Egypt’s first freely elected president, Dr Mohamed Morsi is a fellow alumnus who studied at University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s. I don’t recall ever meeting him in the campus. I am told that he had graduated a year before I joined the campus. After a brief teaching career at Cal State, Northridge, he returned to Egypt where he resumed his academic career. He was first elected to parliament as an independent candidate in 2000. He was arrested along with 24 other Muslim Brotherhood leaders on 28 January 2011. He escaped from prison in Cairo two days later during the chaos of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. President Hosni Mobarak resigned on February 11 after  a thirty-year rule, turning power over to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

Morsi’s 2012 victory marked Egypt’s first genuinely contested presidential election, emerging from the 2011 uprising. But like other Arab Spring states, Egypt soon slid into a harsh counterrevolution. On July 3, 2013, the military deposed Morsi, banned the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, and later oversaw mass killings at Rabaa alAdawiya alongside widespread arrests. 

Morsi spent the next six years facing charges ranging from alleged collaboration with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s IRGC to escaping Wadi elNatroun Prison during the 2011 uprising, all while held in solitary confinement and denied adequate treatment for his diabetes and worsening kidney and liver disease. He died of a heart attack in a soundless cage in a Cairo courtroom on June 17, 2019. Independent observers had described his death as “premeditated murder“. His final words were a verse from a poem that read ‘My country is dear even if it oppressed me and my people are honorable even if they were unjust to me’. 

What caused Dr Morsi to fail? Why did the clock turn back to the pre-Morsi era again? The success of the counter-revolution and rise of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the presidency is typically understood as the victory of the Egyptian “deep state.” Leaders from Egypt’s army, national police, judiciary, and other executive bureaucracies certainly closed ranks against the elected leaders of the Brotherhood. But this fact fails to explain the massive protests in June 2013 against the Brotherhood that were the pretext for al-Sisi’s coup on Morsi. The protesters became convinced the Brotherhood was using wins at the polls to centralize power in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood far beyond their mandate and treat the country as if it accepted the “Islamist project.” Even worse, for many of the protesters, Morsi simply was not fixing Egypt’s multiple and worsening woes.

The irony is, the Brotherhood knew the risks going in. After the 2011 fall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, the group vowed not to try to dominate parliament and not to run a candidate for president, knowing the backlash if it seemed to be grabbing power or if it led a government that failed to fix a broken Egypt. It went back on each of those promises, every time saying its hand was forced into doing so.

Morsi himself recognized the power of the street as he vowed to be a president for all the people. The day before his formal inauguration on June 30, 2012, he first delivered a symbolic oath of office in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the revolt that overthrew his autocratic predecessor. “You are the source of power and legitimacy,” he told the crowd. Nothing stands above “the will of the people. The nation is the source of all power. It grants and withdraws power.”

When Dr Morsi took the oath of office on June 30, 2012, the public wanted a miracle of sort to right the wrongs of the past decades and fix the economy. Forgotten there were the harsh facts that Morsi  had inherited a country in economic free fall, a state apparatus hostile to his very existence, and a neighborhood of powerful monarchies who viewed his movement as an existential threat. One year and three days later, on July 3, 2013, he was removed by the army amid mass protests, setting Egypt on a course back to overt military rule. 

To many, Morsi “failed.” But that verdict obscures a grim reality: given Egypt’s structural constraints, entrenched “deep state,” and the coordinated opposition of key regional powers, no elected leader—Islamic, liberal, or technocrat—could have stabilized Egypt’s economy or secured democratic consolidation in twelve months. The outcome was overdetermined. This is not an absolution of Morsi’s political missteps. It is a reckoning with the system that devoured him. The record is now abundant: the Egyptian military and its institutional allies never ceded real power; Gulf states hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood withheld meaningful aid until a preferred strongman arrived; and external supporters cheered the........

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