Mohamed Morsi

Mohamed Morsi: One Year, and Then the Cage

On 17 June 2019 a man in a defendant's cage in a Cairo courtroom, on trial for espionage, collapsed and died. He had been Egypt's first democratically elected president. His last recorded words were a line of poetry: "My country is dear even if it oppressed me." The state that had removed him censored coverage of his death, requiring newspapers to run identical brief notices that did not mention he had ever held the office.

A Donkey Ride to School

Morsi was born on 8 August 1951 in El Adwah, in Egypt's Sharqia Governorate, the eldest of five brothers. He remembered being taken to school by donkey — a detail he used, as politicians do, but which was also simply true. It is the distance travelled that makes the rest of the story strange: from a village in the Delta to a doctorate in Los Angeles to the presidential palace to Scorpion Prison, inside one lifetime.

Aluminium Oxide, and a Doctorate in Los Angeles

He took a BSc in engineering from Cairo University in 1975 with high honours, served in the Egyptian Army's chemical warfare unit from 1975 to 1976, and completed an MS in metallurgical engineering at Cairo in 1978. He then went to the University of Southern California, where he earned a PhD in materials science in 1982 with a dissertation on aluminium oxide. He stayed in California as an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge, from 1982 to 1985 — two of his children were born there and hold American citizenship — before returning to Egypt to become professor and head of department at Zagazig University, a post he held for twenty-five years, until 2010.

The Brotherhood's Backup Candidate

He sat on the Muslim Brotherhood's Guidance Office until 2011 and served in parliament from 2000 to 2005, elected as an independent because the Brotherhood itself was barred under Hosni Mubarak. After the 2011 revolution he was elected the first president of the newly founded Freedom and Justice Party. He was not the Brotherhood's choice for the presidency. He was nominated only after Khairat El-Shater was disqualified — a substitute, and one his opponents never let him forget.

51.73 Percent

Exit polls in the first round gave him 25.5 per cent. On 24 June 2012 he was declared the winner of the run-off against Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak's last prime minister, with 51.73 per cent of votes cast. Sworn in on 30 June 2012, he moved fast: on 10 July he reconvened the parliament the military had dissolved, and on 12 August he removed the defence minister Mohamad Hussein Tantawi and army chief of staff Sami Hafez Anan, appointing in Tantawi's place a comparatively obscure general named Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. His wife, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud, whom he had married in 1979, declined the title First Lady and asked to be called First Servant.

The November Declaration

On 22 November 2012 Morsi issued a provisional constitutional declaration granting himself authority to legislate without judicial oversight, immunising his own decisions from legal challenge, shielding the Constituent Assembly from dissolution by the courts and extending its mandate by two months. Mohamed ElBaradei's verdict became the slogan of the opposition: Morsi had "usurped all state powers and appointed himself Egypt's new pharaoh." Independent newspapers called the constitution that followed an Islamist coup. Under mass protest and the resignation of senior advisers, he annulled the decree on 8 December while insisting its effects stood, narrowed its scope to sovereign matters, accepted judicial review of most presidential acts and dropped the planned retrials. The new constitution passed with roughly two-thirds approval in a December referendum on a turnout below one-third of the electorate.

The Coup, and the Scorpion

Mass protests demanding his resignation began on 30 June 2013. The military issued a forty-eight-hour ultimatum on 1 July; Morsi rejected it on 2 July; on 3 July Sisi removed him and placed him under house arrest at the Republican Guard barracks. Demonstrations in Morsi's support were crushed with more than eight hundred deaths, including the Rabaa massacre.

The prosecutions ran for six years and were, in Amnesty International's phrase, "a charade based on null and void procedures." He was convicted in April 2015 of the arrest and torture of protesters and sentenced to twenty years; sentenced to death in May 2015 over the Wadi el-Natrun prison break alongside 105 others; given life in June 2016 for passing state secrets to Qatar; the death sentence was overturned that November. He was held in the Scorpion wing of Tora Prison. A British parliamentary panel found his conditions "cruel, inhuman and degrading," with inadequate treatment for his diabetes, and said they could meet the threshold for torture. Its chairman, the MP Crispin Blunt, said afterwards: "We feared that if Dr. Morsi was not provided with urgent medical assistance, the damage to his health may be permanent and possibly terminal. Sadly, we have been proved right."

The Record Against Him

He left a great deal for critics to work with. Videos surfaced in January 2013 of him declaring that "the Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine"; in September 2010 he had called Israelis blood-suckers, warmongers and descendants of apes and pigs. He said the remarks were taken out of context and that he opposed Israeli policy, not Jews: "I am not against the Jewish faith or the Jewish people." He nonetheless wrote to Shimon Peres in October 2012 addressing him as "a great and good friend." He pledged that Coptic Christians were "just as Egyptian as I am," but conditions for Christians and Shia Muslims reportedly worsened under him, and the new constitution made Sunni doctrine the basis of most law. Jordan's King Abdullah II said he had "no depth."

Why Mohamed Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim is narrow, technical and almost entirely pre-political. Morsi was a genuinely accomplished materials scientist: a 1982 doctorate from the University of Southern California on aluminium oxide, an assistant professorship at Cal State Northridge, a quarter-century running an engineering department at Zagazig. That is a real intellect applied to real problems, and a rarer background for a head of state than it should be. In a country where the presidency had been a military possession for sixty years, he was the first civilian and the first academic to hold it.

The counter-case is overwhelming. Nothing in his single year in office suggests political brilliance; the near-universal judgment, from allies and enemies, is of a man who badly misread his own position. He was not the Brotherhood's first choice but its substitute. He won 51.73 per cent and then governed as though mandated to rewrite the constitutional order, and the November 2012 declaration — which handed his opponents ElBaradei's "new pharaoh" line and united a fractured opposition behind it — was a self-inflicted wound of the first order. He promoted the general who deposed him.

What no critique removes is different standing: Egypt's first freely elected president, removed by force after twelve months, dead in a cage at sixty-seven from medical neglect his jailers had been warned about. That makes him historically significant. It does not make him a genius.

Legacy

His son Abdullah was reported to have died of a heart attack in September 2019, three months after his father, though family lawyers later alleged lethal injection. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had attacked Egypt's death sentences and Western silence about them, called Morsi's death that of a martyr. In Egypt the state's response was to instruct the newspapers not to mention that he had been president — an act of erasure that told you more about the fear he still generated than any eulogy could.