With the Fall of 2012, Legitimacy of the Muslim Brotherhood Had Collapsed!!

In the New Egypt, the legitimacy of the Muslim Brotherhood had fallen within only six months of their assumption of the presidency. Morsi came to power in June 2012 through popular elections. The Muslim Brotherhood, for whom I had in error voted. Soon the Brotherhoodization of post-Mubarak Egypt began in earnest.

But out of illegitimate over-reach, their legitimacy through the ballot box, even if verifiable, was gone with the wind. Within only 6 months!! Their collapse had nothing to do with El-Sisi. It had to do with structural and ideological defects which brought their reign, in June 2013, to ultimate ruin.

Here is how!!

• Having joined the January 2011 Revolution late, a lateness due to their fear of an ultimate Mubarak triumph, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) made a premature announcement. "The MB will not field any candidate for the Office of President."
• But later "the Guidance Bureau" (Maktab Al-Irshad), their politburo, changed course. Their Deputy Supreme Guide, moneybags Khairat Al-Shatter was to compete for that highest office against General Shafik.
• A quirk, or a quibble, or a twist in Egyptian electoral law, affecting the qualification of a presidential candidate, disqualified Al-Shatter. Constitutionally, the candidate for that post must be "an Egyptian born to Egyptian parents, none of whom nor the candidate have the nationality of another State." El-Shatter's mother had held an American citizenship, hence the disqualification of her son.
• The near equivalence of this Egyptian constitutional provision is to be found in the American Constitution. Its Article II, Section 1, paragraph 5 begins as follows:

"No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." A provision which prompted crazy Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party presidential candidate to try to delegitimize the Obama presidency. By the nefarious efforts of "the Birther Movement" which claimed that Obama was born outside the U.S.

• So the MB in Egypt, searching for a replacement for the disqualified El-Shatter, found in Mohamed Morsi the person who would lead the New Egypt through the elections of June 2012. And Morsi won.

End of the story of legitimacy of the headship of the New Egypt? No!! In fact that beginning was woefully defective. President Morsi was elected while the new Constitution was still being drafted. The cart was thus placed before the horse. With Al-Itihadiyah Palace (equivalent to the American White House) now occupied by a leader of the MB, the Brotherhood's appetite for garnering more power through accretion became insatiable. Inordinately greedy!!

Fancying Egypt, at that point, an Islamic Emirate in the making (Supreme Guide Mahdi Akef said "To Hell with Egypt (Toz Fi Masr)," the constituent assembly began to frame an Islamic Constitution. What began as a group, on whose membership were all shades of post-Mubarak political thinking, soon turned into an Ikhwan rubber stamp of the Bureau of Guidance. The MB, with Morsi ensconced at Al-Itihadiya Palace, saw to it that liberals, Copts, women, and any secular thinking individuals were impediments to their long march to the Islamic Emirate of Egypt.

And with the non-MB elements abandoning the efforts of keeping Egypt a secular habitat, the Islamic Constitution was readied for a plebiscite a few days before that vote in December 2012. No national debate; no transparency; no voicing of any opposition to that illegal take-over by the Brotherhood under the guise of Islamism. The battle cry of "Islam Is the Solution" became the entire ideology of a movement. A movement which felt emboldened by one important fact: The Armed Forces, as seen as of January 25, 2011, shall not intervene.

In spite of the MB confidence in the ultimate success of their coup (from the ballot box to an Islamic dictatorship), Morsi declared himself in November 2012 that he was immune from any accountability before the law. His move, reminiscent of Hitler becoming Germany's Fuhrer, as an epitaph of the Weimar Republic, was not contested by even the moderate elements of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not even the judiciary, a venerable institution with a glorious tradition based on a sophisticated fusion between Islamic law (Sharia) and the Napoleonic code. That institution was smitten into submission by the instrumentality of hordes encouraged to, among other things, besiege the Supreme Constitutional Court.

That Court had committed an act unforgiven by the resurrected Islamists: the nullification of the legitimacy of one third of the Egyptian parliament, convened as a vehicle for the recalibration of Egypt to fit in the Brotherhood mold.

By the time the Islamic constitution, which had no provision for the eventuality of recall of the President, was rushed for approval, other moves have been put in place by the Muslim Brotherhood:

• The de facto lease of eastern Sinai to Hamas which, through tunnels as well as porous borders, had begun to shift its armed confrontation with Israel to Egypt;
• The borrowing of the Iranian pattern of the Revolutionary Guard to create an Egyptian military institution as a parallel to the regular army;
• The increasing hostility towards the Copts and the Shiis, which expressed itself in attacks and hooliganism;
• The changing pattern of Egypt's foreign relations in the Middle East through enhanced amity towards Ordogan's Turkey, and Pakistan which was being increasingly Talibanised (apostasy laws; harsh treatment of women; and anti-minorities practises);
• Threat of military intervention in Ethiopia for its plan to build Al-Nahdha Dam on the Blue Nile;
• The downgrading of Al-Azhar as the historic citadel of Islamic learning framed into the ideology of tolerance, inclusiveness, and outreach to other faiths and creeds;
• Declaring Egypt's historic monuments as un-Islamic idols which cannot be tolerated by an Islamic State; and
• The systematic weeding out of Egyptian diplomats and consular officials for being "insufficiently Islamic;"
• Tourism was discouraged;
• The arts, the film industry; the vibrant music, the theater were looked upon as suspect cultural deviations.

Against this background, whereby Egypt of 7000 years was being turned on its head, 35 million Egyptians rose as a human wave of protest. The motto of the June 30, 2013 revolution was: "Go!!" (IRHAL).

But the Brotherhood had a different perspective: legitimacy (Shariyah) was being challenged, and its claimed majority among Egypt's nearly 100 million was the nuclear option to be used against the crowds in Tahrir and all over Egypt.

By this calculation, the Brotherhood wrote its own phasing out certificate:

• Morsi refused the entreaties of El-Sisi, the Defense Minister, to accord Egypt a new start: A new plebiscite on the presidency; rejoining the broad national secular forces to avert the horrible spector of civil war; and the avoidance of military intervention to keep the peace, especially that the Police forces have been maligned by the Morsi regime;
• A Road-Map aiming at having all sectors and ideologies in Egypt come together, had to be put in place even with the Brotherhood opting to stay outside the broad national consensus;
• The launching of a transitional government, headed by the jurist Adly Mansour, President of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court. This was met by the launching by the Brotherhood of the occupation of two main public squares in the heart of Cairo: Rabaa and Al-Nahdha. Those locations were declared by the Brotherhood "mini-emirates;"
• For 6 weeks (from July 3 to August 14, 2013), the appeals by the new transitional authorities for the sit-in participants to peacefully disband went unheeded. 
• In both Rabba and Al-Nahdha, crimes were committed, weapons were stored and at times used, foreign intervention was invited, and the banner of "Shariiyah (legitimacy)," though false, was unfurled.

Finally the new authorities had to move on these two locations, where exits of safe passage were repeatedly declared. Those defensive security measures were manipulated by the Brotherhood in its deceptive cry of victimhood.

The battle lines have thus changed as of August 14, 2013. Terrorism in Sinai, Cairo, and the western desert began in earnest. Yet the secular Constitution was enacted in 2014 followed by presidential elections which produced a winner: El-Sisi.

Facts are facts, hard to ignore, and impossible to contest. The Secular Constitution of 2014 provides in its Article 5 that: "The political system is based upon political and parties membership diversity, the peaceful transfer of power, separation of powers with checks and balances, the authority as based upon accountability, and respect of human rights and freedoms as provided in the Constitution."

None of these provisions has equivalents in the Islamic Constitution. The only provision stressed by the Muslim Brotherhood was: An emblem of two swords framing the Quran. With the words "Get Ready" at its base. Get ready for what? For so-called Islamic rule which limits the freedom of expression and the practice of faith to only Brotherhood adherents?


Egyptian laws and regulations whereby the Brotherhood was banned and declared a terror organization were enacted. But only after that organization had decided to take matters in its own hands. Regardless of the popular will, manifested massively from June 30 to July 4, 2013. Prior to those fatal dates, the Muslim Brotherhood stubbornly refused to join the process of Egypt's rebirth after 60 years of military rule.

Nothing can ring more hollow than the claim that "legitimacy" resided only in an Islamist dictatorial rule. A rule raising false facades, impugning the legitimacy of the New Egypt which had brought peace to the Egyptian street, and a new sense of urgency to make up for lost time.

It is not by the constant repetition by media that the present Egyptian government is the outcome of a putsch. It is the result of the vanquishing of a putsch by the Brotherhood in whose terrorist revanchist face one could only see an ISIS affiliate.

The Muslim Brotherhood has no claim to legitimacy in Egypt as of the Fall of 2012. That is when it first put Morsi, its symbols, its ethos above the law. Such collapse is nearly impossible to repair. For it goes to the real core, beyond the facade of the mere use of faith for sordid ends of power.