The Egyptian Muslim Sisterhood between Violence, Activism and Leadership

Abstract

On 25 January 2015, the fourth anniversary of the uprising that toppled Hosny Mubarak and brought the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) into power, Egyptian security forces arrested Aya Alaa Hosny in front of the Journalists Union in central Cairo. Aya is one of the spokeswomen and leader of the Women against the Coup, one of the most active women-only movements established by the Muslim Sisterhood following the Egyptian coup d’état in 2013. Since then, thousands of Islamist women and sympathisers have joined the Sisters in street demonstrations, human rights advocacy and anti-regime protests, notwithstanding the high risk associated with political activism in a context of retrenched authoritarianism. This article offers a gendered analysis of the Egyptian MB by examining the activism of the Muslim Sisterhood, its female wing, post July 2013. Contrary to mainstream academic literature on Islamist women’s activism, which considers Islamist movements’ conservative gender ideology and sexual division of labour as an impediment to female political leadership, this study argues that Islamist informal networks can be conducive to female leadership under ‘negative’ political circumstances. As the case of the Muslim Sisterhood demonstrates, the repression of Islamists following the coup favoured the emergence of women’s leadership, firstly within women-only movements and subsequently, as the very survival of the MB became increasingly compromised, in the MB movement as a whole.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr. Paola Rivetti for reading through the several drafts of this manuscript, and to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I am also immensely grateful to all the women who opened their doors and hearts to me during my fieldwork in Egypt. The writing of this paper would have not been possible without their help.

Notes

1. ‘All According to plan: the Rabaa Massacre and the Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt’, Human Rights Watch Report, 2014.

2. ‘Egypt’s Sisi approves anti-terrorism law setting up special courts’, Reuters, 16 August 2015, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/16/us-egypt-security-lawmaking-idUSKCN0QL0TU20150816 (accessed 20 October 2015).

3. From now I will use the terms Muslim Sisterhood, Muslim Sisters, Sisterhood, MS or Sisters, interchangeably.

4. Given the current political situation in Egypt, for which MB members are routinely subjected to scrutiny, repression, and violence, only the names of these women who wished to have their identities revealed will be used in this paper. In all other cases, only the initials of their names will appear.

5. Here the use of the term radicalization is not to be intended as the adoption from the part of women of militant activism, neither violent or radical ideology, but it only refers to ‘the strengthening of the gender identity of the Muslim Sisterhood as independent political actors vis-à-vis the Egyptian regime and the male-dominated MB movement’.

6. ‘The National Council for Women denounces use of children at pro-Morsi sit-ins’, al-Haram, 2 August 2013, available at http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/78142.aspx (accessed 29 October 2014).

7. ‘Nisaa’ did al-inqilaab: Isaa’at al-Tallaawy limu‘atasimaat Raabi‘a, qurbaan tuqaddimuhi lisaydatiha Suzaan Mubaarak’, Women against the Coup: al-Tallawy offends the Rabaa protesters … paying lip-service to her mistress Susanne Mubarak’, el-Mokhales, 2 August 2013, available at http://elmokhalestv.com/index/details/id/66845 (accessed 4 April 2014).

8. ‘al-muw’tamar al-taa’sisiyy al-auwali liharakat nisaa’ did al-inqilaab’, ‘First Conference of the Women against the Coup Movement’, YaQiyyn TV, 14 July 2014, min. 1.09, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHfPEZZe_34 (accessed 6 April 2014), the author thanks Shaima Omar and Shaima Magdy for helping with the transcript and translation of this speech.

9. RASSD and YaQiyyn are among the common channels were MS videos were broadcast.

10. ‘anthaakaat did almarrat: yyum 100 taht hakm al-Sisi’ – ‘Violations against women: 100 days under the rule of al-Sisi’, (Muslim Sisterhood report presented by Aya Alaa Hosny at a conference of the WAC held at the premises of al-Istiqlal Party, Cairo, 2 September 2014) [unpublished] The report does not include the numbers of al-Azhar female students arrested or killed since the start of the 2014/2015 academic year.