The Thirteenth Anniversary of Egypt's Revolution Against the Muslim Brotherhood

Spread the Word

By Dr. Sadek Al-Salemi

Last week, Egypt marked the thirteenth anniversary of the June 30 Revolution, an uprising many Egyptians regard as the largest popular revolution of the twenty-first century. By Egyptian estimates, more than thirty million people filled the streets, squares, and public plazas of the country on June 30, 2013. Those millions held their ground for three days until the Egyptian armed forces answered their calls, joined them, and fulfilled their central demand: ending the Muslim Brotherhood’s control over power.

The Brotherhood had come to rule Egypt in the wake of President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak’s resignation and his transfer of power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. The military council governed through a one-year transition, then handed power to the Brotherhood after presidential elections held before the new constitution had been approved. In my view, the council was compelled to do so by the pressure the Brotherhood exerted through mass mobilization in the streets, and by external pressure as well. The group drew strength from an American administration that at the time supported, endorsed and funded what was called the Arab Spring, a project that aimed to unseat the Arab presidents of the day and carry the Muslim Brotherhood to power, whether by force of arms or through superficial electoral experiments of the kind Egypt and Yemen witnessed.

The Brotherhood contested those presidential elections before any constitution was in place. Many Egyptians remain convinced, and accounts circulating at the time claimed, that the count favored the candidate running against the Brotherhood’s nominee, and that the group warned the military council it would flood the streets with sit-ins, paralyze public life, and even resort to armed force if the victory of its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was not announced.

The military council also knew what the Brotherhood had assembled on the ground. Egyptian security assessments at the time spoke of more than fifteen thousand foreign fighters affiliated with assorted terrorist groups massed in Sinai. During the chaos of 2011, the group had stormed Egyptian prisons and, by official Egyptian accounts, freed more than fifty-three thousand members of terrorist organizations and convicts in terrorism, state security and serious criminal cases. The council understood the scale of the armed power the Brotherhood possessed and the depth of the external backing it enjoyed. Refusing to hand over power in those circumstances would almost certainly have dragged Egypt into civil war, as was happening in Syria and Libya at that very moment.

Morsi assumed the presidency, and the moment he took office was the first moment he violated the constitution and the law under which he had been elected. Instead of taking the constitutional oath before the House of Representatives, he went to Tahrir Square, where his supporters had gathered, and declared he would swear the oath before the masses, recognizing no legitimacy but theirs. Violations of every foundation of democratic practice followed. The elected president was a facade for the rule of the group. Real authority lay with the Guidance Bureau, the highest executive body in the Brotherhood’s organizational structure, and above all with its deputy chairman, Khairat El-Shater, who directed affairs inside the movement and inside the presidential palace alike. He issued the orders, directives and appointments; the president’s role was reduced to giving legal and official form to the group’s decisions. On more than one occasion Morsi appeared in the media receiving instructions from the Supreme Guide and members of the Guidance Bureau and relaying them to the public; in some instances he strained to catch the whispers of group members in his ear while their voices carried clearly to the audience in the hall.

Brotherhood figures boasted openly that they had come to rule Egyptians for no less than five hundred years. The boast was matched by a takeover of state facilities and institutions through the appointment of members and loyalists across every sector. Loyalty to the group became the sole criterion for public office, regardless of qualifications or experience. In short, the Brotherhood purged the institutions of the state of anyone outside its ranks, from the presidency down to the heads of village youth centers, passing through the cabinet, the governorates, the directorates and the local administrations. So complete was this standard that fugitives from the prison breaks, men convicted in terrorism cases, were installed in senior and sensitive positions of state.

It can fairly be said that in its single year in power the Brotherhood stamped its character on every aspect of Egyptian life, and that the “Brotherhoodization” of the state reached every sector but two: the army and the judiciary. Those two institutions escaped capture, but not attack. Both were targeted by systematic campaigns designed to disable their roles, distort their standing, and prepare the ground for their dismantling.

The army was targeted first at the institutional level. The Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff were dismissed in violation of the constitutional declaration governing the transition, which required the president to consult the Supreme Military Council on the appointment or removal of the defense minister. Morsi removed both men without consultation and appointed a new minister, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who at the time stood two ranks short of qualifying for the post; the president promoted him to full general by virtue of the position so that his rank would satisfy the legal requirement. The appointment breached both the constitutional declaration and the army’s own laws and regulations. The Brotherhood believed the new minister was either one of its own or loyal to it, judging by his evident piety. At the field level, terrorist formations aligned with the group waged a relentless campaign against the army, its personnel, its headquarters and its barracks, and the toll of that war ran into the hundreds. Yet the Brotherhood’s political leadership, in the person of the president, issued strict instructions barring the army from operations against the very groups attacking it. The restriction reached the point of preventing a military operation to free dozens of kidnapped soldiers and officers; Morsi declared that the army was responsible for the safety of the kidnappers as well as the kidnapped. In the end, the abducted men were released through a mediation committee headed by the president and staffed by members of the Brotherhood. Alongside the attacks came an aggressive media campaign against the army and its leaders: threats, rumors, and a sustained effort to tarnish its image and diminish its national role.

The second institution the Brotherhood failed to capture, and therefore assailed, was the judiciary. At the institutional level, the president issued a constitutional declaration immunizing his decisions from judicial review and placing himself beyond all accountability, an assault on the separation of powers that is the essence of any democratic system and a violation of the constitution and the laws of the judiciary. He then dismissed the Prosecutor General. Under Egyptian judicial law, as in legal systems the world over, the Prosecutor General represents the people and cannot be removed by the executive that appointed him. The president removed him anyway. Alongside these measures, Brotherhood members and supporters mounted a ferocious media and street campaign against the judiciary, led by the president himself, to discredit the courts, impugn their integrity and accuse their judges of corruption. It culminated in demonstrations that besieged the Supreme Constitutional Court and attacked it with Molotov cocktails.

Through that year of Brotherhood rule, the group spared no effort to control the institutions of the state, and no effort to dismantle those it could not control. The Egyptian people answered with something the Brotherhood had not planned for. Its violent, exclusionary and narrowly partisan practices alienated every segment of society, and instead of the division the group intended, a national alignment took shape: the Egyptian people on one side, the Brotherhood on the other. Through oppression, repression and threats, the people did not submit. They held to the constitution and the law as their peaceful weapons.

For all its seizure of the state, the Brotherhood proved comprehensively unable to run it. It failed at the simplest tasks of domestic and foreign policy. It could not secure wheat, flour, fuel or electricity. The year of its rule was a year of unbroken crisis: queues that never ended at fuel stations and bakeries, household gas that vanished from the market, blackouts that grew longer, and an economic collapse that drove foreign currency reserves down to roughly fifteen billion dollars, barely enough to cover a few months of imports.

Politically, the group set itself against the whole of the Egyptian people, forcing through a constitution of unilateral character written to its own agenda and deaf to the aspirations of everyone else. Abroad, it subordinated Egypt’s sovereign decision-making to the interests of the Brotherhood’s international organization. National sovereignty receded, and Egyptian policy came to serve the group’s global project rather than the national interest. The Brotherhood, in effect, put Egypt itself up for auction.

As the crises deepened and Egyptians felt the catastrophic consequences of Brotherhood rule at home and abroad, they rose as one on June 30 and declared a sweeping popular revolution with a single goal: to uproot the group from power and return Egypt to its people. On July 3, 2013, that goal was achieved. The leaders, elites and religious and political figures of Egyptian society met with the leadership of the army and together announced the end of Brotherhood rule, closing a chapter that history will record among the darkest and most difficult Egypt has known since the first Pharaonic state.

Thirteen years on, the world has been catching up with that judgment. Egypt outlawed the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in 2013, and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Russia followed. In the past two years the circle has widened further: Jordan has banned the group outright, and the United States has designated its Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese and Sudanese branches as terrorist entities. It can now be said that much of the world has reached the same conclusion Egyptians reached thirteen years ago.