Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood

The surprise story of the Arab elections, anywhere, is not the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, but rather if such an ascent did not occur. For example, if the results of the current Egyptian parliamentary elections show the failure of the Brotherhood to sweep to victory in the constituencies, then this is newsworthy, and not the other way round. Yesterday, an Egyptian newspaper published the headline: “Morocco records the latest in the series of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power!” Well, where is the surprise in that? To be fair, the Egyptian newspaper is not alone in its “surprise” at the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rather there is a queue of human rights advocates, liberals and seculars, specifically on Twitter and Facebook, and similarly the “intellectuals on the street”, who are inclined to go along with the zeitgeist, and protest for the cause of the day! The Muslim Brotherhood is a political reality and a force because its members work day and night, working on the ground rather than through social networking websites. The Muslim Brotherhood is a force because those who claim to be intellectuals do not bother to read history and draw lessons from it. Probably the best we can say about them – i.e. these intellectuals – is that they are passionate, but why are they reading the events of the past five years alone, and not the past five decades? What about the case of the Brotherhood offshoot Hamas? What about the position of the Brotherhood as a whole with Hezbollah? What about the position of the Muslim Brotherhood with Iran and so on? The problem with those who describe themselves as liberals – whether in Egypt or elsewhere – is that their voices do not tend to move a muscle on the ground. Here, I would say that if the size [of support for] the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s current elections is newsworthy and surprising, then what about the other political forces in the Arab world that are fragmented and irrational, without a clear and specific project, even if this project ultimately turns out to be. However, if we consider the policy of riding every popular wave to be a political project, then this is another story. Take Egypt for example, where ever since the overthrow, or stepping down, of Hosni Mubarak, everyone has been preoccupied with the so-called “remnants” of the former regime, or the threat of Salafis supported by Saudi Arabia, or youth suspicions about the army. Of course there was also the crafty Brotherhood plan to disperse the efforts of the youth and other political forces, while the Brotherhood worked in full swing to strengthen their ranks on the ground. Anyone who was alert to this plan received their abundant share of insults and accusations of treason. Another example: consider those intellectuals who showed enthusiasm for the idea of fundamentalism in the days of Osama bin Laden, under the banner of the victory of religion. Then the intellectuals adopted the idea of “resistance” after the 2006 Lebanon War, and now they show enthusiasm for democracy today. Three large fluctuations in the past ten years, but of course these intellectuals only appear as sycophants with no real value, except the ability to confuse. Their leaders have not changed; they always converged with the Brotherhood throughout those stages, but now comes the day when they show surprise at the Brotherhood’s success! Even the al-Assad regime today recalls how the Brotherhood used to politically co-exist with it in the recent past, and Hamas is the simplest example of this. Therefore, the sheer amount of people surprised today at the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing but an indication of a societal defect worthy of much debate.