Cairo embraces US terror tag on Muslim Brotherhood, but there's unease over possible wider repression ahead

Egypt has not yet officially commented on US President Donald Trump's decision to designate the Muslim Brotherhood's branches in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon as "foreign terrorist organisations". Still, Cairo will most likely welcome the move, considering it a long-overdue international recognition of its own decade-long stance against the group.

Within the Arab country's political circles, the applause is unmistakable, yet tempered by unease as many fear that the US designation will hand Egyptian authorities a powerful pretext to intensify repression, broaden terrorism accusations, and further squeeze opposition voices that might not be related to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The American president's move is the first formal review of the Muslim Brotherhood branches, and marks a significant shift in US policy towards the Islamist movement.

Egypt outlawed the Brotherhood in December 2013, almost five months after the ousting by the Egyptian army of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, and a massacre of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the Rabaa square in August of that year. 

Egypt then launched a determined region-wide campaign against this group, known to be the ideological cradle of political Islam. It successfully persuaded key Arab capitals to join the effort, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and even Syria eventually designating the group as a "terrorist organisation."

President Trump's designation of the Egyptian, Lebanese and Jordanian chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organisations strengthens the Egyptian state's past policies against the group, observers in Cairo say.

"This long-awaited designation now proves that Egypt was right from the very start," Islamism researcher Muneer Adeeb told The New Arab.

He noted that Egypt first urged the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a "terrorist organisation" as early as 2014.

Rise and fall

The Muslim Brotherhood's trajectory in Egypt is a saga of secret struggle, meteoric rise to power, and catastrophic fall from grace.

Founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna as a charity and educational movement, the Muslim Brotherhood initially cooperated with the Free Officers during the 1952 revolution that toppled Egypt's monarchy, providing crucial grassroots support to the young military leaders who established the republic.

The post-revolutionary regime under Gamal Abdel Nasser initially granted the Muslim Brotherhood considerable leeway in gratitude for its earlier support. That tolerance quickly evaporated as ideological clashes erupted, particularly over the group's vision of an Islamic state and its refusal to entirely subordinate itself to the secular nationalist project, leading to severe crackdowns as early as 1954.

In one of the most famous recordings from the 1950s, Nasser roars with laughter before a cheering crowd as he recounts a meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood's supreme leader, who demanded that Nasser impose mandatory hijab on all Egyptian women.

President Anwar Sadat initially loosened restrictions on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, using them as a counterweight to lingering Nasserite and leftist influence after he assumed power in 1970. By the late 1970s, however, as the group grew bolder and radical factions splintered off, Sadat sharply reversed course, tightening the noose with mass arrests and sweeping crackdowns in the final months of his life.

Under Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood was tolerated as a tightly controlled loyal opposition. He allowed it to operate within strict limits, winning parliamentary seats as independents, but never threatening the ruling National Democratic Party. The group also served as a convenient scarecrow to fend off Western pressure for genuine democratic reform.

The Islamists, however, were instrumental in Mubarak's downfall in 2011.

The same development opened the door to unprecedented political empowerment for Islamists, in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, with the group's candidate, Mohamed Morsi, winning the first post-Mubarak presidential election.

Morsi's presidency lasted only a year when the army conducted a coup to oust him, a development that shaped Egypt's political life for the following years.

Globalising the fight against the Muslim Brotherhood

Egyptian state-controlled media have applauded President Trump's order, with some TV hosts considering it a crucial milestone for defeating the group on the international stage.

Egyptian analysts stress, meanwhile, that Cairo's enthusiasm for the US designation is less about vindication for the past than about the opportunities it opens for the future.

"The designation elevates the fight against the Muslim Brotherhood from a national struggle to a fully regional and international campaign, one that could eventually lead to the group's outright global outlawing," said Ibrahim Rabie, a former senior Brotherhood leader.

"By choking off its financial arteries, the order will slowly starve the organisation of oxygen until it withers away," he told TNA.

While Egypt's campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood has scored some successes, with some Arab capitals following the Egyptian line against the group, these successes remain partial and fragile, analysts argued.

Cairo worked tirelessly to internationalise its campaign against the group, repeatedly asking Western capitals, and the US in particular, to add the group to their terrorism lists.

In addressing terrorism as an international phenomenon, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has consistently pressed for applying anti-terrorism measures to all terrorist organisations, and to include the Muslim Brotherhood in that category.

Egyptian policy-makers have also repeatedly lashed out at foreign capitals hosting branches or leaders of the International Organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt also offered backing to research centres and think tanks lobbying against the Muslim Brotherhood in Western states, including some centres founded by Egyptians in major Western capitals, such as Paris.

In seeking to globalise the anti-Brotherhood fight, Egypt primarily sought to serve its campaign against this organisation at home, specialists said.

The 2013 ban against the group also included the freezing of hundreds of millions of Egyptian pounds' worth of its assets, including scores of offices and administrative buildings.

Egyptian authorities also took a long series of measures to choke the group by eradicating its domestic and foreign funding sources, including arresting many businessmen accused of bankrolling the activities of the group.

They also practised strict supervision over the transfer of funds from outside Egypt to Muslim Brotherhood members, including the most junior of them.

President Trump's order will technically freeze the assets of the organisation's chapters in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, impose sanctions on them, and enable intelligence-sharing regarding these chapters.

These measures will likely supercharge Egypt's crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, equipping the authorities with tools to further strangle the group's funding and operations in the months ahead, specialists said.

"They will be a game-changer for Egypt," Adeeb said. "Western tolerance, especially by granting safe haven to Muslim Brotherhood leaders and operatives, has long been the single biggest obstacle preventing Egyptian courts from bringing fugitives accused of serious crimes back home for trial."

Fears of domestic impact

In a way, Trump's order against the Muslim Brotherhood legitimises Egyptian measures against the group in the past, the present and the future.

These measures included the arrest of almost all the leaders, the members, and the sympathisers of the group that Egyptian authorities could lay their hands on, a campaign criticised by numerous local and international rights groups.

This is sparking deep concern that the US designation will embolden Egyptian authorities to intensify human rights violations and launch an even harsher crackdown on opposition activists, many of whom could now be arbitrarily branded as Muslim Brotherhood members or sympathisers, with no evidence provided.

There is also widespread concern that Egyptian authorities can be given a blank check to escalate human-rights abuses and intensify repression against a far broader spectrum of opposition figures, including secular activists, journalists, and civil-society voices, by simply labelling them as Muslim Brotherhood operatives or sympathisers.

Most of the opposition activists arrested and put in jail in the past years were accused of joining a banned organisation, namely the Muslim Brotherhood, even as the charge sheets of the prosecution against them do not mention the name of the group in most cases.

Human rights advocates warn that this can risk further worsening Egypt's already dire human rights record, handing the authorities a powerful new tool to settle old political scores by re-labelling opponents, regardless of their political or apolitical affiliations.

"The US designation will possibly compound the Muslim Brotherhood's troubles," prominent human rights lawyer Khaled Ali told TNA.

"It will inject fresh momentum into the security apparatus's campaign against the group," he continued.

He warned that Egyptian authorities now feel emboldened to intensify the crackdown with even greater force, confident that the threat of US sanctions or cuts to military aid has effectively vanished.