One should not suffer this pain throughout his life. It turns into a memory and becomes a learning experience. There isn’t any bitterness [in me]. I’ve said before I was proud I belonged to the Brotherhood and proud I left it. Both benefited me greatly.
—Tharwat El Kherbawy, former member of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, 2012
Joining the Brotherhood, whether in the East or in the West, is an extremely complex process. Even though the organization seeks to propagate its vision to the masses, those who wish to become a full-fledged member must undergo two extremely intensive and lengthy procedures: selection and cultivation.1 Both stages enable the group to screen for only the best recruits, individuals with specific characteristics who possess the qualities and the determination to pass years of tests and scrutiny by the organization’s leadership. It is this very process that makes those who pass feel they belong to an elite movement, a secretive band of brothers working in unison to achieve a divine mission.
The journey starts, in most cases, without the knowledge of the future member. Indeed, the Brotherhood takes the initiative when it comes to admitting new members, proactively looking for the unique individuals deemed to possess the right characteristics to become a Brother. One does not seek out and apply to the Brotherhood. As Khalil al Anani puts it, “Individuals do not join the Brotherhood but are chosen by it.”2
The selection process, like most aspects of the organization’s operation, has been meticulously studied and regulated, with committees established to oversee it. The Brotherhood divides the process into three stages. The first is the dissemination of the call (nashr al dawa). All Brotherhood members are required to act as models of kindness and piousness in order to inspire imitation in all Muslims. But that behavior also serves the purpose of attracting individuals who might possess the right characteristics for themselves to become Brothers.
Brothers working on recruitment then move to the next level, general connectivity (arrabt al-’am). A study group at a university, a unit working for a Brotherhood-leaning charity, volunteers at a mosque—these all constitute the perfect target groups for general connectivity: small, selected group of individuals that can be introduced to Islamist ideology and closely observed by an experienced Brother. In universities, the Brotherhood member Amr Magdi says, “Certain members of the Muslim Brotherhood are supposed to meet and befriend new students and engage them in very normal, nonpolitical activities—football, tutoring—stuff that appeals to everyone.”3 Carrie Wickham perfectly described this process in the setting of urban Cairo. “A group of my committed friends and I will think of getting two or three other guys from our neighborhoods more involved,” a Brotherhood militant whom she interviewed told her. “So we invite them to play soccer, but of course it’s not only soccer; we also talk to them about right and wrong. They see that we play fair, that we don’t cheat, that we set a good example, and gradually, gently, over time, we try to show them the right path.”4 Environments frequented by the Brotherhood are particularly fertile hunting grounds, but recruiters are always on the prowl for individuals who seem to possess the traits of a potential Brother, constantly vetting neighbors, relatives, colleagues, and people they meet in social contacts.
Regular interactions enable the trained eye of the Brotherhood recruiter to find individuals with the right characteristics: piousness and a strong sense of Muslim identity are paramount. “This is what makes us different from political parties,” explains Khaled Hamza, a former editor of the Brotherhood’s English-language website. “We are an ideological grass-roots group, and we use our faith to pick members.”5 But religiosity is not enough, and a prospective Brotherhood member needs to be diligent, enterprising, honest, and sharp. Being well-educated and knowledgeable about religion or politics are not viewed as especially desirable. To the contrary, the organization often looks for very young recruits, in some cases preadolescents, whose worldview can be more easily influenced. “It is better to come with an empty glass,” observes one Brotherhood member interviewed by Egyptian scholar Hazem Kandil. “You learn faster.”
Things are different for those who come from “Brotherhood families.” Young men—or, more often, boys—whose fathers are Brotherhood members are more or less expected to join the group, and their parents guide the process of their entry into it. Individuals who have a close relative in the Brotherhood also have, de facto, a preferential pathway into the group, whether by being introduced by the relative or by deliberately making themselves attractive candidates.
Once a potential recruit is identified, the Brotherhood recruiter zeroes in on him, in the phase known as the individual call (al dawa al fardiya). The recruiter tries to glean as much information as possible about the recruit’s views, attitudes, and private life. He also strengthens his relationship with the younger man, often becoming a trusted mentor. And he starts a gradual introduction of the Brotherhood’s ideology by recommending books written by some of the group’s scholars, always gauging how receptive the target is.
After extensive screening that lasts, on average, about three years, the target deemed Brotherhood material is invited to join the group.6 In most cases, it is also at that time that the recruiter first reveals his role as a Brotherhood recruiter—something that is generally kept secret until it is necessary to reveal it. The recruit who accepts the offer is invited to Brotherhood gatherings and to meet other Brothers—all activities that serve the purpose not just of further introducing him to the group but also of further scrutinizing him.
Upon accepting the offer, the new recruit has to take exams; if he passes them, he is asked to swear the oath of allegiance (baya) to the general guide (murshid al’am), the group’s supreme leader. This complex and lengthy selection process has two goals: it ensures sure that the Brotherhood properly picks its new members and it makes infiltration by government agents more difficult. What comes next serves the same purposes, as selection to entry-level membership is just the beginning of the long and intricate process that ends with full membership.
The Brotherhood has a very complex structure, with fixed levels of membership through which every new member must pass. These have changed over time, and there are now five: muhib (sympathizer), mu’ayyid (supporter), muntasib (associate), muntazim (regular or registered), and ‘amil (active member).7 As he progresses from one level to the next—perhaps taking a few years to complete each—the new recruit is introduced to increasingly intimate and complex aspects of the Brotherhood’s ideology and inner workings. More demanding tasks are also required of him, and tests, of both his knowledge and his commitment, are frequent. Each step up is conditioned on a positive evaluation from the complex web of individuals and committees that, in typical Brotherhood style, oversee and meticulously record the process. After at least five years as a muntazim and a positive evaluation, the aspiring member undergoes special religious and psychological tests; upon passing them, he finally becomes an ‘amil, a full Brotherhood member. Only then can he participate in all the group’s activities, including voting and running in its internal elections. Members, starting at the level of muntasib, also pay a membership fee, known as ishtiraq, which is calculated based on the member’s salary.
This grueling incubation process, aside from weeding out infiltrators and elements unfit to become Brothers, enables an “exceptionally discreet group” like the Brotherhood to open itself to new members, and to do so only incrementally.8 Moreover, it aims at gradually introducing recruits to the other Brothers and deeper into the group’s message. To do so, the Brotherhood relies heavily on the process of tarbiya (education, sometimes referred to as cultivation or even indoctrination), which al Banna termed the “rope that binds Brothers together.” One of the defining internal features of the Brotherhood, tarbiya is the process through which the group shapes its new recruits, teaching them not just ideology and interpretation of Islam but also how to behave at home, at work, and in their interpersonal relations.9 The tarbiya curriculum, an extensive list of readings selected by the group’s tarbiya committee, covers all aspects of the Brotherhood’s ideology, and as the members slowly make their way to full membership, they dive deeper into it.
If the tarbiya outlines the theory, practice makes it perfect. New Brotherhood members are inserted in the lower level of the group’s multilayered hierarchy, thereby integrating their studies with constant socialization with experienced members. All Brotherhood members, irrespective of their level of seniority, are part of an usra, the group’s nuclear unit.10 The usra is generally composed of four to five Brothers (although some are slightly larger) who live in the same area. It meets at least once a week to carry out tarbiya (an obligation that applies not to new members alone) and to discuss all matters, from personal to religious, political to organizational. Tellingly called “family” (the literal meaning of usra in Arabic), this is the group’s core unit, the one with which each Brother interacts most frequently. A Brother tends to form his closest bonds with members of his usra (even though, to avoid cliquishness, usra members are regularly reshuffled). He prays with them, eats with them, and often has business or familial relations with them.
Every usra is headed by a naqib (captain), an experienced Brother who oversees all aspects of its functioning. Even though meetings take place in an intimate and informal setting (often at his house), the naqib sets the agenda for the meetings and maintains detailed records on them and on the usra members’ behavior, particularly that of the junior and still-to-be-vetted members. At the end of the meeting the naqib assigns tasks and gives instructions to each member.
The Brotherhood employs the “intensive process of socialization” that stems from learning the tarbiya and participating in the usra to increase identification of all members—not just new ones—with the group and, consequently, the group’s internal cohesiveness.11 “You read Brotherhood literature, written by Brothers on Brothers. You pray in Brotherhood mosques, built and run by Brothers,” explains a member to Kandil. “You marry a Sister nurtured in a family according to Brotherhood guidelines. Even on recreational trips, you meet Brothers, ride buses owned by Brothers, to stay at a place administered by Brothers.”12 A Brother’s relation to another Brother is different, more complete and trusting, than the one he has with a non-Brother, including family members. Being a Brother is a way of life and encompasses every single activity. His life is a web of usra meetings, committee work, collective prayer, political activism, business ties, friendship ties, family ties—all alongside other Brothers. This tight-knit community is further bound by the sense of divine mission that its members believe they have, creating almost a parallel society characterized by immense cohesion. “The Brother lives, gets educated, makes friends, gets married, finds a job, gets politically engaged in a fully Muslim Brotherhood-based environment,” writes Hossam Tammam. “The group’s attempt to build its own society made it emerge as if it were a religious sect.”13
Various elements tightly bind a Brother to the group. The rigorous vetting and long cultivation he undergoes to join the group give him a sense of pride in belonging to an elite. Once he is a member, most of his personal ties and activities are connected to the Brotherhood, so that his entire life revolves around the group. Moreover, the Brotherhood strongly emphasizes the concept of obedience to the group’s leadership. Internal dissent is at the least frowned on, and a Brother is taught from his initiation that criticism of the group and its leaders is harmful to the group.
In parallel, the Brotherhood’s ideology stresses the importance of internal harmony and collective action. Constantly under attack from external forces, the group can carry out its divine mandate only if it remains cohesive. Working for the Brotherhood is equated to working for Islam, meaning that defending the Brotherhood is defending Islam. Going against the group, undermining it even by merely questioning its leaders, is framed by Brotherhood leadership as an unacceptable religious doubt. The Brotherhood has to be a close-knit body in order to be successful, and its members have to be blindly devoted to the organization if they want Islam to succeed. “Without the movement, there can be no return to Islamic rule,” Kandil notes, also highlighting that “in time, however, means and ends become conflated.”14
One might imagine that leaving a group that puts so much importance on cohesiveness and internal unity is no ordinary decision. Resigning from it means abandoning the divine mission of establishing Islam. It means betraying the trust placed on the member by an organization that perceives itself as fulfilling a divine mandate—an organization that had invested in him and accepted him. It also means turning one’s life upside down. A member “lives and breathes” the Brotherhood only as long as he is inside it. Once out, he also is removed from all the personal and social activities that are so integral to it. By the time the process of full induction (which can take from five to eight years) is completed, “the Muslim Brother’s social life revolves almost entirely around the organization, and leaving the organization would thus entail excommunication from his closest friends.”15 In the harsh warning issued by Ahmed al Bialy, a senior Brother who served as governor of the Gharbiya governorate during the regime of Mohammed Morsi, to those thinking of leaving the group, “Whoever deserts the group will find nothing but estrangement. His own soul will denounce him, and his family and friends will no longer recognize him.”16
While scholars, as we have seen, have long examined the process of joining and the inner workings of the Brotherhood, few have investigated departure from the group. Given this absence, many analytical tools, providing a valuable theoretical framework, can be borrowed from the extensive body of literature on disengagement more generally. Obviously, each movement or organization, like every personal story, has unique features. Nonetheless, a number of patterns in the process of disengagement are common to all organizations that require a high degree of involvement by their members. Over the past few years, for example, several studies have attempted to analyze how individuals abandon jihadist groups.17 Scholars worldwide have also long studied various aspects of how individuals disengage from cults, new religious movements, evangelical churches, criminal gangs, and a wide range of other movements to which followers are intensely committed. The academic approaches toward these phenomena draw on various disciplines, including political science, anthropology, and social psychology.18
Most of the literature describes disengagement as a process, characterized by the complex and highly individualized interplay of push and pull factors.19 While the former are “adverse organizational characteristics that [lead] someone to reconsider their continued involvement in the group,” the latter are “features outside of the group the individual finds attractive.”20 Scholars often use rational choice theories to analyze the process, postulating that whether individuals decide to disengage will depend on their rational and thorough examination of the costs and benefits of participation versus the costs and benefits of disengaging.21 Some studies have even attempted to capture the process in almost mathematical terms, unduly reducing the complexity of the human mind in a cold formula.22
Scholars also tend to agree that the process of disengagement is not linear and that each person’s trajectory is different. In some cases, disengagement can take place overnight; in others, at the end of a long development. In some cases, a trigger event can kick-start the process, while in others such a trigger might accelerate a process that was already under way. Disengagement can also vary significantly depending on how structured, militant, and secretive the organization being left is. The position inside the organization of the one leaving also affects the process, as dynamics for a high-ranking member and for a mere hanger-on are likely to differ. Moreover, disengagement can occur as a quiet separation, as a public and dramatic rupture, or in some fashion in between.
Just as disengagement follows no single course, so too reasons for leaving vary from case to case. Scholars of movements to which followers are intensely committed find that their motivations for leaving tend to fall into two macro categories: disenchantment with the group itself or with its ideology.23 Not uncommonly, an individual has motives from both categories, and, as is usually the case, the distinctions between them are not as clear-cut in life as in an academic treatise. Personal reasons unrelated to any dissatisfaction with the group or its ideology may also play a role.
Seemingly mundane reasons relating to how the group is managed are often among the most common sources of frustration that can ultimately lead to disengagement from movements to which followers are intensely committed. The most frequent among them are concerns about transparency (often related to management of funds), loss of faith in the leadership’s ability and effectiveness, manipulative and hypocritical practices, and lack of internal democracy and meritocracy.
While all these issues at times feature in accounts of disenchanted former Brothers, the last of them appears to be particularly common. Over the past twenty years members of the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood have engaged in heated debate over internal democracy and transparency. Activists have challenged leadership for undertaking internal elections in secret, with results that puzzled many. Similarly, even the group’s bylaws were long inaccessible to members (internal pressure forced the leadership to publish them in 2010).24 The defense for not having transparency is that secrecy is necessary to avoid surveillance and infiltration by the regime, but some have argued that it is instead a way for leaders to retain control and manipulate the group’s direction. Whatever the truth of the matter, several Brothers have left the group because they perceive that it lacks internal democracy.
In addition, some Brothers bemoan a culture of blind obedience that eschews any sort of independent thinking and disagreement with the leadership. “You don’t have a say in the Brotherhood,” complains Mohammed Abbas, a young Brother who led protests against Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square and left the organization soon afterward. “It’s not a democracy.”25 Tharwat El Kherbawy, a former member who has since written extensively about the group in very critical terms, has harsher words: “Anyone who thinks cannot be a part of the Brotherhood because it is a military group; it has a military way of thinking. You do not have to think, for it is done for you. You only have to implement. The Brotherhood only grants high ranks to those who can implement; executive personalities who implement but do not think. Has the Brotherhood got any famous writers, poets, scientists? It is proof enough that they are unable to produce any because they do not allow creative thinking.”26
Once again, the Brotherhood’s leadership justifies this strong emphasis on internal discipline by pointing to the need to maintain cohesiveness in the face of ruthless regimes.27 But some, particularly young members, are left feeling undervalued and become extremely frustrated with the group. This response was particularly strong in Egypt in the post-Mubarak days, when many felt that the new political environment no longer required and justified constant secrecy, undemocratic internal practices, and the stifling of internal dissent.
The democratic deficit appears to play out largely along a generational divide. Younger members accuse the leadership, often age fifty and above, of running the organization without accepting any input from the cadres. The younger generations also accuse elders of being an out-of-touch clique whose tactics are ineffective. Further exacerbating the frustration of many younger Brothers is that the levers of internal power appear to be firmly held by a small number of extended “Brotherhood families.”
Marriage within the Brotherhood is a common practice encouraged by the group. Young Brothers seeking to marry are asked to choose members of the Sisterhood or daughters or sisters of other Brothers. It is a custom that strengthens the group’s cohesiveness and naturally creates one of the core units envisioned in al Banna’s program of gradual Islamization—the Islamic family. Over time, though, the powerful Brothers whose families intermarry, together with the sons of those marriages, have created what some disgruntled members refer to as “Brotherhood cartels.”28 Critics within the organization argue that this consolidation of influence has “transformed the organization into a patrimonial and clientelistic machine,” rife with nepotism.29
Another common source of grievance among the Brotherhood’s members is the choice of tactics adopted by the leadership. Over the past twenty years, all organizations belonging to the Brotherhood family throughout the world have experienced tensions between those members who believe that the group should be deeply involved in politics and those who maintain that such political participation is a deviation and a distraction from the organization’s traditional aim of grassroots Islamization through dawa. The dynamics of this internal debate vary from country to country, also depending on what the local political environment allows them to do. But in all countries where the Brotherhood operates, a “traditionalist” wing more devoted to al Banna’s education-based approach and somewhat wary of delving into political processes opposes a wing that sees political participation as the most effective way to advance the group’s agenda.
This debate has been particularly heated in Egypt, in the years both before and after the fall of the Mubarak regime. Various Egyptian Brotherhood members, of all ranks, had major clashes with the organization’s leadership, accusing it of relinquishing dawa to engage in politics. Though defections caused by such accusations also took place from the 1990s onward, they increased after the fall of the Mubarak regime, as after the revolution the Brotherhood’s leadership decided to fully engage in Egypt’s political process and various senior leaders, including members of the group’s governing bodies, decided to leave the organization. While the main reason cited was the perceived deviation from al Banna’s teachings, they often named the organization’s internal secretiveness as an additional motivating factor.
Abul Ila Al Madi, a former member of the Brotherhood who left it in 1996 to start the Wasat Party, lays out these dynamics clearly: “The Brotherhood has two trends, one of which is reformist and open-minded (similar to us) and another that is more rigid and unfortunately represents the controlling majority. We distinguish between missionary (da‘wa) and political activities, because mixing the two is extremely dangerous, threatening both the nation and religious groups themselves. We are calling for the separation of the two missions—which is what makes us a civil party—while the Muslim Brotherhood combines the two.” Bemoaning the lack of transparency, Al Madi adds that within the Brotherhood “there are members known to the public who have no decision-making powers, and others not known to the public who do, another symptom of the mingling of political and religious missions.”30
A similar criticism comes from Ibrahim al Zafarani, a member of the group for forty-five years who also served on the Shura Council; he resigned in 2011 “for several reasons, the most important being the lack of separation between advocacy work and politics.” “In its origins,” he adds, “the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] is an advocacy grouping that strengthens values in individuals then leaves them to face their lives, whether in public work or in joining a political party. Excess involvement in politics was at the expense of advocacy work within the group and allowed the Salafi advocacy to control the religious scene in the mosques.”31 The next chapter will further outline these tensions.
Disenchantment with the group’s ideology is one of the most common reasons for disengagement by members of all sorts of movements that require intense commitment. It also motivates the departure of Brotherhood members, although there are no hard data giving even a vague sense of the percentage of former Brothers who have left because of disillusionment with the organization’s credo. Such ideological disillusionment can take two very different forms: disillusionment with the kind of Islamism adopted by the Brotherhood or, more broadly, disillusionment with Islamism itself.
The first occurs when individuals who were part of the Brotherhood’s infrastructure at some point find the vision and the approach adopted by the group unsatisfactory and are moved to join a competing Islamist movement or organization. The Brotherhood is just one of the many entities within the Islamist galaxy. It has its own vision of the perfect Islamic society and a very specific approach to achieving that goal. Though it wields an important influence over all Islamist movements, anyone interested in being engaged in Islamist activism has many choices. Most Brotherhood members, having undergone a selection and cultivation process that no other Islamist organization requires, tend to be loyal to the group, but some do become dissatisfied and switch their allegiance to other forms of Islamism.
Of those who embrace other forms of Islamism, many apparently are driven by frustration with the group’s patient and gradualist approach. With some variations from country to country, the Brotherhood pursues a relentless project of slowly Islamizing society. But what tangible results can it show for its efforts? The Brotherhood’s leadership, seeking to divert attention from this discrepancy between expectations and outcomes, frames success in different terms, as something achieved in generations, not years. But it is not uncommon for Brotherhood activists, whether or not their criticism will lead them to leave the organization, to doubt the group’s effectiveness and question whether its approach based on grassroots activism, education, and participation in politics can yield concrete results.
The first years of the Arab Spring, when Brotherhood movements came to rule in Egypt and Tunisia and gained broader influence throughout the Arab world, obviously fueled great enthusiasm within the movement, a demonstration that decades of patient work and suffering did eventually bear fruit. Yet the dramatic turns of events that, in the following months, dethroned the Brotherhood in both countries and led to widespread resentment against it throughout the region have caused many Brotherhood activists to have reservations about the group’s methods. Their fall from power, whether blamed on the loss of popular support or, in the case of Egypt, on the machinations of the military, the “deep state,” and other actors, was a major blow to even the most confident of Brothers.
This frustration might lead those members who decide to leave it in various, even in some cases opposing, directions. One of them is represented by more orthodox and less compromising Islamist forces. In particular, over the past few years, the Brotherhood has suffered significantly from the competition of various strains of the Salafist movement. Some Brotherhood members, particularly among the younger generations, have been attracted by the more direct approach of the Salafists and left one movement for the other.
Some frustrated Brothers embrace the most radical of the many Salafist subcurrents, jihadism. Scholars and policy makers have endlessly debated the relationship between the Brotherhood and jihadism. Positions vary significantly: On one end of the spectrum it is argued that the two ideological currents have little to nothing in common and that the Brothers actually act as a firewall, “preventing otherwise susceptible Muslims from descending down the path of radicalization.”32 Others argue the exact opposite, postulating that the Brothers and jihadis are simply two sides of the same coin, fellow travelers guided by the same worldview who simply occasionally differ in the choice of tactics. This line of thinking sees the Brothers not as firewalls but as conveyor belts, providing a narrative and a fertile environment that naturally lead toward violent radicalization.
The relationship between the Brotherhood and jihadist movements is extremely complex, varying over time and context, and deserves a depth of analysis that is beyond the scope of this book. It is nonetheless fair to state that the two have common roots, and most scholars, no matter what position they take on the relationship, do see in the writings of Brotherhood thought leader Sayyid Qutb the starting point of the Salafi-jihadi movement. Since then, the points of both convergence and divergence are many. To some degree the end goal is the same, as both strive to establish an Islamic society, yet it is fair to say that the Islamic state envisioned by Brothers “would look very different from a Salafi-jihadi Islamic state.”33 A key difference is in tactics, as the Brothers have chosen ballots over bullets, while jihadist groups argue that participation in the political process is heretical. At the same time, though, it would be a mistake to think that the Brothers have fully abandoned jihad as a strategy to achieve their goals, as examples of their involvement in violent actions, even in recent years, abound.
These differences and similarities translate into a complex relationship. It is fair to argue that the two movements are in constant competition between themselves for attracting the most conservative segments of the Muslim population and that the two regularly attack each other with vitriolic diatribes. Yet at the same time there are many circumstances in which Brotherhood and jihadist groups cooperate, thereby defying any unidimensional analysis.
While a separation between the Brotherhood and the jihadist world is evident, and any analysis that lumps them together is grossly simplistic, it is equally clear that more than occasional moments of overlap do exist. It is therefore not surprising that the migration of individual Brotherhood members toward the jihadist movement, while not a mass phenomenon, is not episodic either. Various studies have shown that a substantial number of individuals who belonged to the jihadist movement had previously been involved with the Brotherhood.34 Generally this passage happens because the individual is frustrated with the Brothers’ overly gradual approach and thinks that the jihadists’ more direct approach is more likely to bear fruit.
It is noteworthy that many of the most prominent leaders of the contemporary jihadist movement appear to have moved through that very trajectory. Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who was instrumental in mobilizing jihadists to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine in the 1950s.35 His disciple Osama bin Laden had gravitated in the Brotherhood’s orbit in Saudi Arabia before deeming the group ineffective and taking a more action-heavy direction. According to his own writings seized by U.S. forces during their 2011 raid on his safe house in Abbottabad, bin Laden was also unimpressed by the group’s lack of focus on religion. “From a religious [or theological] aspect,” he wrote, “I was committed within the Muslim Brotherhood. Their curriculum was limited.… Once a week, the meetings. The number of pages was limited. The extent of influence by them was not much from a religious aspect.”36
Similarly, bin Laden’s successor at the helm of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, had been a member of the Brotherhood in Egypt before leading the Islamic Jihad organization. While one should not draw overly general conclusions from it, it is remarkable that the three most important figures in al Qaeda’s early history were all former members of the Brotherhood. And it is equally noteworthy that also Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the current leader of the Islamic State (ISIS, Daesh) was reportedly a member of the Brotherhood in Iraqi before finding the Brothers “people of words, not action” and leaving them for more militant outfits.37
Zawahiri’s case is particularly interesting, as the current al Qaeda chief has repeatedly lashed out at the Brotherhood, highlighting once again the complex relationship between jihadists and Brothers. In 1989 he penned a book, The Bitter Harvest, that is a quintessential anti-Brotherhood screed. Zawahiri accuses the Brotherhood of treachery and heresy for having abandoned the duty to fight jihad and having entered in compromises with the region’s regimes, participating in elections and integrating into institutions. “The Brethren,” writes Zawahiri, “fan the enthusiasm of young Muslims in order to recruit their services, but thereafter put this enthusiasm into deep freeze. And instead of devoting themselves to jihad aimed at the tyrants, they hold political assemblies and participate in elections.”38
With these words Zawahiri perfectly encapsulates the frustrations that have led many Brothers to leave the organization and pursue the jihadi route. These dynamics have played out once again in the wake of the downfall of the Brotherhood-led government in Egypt, leading the jihadists to renew their criticism of the Brothers’ politics-based approach and some members of the Brotherhood, particularly among the youth, to join various jihadist groups.39
But disenchantment with the Brothers’ ideology can lead in many directions. If some leave the group for more militant ideas and outfits, others embark on the opposite journey. It is not uncommon for Brotherhood members to develop a commitment to pluralism, democracy, and human rights and come to the conclusion that the Brotherhood’s ideology, or at least part of it, clashes with these principles.
Over the past twenty years, the cases of Brotherhood members who have left the organization and have tried to find their own, more liberal way of Islamic activism abound. Many individuals who were Brotherhood members or active in Brotherhood-leaning organizations have sought to move away from the organization’s ideological rigidity, recontextualizing some of its ideas and frames to better suit a modern and often multireligious society. It is difficult to lump the heterogeneity of trajectories of former Brothers who have moved in a more liberal direction in one category, but post-Islamism is a term that, despite many flaws, is at times used to do so. The level of ideological and organizational connectivity that these post-Islamists have with the Brotherhood is of course debatable, and different from case to case.
Different is, on the other hand, the situation of those former Brotherhood members who leave not only the organization but Islamism altogether, reneging on all aspects of the ideology. There have been cases, in fact, of individuals who made a complete break with any interpretation of Islam that had a political or activist inclination, and in some extreme cases even leaving Islam itself.
Leaving any political or religious movement to which one feels highly committed is almost always difficult, with far-reaching psychological and personal consequences.40 The emotions involved in the decision-making process are usually intense and conflicting. Individuals often weigh whatever misgivings they have about the group and their involvement in it against the many personal, social, status, and financial challenges that might come with leaving it. This calculation is not cold and mathematical but rather is fraught with emotion. The decision to leave, whether made after lengthy self-examination or in the heat of the moment, is often traumatic. “It was a difficult night. I could not sleep all night, neither [could] my wife,” recalls Ibrahim al Zafarani. “For two weeks, we received thousands of calls from Brothers and Sisters inside and outside Egypt. They begged me to change my mind. These phone calls used to kill us emotionally on a daily basis.”41
Many former members of the Brotherhood and of other high-commitment movements cite being honest with oneself as key to this process. Admitting to oneself first, and then to others, that years or an entire life have been devoted to an organization or a cause in which one no longer believes is a daunting task. Understandably, the higher the commitment to the organization and the price paid because of it, the more challenging a dispassionate self-examination. “Those members who were jailed for the group live in denial and find justifications for all the group’s actions,” perceptively notes Haytham Abou Khalil, an Egyptian Brother who left the organization after the Arab Spring. “It is hard for them to believe that they made sacrifices for a fallible entity.”42
Once the difficult decision to leave is made, communicating it to the organization’s leadership and to fellow Brothers is the next, equally challenging step. The Brotherhood does not take kindly to disengagement. From its perspective, a member who leaves undermines the group’s unity and may reveal its internal secrets. He has betrayed his brothers and has reneged on the sacred pledge he made. Moreover, if, as we have seen, working for the Brotherhood is equated to working for Islam, leaving the group is often framed as leaving the faith—the worst conceivable action for any pious Muslim. “You are renouncing faith, not an ideology,” a member of the Egyptian Brotherhood explained to Kandil; “you are abandoning God, not Hassan al-Banna.”43
The consequences of leaving the Brotherhood are wide-ranging. In some instances, former members have accused the organization of reacting violently, even of attempting to assassinate them. The Brotherhood has always denied these claims, which, to be clear, are rare.44 Significantly more common is the hefty social toll exacted against Brothers who depart. “When a Brother leaves the group, he is uprooting himself from a milieu with which he has organic, emotional and fateful ties,” says Khaled Dawoud, an Egyptian Brotherhood leader married to two Muslim Sisters and the father of eight children, all of whom are Brotherhood members. Mohamed al Qassas echoes his observation: “Resigning from the Muslim Brotherhood is a very tough decision, because the group is more of a society that engulfs your social, familial relations, as well as intellectual and political activities.”45
Ostracism and marginalization are standard responses to former Brothers. Dawoud describes the shunning: “After you leave the group, you get a special treatment from some Brothers. Your friends can boycott you. They may not even say hello if they bump into you in the street. Your wife’s friends, who are usually from the Muslim Brotherhood, may boycott her as well.”46 Rumors about former Brothers are frequently spread. “The Brotherhood assassinated me morally,” bemoans Dawoud.47 Abdel Gelil al-Sharnouby, the former editor of the Egyptian Brotherhood’s website Ikhwan Online, recounts his experience: “They tried to turn my family against me. They went to my home town and spread rumors about me, saying that I’ve become an atheist and that I drink alcohol. They told my wife that I frequent prostitutes.”48
Given the secretive nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is very difficult for outsiders to obtain extensive details on the patterns described thus far. Some scholarly works and journalistic reports have provided useful glimpses into the processes of joining and leaving the group in Egypt and other Arab countries, even though many aspects are still quite obscure. Most of what is known comes from the memoirs of former members. In Egypt, for example, Tharwat El Kherbawy, Sameh Fayez, and a few others have published well-known exposés of the group in books that outline their reasons for leaving.49 These works constitute invaluable sources for those seeking to understand the process of joining the Brotherhood and the organization’s inner workings, on the one hand, and the process of leaving it, on the other. In efforts to analyze a ferociously private organization like the Brotherhood, direct testimonies of former members are vital, even though the risk is always present that their recollections might be tainted by their negative feelings toward the group.
The challenge is even greater when it comes to the Brotherhood in the West. The dynamics of selection, cultivation, and socialization described above are found in Egypt and, more generally, the Arab world. What about the Brotherhood in the West? Does it select, cultivate, and socialize its members in the same way? Is there an usra system? Is there a tarbiya curriculum? And, when it comes to leaving the organization, do we see in the West some of the same patterns observed in the Arab world? Essentially, are the dynamics of the East replicated in the West?
These questions are not easy to answer. First, the secrecy that shrouds the Brotherhood is somewhat greater in the West. Organizations belonging to the Brotherhood family in the Arab world have, understandably, gone to great lengths to hide various aspects of their inner workings and their membership. But they have never denied their own existence—a denial that, as we have seen, is common among the Western Brotherhood. Individuals and networks that disavow any affiliation to the Brotherhood are unlikely to be keen to provide details on the Brotherhood’s structure or modus operandi.
Moreover, knowledge of the Western Brotherhood is scant. Scholarly works on the subject are limited, and none of them focuses in any detail on the dynamics of joining or leaving the Brotherhood, concentrating their analysis instead on the group’s history and ideology and governmental approaches toward them.50 Interesting information on these aspects comes from a handful of books written by former members of the Brotherhood in the West, even though all of them focus on the personal account of the author and do not attempt to offer a broader analysis.51 Various nonscholarly and journalistic works similarly provide useful insights without drawing a systematic analysis.
This book seeks to partially fill that gap by leveraging the testimonies of former members. Each of the following seven chapters is based on an in-depth interview with an individual who either is a former member of the Brotherhood in Europe or North America or, in two cases, has extensive and intimate knowledge of Western Brotherhood networks (Swedish and American, respectively) from the inside. The seven individuals profiled occupied various ranks in their organizations, from top leaders to hangers-on. They operated in different countries and at different times, and obviously they had different reasons for joining and leaving. All, however, left spontaneously. Though some spent some of their years as members of the Brotherhood outside of the West, all lived at least a substantial amount of time there while active in Western Brotherhood networks. And all are identified by name.
I conducted the interviews with these seven individuals over eighteen months (although my dealings with some of them extend back for years, in some cases predating their decision to leave the Brotherhood) and in five countries. Each was interviewed for at least half a day; some interviews stretched over several days. These conversations were supplemented with research and interviews with related subjects in order to both verify and contextualize the information provided by those who disengaged. An additional dozen former members of various Western Brotherhood organizations and individuals with close connections to that milieu were interviewed for this book in seven countries. Some agreed to be quoted by name, some only anonymously. All provided important insights into joining and leaving the Brotherhood.
Each chapter is similarly structured, patterned on the three cycles of militancy: becoming, being, and leaving.52 The first part focuses on how each individual joined the Brotherhood, with particular attention both to the recruitment methods employed by the organization and to the psychological impulses that drove the individual to join. The second section describes life inside the organization: the role the individual played, the activities he engaged in, and the organizations and people he interacted with. The third section covers disengagement: the reasons that led each individual to leave the organization, how he did so, and what the aftermath was.
There are several pitfalls inherent to a scholarly analysis based predominantly on interviews with former members of an organization.53 Anyone would find it difficult to recall events and psychological processes that took place years, if not decades, earlier, but for individuals who disengage from high-commitment movements there is the additional risk of bias—their recollections and views may be partial, distorted, or indeed deliberately fabricated. And the interviewer may introduce more problems by asking leading questions or by misinterpreting the answers; the ethical and practical concerns associated with interviews are widely recognized. I am well aware of these issues, and I have tried to address them in several ways. I made substantial efforts to verify several claims that on their face appeared possibly untrue, defamatory, or both, omitting a few that I could not confirm.
Nevertheless, a microsociological analysis based on the testimonies of former members of the Brotherhood or its larger milieu offers unique value. Their recollections about how and why they joined, what they did while members, and why and how they left constitute unparalleled sources of information about the inner workings, modus operandi, and ideology of a highly mysterious organization. They also provide useful glimpses into the psychological processes that lead some of its members to join and then disengage from the organization. Moreover, each chapter, taken on its own, tells the story of a fascinating life, the personal trajectory of an individual who went through his own complex evolution and, in some cases, played a key role in important political events.