Broken Bonds: Leaders without Legitimacy

Published: March 2, 2023, 9:04 p.m.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a hierarchical organization suffering a debilitating leadership vacuum. Now, the organization has to reinvent itself while most of its top cadres are in exile, dead, or in jail.\nYears after being forced to become a transnational organization because of its leadership\u2019s expulsion from Egypt, the Brotherhood is now at an even more complex crossroads. Its old strategies for managing its relationship with the Egyptian state, and maintaining a quasi-clandestine presence in Egypt, are no longer relevant.\xa0\nAbdelrahman Ayyash explains the power struggles and inchoate efforts to create a coherent strategy among the Brotherhood\u2019s fragmented leadership after the 2013 coup and subsequent crackdown. The Brotherhood has been riven by power struggles and fundamental debates over resources, its international orientation, and the use of violence. This leadership crisis has hobbled the Brotherhood.\nThis is the fourth episode of Broken Bonds, a five-part special season of the Order From Ashes podcast. The first episode charted Abdelrahman Ayyash\u2019s personal coming of age in a Brotherhood milieu. In the second episode, Ayyash, Noha Khaled, and Amr ElAfifi mapped how the crises of identity, legitimacy, and membership simultaneously explain the organization\u2019s weaknesses and its staying power. In the third episode, Khaled dissected the identity crisis that has defined the Brotherhood since its establishment. The fifth and final episode of Broken Bonds explores the crisis of membership and the implications for policy.\nBroken Bonds explores the evolution of Egypt\u2019s Muslim Brotherhood from the apex of its power, when it won Egypt\u2019s presidency in 2012, to the organization\u2019s disarray and marginalization today.\nThe podcast season is a companion to a new book, Broken Bonds: The Existential Crisis of Egypt\u2019s Muslim Brotherhood, 2013\u201322, published in February 2023 by TCF Press. Broken Bonds is part of \u201cFaith and Fracture,\u201d a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.\nParticipants:\nAbdelrahman Ayyash, fellow, Century International\xa0\nThanassis Cambanis, director, Century International