In Egypt, the house for Political dissent is as small as most can bear in mind.

A decade on from the Rabaa bloodbath, when a minimum of 900 protesters had been killed demonstrating in opposition to the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi in a army coup, present President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi – the person who eliminated Morsi – has little home opposition to fret about.

As for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the group that Morsi was a member of when he assumed the presidency for a yr in 2012, they nonetheless seem politically weak, with divisions over what the subsequent steps must be.

Even the house outdoors Egypt for exiled members of the MB to function has reduced in size, with a rapprochement between Turkey and Egypt which means that Ankara is much less welcoming to its territory getting used as a base for anti-Sisi campaigns.

It’s a far cry from the MB’s electoral victories within the quick aftermath of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, which overthrew longtime President Hosni Mubarak.

In the end, this has led to questions being posed in regards to the organisation’s persevering with legacy as a political pressure.

“Issues are trying slightly bleak for the MB proper now, however they’ve overcome comparable crises earlier than,” Joas Wagemakers, an affiliate professor of Islamic and Arabic research at Utrecht College and an MB specialist, informed Al Jazeera.

Wagemakers believes the MB continues to be related – though it has much less house to function within the altering politics of the Center East, he says, it might all the time increase operations in Western nations.

The MB elected Salah Abdulhaq in March as its new appearing Normal Information following the passing of Ibrahim Munir who was based mostly in London. Abdulhaq saved a low profile for many years, which many hypothesised might have performed a giant function in his being chosen by an organisation looking for a brand new begin.

Based on Amr El Afifi, an MB specialist and one of many authors of Damaged Bonds: The Existential Disaster of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the group has grappled with three concurrent crises: an id disaster, a legitimacy disaster, and a membership disaster.

“The organisation was formed by the successive repressive waves it endured, and thereby failed at many junctures to outline itself by itself phrases and provide a complete social and political outlook or manifesto,” argued El Afifi.

Al Jazeera contacted MB spokesperson Suhayb Abdel Maqsud for remark however no response was acquired.

Identification disaster

It may be argued that the MB’s almost 100-year-old texts don’t outline a transparent ideological platform on numerous points, together with political violence, girls’s place in society, and the function of minorities in a Muslim society. Proponents of this view say it has given rise to an inevitable break up between conservative and progressive members.

However, with some notable exceptions, the MB has by design averted taking clear stands on many points, like violence.

Regardless of the efforts of successive generations of MB leaders who wrote extensively in opposition to political violence, some members have interpreted foundational MB and Islamic texts in a different way.

The MB’s platform was ambiguous concerning using violence in the course of the lifetime of its founder Hasan al-Banna. Whereas he was in opposition to revolutions, he mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood would use “sensible pressure” if mandatory to realize its targets, defined El Afifi.

This ambiguity led some distinguished figures throughout the motion, at completely different factors in its lengthy historical past, to separate over using violence, with either side discovering arguments in al-Banna’s work to help their view.

“If the MB desires to proceed to be viable, it should outline itself extra exactly. It can not live on as a one-stop store for every part Islamic,” El Afifi mentioned.

For the reason that toppling of Morsi, who subsequently handed away in jail in 2019, the MB has struggled with this dilemma.

Mohamed Kamal, one of many leaders of the group’s Excessive Administrative Committee, designed a three-stage plan of focused violence in opposition to the Egyptian authorities. Senior members of the organisation rejected this, adhering to the dominant stance in opposition to political violence.

“The 2013 break up throughout the MB cleaved it into two camps: Those that have given up on the Egyptian authorities and those that nonetheless see hope in peaceable change,” Wagemakers defined.

“The MB is at present liable to radicalisation resulting from state repression, however I don’t suppose that this radicalisation will attain the extent of the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties,” Wagemakers informed Al Jazeera.

Within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, he defined, the MB had break up into two camps underneath the strain of the state’s repression and imprisonment of its members. One camp saved channels open with the federal government whereas the opposite noticed the one means ahead as direct violent confrontations with the rulers.

Legitimacy disaster

The id disaster overlaps with a legitimacy disaster. The brand new technology of younger members who’ve endured repression and jail sentences really feel their experiences put them on an equal footing with the older technology of the mid-Twentieth century.

This case makes it troublesome for youthful members to simply accept the ethical authority of the previous guard, Wagemakers mentioned, whereas the MB prioritises “ethical authority”, insisting on selecting older leaders.

“They had been jailed and tortured by the [Gamal Abdel Nasser] authorities,” Wagemakers mentioned. “This offers them huge ethical authority throughout the organisation. These are the members who skilled the mihna (ordeal) of the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.”

However many of those older leaders should not have contemporary concepts that may placate a stressed youthful technology, thus creating additional fissures throughout the organisation.

El Afifi sees this mihna-based legitimacy as out of date, particularly since youthful members have already skilled their very own ordeal over the previous decade. As a substitute, he believes, the MB should discover new types of legitimacy whether it is to take care of its ethical authority over its members.

Organisational disaster

The third disaster going through the MB is the organisational blow it suffered as a result of detention, killing and exile of a lot of its leaders.

“Modifications within the political and social context have rendered the normal recruitment and retention mechanisms of the MB out of date,” El Afifi mentioned.

The geographical dispersion of MB members provides a layer of organisational complexity the management has not been capable of deal with, given the lack of institutional and organisational reminiscence it entails.

As a substitute, in accordance with El Afifi and his co-author Abdelrahman Ayyash in Damaged Bonds, second-tier, inexperienced members have risen by the ranks in what’s described as “disaster promotions”.

The management vacuum led to junior college students taking up immense organisational obligations with little oversight from extra senior members, which explains the power of some youthful members to make use of violent means with out a lot oversight from the historic management.

Regardless of the challenges going through the MB and the awful image drawn by students of political Islamist actions, Wagemakers affirms that so long as there are socially conservative societies with corrupt and autocratic leaders within the Center East, individuals will need Islamist opposition teams that try to make issues higher.

“The MB is down, however not out,” he mentioned.