Ultimately, Egypt’s military-backed government, which possesses far greater hard power and much stronger public support than the Brotherhood, is likely to win its current battle with the group. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s constant—and often chaotic—demonstrations demanding Morsi’s reinstatement have only enhanced the government’s advantages, since the protests are violently dispersed while many Egyptians cheer approvingly. With all of its top leaders either arrested or on the run, its activities banned, and its assets seized by an Egyptian court, the Brotherhood is at the brink of destruction: Its notoriously hierarchical vanguard has been disrupted and the broader environment of fear further prevents its rank-and-file from organizing effectively.
Still, it is too soon to write off the Brotherhood, which has re-emerged twice now from supposed oblivion. Following the February 1949 assassination of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, the group returned to political prominence through its support of the Free Officers’ ouster of King Farouk in 1952. Then, decades after President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s severe crackdown in 1954 that sent thousands of Muslim Brothers to prison, the Brotherhood resurfaced in the 1970s under the relative freedom that President Anwar Sadat afforded it, quietly rebuilding the nationwide command structure that enabled it to quickly win power once Hosni Mubarak fell in 2011.
So how might the Brotherhood bounce back? Here are three possibilities.
First, the Brotherhood could establish its operational headquarters abroad and, during a less repressive period back home, rebuild its links with the group’s rank-and-file within Egypt through both digital and interpersonal networks. This would mean empowering top Brotherhood leaders who have managed to escape the country—for example, Secretary-General Mahmoud Hussein, who has been spotted in Turkey and Qatar, and Deputy Supreme Guide Gomaa Amin, who is in London—to run and maintain the organization. To some extent, the Brotherhood is already laying the groundwork for this strategy, since it has shifted its media center to London and used this foreign outpost to encourage its cadres back in Cairo. Moreover, there are precedents for this strategy among Islamist groups: Ennahda adopted it during the 1990s and 2000s, when its leadership was based in London, and it quickly emerged as Tunisia’s leading party following the 2011 revolution. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood similarly moved what remained of its leadership abroad following Hafez al-Assad’s 1982 crackdown on the group, and it funded its members’ housing and education in exile to preserve the organization. It is a strategy, however, that requires substantial patience. It took Ennahda nearly two decades to return to Tunisia, while the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood still has a limited presence within Syria after more than three decades in exile.