), who headed domestic security services under Sadat; and Fouad Allam (Al-Ikhwan wa ana: min al-manshiyya ila al-manassa, Al-Qahirah: Akhbar Al-Youm, 1995), a longtime security official.Nasser’s comrades and Sadat’s brothers
Institutional legacies and the downfall of the Second Egyptian Republic1
The coup of July 3, 2013 brought a decisive end to Egypt’s brief experiment with elected civilian governance that followed the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. The coup paved the way to a military-sponsored authoritarian regime under the leadership of Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, an army general who was elected president in 2014 in a ceremonial poll that failed to garner any credibility. Shortly after the coup Egypt’s new rulers pledged to restore the electoral process and civilian rule. Instead, they worked swiftly to limit political space. They employed arbitrary detentions and deadly violence against their opponents, while simultaneously placing vast formal and informal restrictions on expressions of political dissent.
Early attempts to understand the downfall of the Second Egyptian Republic2 focused largely around the events that immediately preceded the ouster of President Mohammad Morsi. One set of views attributed the end of Egypt’s post-Mubarak transition to a coalition composed of entrenched bureaucratic interests that sought to protect their anti-democratic privileges from elected institutions. These include the army, the policing establishment, and the judiciary. Joining them were opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood among liberal and leftist political forces, who collaborated with and legitimized the military’s ouster of Morsi. Significant within that story is the refusal of the community of so-called secular political actors to accept electoral defeat, play by the rules of political game, and recognize the legitimacy of the elected president.
An opposing perspective lays the blame on the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president. Morsi, the argument goes, exploited his electoral mandate to undermine the opposition by monopolizing political power and imposing a non-consensual constitutional framework. Central to this narrative is the notion that the Brotherhood was using democratic institutions to advance an anti-democratic, sectarian agenda that was progressively shifting the non-religious character of the Egyptian state and undermining civil liberties.
In sum, both perspectives present the democratic commitments of particular actors (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) as the central driving force behind the downfall of the Second Egyptian Republic. The first argues that the democratic transition fell apart because secular forces were not democrats, whereas the second view claims it was the Brotherhood that betrayed democratic values and norms. Setting aside the merits of each of the two sets of claims, they both overlook the pre-existing structural conditions that shaped the prospects for pact-making between Egypt’s various political forces and the direction that post-2011 transition eventually took. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the enduring institutional legacies that affected the configuration of power inside Egypt’s contemporary political arena, and, relatedly, the fate of the Second Republic.
The chapter argues that decades-old institutional legacies have structured Egypt’s political field in ways that encourage defections from pacted transitions in the present moment. Significant state interventions during the 1960s and 70s have set Islamist and leftist currents on two divergent paths of institutional development. It is in that particular divergence that one could trace the origins of the major asymmetries in the current Egyptian political arena: an organized, autonomous, electorally dominant Islamist current, versus a fragmented, state-coopted left with little electoral agility. In the context of post-Mubarak Egypt, these imbalances have limited the viability of credible pact-making between the Muslim Brotherhood and its opponents, and reinforced the conflicts that led to the failure of the transition.
The first section makes the case for conceptualizing the downfall of the Second Egyptian Republic as the failure to achieve what is known as “contingent consent” among the country’s warring political forces in the aftermath of Mubarak’s ouster. It also explains why the asymmetrical structure of the political field was not conducive to emergence of credible pacts between the Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents. The argument of this chapter is that state interventions during the 1960s and 70s have limited the scope of possibilities in post-Mubarak Egypt. Thus, the second section seeks to understand the ways in which these interventions have contributed to the uneven configuration of power inside the contemporary political arena. It explains the impact of relevant state policies on the divergent trajectories of institutional development of Islamist and leftist movements in Egypt.
THE FAILURE OF CONTINGENT CONSENT
The earliest literature on transitions from authoritarian rule emphasized the centrality of pacts among warring political factions as a possible mode of transitioning toward democracy. A pact is a formal or informal “agreement among a select set of actors which seeks to define...rules governing the exercise of power on the basis of mutual guarantees for the ‘vital interests’ of those entering into it.”3 In some contexts that could mean members of the old regime would not be prosecuted, private property would not be appropriated, traditional institutions would be preserved, and representation for particular social groups would be guaranteed.
Such pacts, as Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter note, often have direct bearing on formal and informal rules of electoral contestation. Pacts ensure that actors capable of impeding a transition are offered sufficient assurances that their interests would be shielded from the uncertainties of electoral outcomes.4 “If a peaceful transition to democracy is to be possible,” writes Adam Przeworski, “the first problem to be solved is how to institutionalize uncertainty without threatening the interests of those who can still reverse this process.”5 Founding elections, therefore, provide an opportunity to institutionalize the compromises necessary for securing the buy-in of relevant political actors.
Central to whether or not these institutionalized compromises will succeed in building consensus around the democratic process is the notion of contingent consent, which is particularly relevant to parties that compete in elections. Contingent consent is the understanding that election losers will accept defeats so long as it is established that today’s winners will not use their position of superiority to impede their opponents’ ability to assume office in the future.6 Thus, the challenge confronting political parties is designing rules of political competition in ways that could facilitate such an understanding.7 These rules are necessary to sustain a viable “democratic bargain” in the long run, because in their absence losers are more likely to defect from peaceful political competition and undermine the stability of the political system from without. “Political forces comply with present defeats,” writes Przeworski, “because they believe that the institutional framework that organizes the democratic competition will permit them to advance their interests in the future.”8 How do these theoretical discussions inform our understanding of the failure of Egypt’s transition?
On the one hand, the Muslim Brotherhood-led parliament (and later presidency) catered to a certain degree to the interests of powerful political actors such as the military and other security agencies.9 In fact, one could argue that much of the political framework in Egypt during that period was grounded in a pact between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Within that framework, the generals ceded some political space for a Muslim Brotherhood-led civilian government with the understanding that elected officials would not infringe upon the autonomy and institutional interests of the military. Thus, as the Muslim Brotherhood was scoring important electoral gains, its leaders signaled on multiple occasions that military officials would not be prosecuted for crimes they were suspected of committing during and after the January 25, 2011 uprising. The 2012 Brotherhood-supported constitution, moreover, kept intact the military’s political and fiscal autonomy and other important privileges the institution long enjoyed.10 Although the Brotherhood’s stance toward the police was more ambiguous at times, talk of enacting meaningful reforms to the policing establishment had dissipated after Morsi assumed the presidency and no meaningful steps were pursued toward that end.11
At the same time, however, the transitional framework was far less successful in producing some sort of agreement over the rules of political competition among prominent political factions. Although the transition yielded an elected leadership and a new constitution, a large part of the political community continued to question the legitimacy of the president and the constitution that the ruling coalition endorsed. That is, the transition failed to generate contingent consent.12
There were promising signs of collaboration within Egypt’s political community prior to the 2012 presidential elections. After the first round of voting, two candidates advanced to the runoff, namely Ahmad Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister who was widely viewed as the representative of the old regime, and Mohammad Morsi, a longtime Muslim Brotherhood leader. In an effort to ensure that elections would not bring to power remnants of the Mubarak regime, liberal and leftist groups agreed to back Morsi under the condition that, if elected, he would share power with his rivals in a national salvation government.13 Ultimately, Morsi won the vote and was declared president, albeit only after agreeing to abide by a military-sponsored constitutional declaration that guaranteed the military’s autonomy and control over national security policy.
It was not long, however, before liberal and leftist forces began clashing with the newly elected president over what they saw as a series of betrayed promises for meaningful power-sharing and national cooperation. These differences only exacerbated preexisting tensions over the work of the Constituent Assembly, the body tasked with drafting Egypt’s new constitution. By virtue of the majority it secured in parliament in early 2012, the Brotherhood held the upper hand in deciding upon the composition of the Assembly.14 As constitution writing proceeded, non-Islamist political groups accused the Brotherhood and its allies among members of the Islamist current of trying to dominate the constitution-writing process to place limits on individual rights, religious freedom, and freedom of speech.15 Thus, defections from the Assembly began mounting that summer and by the fall of 2012 almost a third of its participants had withdrawn in protest at what they saw as the Brotherhood’s domineering role in constitution drafting.
The conflict between Morsi and the opposition reached new heights in late November 2012, when the president adopted a series of controversial decisions that pushed the confrontation between the two sides into open warfare. In an attempt to preempt an alleged imminent ruling by the judiciary to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, Morsi announced a constitutional declaration that made presidential decisions immune from judicial review, and replaced the Mubarak-era prosecutor general. The opposition staged a series of protests and sit-ins demanding that the decrees be revoked, charging that the president was setting the stage for a return to autocracy. Morsi remained defiant, and within weeks the Constituent Assembly completed its work and sent the draft constitution to a national referendum. The constitution was passed and signed into law despite the strong objections of large swaths of the political community.
While the Muslim Brotherhood finally managed to fill the constitutional vacuum that Mubarak left behind in February 2011, the new political order it erected did not garner much support outside of the ruling coalition.16 The National Salvation Front (NSF), a broad alliance encompassing major opposition groups and figures,17 continued to question the legitimacy of the political system, and vowed to bring down the constitution. Efforts to bridge the differences between the president and his challengers failed, and the opposition signaled that it would boycott any prospective elections. In justifying its rejectionist stance, the NSF claimed that the Brotherhood was seeking to entrench its own power inside state institutions in order to ensure that its opponents would have no chance to make it to power or participate in governance in the future. “How can we trust talk about the integrity of the elections if the state is determined to seize power,” said Sameh Ashour, spokesperson of the NSF.18 Put simply, the opposition was not willing to recognize the authority of the president or play by the rules of the new constitution, because they believed the political system was designed to marginalize them and shut them out of political power permanently. The new political order failed to generate contingent consent.
Just as these conflicts continued to brew with no end in sight, popular calls for Morsi to step down and make way for early presidential elections began gaining momentum and became more organized.19 Opposition leaders and protest movements endorsed these calls, setting the stage for a series of national protests, which broke out in June 2013 demanding Morsi’s resignation. Under the pretext of these protests, the military intervened on 3 July 2013 to oust Morsi in an apparent coup, announcing a new roadmap supposedly designed to reset Egypt’s transition. And thus was the end of Egypt’s Second Republic, and the beginning of a new authoritarian era that arguably remains in place until today.
INSTITUTIONAL LEGACIES AND THE LIMITATIONS OF AGENCY-CENTERED NARRATIVES
Indeed, it is tempting to scrutinize the events that led to the coup and consider how that outcome could have been averted. What sorts of compromises could have been made to build common ground between the Brotherhood and the opposition and break the gridlock of 2012–13? Would an alternative set of electoral laws or constitutional design have made a difference? Would the state of polarization have been the same had the Constituent Assembly’s composition been more balanced?
These questions, and the line of reasoning they evoke, however, overlook the structural conditions that limited the viability of cooperation between the ruling party and the opposition. The political field inherited from the Mubarak era was structured in such a way that it made the production of contingent consent extremely difficult and defections from the democratic process more likely. Specifically, the asymmetries between the Islamist current and other non-Islamist groups created a reality in which election losers had no reason to believe that they had any chance of winning future elections through democratic means. Under such conditions, their continued compliance with the underlying political rules of the game was difficult to secure.
Contingent consent is grounded in the idea that losers will accept defeat on the assumption that they are capable of being tomorrow’s winners. Yet in post-Mubarak Egypt, that proposition was simply not credible in light of the organizational inequities between the new ruling party and its opponents. In theory, political institutional design can be modified to increase the probability that electorally weaker parties would secure meaningful representation. Yet the greater the organizational disparities among parties competing for office, the more limited the available range of possible institutional arrangements that could guarantee some form of peaceful power-sharing between them. These realities became unambiguously clear as the Brotherhood dominated successive votes in 2011 and 2012 under different electoral formulas. That is to say, the perceived absence of an electorally viable alternative to the Brotherhood simply reinforced the belief that the majority coalition was here to stay, and that the democratic process had little to offer the opposition by ways of access to decision-making. There may have been normative reasons for why continuing to play by the rules of the democratic game was imperative, but the strategic case for doing so based solely on the possibility of future electoral payoffs was tenuous.
Most observers acknowledge the existence of these disparities. Many attribute them to short-term factors pertaining to the incompetence of secular parties and their unwillingness to engage constituents outside their own headquarters. Similar arguments revolve around the political immaturity of leftist protest movements that came to the surface in the wake of the January 25 revolution. “If these youth would only stop protesting and start organizing as political parties and prepare for elections,” the conventional argument went, “they would have been able to pose a more credible alternative to Islamist currents.” Besides proceeding on factual inaccuracies, these explanations lack any historical reference. The contemporary imbalances in the political arena did not emerge on a blank slate and cannot be reduced to the short-term failings of a particular group of individuals. Simply put, history did not begin on January 25, 2011. It is the argument of this chapter that the current asymmetries between Islamist and leftist movements must be understood as one of the long-term effects of policies that the state pursued in the 1960s and 70s. These policies set Islamist and leftist currents on two different trajectories of institutional development in ways that had significant implications for post-2011 Egyptian politics. Specifically, by contributing to the weakness of leftist currents vis-à-vis their Islamist counterparts, these policies made production of contingent consent more difficult in the contemporary moment. Indeed, this chapter focuses on leftist currents and does not cover evolution of other political players, such as liberal parties. Yet two points must be considered. First, the experience of the left, particularly as it relates to the various state-imposed constraints it faced, is symptomatic of a broader set of problems that confronted liberal groups as well. That is, the left’s experience is representative of the challenges that other non-Islamist currents had to grapple with and that continue to haunt them. Second, the organizational fragility of the left is something that has weakened liberal parties in the contemporary moment to the extent that it ruled out the possibility of effective alliances with leftist groups in the face of Islamist electoral dominance.
THE ORIGINS OF THE POLITICAL FIELD
The rest of this chapter summarizes two sets of state interventions that occurred in the 1960s and 70s, and that are central to the abovementioned, contemporary imbalances between Islamist and non-Islamist political forces. These policies have set leftist and Islamist political currents on two different institutional developmental trajectories, and in ways that have affected the long-term balance of power between them.
Characterizing the left’s trajectory were restrictive, repressive policies during the formative period of the 1970s, and the complete absence of autonomy from the state due to two important events. The first was state pressure during the 1960s to force major communist groups to dissolve their structures and join the ruling party. Eventually, the communists capitulated to President Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954–70), terminating their political organizations. That development was a major setback to the Egyptian left in more than one respect. It injected enduring disunity within it and limited the prospects for cooperation between veteran communists and the younger generation of leftist activists during the 1970s. It also hindered the autonomy of leftist political organizations by generating a legacy of collaboration between the ruling establishment and communist leaders who had joined the Arab Socialist Union (ASU)’s secret vanguard arm. The second event was the decision of significant sectors of the communist movement to submit to regime pressure in the 1970s and participate in state-managed political contestation, mainly through Al-Tagammu‘ Party.20 That decision exposed the left to chronic state intervention for decades to come and limited the possibilities for developing autonomous political organizations.
The Islamist movement that emerged at the forefront of political activism in the 1970s took on a strikingly different trajectory, largely due to what this chapter describes as “Islamist incorporation” policies. The latter denotes a set of policies that the late President Anwar Sadat (r. 1970–81) pursued to open political space toward Islamist groups with the goal of undermining his leftist and Nasserist opponents. Wittingly or not, these policies provided the Muslim Brotherhood and its would-be leaders within the Islamist student movement with space to develop political organizations that were autonomous from the state and less prone to state intervention than formal political parties were. It was in that context that the aging leaders of the Brotherhood, whom Sadat released from prison, were able to join forces with a younger generation of Islamist student activists and lay the groundwork for the Brotherhood’s existing political organization. There was no similar organizational umbrella that was able to accommodate and unite the dynamic leftist currents within the student movement for the reasons mentioned above; thus, the stark contemporary disparities in political organization across the Islamist-non-Islamist divide.
The subsequent sections explain the major elements of each of these two distinct developmental trajectories and how they contributed to the underlying imbalances in Egypt’s political arena.
Islamist trajectory: Islamist incorporation and autonomous organization
The Brotherhood 1971: The uncertain future
The 1970s was a formative period in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood’s development. One could argue that it was during that decade that the movement began to build the incredible organizational capacity it enjoyed on the eve of Mubarak’s downfall in 2011. That view may be at odds with the popular belief that the Muslim Brotherhood has been organizing for over eighty-five years. Taking at face value the idea that the Brotherhood has been in operation since its establishment in 1928, many observers are inadequately attentive to the reality that the group’s fate was uncertain after its virtual disappearance in the wake of the crackdown it endured during the 1950s and 60s. Instead, they assume that, after their release from Sadat’s prisons in the early 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders were simply resuming the movement’s pre-1952 legacy, picking up from where their predecessors had left off.
There is clear evidence, however, that this neat narrative eschews the extent to which the Brotherhood’s return to political life in the 1970s was by no means inevitable. If anything, the view in 1971 suggested that all the odds were heavily stacked in favor of the movement’s collapse and disintegration. After remaining in Nasser’s prisons for almost two decades, the Muslim Brotherhood of the early 1970s enjoyed only a limited following with a membership that did not exceed a few hundred individuals.21 Nasser’s repression, as longtime Muslim Brotherhood member Farid Abdel-Khaleq explains, created a huge void inside the organization and led to its complete loss of contact with an entire generation.22 Additionally, the Muslim Brotherhood was still suffering from the internal discord that followed the 1949 death of its founder Hassan al-Banna.
This is to say that the old leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood who sought to bring the movement back to the political map in 1971 were embarking upon an unusually ambitious endeavor. These leaders were inheriting a highly incoherent and factionalized organization, and not, as many assume, a well-structured group that was prepared to live up to the glorious legacy its earliest founders had left behind. How is it then that the Brotherhood was able to beat these extremely unfavorable odds and reconstitute itself successfully? Much of the answer, as this chapter explains, lies in Sadat’s Islamist incorporation policies. On one level, Sadat provided the Brotherhood with much needed political space in the hopes that it could grow into a credible counterweight to his leftist opponents. Equally important, the Brotherhood reaped indirect (but important) benefits from the tacit support that the Sadat regime channeled to Islamist activists at public universities. Specifically, the Muslim Brotherhood found in the Islamist student movement a highly organized community of committed, energetic activists who had the will and capability to bring Hassan al-Banna’s group back to public life. And within this partnership grew the seeds of the Muslim Brotherhood’s second founding. Echoing this same conclusion is historian Abdullah Al-Arian’s recent study on 1970s Islamist activism at Egyptian public universities. He argues that the reconstitution of the Muslim Brotherhood “could not have been achieved without the active incorporation of the Islamic student movement.”23 The next subsection explains what is it exactly about Sadat’s Islamist incorporation policies that made that second revival possible.
Sadat, de-Nasserization, and Islamist incorporation
Islamist incorporation is understood here as a deliberate effort on the part of the state to allow for the participation of Islamist groups in formal political life. Participation could take on multiple forms, including contestation of national elections or elections in state-managed professional, student, and labor associations, and participation in cabinets and legislatures. In the context of 1970s Egypt, Islamist incorporation manifested itself in various state-sponsored initiatives, as well as direct and tacit support for the public engagement of the Islamist student movement and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The context of these policies was the rising challenge to Sadat from among leftists and Nasserists in formal politics, university activism, and the labor movement. Driving that opposition was a set of de-Nasserization initiatives that Sadat undertook on the economic and foreign policies fronts.24 Among the most controversial of them were his plans to pursue economic liberalization schemes in ways that would have limited the role that the state had taken on under Nasser as the protector of distributive justice. Fearful of the subversive potential that leftist movements posed, particularly with respect to mobilizing the losers of economic reform in opposition to the regime, Sadat pursued a number of steps to marginalize his most vocal opponents. Among them were Islamist incorporation policies. That is, Sadat sought to provide Islamist currents with greater political and cultural space, believing that they would usefully act as a counterweight to communist and Nasserist activists who opposed his policies.
These Islamist incorporation policies were crucial to the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in reconstituting itself and resurrecting its organizational structures after suffering two decades of marginalization under Nasser’s rule. Two elements of Islamist incorporation were critical to the Brotherhood’s reemergence as an autonomous political organization: (1) the regime’s tacit and direct support to Islamist student activism at universities campuses; and (2) Sadat’s support for the reintegration of the Muslim Brotherhood into public life.
Islamist incorporation and university activism
The idea of promoting Islamist student activism took hold within the country’s top leadership in 1972 in the wake of the intensifying opposition from Nasserist and communist students on campus.25 Indeed, the ASU made concerted efforts during the 1970s to implant on university campuses an Islamist current that it could control and use to rein in Sadat’s leftist opponents. But, in reality, the ASU was never quite able to realize this ideal vision due to a variety of practical challenges.26 Ultimately, the regime ended up settling for an alternative set of strategies, which were rather subtle and did not afford it the same degree of control it initially envisioned. The regime began extending (from afar) a helping hand to Islamist student groups that had developed autonomously of the state. It is within this context that one could understand the emergence of al-jama‘at al-islamiyya fil jami‘at, or the Islamic Groups at the Universities (IGUs).27
IGUs represented by far the most significant national student movement in the 1970s. The roots of the IGUs date back to the 1970–1 academic year, when a few medical students formed a small student group under the name of “The Religious Society” (al-jami‘yya al-diniyya) at Cairo University. Among the group’s leaders was Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, who would later become an iconic figure in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and of student activism in Egypt. The group initially worked on a small scale with the goal of promoting religious values and ideas on campus. Eventually, the organization expanded, and, under the name of the Islamic Group (IG), won successive student union elections, and developed a national network of Islamist student groups.
By the mid-1970s, IG was now organizing regular student camps. Usually held on campus during the summer or winter breaks, these were weeks-long conventions that brought together thousands of students with the goal of promoting knowledge on subjects related to Islamic thought. Featuring speaking engagements by prominent Islamic scholars, these camps provided an effective way for recruiting new members en masse and inducting them into Islamist norms and principles. In addition, they offered Islamist student activists a rare opportunity to network and collaborate with like-minded students who belonged to other academic divisions or different universities altogether. It was in this environment that IG’s model diffused to distant universities, and the Cairo University contingent was able to join forces with similar groups across the country through well-institutionalized, formal bodies.
By the fall of 1978, the control of Islamist currents over university student activism was complete. Islamists came to dominate student union elections at eight out of the twelve public universities that existed in Egypt at the time. That same year, Islamist candidates won a majority of seats in the National Student Union. The post of vice-president went to an engineering student from Al-Minya University named Abul Ela Madi, who would later assume a central role in the Muslim Brotherhood before he left to form the Al-Wasat Party in 1995.28
Refuting widespread claims, leaders of the IG of Cairo University insist that they never struck “deals” with the ruling party or collaborated with it in any formal capacity. “I hereby testify before God that we did not strike any deals with the regime or anyone,” says Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, asserting that, if any such deals were actually made, he would have been privy to them.29 At the same time, there are clear indications that the regime welcomed the formation of IGUs with open arms, allowing these groups to expand and flourish as part of a broader Islamist incorporation strategy. Facing criticism from the left, Abdel-Sattar Al-Meleegy writes, “[Sadat] resorted to the well-known political game of using one political current to undermine another, giving a blind eye for the growing Islamist current in order for it to prevail at universities and replace the communist one.”30 Abul Fotouh admits that the level of freedom that Islamist currents enjoyed under Sadat was unprecedented, and would remain so under Mubarak’s rule.31
But there was more to the regime’s support for IGUs than just standing passively on the sidelines to clear the way for Islamist student activism. The state’s proactive support was often apparent. For instance, members of the ruling establishment were featured prominently on the programs of Islamist student camps. And beyond the government’s own endorsement of the “Islamization” of campus politics, state-appointed senior university administrators lent IGUs much support.32 The support of university administrators and their willingness to facilitate the activities of IGUs were arguably indispensable to the success of the Islamist student movement. Both Abul Fotouh and El-Erian, who helped build the IG’s network at Cairo University’s Medical School, acknowledge that, before entering the student union and gaining access to the funding and resources that came with it, their group suffered extreme financial constraints.33 Assuming control of the union, they explain, provided them with office space, as well as logistical and financial support from the university. It was only then that the same organization that could barely afford the cost of printing paper a few years earlier was now able to print books en masse and sponsor conferences and gatherings for thousands of students.
All the official activities that IG leaders report in their memoirs reveal a hefty set of costs that would have been nearly impossible to cover, without the financial backing of the university: pilgrimage trips to Saudi Arabia,34 publishing and printing book series,35 selling subsidized textbooks to students, sponsoring student trips to Luxor and Aswan,36 and selling hijabs to female students as part of a veiling promotion campaign.37 Footing the bill for all these expenses was a receptively sympathetic university administration. More significantly, the famed student camps that expanded the regional and national networks of IGUs were convened on campus under the auspices of the university, which generously provided space and meals for thousands of students for at least two weeks.38
The vast discretionary power that this arrangement afforded the regime vis-à-vis IGUs became unquestionably clear when Islamist currents incurred Sadat’s wrath. Abul Fotouh notes that the cooperative attitude that university administrators had shown Islamist student groups for nearly a decade disappeared once their affiliates heightened their criticism of Sadat’s foreign policies toward the end of the 1970s. Instead, administrators began hampering IGUs’ activities by withholding funding, intensifying bureaucratic red tape and inflexibility, tightening regulation of student residences, limiting services and meals for student events, and, most painfully, cancelling student summer camps.39
In short, the 1970s witnessed a concerted effort on the part of the regime to promote Islamist student groups as a counterweight to Sadat’s Nasserist and Marxist opponents at public universities. This policy would play a major role in supporting the coinciding efforts of Muslim Brotherhood leaders to resurrect their organization after suffering two decades of marginalization under Nasser.
Sadat, IGUs and the reemergence of the Muslim Brotherhood
Sadat’s direct contribution to the Muslim Brotherhood’s reemergence on the political scene was quite evident. Besides releasing them from prison, the president instructed authorities to reinstate recently released inmates to their old jobs, and to relax security surveillance over their activities.40 Additionally, Sadat permitted the Brotherhood to publish its magazine Al-Dawa, which offered the group an institutional base to coordinate and organize its activities. Most importantly, however, it was that open political environment that allowed the Muslim Brotherhood’s aging leadership to enlist the support of the Islamist student movement and channel their dynamism and vitality into the Brotherhood. The lifeline that this younger generation of Islamist activists afforded the Brotherhood came at a moment when the movement’s fate was uncertain.41
Within that open environment, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist student movement began forging institutional ties. Shortly after his release from prison in 1974, Muslim Brother Kamal Al-Sananiri established contact with Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, one of the organizers of the national Islamist student movement.42 According to Essam El-Erian, it was during that period that the core leaders of the IG started deliberating over the future of their organization, specifically whether or not they would seek to form an independent group or enter into the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the major reasons they eventually opted to join the Brotherhood, he explains, was the rapport they established with its members and preachers, whom they often hosted as speakers at their camps and lectures.43
Although they embraced the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood as early as 1975, the Islamist student organizers chose to keep that affiliation under the surface for years in order to avoid raising public concerns or provoking the ruling establishment.44 It was only in 1979 that the national leaders of the student movement began actively calling on their colleagues to join the Muslim Brotherhood formally, according to Abul Ela Madi.45 Indeed, the extent of the government’s surveillance of the Brotherhood and the Islamist student movement at that time is unknown. But there is little doubt that Sadat’s decision to relax security interferences with Islamist currents helped keep that significant development off the regime’s radar.
In granting license to Al-Dawa in 1976, Sadat was allowing the Brotherhood not only a voice, but also a critical institutional base, which was key to advancing the movement’s reemergence on the political scene. Throughout the 1970s, Al-Dawa’s headquarters became the de facto home base for the Brotherhood and the focal point of its organization efforts.46 The magazine, moreover, was one of the major points of collaboration between the young student activists and the Muslim Brotherhood’s older leaders. Furthermore, Abul Fotouh recalls that Al-Dawa’s contributions played a major role in convincing him and his colleagues that joining the Muslim Brotherhood was the way to go.47
Besides channeling energy into Al-Dawa, the incorporation of the Islamist student movement into the Muslim Brotherhood afforded the group a national organizational structure capable of undertaking grassroots activism. The astounding resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood as a coherent organization in the 1970s and 80s was primarily the product of its partnership with the vibrant Islamist student movement that grew under the auspices of Islamist incorporation policies.48 At a time when the Brotherhood’s historic figures, including Mustafa Mashhur and Al-Sananiri, were failing to bring new blood into the group, Madi explains, student organizers, such as Abul Fotouh and others, were able to recruit thousands of new members.49 The Brotherhood’s student movement generation was left in charge of the effort to bring the group back to public life, especially after Al-Sananiri’s death in 1981, and Mashhur fleeing Egypt that same year. For instance, among those tasked with reconstituting the Brotherhood’s networks nationwide were former student activists such as Abul Fotouh, Abdel-Sattar Al-Meleegy, and Anwar Shehata. Al-Meleegy, along with fellow recent graduates Helmy al-Gazzar and Madi, took responsibility for managing the Brotherhood’s university chapters.50
Not long after their release from prison in 1982, many of these recent, young recruits began discussing how to pursue their political engagement now that their college activism came to a close with graduation. These deliberations eventually led to the Brotherhood’s decision to contest elections in multiple professional syndicates, where it secured significant representation, starting with the medical doctors’ and the engineers’ syndicates.51 Subsequently, members of the student movement generation, including Abul Fotouh, Mukhtar Nouh, Mohamed Abdel-Qouddous, and Badr Mohamed Badr, were tasked with coordinating the Brotherhood’s engagement inside professional syndicates.52 That community of students, including Mukhtar Nouh, Essam El-Erian, and Mohieddin Issa, also played a visible role in parliament after the Muslim Brotherhood became the largest opposition bloc in the legislature in 1987. Although many of these figures would later suffer marginalization, their central role in writing a new history for the Muslim Brotherhood was unmistakable. Equally significant, for the purpose of this chapter, is the role of Islamist incorporation policies in making this possible by supporting the emergence of the Islamist student movement, which became the organizational backbone of the Muslim Brotherhood.
One distinctive aspect in how the Brotherhood reconstituted itself during that formative period is the organizational autonomy it enjoyed vis-à-vis the state. State policies supported the resurrection of the Brotherhood, yet without coopting the movement into state bodies, as was the case with the communist movement and its successors. Indeed, regime figures tried to establish Islamist groups on university campuses as part of a secret ASU arm. Yet they failed to do so, and instead had to settle for supporting the more independent IGUs, which later played an important role in the reconstitution of the Muslim Brotherhood. Additionally, Sadat offered to allow Brotherhood leaders into the ruling party, and in another instance, an opportunity to obtain legal status. Aware of the potential state interferences associated with operating under state regulation, Brotherhood leaders turned down these offers.53 In contrast, the Brotherhood’s leftist counterparts, as the next section explains, developed under the guardianship of the state, which ruled out the emergence of a strong, autonomous political organization on the left side of the political spectrum.54
Leftist trajectory: A history of capitulations
Communist activism on the eve of Nasser’s state socialism
Communist activism has a long history in Egypt. Documented presence of communist cells dates back to at least 1894. More formal structures came into being in 1921 with the establishment of the Egyptian Socialist Party, which was later renamed the Egyptian Communist Party. The group, however, suffered from state repression until it was virtually nonexistent by the late 1920s.55 The 1930s and 40s witnessed the reemergence of communist organizations, though they suffered from chronic fragmentation. Some promising signs surfaced in 1947 when two of the most influential communist groups joined forces to become Hadeto, which would comprise almost ninety percent of the entire communist movement.56 Yet, within its first year, disunity began haunting the group, leading to defections and splintering.57
In spite of unfavorable conditions, including state-led repression, the tide of communist activism appeared unstoppable. Hadeto’s influence was on the rise again, as its membership doubled between 1947 and 1952.58 The group also enjoyed some presence inside the military and, more significantly, among the Free Officers Movement, and thus it was initially supportive of the July 23, 1952 revolution. It was not long, however, before relations between the communists and the country’s new military leaders soured in large part due to state repression of labor activism.
On January 8, 1958, the three major communist groupings in the country, including Hadeto, announced they would rally under a single organization known as the Communist Party of Egypt (CPE). That unity was once again short-lived due to disagreements over the relative share of power between the three factions and persistent differences regarding how to manage relations with Nasser. Eventually, the group split in January 1959 when the Hadeto contingent announced it would form its own party.59 The split between these groups coincided with a crackdown against communist organizations, which left thousands of activists in prison from 1959 until the mid-1960s.60
State socialism and the cooptation of the communist movement
Nasser later reversed the regime’s repressive orientation toward the communist movement during the first half of the 1960s, releasing them from prisons and coopting them into the ruling establishment. Central to that change of heart was Egypt’s turn to “state socialism” during that same period. On the political side, the shift was associated with an effort to confront and balance against a variety of bureaucratic and private interests that managed to maintain pockets of influence inside the state apparatus despite the 1952 revolution. Toward that end, Nasser formed the ASU’s “Vanguard Organization” (VO), which was designed to keep in check opportunistic and subversive forces inside the state apparatus. The VO was also one of the main instruments through which the president sought to coopt senior communist leaders.
The establishment of the VO came about in late 1963,61 when Nasser summoned to his home a number of political leaders and advisors to devise a strategy for building a secret organization inside the ruling party.62 Also conceived within that meeting was the beginning of Nasser’s efforts to coopt members of the communist movement into the ruling party and the state apparatus. Informing that move was a desire to inject into the VO individuals who displayed both revolutionary purity and a commitment to the socialist transformation.63 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the earliest VO cells featured a variety of communist activists.64
By the spring of 1964, months after the launching of the VO, all communists that were detained in 1959 had been released from prison. Meanwhile, Nasser ordered senior officials to facilitate the work of the communist contingent inside the VO, which reached 250 members within a short period of time.65 Certainly, the communists were by no means the dominant force inside the VO, but their presence was quite pronounced, especially during its formative stages.66
The dissolution of the communist parties
The rapprochement between the communists and Nasser, however, came at a heavy price, one that proved to be a major setback for the independence of leftist political activism in the long run. As a condition for their reintegration into political life and their entry into the ruling party, Nasser demanded that communist leaders dissolve their organizational structures. In spite of internal resistance, the CPE decided to comply and dissolved itself in early 1965. The other Communist Party of Egypt, which included the Hadeto faction, had dissolved itself a month earlier.67
There is wide consensus that communist groups’ self-dissolution in 1965 was a huge setback for the long-term development of leftist political organizations in Egypt. The wounds of that controversial measure continued to haunt leftist political groups for decades and arguably until this day.68 In the 1970s, it hampered the ability of veteran communist leaders to recruit into their political organizations the younger generation of leftist activists that emerged on college campuses in the wake of Sadat’s de-Nasserization initiatives. In its 1981 program, the Egyptian Communist Party, which was reconstituted in 1975, admits to the disastrous consequences of the 1965 dissolution, recognizing the chasm it created between older and younger generations inside the communist movement.69 It is quite telling that during the 1970s many younger activists dismissed the newly formed Al-Tagammu‘ and refused to join the party on the grounds that they deemed its cofounders guilty for dissolving the communist parties in 1965.70
Beyond the internal discord it introduced inside the Egyptian left, the dissolution of the two communist parties in 1965 brought a conclusive end to the organizational independence of the communist movement from the state. It turned a once promising political movement into, at best, a subordinate partner inside the ruling establishment, or, at worst, a group of underworked bureaucrats.71
A limited number of old guard communists, along with some newer cadres of leftist activists, tried to resist the dissolution decision and maintained underground organizations. Some of them showed some promising potential and succeeded in building a presence within the student movement during the 1970s. Yet, in contrast with their Islamist counterparts, none of the groups was ultimately able to channel their efforts into enduring political organizations due to successive waves of state repression during the 1970s and internal splits.72
On the other hand, those who accepted the dissolution decision and made their peace with the Nasserist regime found a place inside the ruling establishment through the ASU and its VO, as well as state media and cultural institutions. The communists agreed to join the ruling party on the assumption that they would get to play a prominent role in leadership circles and advance their agendas from positions of influence. Later on, well after dissolving their organizations and joining the ASU, the communists realized the political leadership was determined to keep them in subordination at all times and shut them out of positions of influence.
Indeed, Marxist perspectives became more pronounced inside state media institutions. Nonetheless, the representation of Marxist figures in positions of leadership in state media and other state bodies remained rather limited.73 The situation was no different inside the ASU. Notwithstanding the regime’s initial interest in recruiting the support of the communists inside the VO, at no point were they granted influential posts inside the ASU.74 These trends collectively underscore the limited role that Nasser envisioned for the affiliates of the communist movement. That is, he wanted to employ them as an instrument of control in the service of the state in containing the influence of rival bureaucratic powers and private capital, but without giving the radical left or the social classes it sought to represent a real shot at sharing power.75
The Egyptian left and the legacy of the VO
Although the VO was officially terminated in the wake of Sadat’s infamous showdown with the “centers of power,” the legacy of the VO’s network continued to live on well into the Mubarak era. Not only did the VO’s cadre come to control the ruling NDP throughout much of the 1980s and 90s, but it also exerted much influence inside opposition groups, including the socialist Al-Tagammu‘. The old VO networks that once tied NDP personnel and opposition leaders offered the regime an additional channel for pressuring opposition parties into compliance. Much like most of the opposition parties that emerged under Mubarak, Al-Tagammu‘ exhibited the pathologies of association with the former VO, given that its leaders were once part of the VO culture of cooperation with the ruling party and security agencies. Specifically, many of Al-Tagammu‘’s founding and long-standing leaders were tied to the VO at one point or another.76 Practically speaking, these individuals were tasked with submitting secret reports to officials about activities they deemed subversive, especially at their site of employment. In more cynical terms, they served as spies for the ASU.77 That legacy of covert collaboration with the ruling party would haunt Al-Tagammu‘ during the 1980s and would facilitate the process by which the regime managed to coopt the party and temper its oppositionist orientations.78
Al-Tagammu‘ and the second capitulation: The prison legality
A second major development that further hindered the efforts of Egyptian leftists to build independent political organizations pertained to the formation of the Al-Tagammu‘ Party in the mid-1970s. The context for Al-Tagammu‘’s formation was a set of reforms that Sadat pursued in the 1970s with a view to contain political actors capable of exploiting the grievances of organized labor to mobilize opposition against the regime. The obvious contenders for such a role were those whom the president had just demoted from the ruling coalition, notably Nasserists, along with a host of communist groups that saw the political decline of the ASU and state socialism as an opportunity to reconstitute their networks. Sadat had hoped that those forces could somehow be coopted and kept in check through the left minbar (platform) of the ASU, which would later become Al-Tagammu‘ Party.79
The diverse communities of leftists that formed Al-Tagammu‘ at Sadat’s invitation were certainly successful in carving out valuable space for the progressive left within the emergent political arena. Opponents of Sadat’s political and economic reforms now had a clear, recognizable home base at Al-Tagammu‘, even if many relevant activists were still dubious about the credibility of the organization. At the same time, by assuming the role of a formal opposition, the founders of Al-Tagammu‘ were in effect accepting a number of institutional constraints that proved highly crippling in the long run. These institutional hindrances serve as a useful contrast to the wide space that the state granted Islamist political currents during that same period. These seemingly benign disparities would have long-lasting implications for the future balance of power between the Muslim Brotherhood and leftist currents.
Just like any other licensed political party, the founders of Al-Tagammu‘ ceded a great deal of autonomy to the state by agreeing to operate under a highly unfavorable legal framework, particularly Law 40 of 1977, famously known as the “Political Parties Law.” The law effectively gave the state a blank check to interfere in the affairs of opposition parties through a variety of formal and informal methods.
For example, the law mandated that each party report all of its financial activities and donations to the Central Auditing Agency, which in turn was obligated to report them to the state-controlled Political Parties Committee (PPC) each year. In effect, that allowed the regime to monitor the financial activities of their rivals, and to intimidate opposition party financiers through informal tactics and politically motivated investigations.
The Muslim Brotherhood was never subjected to that law, because it participated in elections and parliamentary life without an official political party license, and thus did not have to experience the same type of state oversight as its legal counterparts. This is not to deny that the Brotherhood suffered from chronic state repression, arrests, and politically motivated trials. Rather, this is to say that state repression of the Brotherhood did not encompass the same interventionist strategies that were exercised against legal parties such as Al-Tagammu‘ and that tended to disrupt institutional development. Intuitively speaking, a political group that participates in politics without a license is at a huge disadvantage, because it is deprived of the privileges that come with legal status, such as constitutional protections and public financing. In reality, however, the lack of legal status meant the absence of heavy-handed state oversight, especially as it relates to financial transparency. Thus, as a political group that was permitted to participate in politics, albeit in varying degrees across time, the Muslim Brotherhood did not have to deal with the same financial reporting requirements as their rivals. As a result, the state had no clear mechanism by which it could check and curb the fundraising activities of the Brotherhood.
An additional instrument through which the state-dominated PPC exerted influence over the legal opposition – as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood – is Article 13 of the Political Parties Law. The article granted the head of the PPC the power to dissolve a given party under extremely subjective circumstances, such as carrying out activities that violate the constitution, or threaten national security or social peace. That flawed legal framework afforded the regime the authority to freeze even the most law-abiding party, which stood as a powerful deterrent against legal opposition parties that contemplated whether or not to challenge the political status quo.
An additional constraint imposed on licensed political parties pertains to the fact that they were required by law to maintain open membership. At first glance, these requirements seem rather harmless and uncontroversial. Yet upon closer examination of the political context in which these opposition parties operated under Mubarak, open membership seems more of a ticking time bomb. It is this open membership requirement that has allowed security agencies to infiltrate opposition political parties through informant networks. Not bound by these same legal instruments, the Muslim Brotherhood has structured its membership requirements and procedures in very rigid ways, which has made the task of infiltration an onerous one.
Finally, the state was able to tacitly exert pressure over opposition parties through the various strings it attached to their newspapers and publications. Almost every party produced a daily or weekly newspaper, which is one of the main channels through which it was able to convey its ideas and principles, voice its critiques of the government’s performance, and enhance its outreach to members and potential supporters. These publications, however, were normally printed at state-owned printing houses, which means the state was at liberty to block the printing of opposition newspapers without having to resort to direct censorship or without obtaining a court order to recall the publication from newsstands. Another channel through which the state was able to influence opposition party newspapers is their advertising departments. By being the major buyers of advertising space in opposition newspapers, government ministries had effectively become the subsidizers of opposition parties. The threat of withholding advertisement requests from these newspapers provided various government officials with a fair amount of tacit influence over opposition parties throughout the Mubarak era.
In short, in agreeing to operate under a legal status, Al-Tagammu‘ was effectively embracing a variety of institutional mechanisms through which the state could systematically interfere in its own affairs. Thus, chronic state interference and the absence of autonomy became one of the major hallmarks of the left’s developmental trajectory in Egypt. On the other hand, Islamist incorporation policies provided a valuable balance between state support and organizational autonomy, such that the Muslim Brotherhood was able to benefit from the state’s receptive policies without submitting entirely to the regime. The communist movement and its successors, on the other hand, received only limited support from Nasser during the 1960s, and, under Sadat, neither support nor autonomy.
As explained earlier, the implications of these divergences in institutional development to the contemporary context of Egyptian politics are extremely significant. It is within these divergences that one could understand why is it that the post-Mubarak political arena was inhospitable to the emergence of consensus around the democratic rules of the political game. The organizational asymmetries that these legacies generated made the production of contingent consent a difficult endeavor, paving the way to the downfall of the Second Egyptian Republic.
The purpose of this chapter is to add historical depth to discussions of the downfall of Egypt’s Second Republic by analyzing the role of institutional legacies in contributing to that outcome. It makes the argument that the failure of Egypt’s post-Mubarak transition cannot be understood in isolation of the main features of the political field that was inherited from the Mubarak era. Among those features are the organizational disparities across the Islamist and non-Islamist divide, which has generated an environment not conducive for a pacted transition that could have produced some consensus around the democratic process. These disparities are the product of a set of important state interventions that occurred in the 1960s and 70s and that have shaped the institutional developmental trajectories of leftist and Islamist movements in uneven and divergent ways. It is within that historical context that one must understand the failure of Egypt’s post-Mubarak transition.
The aftermath of the July 3 coup underscores the enduring character of the legacies examined in this chapter. Leftist and liberal actors played a visible role in endorsing, whether explicitly or tacitly, the military’s ouster of President Morsi, along with the subsequent repression and deadly violence the state employed against Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and supporters. Interestingly, these actors were not limited to political forces that historically rejected Islamist currents and consistently endorsed the repression Islamists endured at the hands of successive governments under Mubarak. Rather, supporters of the post-July 3 political order included former interlocutors who coordinated and justified strategic cooperation between Islamist and non-Islamist opposition currents under the banner of advancing democratic change during the Mubarak era.80 Specifically, individuals who had once crossed the Islamist/non-Islamist divide to launch serious democratic reform initiatives such as Kifaya and the National Association for Change found themselves at opposite sides of political warfare in July 2013. That trend perhaps suggests that even political leaders and activists who are evidently inclined to uphold cooperation for the sake of democratic change confronted conditions that trumped their predisposition to collaborate and compromise with their rivals. At the heart of these permeating, unfavorable conditions was the uneven political field they inherited from the Mubarak era and that limited the prospects for credible, stable pacts between the country’s warring political forces.
1 The author would like to thank Ziad Abu-Rish, Joel Beinin, Adel Iskandar, Nancy Okail, and Ahmad Shokr for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
2 “The Second Egyptian Republic” is used in this essay to refer to Egypt’s brief experiment with elected governance between the end of 2011 and the coup of July 2013. I use the term while acknowledging the limitations placed on elected institutions during that period and the different manifestations of continuity between the Mubarak era and the political framework that surfaced following his ouster. For example, the anti-democratic privileges of the military establishment and other entrenched bureaucratic powers remained largely intact even after Mubarak’s downfall, and were not subjected to any meaningful checks from elected institutions.
3 Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 37.
4 Ibid., 40–5.
5 Adam Przeworski, “Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Lawrence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 60.
6 O’Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, 59.
7 Ibid., 60–1.
8 Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 19.
9 The one exception to that trend was the judiciary, which had a much more contentious relationship with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, more generally. For a summary of political confrontations between them, see Nouran El-Behairy, “Timeline of Morsi and the Judiciary: One year in power,” Daily News Egypt, June 29, 2013, accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/06/29/timeline-of-morsi-and-the-judiciary-one-year-in-power/
10 See Hesham Sallam, “Obsessed with Turkish models in Egypt,” Jadaliyya, June 30, 2013, accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12517/obsessed-with-turkish-models-in-egypt/; and “Morsi past the point of no return,” Jadaliyya, December 8, 2012, accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/8881/morsi-past-the-point-of-no-return/
11 See Yezid Sayigh, Missed Opportunity: The Politics of Police Reform in Egypt and Tunisia (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2015), accessed September 12, 2015, http://carnegieendowment.org/files/missed_opportunity.pdf/
12 The discussion that follows is informed by Hesham Sallam, “Egypt: Transition in the midst of revolution,” in Elections and Democratization in the Middle East: The Tenacious Search for Freedom, Justice, and Dignity, ed. Mahmoud Hamad and Khalil al-Anani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 35–66.
13 Salma Shukrallah, “Once election allies, Egypt’s ‘Fairmont’ opposition turn against Morsi,” Al-Ahram Online, June 27, 2013, accessed September 12, 2015, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/152/74485/Egypt/Morsi,-one-year-on/-Once-election-allies,-Egypts-Fairmont-opposition-.aspx/
14 For background on the formation of the Constituent Assembly and the politics surrounding it, see International Commission of Jurists, Egypt’s New Constitution: A Flawed Process; Uncertain Outcomes (Geneva: International Commission of Jurists, 2012), accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/530ef8a34.pdf/
15 For more on these controversies and allegations, see Lina Attalah, “The draft constitution: Some controversial stipulations,” Egypt Independent, December 1, 2012, accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/draft-constitution-some-controversial-stipulations/
16 On the disconnect between formal and contentious politics in Egypt during that period, see Sallam, “Egypt: Transition in the Midst of Revolution.”
17 For more on the NSF and its composition, see “Profile: Egypt’s National Salvation Front,” BBC News, December 10, 2012, accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-20667661/
18 Al-Masry al-Youm, “NSF to Boycott Parliamentary Elections,” Egypt Independent, February 26 2013, accessed September 8, 2015, http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/nsf-boycott-parliamentary-elections/
19 For more background on these efforts, see Adel Iskandar, “Tamarod: Egypt’s revolution hones its skills,” Jadaliyya, June 30, 2013, accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12516/tamarod_egypts-revolution-hones-its-skills/
20 The party is formally known as Al-Tagammu‘ Al-Watani Al-Taqadomi Al-Wahdawi or the National Progressive Unionist Party (NPUP). The party is widely dubbed “Al-Tagammu‘.”
21 See testimony of former Muslim Brotherhood leader Abdel-Sattar Al-Meleegy in Abdullah A. Al-Arian, Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 101.
22 Farid Abdel-Khaleq, Al-Ikhwan al-muslimun fi mizan al-haq (Al-Qahirah: Dar Al-Sahwa lil-Nashr, 1987), 143–6.
23 Al-Arian, Answering the Call, 148.
24 For more detailed accounts of these developments, see John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Mark N. Cooper, The Transformation of Egypt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, iBooks, 1982).
25 The emergence and evolution of that policy is well documented in four critical insider accounts, namely those of Sadat senior advisor and Governor of Assiut Mohamed Othman Ismail (see Atef Abdel-Ghany, Mohamed Othman Ismail yatadhakar: Al-Wazir alathi kalafahu Al-Sadat betakween al-jamaat al-islamiyya, Al-Qahirah: Atef Abdel-Ghany, 2000); Sadat’s advisor and friend Mahmoud Gamee (‘Arift Al-Sadat, Al-Qahirah: Al-Maktab Al-Misri Al-Hadith, 2004); former minister of interior Hassan Abu-Basha (Fi al-amn wal-siyasya, Al-Qahirah: Dar Al-Hilal, 1990, accessed April 5, 2015, http://www.ikhwanwiki.com/index.php?title=), who headed domestic security services under Sadat; and Fouad Allam (Al-Ikhwan wa ana: min al-manshiyya ila al-manassa, Al-Qahirah: Akhbar Al-Youm, 1995), a longtime security official.
26 See testimony of Mohamed Othman Ismail in Abdel-Ghany, Mohamed Othman Ismail yatadhakar, 80.
27 The history of IGUs is detailed in the firsthand account of Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh (Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr: 1970–1984, Al-Qahirah: Dar Al-Sherouk, 2010) and Al-Sayyid Abdel-Sattar Al-Meleegy (Tajribati Ma‘a Al-Ikhwan, Al-Qahirah: Al-Markaz Al-‘Ilmsi lil-Behouth wal-Dirasat, 2009, accessed April 3, 2015, http://www.ikhwanwiki.com/index.php?title=%D8%AA%D8%AC%D8%B1%D8%A8%D8%AA%D9%8A_%D9%85%D8%B9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86_%D9%85%D9%86_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%A9_%D8%A5%D9%84%D9%89_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%B8%D9%8A%D9%85_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B1%D9%8A), as well as the accounts of various Islamist student leaders, including Essam El-Erian, and Abul Ela Madi, and others. See their testimonies in Sameh Eid, Al-Islamiyyoun yatahadatoun (Al-Giza: Dar Hala, 2013). Also see Al-Arian, Answering the Call.
28 Abul Ela Madi, “Hikayati ma‘a al-ikhwan wa qisat al-wasat,” Masress, January 4, 2006, accessed April 5, 2015, http://www.masress.com/almesryoon/9998/
29 Abul Fotouh, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 52.
30 See Al-Meleegy, Tajribati Ma‘a Al-Ikhwan. The same interpretation is apparent in Abul Fotouh’s own testimony on the history of the 1970s Islamist student movement. See Abul Fotouh, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 54.
31 Ibid., 57, 127.
32 “Sufi Abu-Taleb who was the Vice-President of [Cairo] University until my graduation in 1977 never turned down any of the requests I made as the leader of the Student Union,” says Abul Fotouh. Abul Fotouh, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 110.
33 Ibid., 33, 41, 49; see also Essam El-Erian’s testimony in Eid, Al-Islamiyyoun yatahadatoun, 86–7.
34 Ibid., 103.
35 Ibid., 97.
36 Ibid., 85.
37 Montasser Al-Zayat testimony in Eid, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 33.
38 Abul Fotouh, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 46. In outlining the procedures for convening these camps, Abdel-Sattar Al-Meleegy reveals the central role that the university administration used to play in supporting such events, Al-Meleegy, Tajribati Ma‘a Al-Ikhwan.
39 Ibid., 111.
40 According to Abdel-Sattar Al-Meleegy, Brotherhood figures have acknowledged these gestures in various accounts. See Al-Meleegy, Tajribati Ma‘a Al-Ikhwan. The second claim is consistent with the testimony of Fouad Allam. See Allam, Al-Ikhwan wa ana, 251.
41 Al-Arian, Answering the Call, 140, 104, 109.
42 Abul Fotouh, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 74–5.
43 See El-Erian’s testimony in Eid, Al-Islamiyyoun yatahadatoun, 91.
44 See Abul Fotouh, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 88–9; see also El-Erian’s testimony in Eid, Al-Islamiyyoun yatahadatoun, 97.
45 Quoted in Abdel-Reheem Aly, Al-Ikhwan Al-muslimun: Azmat tayyar al-tajdid (Al-Qahirah: Markaz Al-Mahrousa, 2004), 169.
46 Al-Meleegy, Tajribati Ma‘a Al-Ikhwan.
47 Abul Fotouh, Shahid ‘ala tarikh al-haraka al-islamiyya fi misr, 103.
48 Abul Fotouh’s firsthand account of the history of the Islamist movement makes this point very decisively. Ibid., 91–2.
49 Quoted in Aly, Al-Ikhwan Al-muslimun, 169.
50 See Mohamed Habib, Dhikrayat duktur Mohamed Habib: ‘an al-hayah wal-da‘wa wal-siyasa wal-fikr (Al-Qahirah: Dar Al-Sherouk, 2012), 170; Al-Meleegy, Tajribati Ma‘a Al-Ikhwan.
51 See Abul Fotouh’s comments in Aly, Al-Ikhwan Al-muslimun, 163.
52 Al-Meleegy, Tajribati Ma‘a Al-Ikhwan.
53 See the testimony of Saleh Abu-Ruqayiq in Hassanein Koroum, Al-taharukat al-siyasiyya lil-ikhwan al-muslimin 1971–1987 (Al-Qahirah: Al-Markaz Al-Arabi Al-Dawli Lil-I‘lam, 2012), 31–9. Late Muslim Brotherhood Guide Mamoun Al-Houdaibi admits in a 1998 interview that Sadat did in fact make that offer, but that this would have given the government much discretion in intervening in its internal affairs. See Adel Al-Ansary, Al-Ikhwan al-muslimun: 60 qadiyya sakhina (Al-Qahirah: Dar Al-Tawzee wal-Nashr Al-Islamiyya, 1998), 42.
54 Beinin argues the absence of independent political groups within the Egyptian left was detrimental to the ability of the workers movement to push the post-2011 transition toward a more democratic outcome comparable to that of the Tunisian transition. Joel Beinin, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ebook, 2015), 334–6.
55 Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifaat El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920–1988 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 12–31.
56 Rami Ginat, A History of Egyptian Communism: Jews and Their Compatriots in Quest of Revolution (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011), 277–83.
57 Ismael and El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 67.
58 Ismael and El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, estimate membership at three thousand in 1952, whereas Curiel reports one thousand and four hundred members in 1947. Quoted in Ginat, A History of Egyptian Communism, 279.
59 Ibid., 109–21.
60 Paving the way to that wave of repression was Nasser’s suspicious attitude toward communist activists due to their support for Iraq’s President Abdul-Kareem Qassem, who refused to accede to Egypt’s leadership and join the United Arab Republic (UAR). That communists in both Syria and Iraq resisted the UAR idea only made Nasser more dubious of their Egyptian counterparts. The beginning of the end for the CPE, however, was turning down Nasser’s request to instruct members to join the ruling party, after which a wide series of arrests followed, making the Egyptian communist movement virtually disappear for years. See Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?: Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 205–7.
61 The details of that discussion were conveyed in two different independent firsthand accounts, namely those of Nasser’s aide Sami Sharaf (Sanawat wa ayyam ma‘a Gamal Abdel Nasser, al-juzu al-awwal, Al-Qahirah: Al-Firsan lil-Nashr, 2004); and Ahmad Fouad in Ahmed Hamroush, Shehoud thawrat youlyo (Al-Qahirah: Maktabet Madbouly, 1984).
62 Sami Sharaf, Sanawat wa ayyam ma‘a Gamal Abdel Nasser, al-juzu al-thani (Al-Qahirah: Maktabet Madbouly, 2005), 169; Ahmed Hamroush, Thawrat 23 youlyo (Al-Qahirah: Al-hay’aa al-‘amah lil-kitab, 1992), 611.
63 Ibid., 611.
64 Sami Sharaf, “Abdel Nasser wal-tanzim al-siyasi,” in Sanawat wa ayyam ma‘a Gamal Abdel Nasser, al-juzu al-thani (undated document), accessed April 15, 2015, http://hakaek-misr.com/yahiaalshaer.com/SAMY/Book-2-POLORG-XX.html/
65 Hamroush, Thawrat 23 youlyo, 614.
66 Hamada Hosni, Abdelnaser wal-tanzeem al-talee‘i al-serri 1971–1963 (Al-Qahirah: Maktabet Beirouth, 2007), 68.
67 For a more detailed account of that history and the factors behind the dissolution decision, see Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There?; and Ismael and El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt.
68 See Revolutionary Socialists’ 2006 vision for change, which references those decisions. Revolutionary Socialists, Al-Ishtirakiyya allati nudaf‘i ‘anha (Al-Qahirah: Markaz Al-Dirasat Al-Ishtirakiyya, 2006), 35.
69 Quoted in Ismael and El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 140.
70 See Rifaat Al-Said, Mujarad dhikrayat al-juzuu al-taleth (Demashq: Dar Al-Mada, 2000), 42.
71 See Hamroush, Thawrat 23 youlyo, 615.
72 For more on these organizations, see Ismael and El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 127–50; Rifaat Al-Said, Al-Tayyarat al-siyasiyya fi misr, ru’ya naqdiyya: Al-Markeseyoun, al-ikhwan, al-nasiryoun, al-tagammu‘ (Al-Qahirah: Al-hay’aa al-‘amah lil-kitab, 2002), 83–5; Al-Ahram Center, Al-Taqrir Al-Istratiji Al-‘Arabi 1987 (Al-Qahirah: Markaz Al-Dirasat Al-Siyasiya wal-istratijiyya, 1987), 371–7.
73 See Sharaf, Sanawat wa ayyam ma‘a Gamal Abdel Nasser, al-juzu al-thani, 389–90; Sherif Younis, Nidaa’ Al-Sha‘b: Tarikh naqdi lil-‘idiolojiyya al-nasiriyya (Al-Qahirah: Dar Al-Sherouk, 2012), 580.
74 Hamroush, Thawrat 23 youlyo, 627; Ismael and El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 128.
75 Hamroush himself cites evidence in support of that argument. See Hamroush, Thawrat 23 youlyo, 621–2.
76 Hosni, Abdelnaser wal-tanzeem al-talee‘i al-serri 1971–1963, 52–7; Hamroush, Shehoud thawrat youlyo, 22; Sharaf, “Abdel Nasser wal-tanzim al-siyasi”; Ismael and El-Sa‘id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 123.
77 See Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (London: Verso, 2012), 59–60; Hamroush, Thawrat 23 youlyo, 629, 631.
78 For a detailed firsthand account of that history, see Hussein Abd al-Raziq, Al-Ahaly: Sahifa taht al-hisar (Al-Qahirah: Dar Al-‘Alam Al-Thaleth, 1995).
79 For more on the history of Al-Tagammu‘, see Iman Hassan, Wadha’ef al-ahzab al-siyasiyya fi nudhm al-ta‘adudiyya al-muqayada: dirasat halat hizb al-tagammu‘ fi misr 1976–1991 (Al-Qahirah: Al-Ahaly 1995); and Al-Said, Mujarad dhikrayat al-juzuu al-taleth.
80 For more on the history of cooperation between Egypt’s Islamists and non-Islamists under Mubarak, see Dina Shehata, Islamists and Secularists in Egypt: Opposition, Conflict, and Cooperation (London: Routledge, 2010).