Brotherhood and the benefits of Morsi’s death

Maher Farghali

The Muslim Brotherhood shows its true self at times of crises. These are the times when the group tends to lie and propagate baseless claims, hoping to make the utmost gains.

This happened soon after Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood member who ruled Egypt for a year and was deposed by the general Egyptian public in July 2013, was declared dead on June 17. Morsi died during his trial on charges of espionage.

The fact is that the Brotherhood stands to gain a lot from Morsi’s death. This terrorist movement used Morsi when he was alive and now seeks to use him after his death.

Morsi was not a president in the real sense of the word. He was not qualified to rule a country as big as Egypt. He was nominated by the Muslim Brotherhood to run in the 2012 presidential elections only because the group knew that he would allow it to rule Egypt from behind the curtains.

When Morsi went to jail, the Brotherhood exploited this also by issuing statements signed by him. In these statements, the group encouraged its followers to maintain their protests in the streets, calling for his return to power. Now, the Brotherhood thinks of how it can use Morsi’s death in making yet more gains.

Morsi’s death gives the Brotherhood the chance to claim that it is an oppressed group, a claim it used over the years to make others sympathize with it.

The group issued a statement in which it claimed that Morsi was killed slowly by prison authorities and that he was subjected to torture. This of course contradicted all realities.

The good thing is that Morsi died in court and in front of other Brotherhood members who were tried with him in the same case. This means that nobody can claim that he was killed in jail.

The Brotherhood is always in the habit of using developments on the ground to return to the political stage. This is why Morsi’s death is a golden opportunity for the group to do this, especially after it went out of the limelight and its radical nature was made clear to everybody everywhere.

The Brotherhood will most likely encourage its members to perpetrate violence in Egypt, using Morsi’s death to justify this. It will also prod other terrorist groups to do this, even in the presence of minor ideological differences between it and these groups.

Those following the history of the Muslim Brotherhood can easily notice that the group had encouraged violence whenever and wherever it served its own interests. It verbally opposed the use of violence in Egypt in the 1990s, whereas it encouraged it in countries like Afghanistan in the same period.

So far, the Brotherhood has proved success in doing this. It claims to oppose al-Qaeda and ISIS, but at the same time allows its members to join these groups and even lead them. The Brotherhood never denounces the actions of these movements.

Difference between the Brotherhood and other terrorist groups are a mere blur now. It adopts the same ideologies and thoughts of these groups.

The Brotherhood is now in the same camp with Salafist Jihadism. It offers logistical and social support to this current, using radical Islamists in serving its own interests and destabilizing countries like Egypt.

Morsi’s death, at the same time, puts an end to the legitimacy claim which the Brotherhood used to justify its violence in Egypt. It never ceased talking about this legitimacy, both inside and outside Egypt.