Egypt’s Sisi Rules by Fear—and Is Ruled by It

According to Nashat al-Daihi, the host of an Egyptian television program called “With Pen and Paper,” I am in the pay of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was not the only Egyptian outraged over my last column, which was about how Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ruined Egypt. Sisi’s online supporters poured forth an endless amount of whataboutism and personal insults on my Twitter—er, X—timeline for what seemed like days, revealing once again that all hope for thoughtful debate on social media was lost long ago.

The claim is absurd on its face. There is simply no way that the Muslim Brotherhood would pay me for anything based on who I am and what I have written about them. I don’t believe the group’s shtick and never have. They, like others in Egypt, are adept at leveraging the discourse of political reform in pursuit of an anti-democratic agenda.

Moreover, I am skeptical of the mythology that the Muslim Brotherhood has created around the immediate post-Hosni Mubarak era. There was more Brotherhood electoral chicanery and intimidation that went into its candidate Mohamed Morsi’s election to the presidency in 2012 than anyone cares to admit. Even if the Brotherhood had been less incompetent in its attempt to gain control of the state, I doubt Egypt would have been an Arab Spring success story.

Having written about Egypt for years, I’m used to this sort of thing by now, and my practice is usually to ignore such bile. But al-Daihi’s comment caught my eye. That’s because the accusation that Sisi’s critics are employees of the Muslim Brotherhood is symptomatic of two related problems that the Egyptian leader and his supporters have, for which they do not have any answers.

First, as I wrote in my previous column, there is a large, growing, and noticeable divergence between what the government promises Egyptians and how they experience everyday life. When people have the temerity to point this out, they are branded as supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood or, in the case of a large number of Egyptians, subjected to imprisonment and physical abuse. This ferocious response is a measure of how much Sisi and his supporters know and fear that there are many Egyptians who recognize this gap and its potentially destabilizing nature.

Second, and more important for our purposes here, is that despite Sisi’s best efforts, he still can’t get rid of the long shadow the Muslim Brotherhood continues to cast over Egyptian politics and society.

Of course, even well before the Sisi era, it was common for Egyptian officials to alternately appease and repress the Brotherhood. In the early 1940s, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahhas bent to the Brotherhood’s political pressure and cracked down on alcohol and prostitution while allowing the organization to publish its newspapers. A few years later, a new government cracked down on the Brotherhood—before yet another government resumed placating the group.

Gamal Abdel Nasser imprisoned thousands of Brotherhood leaders and members, let some of them out, and then imprisoned them again. His successor, Anwar el-Sadat—a onetime fellow traveler of the Brotherhood—released them and gave them the opportunity to publish and preach. However, they fell out over Sadat’s peace with Israel, and Egypt’s jails filled up with Brothers once again.

After Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Mubarak afforded the group the opportunity to resume its activities, believing that a higher profile for the Brothers in publishing, education, and civil society would draw support away from the extremists who had murdered Sadat. After about a decade, Mubarak determined he’d had enough and ordered the security services to bring the group to heel. Throughout this pattern of accommodation and confrontation, the Muslim Brotherhood remained an important political, social, and cultural actor in Egypt.

In recent years, both the repression of the Brotherhood and the allegation that the government’s critics are members of (or otherwise in the pay of) the group have become more pronounced and dangerous. That is because Sisi has sought to recast Egypt’s nationalist narrative by writing the Muslim Brotherhood out of it.

Nationalism doesn’t just occur spontaneously. It is conjured and imagined—and it is the result of concerted political projects. It is thus periodically subject to reinterpretation to suit political leaders’ needs. This is precisely what Sisi has done to portray the Brotherhood—whose origins, prestige, and worldview are firmly rooted in the Egyptian experience—as both violent and alien to the society from which it was born.

After the coup d’état that brought Sisi to power, parallel to the state-led media campaign that sought to create and sustain a reservoir of support for what was called Egypt’s “second revolution” was a drive to portray the Muslim Brotherhood as “fifth columnists.” The Brothers were routinely depicted as being agents of either the Qataris and/or the Turks.

At the same time, Sisi justified the violence he employed to suppress the Brothers on the grounds that the group was a terrorist organization. There was a time when the Brotherhood maintained a so-called secret apparatus or armed cadres, but they were dismantled long ago. Still, the Egyptian government made a direct link between the Brothers and Islamic State-like extremism. When analysts questioned the government’s narrative and its use of violence, they were routinely depicted in the Egyptian press as instruments of the Brotherhood. Put 100 Western Egypt watchers in a room and ask for a show of hands of people who have been accused of shilling for the Brothers, and I am certain a majority would respond affirmatively.

This brings us back to the leadership’s second problem for which it has no answer: Try as Sisi might to rewrite Egypt’s nationalist narrative, his effort to banish the Brotherhood from it is malarkey. The Brothers played an important role in some of the most important nationalist episodes of the 20th century. They agitated against the British occupation, and although they were initially positively disposed toward the Egyptian monarchy, they opposed King Farouk throughout much of the 1940s and early 1950s.

The Brotherhood was among the first groups to raise the alarm over Zionism and Jewish migration to Palestine. In the 1948 war between the new state of Israel and its neighbors, the Brothers fought (albeit ineffectively) against Israelis near Beersheba, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, though they did distinguish themselves by aiding thousands of Egyptian soldiers and officers stranded in the Faluja pocket—near the Gaza Strip—in the last stages of the conflict.

There was, however, another critical political dimension to the Brotherhood’s activism regarding Palestine. The group, consistent with Islamic reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, believed that the weakness of Muslim societies invited foreign intervention. Inasmuch as they and many others regarded Zionism an instrument of European colonialism, the Palestinian struggle against Israelis was seen as the same nationalist struggle that Egyptians were waging against the British.

The Brothers were not the only actors in these complex events, which spanned decades. There were, of course, the Wafd Party, the Free Officers, and a variety of others. But even as Sisi tries, you cannot deny the role that the Brotherhood plays in issues that were and remain critical to Egypt’s nationalist narrative.

In some ways, this is an old Egyptian story, where basic questions about society, governance, identity, and the country’s role in the world have long been contested. But because Egypt’s leaders rely mostly on fear and coercion to maintain political control, they are vulnerable to would-be political leaders who have answers to these questions.

Sisi can bring a lot of force and violence to bear, which is why accusations that someone is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or in the pay of the organization are so potent. Non-Islamist, peaceful Egyptian oppositionists have been hauled off to prison as a result, making it all the more difficult and dangerous for activists to pursue their agendas.

At the same time, the accusation is empty—mindless, even—a rote response to any and all criticism for a leader and his supporters, who are unable to conjure a coherent response to their critics. It is also the kind of response that political leaders use when they are afraid. Indeed, as much as Sisi rules by fear, he is ruled by it.