Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt
Amy Hawthorne
July 05, 2015
Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections
in Egypt. By Tarek
Masoud. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014. 252 pp.
How
did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood do so well in elections under the authoritarian
Hosni Mubarak regime, and again in 2011 and 2012 after the January 25 uprising?
Why did the Brotherhood then fall from power so quickly? Why has the secular
opposition performed ineptly, and, in particular, why can’t the pro-welfare
Egyptian Left win elections in a poor country? Tarek Masoud provides valuable insights into such
crucial questions in Counting
Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt.
His rigorous study should change how readers think about Egyptian politics.
Using extensive quantitative research (economic,
voting, and polling data), Masoud challenges the widespread view that the
Brotherhood’s famed organizational skills, its charitable work, or the appeal
of its Islamist ideas are sufficient to explain its electoral success. He
contends that for Egyptian voters, elections are mostly about economic
interests—especially contests for parliament, whose main role in Egypt is to
provide services, not to shape policy. In
addition, decades of underdevelopment have structured Egyptian society to the
advantage of pro-regime and Islamist candidates. Masoud analyzes various data
to show that in authoritarian, poor, largely non-industrialized Egypt,
state-controlled social and economic organizations, family networks, and
Islamic institutions dominate the civic landscape; and pro-regime and Islamist
candidates use them to lobby voters with economic promises. Meanwhile, secular
opposition parties lack similarly dense networks of mobilization. For example,
only 12 percent of workers belong to unions, and there are few other class- or
occupation-based groups.
Masoud provides a close analysis
of how the Brotherhood won numerous seats as a repressed opposition group
during the Mubarak regime. He shows that the Brotherhood could not, as is often
thought, use mosques as significant mobilization sites because of heavy regime
policing. He also questions whether the Brotherhood’s charity network was as
powerful as a vote-getting machine as is often assumed. As Masoud points out,
there is actually little detailed evidence to show that the Brotherhood’s
social services were anything more than modest. His own research suggests that
those who received Islamic charity did not necessarily vote for the group.
Instead, in the low-turnout elections of the Mubarak era, the Brotherhood won
by mobilizing a very small number of middle-class constituents, its historic
base. These voters didn’t need to trade their ballots for regime patronage as
poor voters did, and thus could “afford” to cast protest votes for the
Brotherhood.
Masoud does not fully explain, however, why these voters chose
Brotherhood candidates. How did the Brotherhood convince voters of its
competence and persuade them to risk violent harassment by Mubarak’s thugs when
they went to vote? Masoud perhaps underplays the influence of the group’s
social capital and political-religious authority among its followers—after all,
the Brotherhood is first a significant social movement, only second a political
party.
Concerning elections in the
immediate post-Mubarak period, Masoud writes, “One would think that with
democratization non-Islamists could improve, and the Islamists’ advantage would
disappear, but this was not the case.” He argues that the Brotherhood secured a
plurality in the 2011-2012 parliamentary elections primarily because of
economic factors, not a demand for sharia. According to 2011 polling data, the
economy was the most important issue for the majority of voters. Moreover,
polls showed that the Egyptian public had a clear leftist economic orientation,
with distaste for neoliberal policies and a strong preference for
welfare-statist and redistributive policies.
Why couldn’t leftist parties
take advantage of the far more open political environment to tap into this
constituency? They could not overcome two Brotherhood advantages, Masoud says.
First, with the democratic opening, the Brotherhood suddenly had access to
numerous religious institutions that had previously been hard to penetrate.
Second, drawing on its reputation for competence and electoral success, the
Brotherhood convinced enough voters that it shared their left-leaning economic
preferences—even though the group’s platform actually espoused pro-capitalist
policies. Masoud explains that many Egyptians “appeared to [vote for the
Brotherhood] because they believed [it] would pursue the policies of wealth
redistribution and strengthening of the social safety net that the Mubarak
regime appeared to have long abandoned.” Masoud acknowledges that decades of
repression and cooptation have contributed to the Left’s “political languor.”
But he attributes its electoral failure more to factors associated with Egypt’s
socio-economic structure—mainly the absence of a robust network of labor-oriented
organizations through which to mobilize poor and working-class voters.
The May 2012 presidential election, narrowly won by
the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, featured a different dynamic, Masoud
explains. By this time, the Brotherhood’s weak performance running the
parliament had punctured its claims of competence and cost it much public
support. Though economic issues were still important, the presidential vote was
more about personalities, and the mass media, over which the old regime still
held sway, played a larger role in reaching voters. The old regime patronage
networks, mostly dormant in the 2011 parliamentary elections, were revitalized
by spring 2012 and sprang into action to support the candidacy of one of their
own, Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, a former general who once
headed the Air Force. Morsi tapped into religious networks and a strong
anti-Shafik sentiment among enough secular voters to eke out a second-round
victory by 3 percent. Still, in the first round, four million fewer voters cast
ballots for the Brotherhood than in the parliamentary elections just six months
earlier.
This leads to Masoud’s incisive
rendering of Morsi’s July 3, 2013, ouster by the military. By late June,
popular anger over the Brotherhood’s economic mismanagement, controversial
social agenda, and authoritarian predilections had mushroomed into mass
protests demanding that Morsi resign. These protests were backed by Mubarak-era
business leaders and the police, military, and other state institutions. A
severe political crisis ensued and violence flared when he refused to step
down. The Brotherhood, refusing on principle to sacrifice the hard-fought
presidency and also fearful of losing a snap presidential vote, pushed for new
parliamentary elections, which were already due after the Supreme
Constitutional Court had invalidated the 2011 parliament, and which they
believed they could win owing to their structural advantages. The opposition,
rather than trying to ride the huge wave of anti-Brotherhood anger to take
control of parliament and marginalize Morsi that way, instead demanded an early
presidential election, which they believed they could win. To break the civilian political gridlock,
the military stepped in, removed Morsi, and pledged swift elections. But it
then sidelined the opposition, consolidated power, and effectively ended the
democratic experiment. The opposition’s aversion to parliamentary competition
against Islamists, built up over years of defeat in elections, was only one of
many factors in the complicated situation leading to the military’s takeover,
but Masoud reminds us that its mistrust of democratic processes helped clear
the army’s path.
Masoud’s overall conclusions are compelling. If the
Brotherhood is ever allowed to reenter the political game after the current
brutal crackdown, he argues that its social base, structural electoral
advantages, and years of election experience may position it to do well in
elections once again. Meanwhile, the Left faces a long political road ahead
unless economic changes alter the socio-economic landscape to its advantage. As
Masoud writes, the fall of Islamists in Egypt is unlikely to lead to the rise
of the Left anytime soon.
Amy
Hawthorne is
resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the
Middle East. She served in the U.S. Department of State as an advisor on Egypt policy
in 2011 and 2012. From 2006 to 2010, she was executive director of the Hollings
Center for International Dialogue. She was the founding editor of the Arab
Reform Bulletin (now Sada) while serving as an associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 2002 to 2004. On Twitter:
@awhawth.