Letter from Cairo: After rise, Brotherhood headed for a fall

The clampdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in recent months has been comprehensive and relentless, but is the campaign against the group designed to bring it into line, or are the authorities intent on crushing it out of existence? Foreign Correspondent Youssef Hamza reports

CAIRO // In just over two months, Egypt’s military-backed authorities have detained about 2,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Islamist group’s supreme leader and his powerful deputy.

It is the heaviest and most far-reaching crackdown against the Islamist group since the 1950s and 1960s, when the nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel-Nasser outlawed the Brotherhood in 1954 and followed up with the jailing of thousands of its supporters. The group had remained outlawed until Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power in a popular uprising in 2011.

Now, the 85-year-old group faces the possibility of being outlawed again as well as declared a terrorist organisation, a fall that, if it happens, would match in magnitude the Brotherhood stunning rise after Mr Mubarak’s ouster to become Egypt’s most dominant political force, sweeping parliamentary elections and giving the country its first freely elected leader, Mohammed Morsi.

A Cairo court this week upheld an earlier ruling that banned the Brotherhood and ordered the confiscation of its assets, removing the last legal hurdle before dismantling the group’s infrastructure, from schools and clinics to charities and businesses.

It is not clear whether the mass arrests and multitude of court cases against Brotherhood members are designed to pressure the group into accepting and joining the new order created by the popularly supported removal of Mr Morsi on July 3; or whether the ultimate objective is to dismantle it from top to bottom so it may never rise again.

There are growing signs that the aim may be the latter.

Beside the arrests, authorities have identified and removed thousands of Brotherhood members who were allegedly given jobs in the government or the state media during Mr Morsi’s one-year rule not for their qualifications but rather for their loyalty to the group. Steps are also under way to remove Brotherhood supporters or known sympathisers from academia and the judiciary, as well as from among government-appointed mosque imams. As many as 55,000 imams have been removed since Mr Morsi’s ouster because they were not appointed by Al Azhar, Egypt’s highest seat of Islamic learning and an icon of religious moderation.

Significantly, the crackdown appears to enjoy the support of a majority of Egyptians who had grown frustrated and disheartened by Mr Morsi’s bias towards the Brotherhood, of which he has been a longtime leader, and his perceived failure to solve any of the country’s pressing problems. That sentiment is backed by a boisterous media campaign against the Brotherhood and its hard-line allies.

The events in Egypt since Mr Morsi’s removal could have only fuelled the anti-Brotherhood sentiments and have gone a long way in diluting whatever sympathy they might have gained after hundreds of Brotherhood supporters were killed when security forces moved to clear two pro-Morsi sit-in protests in Cairo on August 14.

Brotherhood supporters had turned their sit-in protests into centres for hate speech, and speakers there did the once unthinkable when they called on troops and policemen to mutiny against their commanders. They also tried to storm government offices and police stations. At the larger of the two sites, Mr Morsi supporters are alleged to have tortured suspected undercover police and army agents.

Mr Morsi’s downfall, meanwhile, appears to have ignited stepped-up attacks against security forces in the Sinai peninsula, leading many to suspect close links between the Brotherhood, for years touted as a moderate Islamist group, and radical Islamists who embrace violence.

But while popular sentiment is mostly anti-Brotherhood in Egypt, crushing it raises possibilities about the group’s future that are not all favourable to a stable Egypt.

One obvious scenario would be for the group to return to its old ways, going underground where it can reorganise away from the watchful eyes of authorities and rise again one day to stake a political claim to rule. A much more dangerous and immediate scenario is for members to break away from the group and join more radical groups or even militant Islamist organisations, embracing violence against the government.

The more optimistic scenario is for the Brotherhood’s middle leadership to embark on a comprehensive revision of the group’s political convictions and, in the process, remove the radical group that has led under Mr Morsi. That revision could possibly mean abandoning politics and focusing instead on the group’s core activity before it entered politics, spreading the teachings of Islam.

Regardless of which way the Brotherhood goes, the group is unlikely to rule Egypt again, not in the near future anyway, unless it completely changes its ways. That is primarily because of the group’s clear association with violence since Mr Morsi’s downfall and the readiness it has shown in the last two-and-a-half months to go against the public’s will and try to cling on to power with little regard for the cost.