Secularizing Islamism and Islamizing Democracy: The Political and Ideational Evolution of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers 1984–2012

Abstract

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) emerged in Egypt in the early twentieth century to resist secularism and political pluralism in favour of religious revival and a unitary Islamic state. After three decades of political participation culminating in its formation of a government in Egypt, the MB has prioritized electoral paths to power, while claiming to defend individual rights, popular majorities and a civil state. Nevertheless, the MB's discourse continues to straddle religious and secular terrain: in recent election campaigns, MB leaders promised to build an ‘Islamic state’ and a ‘caliphate’, all the while insisting that the people, not God are the source of all power. What explains these contradictions, and what do they tell us about the Brotherhood's apparent adoption of political and ideational pluralism and democratic values? The article contends that the MB's ambivalence about democracy is not a sign of dissimulation or lack of ideological evolution. Instead, it has its roots in a 30-year process of partially adapting to democratic and ‘secular’ political ideas by reframing them in religious terms which, however, resulted in creating what the article discusses as a hybrid ‘secularized’ Islamism. This hybridization has both enabled and constrained the Brothers' adaptation to democracy in the post-Mubarak period.

Notes

¹ Mohammed Morsi, presidential election rally, Cairo University, 12 May 2012.

² Nouran el-Behairy, ‘Shater: “We are the people, we are the majority”’, Daily News Egypt, 8 December 2012.

³ http://www.ikhwanonline.com/new/Article.aspx?ArtID = 131916&SecID = 230

⁴ Presidential election rally, Cairo University, 12 May 2012.

⁵ ‘Shura Council passes Saudi loan approved by Brotherhood, rejected by Salafis’, Egypt Independent, 20 February 2013; Egypt Independent, 13 March 2013.

⁶ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 96WuDfJDrPY&feature = share; and ‘Mashrou al-nahda al-islami’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = JnSshs2qzrM, transcribed by Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 13, 10 April 2012.

⁷ Slogans at Salafi rally for shariah in Tahrir Square, 9 November 2012.