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Hany Ghoraba
IPT News, July 3, 2023
“Ultimately, [the] MB fell because it was weak and because it got too greedy too quickly without accounting for the overall situation inside the country.”
Islamists’ rapid rise to power in the Middle East following the Arab Spring revolutions came to a halt following a popular revolution that swept Egypt on June 30, 2013. Several days of protests across the country were met with violence by the Muslim Brotherhood and allied Islamists to protect the first Islamist president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, at all costs. But the Egyptian army declared it would side with the will of the people on July 3, and ousted Morsi, signaling a new era in the region.
Prior to the June 30th revolution, Islamists across the region had reached the highest echelons of power, including the presidency in Egypt in 2012, and controlled the parliaments in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan.
They were moving steadily to dominate the entire region between the years of 2011-2013, but along came the June 30th revolution that obliterated the Islamists’ ambition to rule the region.
“The June 30, 2013 [revolution] underscored for the first time that the Arab Spring was not brought about by democratic forces as many Western scholars have claimed and many in the MENA region liked to believe at the time, but rather, was a result of a narrow, hierarchical structured manipulation by the Muslim Brotherhood and its state sponsors,” New York-based human rights lawyer and editor-in-chief of the Washington Outsider Irina Tsukerman told The Investigative Project on Terrorism. “The revolt that followed uprooted the mistaken perception of the MB as having widespread popular and institutional support in Egypt. This change was very important because it uncovered that the MB and its allies were actually subverting democratic processes, rather than implementing them.”