Washington Institute for Near East Policy analyst Eric Trager has written an article for Foreign Affairs analyzing what he sees as the breakdown of internal discipline within the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The article, titled “Can the Muslim Brotherhood Survive“, begins:
January 17, 2016 Muslim Brothers call Mahmoud Ezzat the ‘Iron Man.’ The stoic 71-year-old deputy supreme guide earned that nickname on account of his lifelong struggle on behalf of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, including over a decade spent in Egyptian jails, during which he burnished his reputation for toughness as one of the foremost enforcers of discipline within the organization’s rigid hierarchy. Following the July 2013 ouster of Egypt’s first elected president, Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, Ezzat’s legend within the organization grew as he evaded the crackdown that landed most top Brotherhood leaders in prison, and then hid within Egypt even as other Muslim Brothers fled into exile. ‘He has the ability to hide because he was imprisoned prior to this for about ten years,’ Brotherhood youth activist Amr Farrag said during an October 2014 interview in Istanbul. ‘He can sit for something like five years without speaking to anyone, sitting in only a closed room. He can do this.’ Farrag added that Ezzat asked his Brotherhood colleagues not to contact him, presumably to avoid detection within Egypt.
Ezzat’s strategy for self-preservation ultimately worked: Egyptian security forces did not capture him. But in his absence, the Brotherhood’s internal discipline collapsed, and a severe internal rift exploded into the open in the spring of 2015. After initially attempting to resolve these divisions from within Egypt, Ezzat suddenly reappeared in Turkey in mid-November and declared himself the Brotherhood’s acting supreme guide. Yet the Iron Man had lost his touch: Many Muslim Brothers rejected his power play, and the rift has deepened considerably in the past few months.
Ezzat’s failure to assert his control reflects a significant change in the organization’s internal culture. For much of the past two decades, the Brotherhood was dominated by a hardline faction known as the ‘Qutbists’—followers of the radical Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, whose call for global jihad later inspired al Qaeda and other terrorist movements. Like other Brotherhood leaders of his generation, Ezzat was imprisoned with Qutb prior to Qutb’s execution for plotting to overthrow Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government in 1966. Although Ezzat downplays the more extreme elements of Qutb’s writings, he and his fellow Qutbists embrace Qutb’s call for creating a ‘vanguard’ that would ‘keep itself somewhat aloof’ from the broader society until it can establish Islamist rule. Until the January 2011 Arab Spring uprising that ended Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign, the Qutbists viewed the Brotherhood’s pursuit of power as a long-term goal, and worked in the interim to build an ideologically cohesive organization by recruiting only the most dedicated followers and preparing them for power when the time was ripe. The Qutbists typically argued against political cooperation with non-Islamists, fearing that doing so would force the Brotherhood to compromise on its Islamist principles.”
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The article goes on to identify Gehad El-Haddad, the son of the important Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam El-Haddad, as a supporter of the hardline Egyptian Brotherhood faction. In August 2013, the GMBDW reported on the arrest of Gehad El-Haddad by Egyptian security forces. At the time, we noted that although we were the first and only Western source known to have reported on El-Haddad’s employment by the Clinton Foundation, mainstream media reports mentioning this employment failed to credit the GMBDW. In March 2014, we reported that Gehad El-Haddad was sentenced to life imprisonment in a 2103 case known as “the media trial.”