plan to preserve their power by dictating constitutional principles; now they were trying a more subtle approach.
I was incensed that Egyptian journalists had been left out of the briefing. So I arranged for the New York Times website to post my audio recording. The reaction to Mulla’s comments was swift. Liberals and Islamists again accused the generals of attempting a coup. The Brotherhood pulled out of a civilian “advisory council” the generals had set up. Within days, the military had retreated back to letting the Parliament oversee the writing of the charter.
But as obvious as the mutual suspicions between the soldiers and the Islamists seemed to me, many non-Islamist politicians and activists saw a conspiracy. They were convinced that the Muslim Brothers were secretly cutting a deal with the generals. The Brothers had accepted the military’s continued control of the government, the theory went. In exchange, the generals had scheduled elections on a quick timetable that enabled the Brothers’ well-prepared organization to lock up a plurality of the Parliament.
Now, in the midst of the Brothers’ celebrations outside the assembly, protesters arrived denouncing the supposed Islamist sellout and demanding that the Brothers in Parliament push harder to take power from the generals. “No to the military, no to the Brothers, the revolution is still in the square!” hundreds of demonstrators chanted. Some seized on a phonetic similarity between the Arabic word for “sell” and the family name of the Brotherhood’s general guide, Badie. “Sell, sell, sell the revolution, oh, Badie.” It was funny in Arabic.
The Brothers, though, were well coached that morning. Scores linked arms. A long chain held back the protesters. A few threw empty plastic water bottles at the Islamists, but the Brothers more or less held their ground, and, for the day, kept the peace. How long would that restraint last?
Every conversation about the Arab revolts eventually became a debate about the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamists inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brothers constituted the main opposition to every Arab autocracy. The Cairo headquarters had no control over the many loosely aligned affiliates around the world, but every Arab autocrat sold himself to the West as a bulwark against the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam. Would participation in pluralistic politics now domesticate the Brotherhood? Or was the Brotherhood’s promise of an “Islamic democracy” a Trojan horse packed with jihadis? Were we watching a triumph of liberal democracy, or a clash of civilizations?
The U.S. government had been trying to understand the group for nearly six decades. Eisenhower had invited a senior Brotherhood leader into the Oval Office: Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s founder. He had come to the United States in 1953 to attend a conference at Princeton, and a cable from the U.S. embassy in Cairo had warned against “offending this important body.” Eisenhower hoped to court the Brotherhood as an ally against communism. But when the Cold War ended, there was less to discuss. Mubarak learned in the early 1990s that American diplomats in Cairo had talked with the Muslim Brothers, and he exploded in rage.
“Your government is in contact with these terrorists from the Muslim Brotherhood,” he fumed to the journalist Mary Anne Weaver—tarring the Brothers with an accusation that had dogged them for decades without substantiation.
George W. Bush raised a fuss when Egypt jailed non-Islamists, but he did as Mubarak asked when it came to the Muslim Brothers. “We have not engaged with the Muslim Brotherhood. And we won’t,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to the American University in Cairo in 2005, after Mubarak had moved to thwart the early Islamist victories in the parliamentary voting. Egypt “has its rule of law, and I’ll respect that.”
The philosopher Tariq Ramadan—son of the Muslim Brother who met Eisenhower and a grandson of the movement’s founder—was hired as a professor at Notre Dame in 2004. The Bush administration denied him a visa. Ramadan was forced to teach at Oxford.
Seven years later, in 2011, some in the Pentagon and the Obama White House still viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as a close cousin to Al Qaeda.
“They are all swimming in the same sea,” General James Mattis of Central Command later said in a speech looking back on the period. He meant not only the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda but also the Shiite theocracy in Iran. National Security Council staff presented Mattis with intelligence reports delineating the deep differences and even animosities among those three rival strains of political Islam. But Mattis stubbornly persisted in lumping them together.
“Is political Islam in the best interest of the United States?” Mattis asked in the same speech, at the Heritage Foundation. That was the “fundamental question,” he said. “If we won’t even ask the question, how do we get to the point of recognizing which is our side in the fight?”
He saw the fight against political Islam—in all its forms—as the central dynamic of the Middle East, and plenty of others agreed with him in Washington, including at the Pentagon, in the White House, and in Congress. “Islamists are not our friends,” Dennis Ross, the president’s adviser, later wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times, making the same case. “Their creed is not compatible with pluralism or democracy.”
John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and future secretary of state, was an inveterate foe of the Brotherhood. In a 2008 confirmation hearing to send an ambassador, Margaret Scobey, to Egypt, Kerry asked only about “the current state of threat” posed by the Brothers.
“I’ve heard this from President Mubarak,” Kerry said, describing the theory that democratic elections in Egypt would precipitate a Brotherhood takeover on the hard-line model of Hamas in Gaza. “If you sort of open it up and the Muslim Brotherhood were legitimate, that you would in fact have a more radical outcome and greater instability in Egypt.”
Then there was the question of public opinion. Even those in the administration who understood the difference between the Brotherhood and Al Qaeda knew that distinction eluded most lawmakers and voters. No American politician wanted to publicly support the Brotherhood. An Egyptian lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood had turned up at a reception at the Cairo home of the American ambassador in 2007, and it became a Washington scandal. During the eighteen-day uprising against Mubarak, Hillary Clinton and White House officials avoided any mention of either “Islamist” or “Muslim Brotherhood” when they met with think-tank experts. The White House stuck to the euphemism “nonsecular actors.” Later that spring, Obama personally struck the words “Muslim Brotherhood” from a draft of a speech about the uprising.
When European diplomats invited their American counterparts to meet with Arab Islamists, Steven Simon of the National Security Council staff imagined the headline: UNITED STATES JOINS EUROFAGS TO MEET WITH TERRORISTS. The Americans skipped it.
Now Egypt (and Tunisia) could provide the real-world answers to decades of hypotheticals about what might happen if Brotherhood-style Islamists won free elections. They were poised to wield power, and some in the administration realized that apprehension had kept Washington from acquiring firsthand information about the Muslim Brothers or their internal dynamics.
The American embassy in Cairo, heeding the six-year-old promise from Rice, had eschewed all contact except rare meetings with lawmakers who happened to be Muslim Brothers. In the spring of 2011, the State Department knew no one in what was about to become Egypt’s most influential political bloc. “Why were we not talking to these people?” one member of the White House national security staff later told me, recalling the exasperation. “We didn’t know anything!”
Advisers to Clinton at the State Department and staff on the Egypt desk at the National Security Council drafted a cable formally instructing the embassy in Cairo to reach out to the Muslim Brothers. But Donilon was still nervous. He sat on it for more than a month.
Finally a Clinton adviser got his hands on a faxed copy of a cable with the same instructions from Prime Minister David Cameron to the British embassy in Cairo. Now Washington was falling behind London. Donilon immediately approved the American cable.
Then the embassy resisted. Its diplomats were too anxious about being seen with the Brothers, and too unsure of which ones to call. By the summer, Clinton’s chief policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, decided to send the State Department’s expert on political Islam, Peter Mandaville, to make contact. But the outgoing American ambassador, Margaret Scobey, exercised a seldom-used prerogative to block the visit. She acceded only after top State Department officials assured her that Mandaville would bring along an embassy diplomat to the meeting.
Finally, in July 2011, Mandaville and the embassy diplomat met for coffee at the InterContinental Semiramis hotel in Cairo with Mohamed el-Shahawy, a forty-year-old Muslim Brother who worked as a regional executive for 3M, the American multinational. Western diplomats, journalists, and academics were swarming over Cairo asking about the Muslim Brothers by then. That coffee was just another meeting for Shahawy. As it happened he was on his way out of the movement. He resigned soon after as part of a mass defection of moderates.
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.
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 writing 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 tract 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.”
Aboul Fotouh and the Islamist students he brought with him began pushing the Brotherhood to compete in elections in the state-sponsored professional associations, like the doctors’ syndicate. Although Mubarak still outlawed the Brotherhood, its members eventually began running for Parliament, too, initially under the banners of existing parties and then as independents. By 1987, the Brotherhood’s candidates were distributing booklets that forswore any imposition of Islamic law and affirmed the equal citizenship of Coptic Christians. In 2000, the Brothers fielded female parliamentary candidates, reinterpreting Quranic verses about male guardianship to refer only to the family. Some leaders even said the head scarf was not a religious obligation, but “merely a question of identity and belonging, just as saris are for Indians.”
Aboul Fotouh was the Brotherhood’s most prominent advocate of moderation and an increasingly visible spokesman. He belonged to a broader movement of like-minded Islamists around the region who advocated for religious values but secular governments—most notably including Aboul Fotouh’s close friend Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia. Essam Sultan, who upended the opening day of Parliament, was part of the same trend. By around 2005, they were conspicuous enough that journalists and scholars needed a term for them: “post-Islamist.”
Then to the shock of most rank-and-file Muslim Brothers, their governing board voted in 2009 to expel Aboul Fotouh from his seat. He had dissented from a prototype party platform that rolled back much of what he stood for. It declared that only a male Muslim could serve as president of Egypt, and that the Parliament should be required to take the advice of a council of Muslim scholars. Despite the outward transformation of the Brotherhood, a conservative faction had the upper hand after all. “They controlled the Brotherhood completely,” Aboul Fotouh later told me. “There was no hope for me.”
In June 2011, he was sitting in an airplane taxiing at the Cairo International Airport, having just returned from a visit to London, when his presidential campaign media adviser called with news from the Brotherhood. The same leaders who had removed Aboul Fotouh from its governing board had voted to expel him from membership in the Brotherhood. The board said he had defied its orders by running for president after the Brotherhood had pledged not to field a candidate. He wept in his seat.
The revolts of the Arab Spring had pulled once-hushed debates about the goals of political Islam into the open. We heard versions of it playing out everywhere—from the street cafés of folding chairs selling Turkish coffees downtown to the cacophony of nightly talk shows.
Aboul Fotouh, undaunted by the Brotherhood’s opposition, built a presidential campaign aimed at the center of the question. Dozens or hundreds of young Muslim Brothers were defecting to join him (including Shahawy, the 3M executive who had met with the Americans). His campaign media adviser was a young liberal whose primary qualification was experience on Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign in New York. The campaign’s political adviser was an outspoken feminist and socialist, Rabab el-Mahdi, who had taught political science at Yale before coming home to join the American University in Cairo.
I tracked her down at the end of yet another Tahrir Square rally against military rule, and she let me follow her to her car if I could keep up. She had wavy shoulder-length hair and colorful glasses, and she threw around words like “discourse” and “hegemony.”
“Egypt needs to hear the core ideas of the left, but through an Islamist voice so it does not sound so alien,” she said. The Aboul Fotouh campaign set out “to create a left that included Islamists and non-Islamists, so we could talk about politics and stop talking about religion.”
She made no secret of her delight at inflicting pain on the Brothers. “Aboul Fotouh is very dangerous for them—a matter of life and death. If he succeeds, it means the Brotherhood loses its monopoly on moderate Islam.”
Aboul Fotouh’s views evolved, she told me years later. “At first he would say, ‘Why do I need a special policy for Copts? Why are Copts different than the Muslim Brotherhood? Aren’t the Muslim Brothers discriminated against, too?’” The day after the massacre of the Christians outside the Maspero building in October 2011, some of the ex-Islamists on Aboul Fotouh’s campaign team sympathized with the soldiers, suggesting they were obliged to defend against a Christian attack. Mahdi was outraged and stormed out of the campaign office.
But after she left, Aboul Fotouh issued a stronger condemnation than almost any other party, stronger even than the Coptic Church itself. “Those who have fallen, the dead and the injured, are Egyptians, and we Egyptians have to unite to stop this threat to our national security,” he said.
I came to consider Mahdi a friend, and she was merciless about any hint of sexism. But she was also critical of her fellow feminists who acted like political Islam was the only threat to the rights of Arab women. She knew from experience that Egyptian nationalists, liberals, and leftists were all sexist, too.
“When I hear Egyptian women say, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood are going to put us down,’ I tell them, ‘Guys, we are already put down!’” she said. “In terms of sexism and patriarchy, the Muslim Brothers are very much in the Egyptian mainstream.”
Like most Egyptian politicians, Aboul Fotouh started out referring to women as “girls,” talking about “wives and mothers and sisters,” or extolling the importance of women “to cultivate children and homes.”
“I said, ‘dump that shit,’” Mahdi told me. Soon Aboul Fotouh was talking about “minimum income” instead of minimum wage, stressing the value of work inside homes, and correcting interviewers who asked him about “poverty.” Call it “impoverishment,” he would tell them, because it was a product of an economic system and not an immutable condition.
“We sold him on everything,” Mahdi said.
I followed Aboul Fotouh to rallies in Cairo and the Nile Delta. Whenever he was asked about religious issues, he replied that Egyptians were already religious enough. “Egypt has been proud of its Islamic and Arabic identity for fifteen centuries. Are we waiting for the Parliament to convert us?” he would say, or, “Egypt has enough mosques. What Egypt needs are factories.”
Some of his younger supporters had recorded a song in the hip-hop-style computer-generated street music that blared from the speakers of tuk-tuks. “He is not American, not British, not Iranian. . . . He did not steal land. . . . He is a clean man. . . . Aboul Fotouh! Aboul Fotouh!” I was told that he hated it. I could not get it out of my head.
Khairat el-Shater was a business tycoon and the deputy general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was its chief strategist, its top financier, and an old friend of Aboul Fotouh. That is, until 2009, when Shater emerged as the driving force behind Aboul Fotouh’s expulsion from the governing board and then the movement.
Shater was sixty-two years old in 2012, and the tallest Egyptian I ever met. He stood well over six feet, and he was thick in the middle. Streaks of gray ran through his full beard, and his eyes were set deep below a high forehead. He had amassed a personal fortune investing in furniture, bus manufacturing, textiles, software, and other industries. We met in the headquarters of his holding company, in a high-rise in the neighborhood of Nasr City. Waiters served us cold glasses of freshly squeezed mango juice.
Shater had spent a dozen years behind bars on various politicized charges under Mubarak, longer than any other Brotherhood leader. He had run his business empire, the Brotherhood, and a family of ten children from inside a jail cell. He had married off all eight of his daughters to young Muslim Brothers—some of whom were his fellow inmates. The eight grooms visited him in prison to ask his consent. Five said their vows behind bars. The Brotherhood was an insular world.
If Aboul Fotouh had revitalized the Brotherhood, Shater had reorganized it. He had plotted and financed its political strategy, its expansion onto the internet, and its outreach to the West. He spoke with a time-is-money efficiency. Each utterance seemed to come out of his mouth already organized into roman numerals and capital letters. I am not sure he ever laughed.
He told me that he had been drawn to the Brotherhood because it answered every question. “It talks about building the individual, building the family, building the society, building the state,” he said. “It talks about the economy. It talks about sociology. It talks about culture.”
Shater had been as outspoken as anyone about the Brotherhood’s embrace of democracy and respect for the West. NO NEED TO BE AFRAID OF US was the headline of an opinion column he had contributed to the Guardian in 2005. Now Shater had led the Brotherhood to abandon the positions in the old prototype platform—the same one over which the group had pushed Aboul Fotouh off the governing board just three years earlier. The board no longer taught that only a male Muslim could be president and that Muslim scholars should guide the Parliament.
But now that Mubarak was out, many younger Muslim Brothers complained that, in contrast to his calls for a democratic government, Shater was suppressing internal debate and dissent within the Brotherhood, running the group as a strongman. “We were deceived,” twenty-seven-year-old Mohamed el-Gibba told me as he was leaving the group.
I was running into defecting Muslim Brothers right and left. Numbers were impossible to quantify, but there was clearly an exodus of Muslim Brothers leaving to express their own views. (Islam Lotfy, who helped organize the Police Day protests, was expelled, too, for starting a new post-Islamist party.)
“They tightened the screws on anyone who had different ideas,” a former deputy general guide, Mohamed Habib, complained to me. “It should be a group for Muslims, not ‘the’ group for Muslims.”
Why expel people from a religious movement over political disagreements? I asked Shater. Was that democratic?
Shater, for the first time in our conversation, sounded heated. “The Muslim Brotherhood is a value-based organization that expresses itself using different means—political, economic, athletic, health related, and social,” he said. “You cannot take one part from one place and another part from another—this isn’t how it’s done.” Islam “regulates life in its entirety—politically, economically and socially; we don’t have this separation,” he said, referring to the line between religion and government.
“You can’t adopt a different vision from the party that represents us, the party that represents the vision of the group,” he continued. So he had told dissenters, “Either you stay in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, or if you insist on another party, then you’ll be the ones leaving us!”
I was beginning to wonder about his avowed commitment to democracy, which clearly did not extend to allowing real debate within the Brotherhood. Where was the Islam in the Brotherhood’s vision, then, if all faiths were equal under the law and if Muslim scholars played no role at all?
Islam should shape everything, Shater insisted. In an ideal world, the minister of finance would know economics and also Islam. The health minister should master medicine and Islam. The minister of transportation should understand traffic and Islam. And so on. “It is better, with time, to have someone who knows both subjects,” he said. For Shater, I realized, Muslims were more equal. He supported elections. But he thought Muslims should win. No Christian could ever be so qualified.
Aboul Fotouh, the liberal Islamist, had gone to war against that all-or-nothing vision of the Brotherhood. On the campaign trail, he now vowed to force the Brotherhood to follow the same laws as any nonprofit, including disclosing its finances and severing its political arm. He would end the Brotherhood as Egypt had known it, and Shater’s power with it.
The presidential race turned into an Islamist free-for-all. A moderate Islamist lawyer had jumped in on one side, a charismatic Salafi television preacher was sprinting ahead on the other. The Salafi, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, promised all kinds of trouble: he vowed to cut back international trade, arrest women for wearing bikinis, and annul the peace with Israel. The Brotherhood risked losing its status as the standard of political Islam.
What’s more, the military’s repeated deferral of the handover of power meant that whoever won the presidency could have the decisive voice in shaping (or rolling back) the political transition. The Parliament would remain impotent until a constitution was drafted, and the president could put his stamp on it.
Having expelled Aboul Fotouh for violating the Brotherhood’s pledge not to run a presidential candidate, Shater broke the same pledge himself. In a close vote of its internal assembly, in March 2012, the Brotherhood voted to run a candidate after all. It nominated Shater to run against Aboul Fotouh. The fight over the future of the Muslim Brotherhood was out in the open now. Exposure to the sunlight promised to change political Islam, if that open debate was allowed to continue. Surely that was a development that liberals would cheer, or so I assumed.