ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates two questions. The first is what caused the initiation of the de-radicalization process of the MB’s armed wings, a question that was overviewed in Chapter 3. That process had three dimensions: the first was behavioral, and involved the decision of the MB’s leadership to abandon violence permanently. The second dimension was organizational, and aimed at dismantling the armed wings, seeking consensus among their commanders and convincing their foot soldiers to uphold the transformation towards non-violence. The third dimension was ideological, and had as its objective the legitimization of the deradicalization process, and thus ultimately ensuring the permanent abandonment of violence along ideational and theological lines. The second question flows from the historical fact that the leadership of the MB1 attempted to de-radicalize the group three times: between 1951 and 1953, between 1964 and 1965, and between 1969 and 1973. The first two attempts were complete failures, with both national and international consequences.2 The third attempt was successful and, at a later stage, led to the promotion of the moderation process that the MB underwent during the leadership of its third murshid Umar al-Tilmisani (1972-1986).3 The second research question that this chapter attempts to answer is: why did that third de-radicalization attempt succeed, when the other two had failed? The argument proposed to answer the two questions can be summarized as follows: first, the four causal variables4 behind a successful de-radicalization process were only present in the third attempt. Second, the interaction between those variables, especially the coordination between President Sadat’s regime (selective inducements) and the MB’s consolidated leadership following a long
period of sustained repression, was reinforcing the third de-radicalization attempt, leading ultimately to its success in the early 1970s. In the previous attempts at de-radicalization, some of the necessary causal variables were missing, and the patterns of interaction between the variables were impeding the de-radicalization process. More specifically, state repression was constantly undermining the leadership, which was willing to de-radicalize in 1951 and, less evidently, in 1964. In addition, state repression was impeding the process of internal interaction between the members of the MB’s leadership, the middleranking commanders and the grassroots, especially in the early 1960s.
