Washington Institute Fellow Eric Trager on Tuesday published an extensive analysis of the calculations seemingly being made by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as the country approaches the first anniversary of the July 2013 ouster of then-president Mohammed Morsi – whose Brotherhood-linked government had brought Egypt to brink of state disintegration – with Trager contrasting indicators that “the Brotherhood believes that it is winning” against objective evidence that “the Brotherhood isn’t winning at all — in fact, it’s at its weakest point in nearly four decades, and its notoriously rigid organization is in total disarray.”
The significance of the organization’s rigid, hierarchical structure had not always been appreciated by analysts. Trager had made a point long ago of emphasizing it as a potential weakness that potentially enabled the Egyptian military to decapitate and scatter the group, versus conventional wisdom that had held that the Brotherhood was too intimately interwoven into Egyptian life to be untangled by even a concentrated campaign. Subsequent empirical evidence has seemed to side with analysts who bucked the conventional wisdom and recognized the Brotherhood’s vulnerability.
Trager’s Tuesday article cited top leaders from the group expressing confusion as to who is currently setting policy, and more pointedly what the current policy actually is:
Within urban centers, the Brotherhood’s five-to-eight-member cells, known as “families,” haven’t held their weekly meetings since Morsi was ousted, and Muslim Brothers say they can only meet each other one or two at a time.
Meanwhile, the Brotherhood’s top leadership hasn’t met since late July. And although new leaders have been promoted to replace those who have been imprisoned, Muslim Brothers don’t actually know who is strategizing on their behalf. “Those who manage, I don’t know them and nobody knows them,” said Heshmat, the Brotherhood leader exiled in Istanbul.