In August 2013, the Egyptian police and armed forces committed what Human Rights Watch deemed “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” Eleven years on, the massacre of supporters of the deposed President Mohammed Morsi at Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda squares — the Rabaa Massacre — has gone largely unpunished. And under the stewardship of its architect, then-Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt has degenerated into a police state even more repressive than the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak that ended in 2011.
The livestreamed massacre of Egyptian citizens at Rabaa proved exceedingly popular across large segments of Egyptian society. Even more distressing, the sentiments that emboldened the atrocity of Rabaa filtered into the leadership of Egypt’s pro-democracy and civil society movements. Several of the leading lights in this milieu, who saw themselves as intellectual protectors of the Egyptian revolution’s ambitions, quickly jettisoned their long-standing commitments to human rights and the rule of law and enthusiastically supported the return of military rule under Sisi.
One of those civil society leaders, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was also among Egypt’s most influential intellectual figures. In an article penned just days before Mubarak’s resignation in February 2011, the historian Juan Cole at the University of Michigan noted that the protesters in Tahrir Square were inspired by Ibrahim’s vision for a democratic Egypt and declared Ibrahim a “largely unheralded hero of the Egyptian revolution.” In an essay titled “Saad’s Revolution,” Cole, author of such books as “Engaging the Muslim World” (2009) and “The New Arabs” (2014), argued that Ibrahim had been “vindicated by history” following the fall of Mubarak in 2011.
Ibrahim spent his career insisting that democracy is the solution both to political authoritarianism and to the allures of religious fundamentalism in the Arab world. Pushing back against the prevailing view that Islamist groups must be marginalized, he argued that they should be included in the democratic process. He even went so far as to advocate, in an article titled “Toward Muslim Democracies,” that “it will be better for us as democrats, for the Islamists, and for Egypt to enlist Islamists under the flag of democracy.” He duly encouraged the United States and Europe to support this vision and put aside common fears about Islamist movements to bolster democratic movements in the Arab world.
Despite his position being ignored for decades in the name of regional stability, Ibrahim’s ideas about Islam and democracy couldn’t help but be meaningfully considered in the revolutionary moments in Tahrir Square in 2011.
But a mere two years later, his historical legacy was torn asunder. After a lifetime of championing democratic ideals, he abruptly degenerated into an apologist for authoritarian counterrevolution.
Ibrahim’s advocacy for democracy and human rights frequently put him in the crosshairs of the Egyptian security apparatus during the Mubarak dictatorship. In his dual capacity as a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, a Cairo-based political think tank, Ibrahim spent his life and career advocating for civil society and democratization in the Arab world. A publicly engaged scholar, he leveraged his academic study of social movements in his decades of campaigning for a freer and more inclusive Egypt. That included demanding equal rights for religious minorities, assimilating Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood into the formal political process and demanding free and fair elections — even training civilian election monitors to ensure democratic transparency.
With the Arab Spring of 2011 and the ouster of Mubarak, the dictator who ruled Egypt for the preceding three decades, it seemed, if only briefly, that Ibrahim’s overarching civil society project was being realized.
Born in 1938 in the Egyptian city of Mansoura, Ibrahim began his intellectual odyssey as an undergraduate at Cairo University, where he studied sociology and served as president of the student union. In 1962 he moved to the United States for advanced studies, earning a master’s in sociological development from the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally a doctorate in political sociology from the University of Washington. He taught at DePauw University in Indiana from 1967 to 1974, but built his major intellectual bona fides back in Egypt, serving as a professor at AUC for the rest of his academic career.
As an academic, Ibrahim conducted groundbreaking sociological studies, primarily based in Egypt. His Arabic-language books covered a wide array of themes, from works on social development in mid-20th-century Egypt in the 1980s to books on the issue of minorities in the 1990s to a book on (Arab) intellectuals and power in 2000. In 1975, Ibrahim also published a book on Henry Kissinger and the Middle East. Surveying his decades of writing reveals a series of overlapping intellectual proclivities, mostly centered around issues of civil society and democratization in the Arab world.
Though most of these works were never translated, many of his core insights from decades of research were compiled in an English-language volume titled “Egypt, Islam and Democracy” (2002). These essays reveal two parallel yet equally illuminating aspects of Ibrahim’s intellectual project.
First, they reveal that Ibrahim had full command of the methods and theories of academic sociology. While this may not be particularly sexy to many, it is precisely his familiarity with that tradition that allowed him to intelligently engage with Islamist groups. A skilled ethnographer, he and his research teams collectively spent years interviewing Egyptian Islamists, including militant group members in prison. Those studies offered insights into why Islamist groups appealed to many more Egyptians than did left-oriented social movements. These factors included the inability of ruling elites to dismiss Islamists as atheistic foreign agents the way they often did with leftist and Marxist opposition groups, the negative reputation of quasi-socialist experiments throughout the Arab world after 1967, the deep-rootedness of Islam in the Middle East and the strong sense of communion Muslim groups offer their members. Ibrahim’s command of sociological methods allowed him to understand Islamism well before academic interest in the topic proliferated following Sept. 11, 2001. Indeed, much of his preliminary fieldwork was conducted before the 1979 Iranian revolution.
His command of Anglo-American sociology also extended to quantitative methods. This is quite rare for intellectuals in Muslim-majority societies who specialize in social movements. Most focus on qualitative methods like ethnographic fieldwork. Ibrahim broke that mold, complementing his ethnographic acumen with an equal level of comfort weaving through census data, election membership statistics, migration patterns and economic data from organizations like the International Monetary Fund.
Alongside his mastery of the methods of academic sociology, Ibrahim was equally well-versed in Arab and Islamic thought and history. In particular, in multiple studies he brought up the legacy of the 14th-century Tunisian polymath Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun. Considered the father of sociology, Ibn Khaldun produced groundbreaking works in multiple disciplines. His magnum opus, “Al-Muqaddimah” (“The Prolegomena”) offered a social, economic and global history of the rise and fall of empires.
In his evaluation of social movements, change and revolutionary upheaval, Ibrahim repeatedly referred to Ibn Khaldun’s theory of “asabiyyah.” Often translated as “social cohesion,” Ibrahim described the phenomenon as a primordial form of solidarity, commonly associated with tribal loyalties. A strong commitment to asabiyyah, Ibrahim maintained, provided the impetus for seizing political power and instigating social change. He was clear, however, that tribal solidarity was not sufficient to fully solidify social transformation. In Ibrahim’s interpretation of the Khaldunian concept, asabiyyah must be coupled with a religious mission, which offers a spiritual foundation for a new political movement’s long-term success. He pointed to the Wahhabi movement in the Arabian Peninsula, the Sanusi movement in Libya and the Mahdist movement in Sudan as contemporary embodiments of the Khaldunian paradigm at work.
It is revealing that the Egyptian sociologist gravitated so strongly toward this particular medieval thinker. After all, Arab and Islamic intellectual history offered him several worthy intellectual interlocutors to aid in what became his overarching political project of building a democratic Egypt. Many, like the 10th-century philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi and the 11th-century legal theorist Abu al-Maali al-Juwayni, wrote explicitly on matters of government amid social change. But Ibn Khaldun was unique, because of how interdisciplinary he was in his approach to social change. His cyclical history owed as much to the study of economics and demography as it did to the study of history. Ibrahim thus found a kindred spirit in his medieval interlocutor, in large part because he saw Ibn Khaldun’s methods as internally cohesive even for the purpose of analyzing the contemporary Arab world.
In particular, Ibrahim was drawn to the Khaldunian interplay between the unruly tribal hinterland (“bilad al-siba”) and the more orderly and tax-paying urban arenas (“bilad al-makhzan”). In Ibn Khaldun’s worldview, the marginalized and powerless tribes develop increasing animosity toward the decaying ruling elite. And under the right circumstances, they can rebel against the corrupt ruling establishment in an attempt to restore their paradise lost.
Granted, Ibrahim accepted Ibn Khaldun’s methods with caveats, explicitly acknowledging that the sociocultural transformations of Arab and Muslim societies from the late 18th century onward, particularly their integration into a world system, rendered much of the Khaldunian paradigm anachronistic. But Ibrahim still saw value in Ibn Khaldun’s juxtaposition between the marginalized and powerless and the corrupt ruling elite in contemporary Arab societies. Seeing contemporary marginalized Arabs as akin to the Khaldunian tribal frontier, Ibrahim anticipated that they too were liable to rebel against the corrupt elite under the proper circumstances, in an attempt to recover a former way of life.
In Ibn Khaldun’s world, that lost world was reclaimed by movements buttressed by asabiyyah, emboldened by a spiritual or religious mission. And in the contemporary Arab world, Ibrahim saw Islamic activism as offering precisely the same appeal to the marginalized and downtrodden.
Ibrahim had no desire to see Islamist movements — the contemporary Khaldunian equivalent of the tribal hinterland — take over extant powers in the Arab world, however corrupt they may be. Informed by Ibn Khaldun’s insights about the rise and fall of dynasties, he stood against both the decadent political structures rampant in the Arab world and the Islamist forces that stood to challenge them. Instead, he emphasized the cultivation of a robust tradition of civil society, to serve as a bulwark against Arab authoritarianism. This commitment came to define Ibrahim’s work both as an academic scholar and as a political advocate.
In 1988 he founded a Cairo-based nongovernmental organization specifically to promote the development of civil society and democratization in the Arab world. Aptly named in honor of his medieval intellectual inspiration, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies housed Ibrahim’s most innovative research projects on civic culture and institutions in Egypt and the greater Arab world.
His quest to strengthen civil society led him to emphasize the rights of minorities, leading to a series of pioneering interventions on the systematic discrimination against Coptic Christians in Egypt. In 1996 he published a report with the Minority Rights Group titled “The Copts of Egypt,” which offered an extensive historical overview from the origin of the community to the present. That report concluded with a series of recommendations, key among them an emphasis on the freedom of worship and belief that the Coptic community was long denied by the Egyptian state.
Similarly, his decades of academic work on Islamists led him to make the controversial case that the Muslim Brotherhood must be granted a legitimate space in Egyptian politics and civil society. Here he was pushing back against the prevailing opinion in both Egyptian and Western policy circles that all Islamist groups constituted an existential threat to Muslim-majority societies and sought to turn them into regressive theocracies, thus requiring that Islamists be marginalized. The aftermath of the 1979 revolution in Iran contributed heavily to this posturing. But Ibrahim argued against this essentialism, warning that excluding Islamists from the public sphere would necessarily lead their members to seek illicit and potentially violent avenues to pursue their vision.
In addition to drawing on the legacy of Ibn Khaldun, Ibrahim grounded his vision of a thriving Egyptian civil society on the work of innovative Arab writers and intellectuals from the 19th and early 20th centuries. This cadre of thinkers included the Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim, the Lebanese Christian journalist Farah Antun, the Egyptian litterateur and former Minister of Education Taha Hussein and the inaugural president of Cairo University Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. Like Ibrahim, this assemblage of avant-garde intellectuals sought a vibrant public sphere and had managed to make considerable strides throughout the region prior to the Arab defeat by Israel in 1948. Following the Lebanese-British historian Albert Hourani, author of the monumental 1962 book “Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939,” Ibrahim referred to the period in which these intellectuals operated as the “liberal age,” and explicitly identified it as part of his inspiration for his founding of the Ibn Khaldun Center. Ibrahim was thus an avowed descendant of the tradition of Arab liberalism and saw his intellectual trajectory as following in its footsteps.
It is not an accident that figures associated with the “liberal age” had a soft spot for the work of Ibn Khaldun. Many figures associated with Arab liberalism had an acrimonious relationship with Islam; several strongly pushed back against religion in public life. But the work of Ibn Khaldun in particular had appeal among this cast of thinkers. Hussein (1889-1973), whom Ibrahim explicitly identifies as an archetype of the “liberal age,” wrote his second doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne on the work of Ibn Khaldun, receiving his degree in 1917. Similarly, the secularist Antun (1874-1922) engaged with Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual legacy.
And like the thinkers of the “liberal age,” Ibrahim found himself targeted by the authorities for his research and advocacy. Two instances are especially noteworthy. First, Ibrahim came under fire for insinuating on a radio show that the Mubarak family, with whom he previously enjoyed healthy relations, had planned to install their son Gamal as Egypt’s next president. Criticizing the Arab world’s tendency to produce dynastic rulers, like the Assad family in Syria, Ibrahim joked that it had invented a new form of government, the “jumlukiyya” — a neologism combining the Arabic words for republic (“jumhuriyya”) and monarchy (“mamlakiyya”) — which emerged from military republics to produce leaders for life. The Mubarak family didn’t take this jab lightly, particularly as patrons of a style of Arab republicanism that has long regarded itself as more progressive than the reactionary Gulf monarchies. In one witty portmanteau, Ibrahim was able to expose how flimsy the distinction between Arab republicans and monarchs actually was.
And second, the sociologist’s proclivity for public engagement led him to broaden his research to include facilitating election integrity. Under the auspices of the Ibn Khaldun Center, he trained ordinary Egyptians in basic election monitoring, specifically to empower them as whistleblowers in case of fraud during Egyptian parliamentary elections.
Furious at what it regarded as Ibrahim’s overreach, the Mubarak regime responded harshly. Accusing him of using foreign funds to finance his election monitoring campaign, the Egyptian government sentenced him to prison in 2000. Languishing behind bars for three years, Ibrahim’s health deteriorated rapidly. Through international pressure, both from the U.S. and European governments as well as international human rights organizations, he was eventually released in 2003 and sought exile in the United States.
I had come to learn of this brave sociologist and his travails from afar during his exile period. I was so inspired by his journey that, prior to the events of the 2011 Arab Spring, I moved to Cairo to take up a role as a researcher at the Ibn Khaldun Center. I knew no Arabic at the time, but I was motivated to follow in the footsteps of a dissident who paid a hefty price to advance the ideals of democracy, human rights and religious freedom.
Corresponding regularly with Dr. Saad (his affectionate sobriquet both to his students and many of his colleagues) in exile in the United States, I led and edited the center’s flagship journal, Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World. I also directed several of the center’s major initiatives. Additionally, inspired by my mentor’s commitment to bridge scholarship and practice, I began moonlighting as a journalist, writing op-ed pieces for regional publications about human rights in Egypt and the Arab world. I still consider those Cairo years as the most formative of my life, on a professional, intellectual and personal level. But I also left Egypt with a healthy dose of cynicism. Unable to see a feasible pathway to change, especially given the U.S. government’s steadfast support for the Mubarak regime, I left Egypt wholly convinced that Mubarak would indeed bequeath the country to his son Gamal.
Needless to say, the events of the 2011 Arab Spring and the Egyptian revolution quickly proved me wrong. And as I saw Mubarak step down, I couldn’t help but think of my mentor smiling ear to ear. Through his intellectual work and personal sacrifice, he helped pave the way for this historic moment. Despite his years of suffering, it seemed that the aging sociologist had gotten the last laugh.
Or so we thought. In August 2013, following a yearlong research stint in Morocco, I saw the horrors of counterrevolution take shape in Cairo. And as I returned to the United States to start doctoral work, I started paying closer attention to the Arabic-language press in Egypt.
What I discovered proved demoralizing. Several major liberal activists and intellectuals in Egypt, many of whom I had considered political and intellectual allies during my time in Cairo, were cheering on the return of military rule. The journalist Ibrahim Eissa, who had been editor of the oppositional newspaper Al-Dustour during the Mubarak years, rolled out the red carpet for the new military regime. In 2011, Eissa moved on to head the newly created newspaper Al-Tahrir, which began specifically as an outlet to represent the voice of the Jan. 25 revolution. Following the events of July 2013, the publication quickly fell in line with the Egyptian zeitgeist of the time, insisting that the return of military rule was a revolution, not a coup. Having defended Eissa in an op-ed after he had been arrested on charges of questioning Mubarak’s health, it felt personal for me to see him embrace the Sisi government.
And worst of all, my cherished teacher Dr. Saad was also buying into the Sisi euphoria. On Aug. 23, 2013 — barely a week after the Rabaa Massacre — Ibrahim appeared on Egyptian television to give the Egyptian authorities a clean bill of health for their handling of the dispersal. In a report he submitted to the Ministry of the Interior, he wrote that “given the circumstances in which the events took place, the Egyptian police exercised the greatest possible restraint, and adhered to international standards in the dispersal of the demonstrations.”
This despite the fact that Human Rights Watch confirmed after a yearlong investigation that the “dispersal” from the squares constituted a massacre facilitated at the highest levels of the Egyptian government and was likely a crime against humanity. “The overwhelming evidence of Egypt’s preplanned atrocities, extensively documented by Human Rights Watch and other prominent organizations, was indisputable,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, who served as executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division at the time and is currently the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. Ibrahim’s “effort to whitewash the Egyptian government’s massacres,” she told New Lines, constitutes “an embarrassing and depressing coda to his legacy.”
Nine months later, the unthinkable (in my eyes) happened. In an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm al-Saba, my erstwhile mentor described the sham election of May 2014, in which Sisi won over 95% of the vote, as the “greatest in the history of Egypt.” That was the last straw.
To me, Ibrahim’s about-face felt like a betrayal. For someone who devoted his entire life and career to democracy in Egypt to suddenly lend his enthusiastic support to a military strongman, going so far as to praise the patently farcical election that solidified his power as an exercise in democratic excellence, seemed to render his prior commitments almost hollow.
After all, my entire journey to both activism and academic scholarship was inspired by my admiration for this dissident and for what I took to be his principled democratic convictions. But were those convictions fickle all along? I needed to find out.
Seeing my mentor’s change of heart led me to dig deeper. With whatever spare time I could muster alongside my doctoral work on an adjacent topic, I read voraciously into the history of Egyptian liberalism, the strand of thinking Ibrahim identified as pivotal to his own. And two years later, with a cadre of scholarly collaborators, I assembled a book titled “Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism: Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy” (2017). For me, this undertaking was about more than Egyptian liberalism. It was a project primarily motivated by the need to make sense of my former mentor’s abrupt turn.
This two-year exploration revealed that the project of Arab liberalism, to which Ibrahim both subscribed and contributed through his considerable writings, was ultimately beholden to an authoritarian contradiction. While he spent years advocating for reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, when that organization actually gained power in 2012 (and handled it terribly), it proved too burdensome for Ibrahim’s thought experiment. Indeed, the project of Arab liberalism was freighted from its inception with a visceral fear of Islam in public life.
This was in large part because many of Arab liberalism’s leading lights were so mesmerized by European liberal philosophy that they hoped to simply transplant its models to their homeland. Hussein, after spending considerable time in France, went so far as to suggest in his 1938 book, “The Future of Culture in Egypt,” that “in order to become equal partners in civilization with the Europeans, we must literally and forthrightly do everything that they do.” Unfortunately for him, the bulk of the Egyptian masses were unwilling to part with their religious traditions or wholly consign them to the realm of the private. Put another way, if most Egyptians were given the choice between being liberal or being Muslim, they would overwhelmingly select the latter.
Faced with that reality, several figures of the “liberal age” actively forged authoritarian alliances to forcibly impose their liberal worldview on an otherwise unwilling populace. Most famously, liberals cheered on the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser as the “just tyrant” who offered an authoritarian safeguard against Islamic actors becoming too influential in public life. And in 2012-2013, with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood actually in control of the state rather than at its fringes, the intellectual fibers of Ibrahim’s project began to fray.
Ibrahim’s inconsistency is especially baffling given his debt to the legacy of Ibn Khaldun. In particular, as he articulated in a 1995 essay on “Islamic Activism and the Western Search for a New Enemy,” Ibrahim interpreted the Khaldunian paradigm as requiring that every new social movement, if it hopes to offer tangible political outcomes, must offer an alternative king and pope, to replace a currently decaying king and pope.
Ibrahim acknowledged that the Khaldunian paradigm is not fully applicable to the contemporary context. But even in the present moment, he emphasized the appeal of a social movement capable of offering a vision of a lost ideal to the downtrodden. Islamism, in his estimation, offered precisely that vision, however reactionary it arguably was. Egyptian liberalism, on the other hand, offered no competing spiritual or emotional force.
The project of Egyptian liberalism has fallen short in large part because it has failed to appreciate that religious mission, or to offer an alternative king and pope to the Egyptian people. Rather, it had no place for religious actors of any kind in the public sphere. Faced with the choice, the Egyptian people have repeatedly rejected that proposition.
Still, even after compiling a book exploring the contradictions of Egyptian liberalism, I remained unsettled about Ibrahim’s turn. Although he saw himself as an embodiment of the liberal project, his case was unique and broke the mold of many other Egyptian liberals.
In particular, his track record fighting for democracy and human rights in Egypt, going back decades, outshines nearly every other Egyptian liberal figure. Hardly an armchair theorist, his advocacy came at an immense personal cost, including lengthy prison sentences and the deterioration of his health.
And unlike many of his fellow liberals, he had a long history of advocating for the inclusion of Islamists in the democratic project. As a pluralist, he believed there should be a seat at the political table for them. Informed by his groundbreaking sociological studies of Islamist groups, Ibrahim was one of the first scholars to advocate for rapprochement with, or at least tolerance of, the Muslim Brotherhood. Other Egyptian liberals, in contrast, took a rejectionist stance on Islamist groups, advocating their exclusion.
This makes Ibrahim’s embrace of authoritarianism even more vexing than the cases of other Egyptian liberals whose commitments to democracy and pluralism were dubious or nonexistent. While the tensions and contradictions in liberalism help contextualize Ibrahim’s turn in his final years, this only takes us so far. What explains his specific case, and the particular positions he took in the critical moments of decision that Egyptians faced in 2013?
Cole, the historian at the University of Michigan, whose personal relationship with Ibrahim went back several decades, offered a revealing anecdote from his final engagements with the sociologist. Ibrahim revealed to Cole that upon seeing the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf Qaradawi arrive in Tahrir Square in early 2011, after decades of exile in Qatar, it reminded him of the Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin arriving from Switzerland at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Ibrahim “saw the Muslim Brotherhood as a Stalinist Party determined to undo the February Tahrir revolution with the Egyptian equivalent of an October Bolshevik Revolution, which must have been what Morsi’s victory in the presidential election of 2012 looked like to him,” Cole told New Lines. Cole senses that Ibrahim “saw Morsi versus Sisi as a choice between two counterrevolutions, one promoted by the Brotherhood and its covert branch, and the other by the officer corps. Maybe he just preferred the devil he knew.”
The Egyptian political scientist Ahmed Abdrabou also knew Ibrahim. Abdrabou taught at both AUC and Cairo University from 2012 to 2015, when the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Egypt forced him into exile, where he is now associate director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. Abdrabou offers a personal anecdote that shines a light on the late sociologist’s conflicted legacy. At a private dinner at Ibrahim’s home in the Maadi district of Cairo in the summer of 2014, the sociologist spoke in an apologetic tone, lamenting how the human rights community in Egypt — he referred to as “we,” implicating himself — shared responsibility to keep fighting for human rights in their country.
Abdrabou, who at the time served as a board member of the Egyptian Initiative of Personal Rights, detected a tone of regret from Ibrahim over the positions he had taken in 2013. Abdrabou believes that this sense of regret drove Ibrahim, in 2016, to call for reconciliation between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood (an initiative that ultimately failed to materialize).
Finally, Abdrabou offered the sagacious reminder that public intellectuals change over time. Ibrahim in his 80s was not representative of the thinker in his younger, more optimistic and risk-taking incarnation.
His failures of judgment notwithstanding, the world is indebted to the legacy Ibrahim bequeathed us. Again, it would not be an exaggeration to say that his work paved the way for the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Additionally, entire generations of scholars, myself included, owe their inquiries to Ibrahim and his interventions on their behalf.
Azza Karam, former lead facilitator for U.N. Strategic Learning Exchanges on Religion, Development and Diplomacy, says that her studies with Ibrahim played a formative role in her decision to pursue a human rights career. It was his “human rights-based approach to the study of and engagement with Islamists and Islamism,” she told New Lines, that inspired her to focus on the nexus between religion and politics in her own advocacy, research and teaching.
Nader Hashemi, director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at Georgetown University, told New Lines that a 1980 essay by Ibrahim, “Anatomy of Egypt’s Militant Islamic Groups,” played a formative role in the way his generation of scholars approached the topic.
Ibrahim was one of the first scholars to see Islamist groups as social movements. At that time, Hashemi notes, Islamic movements were understudied “because of the secular assumptions of modernization theory, which assumed that religious politics would gradually wither away” with modernization. Although the neo-Marxist approaches of the period presented an alternative to modernization theory, they “also ignored the resurgence of religious politics,” he notes. Ibrahim’s essay was thus groundbreaking at a time when “there were few serious academic studies of the topic based on fieldwork.”
Cole offered an anecdote the sociologist shared about his time in Egypt’s Tora prison. One of Ibrahim’s fellow inmates, a tailor convicted of terrorism and tasked with doing stitching for the other inmates, noticed that whenever prominent people came through Cairo they sought permission to visit Ibrahim in prison. The tailor asked Ibrahim why those people didn’t come to see him as well. Ibrahim replied that these individuals saw him as a human rights activist. The tailor responded indignantly, “So am I!” To which Ibrahim riposted, trying to let him down gently, “I don’t think that that is how you are generally seen.” Even in incarceration, Ibrahim maintained both his intellectual astuteness and his sense of humor.
But we must remain equally judicious in recognizing the contradictions of Ibrahim’s thought, particularly as the same blind spots endure beyond Egypt. Throughout Muslim-majority countries, we see examples of liberal and leftist figures who are so terrified of a public role for Islam that they are willing to ally with the most horrific forms of authoritarianism to extirpate it. We saw this phenomenon in Syria, where figures of this type bought into President Bashar al-Assad’s propaganda, seeing the “secular” tyrant as preferable to any Islamic alternative.
More recently, we have seen a manifestation of this phenomenon in Tunisia, where some leftist figures embraced Kais Saied’s self-coup out of fear of Rached Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party — this despite the fact that Ennahda is perhaps the most evenhanded and democratic Islamic political movement in modern history.
Doing justice to the ambiguous legacy of Ibrahim requires celebrating the good he did, while simultaneously working through such contradictions.
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