5 - Struggle for Leadership (2001–2011)

Summary

This chapter looks at the Brotherhood’s evolution in the decade after 9/11, and how debates about principles gradually morphed into an identity crisis concerning the organization as a whole. Against the setting of an unstable global security environment, marked first by a US-led ‘global war on terror’ and then by US-sponsored projects for the ‘democratization’ of the Middle East, the chapter highlights the debates between the followers of the Tilmisani school on the one hand, and the vanguardist faction on the other. The chapter also introduces the youth members of the Muslim Brotherhood who, in the context of an increasingly potent social protest movement, found themselves increasingly at odds with their leadership. The chapter ends with the contentious Guidance Office elections of the winter of 2009, when the vanguard leaders asserted total control of the Brotherhood’s executive office. Based on Oral History interviews with key Brotherhood members from across all organizational ranks, memoires and available online material, original texts published by the Brotherhood, an analysis of the Brotherhood-related diplomatic correspondence of the US Embassy in Cairo as published by Wikileaks, and a reading of the available scholarly literature, the chapter recounts how the Muslim Brotherhood, while meandering through an unstable global security environment, became further entrenched within its own internal bickering and squabbles to yield a weakened organization unready to meet the challenges of the Egyptian uprising of 2011.