Part one : Interview with Hazem Kandil – Inside the Brotherhood (Part One)
We started by discussing the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and the contemporary Egyptian context (Part One). Regarding your research more specifically, you have built on an impressive set of data –years of observations at a Brotherhood mosque in California, hours of audio/video material, long-term immersion within a group of Muslim Brothers in Cairo, extensive interviews. To what extent does this innovative methodology and ‘insider’ perspective fill a gap in the literature?
While studying the Brotherhood in different ways since 2000, I realised that, by reading material written on the Brotherhood or reading material written by the Brotherhood (books, pamphlets and so on), or even by interviewing Brothers, you don’t get much insight into the organization itself. This can be explained by the fact that they are very self-conscious and their message is very systematic. No matter how hard you try to shake them away from their talking points, they get back to them. Since I was not making any breakthrough, I decided to abandon the project for a while, out of frustration.
Then something unexpected happened. Through my previous research with them, some Brothers remembered that I was interested in ideologies, and it was a period (2008) when they were trying to build several national unity fronts within the Egyptian opposition and wanted to learn more about the ideologies of other parties: liberalism, communism, nationalism, and their history in the Muslim world. They had very rudimentary understanding of these matters and wanted to be able to speak intelligently about them. So I started giving lectures at the house of a Brother and, after a while, I came up with this idea of an ethnography. When I explained to them that ethnography entails hanging out with them and taking notes, and maybe publishing them one day, they absolutely rejected the idea! But this time, I was adamant to get something out of this relationship and thought about adjusting the conventional ethnography method: I would hang out with them but none of my observations would be published. And whenever I decided to wrap up the project, I would come back to conduct interviews, like anyone does, and only what would be said in interviews would be published.
This arrangement worked well for both of us. On the one hand, without the ethnography I would never have known what to ask and who to ask. Now, I could ask an interviewee: ‘remember two years ago, at this person’s house, when this person said that, what do you think it means?” At the same time, pledging not to publish any observations made them more at ease. I started in 2008, very slowly, mingling with Brothers, meeting their friends and family, going to shopping malls and the cinema, playing football, spending late nights in heated discussion… but they were still mostly thinking about winning me over to their cause. Then the 2011 revolt happened and experiencing this transformative event together finally broke the ice. Some people, of course, remained reserved, but many of them became more open – for two main reasons. One group became drunk with victory, and felt that – since they had triumphed –, they had nothing more to hide and should share their methods and success story. The other group, on the contrary, was becoming more disillusioned with the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership because of the way they had acted during the revolt, especially during the fatal street battles on Mohammed Mahmoud street (in November 2011). It was a very traumatic moment, with the interior ministry brutally attacking the demonstrators using nerve gas and the Brotherhood ordering its members to turn a blind eye to preserve their chance of participating in the coming Parliamentary elections. So it is important to stress that my ethnographic methodological innovation could only have worked in a very specific historical context, under a very particular set of circumstances.
With this methodological shift in mind, could you outline your main findings, regarding socialisation patterns for instance?
My findings touch upon the core of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, what I call ‘religious determinism’, and how this ideology is inculcated in individual members. Here, Bourdieu and Foucault are useful to grasp a process that is hard to trace through regular interviews, a process of producing a certain type of social subject. Foucault talks about producing subjectivities and the structuring of their field of actions. As for Bourdieu, he discusses ‘habitus’, that is, instilling certain cognitive, emotional, and even physical dispositions and temperaments. These processes happen through what Foucault termed ‘disciplining technologies’ and what Bourdieu described as ‘field socialisation’. It is about mundane ways of interpreting and dealing with the world in everyday life rather than outright ideological indoctrination where you are told that ‘to be a good comrade, you should do so and so’. It is much more subtle and it happens largely unconsciously in family meetings, normal conversations and interactions with friends during football matches, fieldtrips, etc.
But like any social process, the historical context and the concrete characteristics of the field are very influential. This is why my ethnography was complemented by an in-depth historical study of the development of the Brotherhood as an organisation. Foucault talks about genealogy and Bourdieu emphasizes genesis: understanding the history of the movement and the literature it produced is essential. The writings of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb and dozens of leaders and rank-and-file members could only be understood in light of what was actually happening within the movement itself.
Regarding the key concept of your book, religious determinism, could you explain to what extent it sheds lights on the Brotherhood’s ideology and strategy?
This brings me to another element of this project. Scholars studying Islamist movements are not necessarily well versed in Islamic theology and jurisprudence, which is something they are not expected to know as sociologists or anthropologists or political scientists. However, since I have been exposed to some extent to Muslim religious sciences, the Brotherhood’s ideology struck me as radically different from mainstream Sunni Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Of course, other people had perceived new elements before. Asef Bayat and Sami Zubaida, for instance, analysed how the Brotherhood developed innovative ideas to deal with the modern state, civil society, national economy, etc. However, I saw something more fundamentally different.
Far from being just a modern reflection of mainstream Sunni jurisprudence, Islamism as an ideology, first formulated by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, actually inverted mainstream Sunni Islamic theology and jurisprudence on its head, it reversed the traditional understanding of the relationship between religion and public life. According to traditional Islamic thought, for Muslims to be successful in this world they have to use the same material means as anyone else. For instance, if you want to be wealthy, you need to become a successful entrepreneur, merchant, etc. If you want to win a war, you need to raise a formidable army. And if in addition to this earthly success, you are also concerned about your salvation and the eternity of your soul, then you take on the added burden of abiding by Islamic laws and morality. Abiding by those religious junctions, in fact, makes it slightly harder for you to become successful in this world, and it is because of this difficulty that you will be rewarded in the hereafter. But the Muslim Brotherhood reversed this reasoning by saying: if you are moral and if you abide by religious laws, then you will be successful in this world. In other words, by following Islamic morality and sharia, you become politically strong and militarily invincible and economically prosperous and so on.
There is something very deterministic here, in a way reminiscent of Marx and Hegel. Marx proposed that if certain historical material conditions were fulfilled, almost automatically the exploited classes would revolt. As for Hegel, history also unfolds dialectically, but through the ideas and actions of world-historic personalities. Islamists advocate a similarly deterministic pattern: once certain religious conditions were fulfilled, then you invite divine intervention on your behalf in the worldly sphere. What they are required to do, therefore, is to produce a pious society, and then worldly change would inevitably follow.
This concept of religious determinism helps us see the Brotherhood’s discourses and actions in a different light. For instance, people keep asking them: ‘what are your positions towards women?’ and ‘will you force them to wear the veil?’ And the Brothers would say to every journalist and every scholar: ‘we will never do that’. During private meetings, however, they do envision a society where every woman wears the veil, and those statements sound hypocritical. But this is not the case. They actually believe that once they create a pious society, by God’s grace, everyone would invariably see the light and women would voluntarily wear the veil. The same logic applies to foreign policy: people were surprised by President Mohamed Morsi’s friendliness towards the Israelis and by his infamous letter to Shimon Perez, where he addressed him as a dear friend. Everyone thought he was being hypocritical or opportunist, hiding a secret agenda that would come out at some point. But this is not the case. When Essam al-Erian, deputy leader of the Brotherhood’s political party, said ‘One day Israel would just dissolve’, nobody understood what he meant, except for Brothers of course. He meant that if they were successful in creating a pious society in Egypt, then Israel would just dissolve by a series of divine acts. Amr Khaled, the now famous televangelist who was in the past responsible for youth indoctrination within the Muslim Brotherhood, used to say that Jerusalem would be liberated when the last girl would don the veil in Egypt. Once you understand religious determinism, it makes more sense: Brothers are not inconsistent, they are not hypocritical, they are not opportunists. They believe that if they continue working on society, then God will take care of the rest.
It is important to stress here that this ideology is the product of a specific historical context, which was the abolition of the caliphate in 1924. Such abolition was simply unthinkable from a Muslim standpoint. For fourteen hundred years, the caliphate was militarily defeated and politically weakened but was never abolished. In jurisprudence, this idea was not even entertained and people outside the Muslim world sometimes fail to realise how traumatic and unprecedented it was. Hasan al-Banna and his associates, after seeing the caliphate collapse, just looked around and thought about the way forward. They correctly understood that they were so weak materially that they had nothing to convincingly present as a solution (as nationalists had later tried and failed). The way out was to focus on the only thing they have not yet been dispossessed of: their morality – and God would take care of the rest. Contrary to the nationalists, Hasan al-Banna believed that relying on material means would not be enough; without God’s help, Muslim would never be able to overtake the West.
How does religious determinism account for what happened in Rabaa?
First, religious determinism helps understand what happened before Rabaa, why the Muslim Brotherhood did not have any concrete solutions to the country’s problems, nor even a clear strategy about how to stay in power. They thought that the only thing they needed to do was to work on society, and they came to power completely unprepared. A striking example is the economic field – what people in Egypt are really concerned about. During a conversation with a Brother, I was asking him about their economic platform and he would keep referring to common places, ‘we will fight corruption’, ‘we will become more efficient’, ‘we will create wealth’. When I tried to corner him, he finally said: ‘well, what was the economic program of the family al-Saud? They brought people back to religion and they woke up one day and found themselves swimming in oil’. This is exactly what religious determinism is and what was their economic program was. Egyptians just needed to wait patiently until Brothers achieve their hoped-for cultural transformation, or perhaps we could call it social re-reengineering.
Once in power, they committed a second mistake. Concerned with staying in power long enough to transform society and bring about a radical cultural change, they decided that the best way to buy time was to worm themselves into the good graces of Egypt’s most powerful institutions, the military and the security, thinking: ‘If they accept us on the table, as a junior partner, if we promise not to upset them and not to question their privileges and their repression, they will allow us to transform culture and society’. Consequently, the Brotherhood was adamant to control the ministry of culture, the ministry of education, and the ministry of information, but little else. Ostracising the civil activists that brought about the popular revolt in 2011 was key. These activists had become a nuisance to everyone. Their continued agitation infuriated the military and security. And their dogged secularism was anathema to the Brotherhood.
These two mistakes – having nothing concrete to offer the people, and seeking the goodwill of the military and security by sacrificing the revolutionaries – proved fatal when the old regime decided to remove them from power because now the old regime found allies among the revolutionaries and among people disappointed by the Brotherhood’s lack of program. And this gave the counterrevolution some legitimacy.
What happened in Rabaa specifically could only be understood from the viewpoint of religious determinism. Brothers believed that after working on society for so long, God had finally decided to reward, to crown their eight-and-a-half-decade struggle. They believed that God made the revolution for them (the general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood said publicly ‘God made this revolution’) and what God has decreed no mortal could undo – least of all, a petty general of Sisi’s ilk. They saw the attempt to remove Morsi as a final test from God. ‘Obviously, we won’t be overthrown from power, but with our president kidnaped, those of us who give up will demonstrate that they don’t believe in God’s grace, those worried about us being outnumbered and outgunned will demonstrate that they still calculate things materially rather than spiritually’. For the Brotherhood, this was a test of faith. Though a number of brothers I talked to in Rabaa would say ‘don’t you see the battalions and tanks?’ people would dismiss their warnings, insisting that those who stay true to the cause and believe in their hearts that a divine miracle was shorty at hand were the chosen ones, the ones who will reign over the newly resurgent Islamist society. A recurring theme in Rabaa’s discussions, unreported in the foreign press because I suppose it sounded too exotic, was that ‘We are like the Hebrews with Moses on the beaches of the Red Sea surrounded by Pharaoh and his soldiers – i.e. Sisi and his men– and doubting our victory although Moses promised that those who keep faith with God will be delivered and will cross to the promised land – the Islamic Egypt they we have been dreaming of all that time’.
And, in an incredible historical coincidence, the sit-in in Rabaa coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, that is the month that witnessed most of the Muslims’ early military victories and the month during which miracles happen. So you can only imagine being in that mind-set for forty days, holding constant vigil, fasting all day, praying all night, hearing all these omens and holy visions relayed from the central stage, and then watching helplessly the brutal clearing of Rabaa in mid-August.
To conclude on a more contemporary perspective, what is currently going on within the Brotherhood?
Interestingly, religious determinism has not been questioned. Going back to Foucault and Bourdieu, it is so much in their temperaments and subjectivities that it cannot be questioned; for them it is not an ideology, it is the nature of things, the way the world is. So how did they explain what happened? A small group of Brothers decided that the battle is still continuing, that they are still being tested but that the test is not for only forty days but for three, four, five years. And if you visit Cairo right now, you will numerous graffiti declaring that ‘God’s victory is near’. For them, it is an on-going battle: God wants them to continue to believe that He will overcome these material hurdles on their behalf if they continue to resist.
But a big part of the Muslim Brotherhood went back to the old style of understanding religious determinism: ‘Obviously, we were not ready, we grabbed power prematurely. Since God would never let His soldiers down, if He appears to have abandoned us, this means that we had not merited his grace and we need to work more on the process of cultivation, tarbiyya’. Both groups somehow blame the leaders: the first group for not continuing to fight, and the second for pushing them prematurely in politics. And this is why the latter keeps telling people: ‘Forget about what you’ve heard in Rabaa. These are radical people and don’t represent us. We are the people you have known for eighty-five years’. They hope to retreat to their closed society and hopefully come back again in ten or fifteen years, once they are ready.
