If the oil boom of the 1970s was a distinct era of abundance for the labor-exporting states of the region in terms of remittance inflows and financial assistance from Gulf States, the bust in oil revenues that deepened by 1985/86 resulted in a dramatic recessionary downturn that had important long-term consequences for domestic politics. After 1986, in particular, economic austerity measures and shrinkage in the size of the parallel market in terms of the volume of foreign currency transactions reconfigured informal economic and social arrangements in profound albeit different ways in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia. In all three countries, as the financial and political power of groups engaged in the informal economy rose, state elites struck back – almost at the same time. Only in Egypt was this effort partially successful.

In the case of Egypt, the boom period, lasting from 1975 to 1985, afforded the state extraordinary access to foreign exchange as a result of oil exports, Suez Canal receipts, tourism, and expatriate remittances. These “big four” provided the country 75 percent of its hard currency, and all these sources were linked to the price of oil since expatriate workers mostly worked in the Gulf. Moreover, upward of 50 percent of tourists were from the oil-rich Arab countries, and much of the trade through the Suez Canal consisted of oil shipments (or Western goods) headed to the Gulf countries.¹ Consequently, when the oil price fell in 1985/86 the country suffered a drastic and steady decline in revenue from remittances through the 2000s as well as the other main sources of revenue affecting the entire economy adversely. GDP fell from 7.4 percent in 1984/85 to 4.2 percent in 1986/87 and to as low as 2.1 percent by 1990/91 (see Figure 4.1).² Coupled with a soaring external debt the regime was forced to turn to the multilateral lending institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for debt relief and to implement further economic reforms that included the unification of exchange rates, trade liberalization, and to limit imports.³

Figure 4.1 Remittances as a proportion of exports/GDP/imports in Egypt.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (World Bank, Washington, DC). https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators

Throughout the 1990s low oil prices resulted in a consistent and dramatic decline in rents flowing into state coffers from oil exports, foreign aid, and Suez Canal fees. Oil revenues declined from 11 percent of total revenues in 1990 to just 2 percent in 2000, and whereas they represented almost 50 percent of total exports in the 1980–2005 period, after the 1986 glut, international crude oil prices did not exceed the 1982 level ($31.55) until 2004 ($37.41), hitting a historical low in 1998 ($11.9).⁴ This decline in external rents in the 1990s took its toll on state revenues and total exports which declined roughly from 30 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2004. As late as 2008/09, the ratio of revenues to GDP had not surpassed that of the early 1990s.⁵

The post-1986 period accented problems that had already emerged in the 1970s during the remittance boom and the early years of infitah. By the early 1980s, under Mubarak, economists generally recognized that infitah had favored the trade and finance sectors of the economy and encouraged the expansion of the black market (i.e., foreign exchange speculative dealings) and that, ultimately, the regime was compelled to implement economic reforms. But it is also clear that these reform measures also sought to curb the power of what the regime considered an Islamist economic and political threat. Consequently, in 1991 the Egyptian government liberalized the exchange rate in order to discourage foreign currency speculation in the black market and redirect labor remittances into formal institutions and away from parallel market transactions. As intended, financial liberalization – coupled with new regulatory measures – undercut the short-lived Islamist monopolization of informal finance.⁶ However, rather than eliminate informal economic activities altogether, these policies only altered the social composition of the important segment of the informal economy and in so doing, the organizational structure, material incentives, and normative orientation of both the moderate and Islamist trends of the Islamist movement in the country.

It is important to emphasize that in contrast to other labor exporters with weaker state capacities (e.g., Sudan and Somalia) the regime in Egypt did not forfeit all its autonomy over the economy and it maintained great control over the degree and pace of economic reforms. Moreover, as many scholars have noted, its geopolitical position against radicalism and its peace agreement with Israel won the country generous debt relief throughout the recession period. Nevertheless, the general thrust was to free the local market from state intervention and not surprisingly this had important social and political consequences. Naturally, the recession affected all segments of society and particularly public sector workers whose salaries went into steep decline. But two important segments of society were also affected in ways that had important consequences for Islamist politics in the country: the middle-class Muslim Brotherhood movement and a poorer segment of Egyptian society working in the hitherto booming informal building trade such as those in the poorer quarters of Imbaba discussed in Chapter 7.

Back to the Future

The violent crackdown by the regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, which overthrew the government of the Muslim Brotherhood’s elected Prime Minister Mohamed Mursi in July 2013, is unprecedented in terms of the scale of violence used against opposition groups and individuals. Between July 2013 and May 2014, less than a year after Sisi assumed power, an estimated 40,000 individuals had been arrested, more than 100 members of the Muslim Brotherhood sentenced to death, and both secular as well as Islamist groups banned, including the April 6 youth-led organization that spearheaded the historic Tahrir uprisings of January 25, 2011. However, it is important to note that the state’s confrontation with the Islamists dates back to the 1990s and that the ongoing Islamist insurgencies across Cairo and in northern Sinai, which began in earnest in September 2013 against the military and security forces of the Sisi regime, have been routinely and understandably compared to the confrontation between the Egyptian State and the Jama’a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) militant group in the 1990s in the neighborhood of Imbaba.⁷ Indeed, the 1990s were a watershed in the relationship between the state and the moderate as well as the militant wings of the Islamist movement with important consequences for the present.

In December 1992 the Egyptian state entered the informal housing sections of Imbaba in Cairo. As many as 16,000 paramilitary troops, led by 2,000 military officers, state security personnel, and local police joined forces in the largest campaign against Islamist militancy in Cairo since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. Over the course of one week, 1,700 people were imprisoned, local residents arbitrarily arrested and tortured, and a small number killed. For several days, residents of Imbaba were prevented from leaving their homes for work, and all commercial activity in the neighborhood was prohibited. In addition, security forces forcibly shut down a number of storefront (ahali) mosques in the neighborhood. These mosques had served as important institutions through which Islamists activists belonging to the Islamic Group (al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya) had mobilized their supporters and rank and file cadres. Among the mosques closed down by security forces were Masjid Said al-Mursileen, Masjid al-Nasr, and Masjid al-Rahman.⁸ All three mosques served as important meeting places for the supporters of the Islamists, and it was from their pulpits that Islamist preachers spread their message to local residents.

As Diane Singerman has noted, the reason behind the unprecedented crackdown was the increasing power and popularity of the Jama’a al-Islamiyya.⁹ To many in Cairo the ascendancy of the Islamic Group at the heart of the city was a surprising development since the bulk of radical political violence during the 1980s was largely confined to the rural and less-developed provinces of Upper Egypt. It was in Upper Egypt that clashes between militants and security forces had left more than 900 dead and tens of thousands of Islamist militants in jail by the late 1980s.¹⁰ But it now appeared that, for several years, members of the Islamic Group had slowly filled the vacuum left by the state’s neglect of the Western Munira sections of Imbaba. By the mid-1990s militants in these quarters had become active in providing food to the poor, running health clinics, mediating disputes, collecting taxes, and reinstating a severe form of “law and order” among local residents.

The direct catalyst of the siege was the convening of a press conference by the Jama’a in Imbaba in late 1992. At that time Sheikh Jabir Mohammed Ali, the leader of the Islamic Group in the Neighborhood, invited foreign journalists to “celebrate” the anniversary of Sadat’s assassination.¹¹ Sheikh Jabir, commonly referred to as the “ruler of the State of Imbaba” (hakim dawlat Imbaba), used this opportunity to announce the establishment of an independent state within a state, the Emirate of Imbaba.¹²

At the same time the regime also broadened its repression of the Muslim Brotherhood by cracking down on what Egyptians commonly refer to as al-Iqtisaad al-Ikhwani (the Brotherhood Economy). Beginning in 1991 the Mubarak regime targeted informal financial networks and institutions it perceived to pose a direct economic and political threat to its authoritarian rule. The regime imprisoned and put on trial prominent black-market traders, liberalized the financial sector to undercut the parallel economy, and began to strongly regulate informal welfare institutions in a process that lasted into the latter part of the Mubarak regime and has continued with even greater force under the present regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. In 2007 and again in 2009 the Mubarak regime went further in its campaign of attacking the Brotherhood’s business interests. Its military court detained and put on trial two prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood: Khairat al-Shater and Hassan Malik.¹³ The two men stood accused of economic treason against the state and engaging in money laundering and “illicit” commercial activities. In April 2008, the military court dismissed the money-laundering charges. Nevertheless, in what the popular press termed a game of al-Ker wa al-Fer (“hit and run”), on April 15, 2008, the military court dismissed money-laundering charges against those arrested, acquitted fifteen, and reduced the prison sentences of the remaining defendants but confiscated the assets of the most prominent Brotherhood businessmen. These included substantial capital investments in a wide range of enterprises including pharmaceuticals, tourism agencies, construction firms, educational institutions, publishing houses,¹⁴ and land reclamation companies.¹⁵

Consequently, while in its relationship with the Brotherhood the regime continued its policy of strategic cooptation (most notably, permitting the organization a small measure of representation in parliament), it nevertheless marshaled its economic coercive power to regulate and undermine the movement’s financial assets built during the boom years. In this regard, what made the arrest of Malik and al-Shater a subject of national debate was that they are known to be the two most prominent Brotherhood businessmen. Al-Shater the then former deputy head of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hassan Malik, his long-time business associate, had long been significant funders of the Islamist movement in Egypt during ‘ahd tajmee’ al-tharwat (the era of wealth accumulation).

In the 1970s and 1980s they were primarily responsible for institutionalizing two important aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s commercial network: They established a host of successful business enterprises in domestic markets, and they also established links with other Islamists abroad in ways that capitalized on the transnationalization of Islamist commercial networks and investments in global stock markets, particularly in the Arab Gulf and the United States. Moreover, Khairat al-Shater gained further prominence following the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. He was released from detention just one month after the toppling of Mubrak’s regime by the Tahrir uprising, and he quickly resumed his post as deputy to the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badi. However, along with scores of other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, al-Shater was arrested on July 25, 2013, and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court following Sisi’s military coup against the Brotherhood-led government of Mohamed Mursi.

The successive arrests of al-Shater under the rule of Hosni Mubarak and again under the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi reflect an enduring strategy aimed toward undermining the institutional and financial administrative capacity of the Brotherhood: a capacity that had in previous decades financed the salaries of the organization’s employees and cadres, supported Islamist candidates during electoral campaigns in the country, and provided material incentives to new members to the organization.

The Battle over Informal Finance and Islamic Banks

Two important facets of the Islamic Economy that grew out of the boom period and which benefited from state patronage saw their fortunes come to an end in the 1990s in great part as a result of increasing state regulation and an assault on Islamic economic institutions: the black-market trade responsible for the growth of the unregulated Islamic Investment Companies (IICs) and Islamic banks. In 1988 the Mubarak regime intervened to regulate the IICs. On June 7, 1998, the People’s Assembly pushed through Law No. 146 that limited the right to collect capital to joint stock companies and gave wider powers to the Capital Market Authority (hay’at suq al-mal) and the Central Auditing Agency (al-jihaz al-markazi lil-muhasabat) to regulate and shut down the IICs. Most significantly, the Capital Market Authority was given the right to refuse or revoke existing licensing of any IIC based on a report from the Minister of Interior indicating that its activity was a threat to “national security” or “public (‘amm) economic interest.”¹⁶

It is important to note that prominent Islamists altered their attitudes toward the IICs and become more critical in the context of the state’s attack against these unregulated investment houses.¹⁷ However, the IICs also generated significant investment from members of the Muslim Brothers as well as large sections of Egyptian society during their heyday. One member of the Muslim Brothers, Ahmed ‘Alawi, informed me that like many members of the brotherhood at the time he was strongly in favor of the economic reforms that made the IICs possible for a time and that he, along with other members of the Ikwhan, heavily invested in the IICs. He acknowledged that the Muslim Brothers did in fact support these institutions and that they received funding for their organization from them. He noted that al-Rayan in particular helped to finance the movement at the time. As he put it: “al-Sharikat were an example of how the state could not control the ‘freedom’ unleashed by Infitah.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, while ‘Alawi continued to defend the sharikat in principle, he acknowledged somewhat bitterly that their leaders suffered from greed. “In the early years they offered depositors 24 percent return from their investment, but by the time they were shut down by the state, this had reached 30 to 40 percent.”

Importantly, ‘Alawi noted a trend that obtained across the labor exporting countries in the region during the remittance boom. That is, that Egyptian migrants irrespective of whether they harbored sympathies for the Muslim Brotherhood deposited part of their wages in the sharikat not, in his view, because they trusted in the Islamic credentials and legitimacy of these financial institutions, but rather because expatriates had little choice owing to high rates of inflation that resulted from the boom in the influx of remittances in the 1980s. Migrants found depositing their hard currency in what were hitherto informal financial institutions more profitable than in the heavily regulated formal banks. This is because, as ‘Alawi observed in Imbaba where he resides as elsewhere, when “land prices shot up as a result of migrant money, so did the price of residential apartments. People had to put money into the sharikat so as to make their money meet the ‘real’ [i.e. inflationary] prices of real estate.”¹⁹ To be sure, and particularly in the early years of the sharikat’s establishment, many Egyptians were also encouraged to invest in the sharikat out of trust in the religiously garbed and seemingly pious financiers that operated them. The leaders of these companies were careful to patronize public prayers and donate to mosques and Islamic Welfare Associations (IWAs).

The experiment of the IICs was a dramatic and amply documented financial scandal in Egypt. By the late 1980s depositors and the general public became aware that the IICs operated on the basis of a pyramid scheme that swindled thousands of depositors from their hard-won earnings. For its part, the regime’s attack against the IICs had more to do with state’s fear of a parallel economy in finance that posed a grave economic and political threat to its authority over society. The IICs posed two essential dangers to the regime: the erosion of state capacity in the economic, and particularly financial, sphere and the resurgence and rising power of new economic actors in civil society operating outside the purview of the state. Moreover, irrespective of who benefited most from the profits of the IICs at the time, in the context of economic reform, and since these companies attracted savings ostensibly based on Islamic principles, they came to represent what the economist Abdel Fadil famously noted as “a force that would possibly splinter the dominance of the state over the society.”²⁰ Moreover, when the IICs crashed in the late 1980s they had an important political consequence since their fall discredited all economic projects working under the banner of Islam.

In contrast to the Islamic Investment Houses, the threat to the regime of the Islamic banks was relatively modest. This was primarily due to the strength of the state over the Islamic banking experiment: a state of affairs that stood in stark contrast to the Islamic banks in neighboring Sudan (see Chapter 5). To be sure, as in other Muslim countries, the spread of Islamic banking in Egypt raised the political profile of the Islamist movement in symbolic terms, but from the beginning the regime made sure that these banks would not come to be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. In contrast to Sudan, Islamic banking in Egypt has not been the monopoly of the Islamist movement primarily owing to the Egyptian regime’s stronger capacity to both regulate the financial sector and exert political, and coercive influence over groups in civil society. More specifically, in the 1980s state security forces intervened repeatedly to expel Muslim Brothers from the banks’ board of directors. In addition, in order to ensure that those Islamic banks established by influential Brotherhood leaders did not attract more deposits than the public sector banks, the regime enlisted the government appointed Mufti of al-Azhar’s assistance in this objective. In the late 1980s and up to the late 1990s through the issuance of a series of fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) the Mufti conferred religious legitimacy on interest taken and dispensed by conventional banks.²¹ Equally important is that the recession of the 1980s served to usher in the demise of the Islamic banking experiment in significant ways. An important reason for the decline in the influence of private Islamic banks is simply that the regime established Islamic branches of conventional banks throughout the country in a relatively successful effort to attract more savings. By 1996 Bank Misr, for example, had thirty Islamic branches, and by 1998 deposits in Islamic banks as a percentage of deposits in the conventional banks represented only 3.1 percent.²²

Economic as well as political factors combined to herald the demise of Islamic banking in the country. In the mid-1980s, at the start of the recession, and up to 1993 the growth rate in the deposits of Islamic banks began to decline dramatically. This was clear in terms of the shrinkage of Egyptian savings kept in Islamic banks, which represented 4.8 percent in 1994 down from 9.8 percent in 1986.²³ One important reason had to do with the decline in remittance inflows associated with the oil slump in the Arab oil-producing countries where thousands of Egyptians had made their living. However, it is important to note that as in Sudan the crisis of Islamic banking can be explained by political factors, and internal mismanagement as well as the decline in deposits of remittances in the recession. Another key decisive factor had to do with the fact that the Islamic banks’ share of total deposits plummeted because the rate of return to depositors awarded by these banks was below the interest rates of the conventional banks. This was a result of successive devaluations of the national currency resulting from financial liberalization and the fact that the regime maintained higher rates of interest in its public sector banks in order to, in the elegant formulation of Soliman, “make the price of conformity with Islamic law high and the temptation toward ‘sin’ of receiving interest stronger.”²⁴ What is noteworthy about the state’s role in Islamic banking is that, in contrast to Sudan where these financial institutions came to represent a powerful political and economic force in civil society propelling the Islamist movement to power, in Egypt the state retained great capacity to regulate and curtail the strength of the power of the Muslim Brotherhood in these banks and to undermine their autonomy and popularity in terms of attracting depositors.

Importantly, the assumption to power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the election of President Mohamed Mursi reignited the deep political and economic conflict over the role of Islamic banking as a central pillar of contestation with profound political consequences pitting Islamists versus remnants of the Mubarak regime and, more recently, those supportive of the military regime of Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi. Indeed, almost immediately following Egypt’s historic parliamentary elections of November 2011, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (JFP) began drafting a series of laws that would modify the role of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) and regulate the offering of Islamic financial services across the entire sector. Moreover, by making the registration of Islamic banks easier, the proposed regulations were primarily designed to achieve a long-standing objective of Brotherhood leaders of increasing the market share of Islamic banks vis-à-vis the traditional or conventional banks.

Indeed, what is noteworthy is that these legislative proposals sought to reverse the policies of the Mubarak regime that strongly regulated Islamic banking after the latter’s strong growth in the oil boom years. Specifically, they called for Shari’a boards (Lijan al-Shari’a) to monitor compliance with Islamic law,²⁵ the strengthening of Islamic sukuk law that governs the issuing of bonds, and the creation of an Islamic banking department at the Central Bank that would regulate the sector.

President Mohamed Mursi and representatives of his party argued that these regulations would make the banking sector more competitive and attract a huge volume of capital inflows from the global Islamic economy estimated in 2012 at more than a trillion US dollars. Mohammed Gouda, a member of the FJP’s committee on the economy, predicted that with these new modifications to the Central Bank law the Islamic financial sector would grow from 7.5 percent to 35 percent of the total banking industry over a five-year period. This optimistic target was based on two key assumptions on the part of the Brotherhood: the fact that Egypt, with its predominantly conservative Muslim population of around 90 million, represents an untapped demand for Islamic financial services and that the Brotherhood’s long-standing transnational financial linkages represent a strong demand for Islamic banking and source of capital inflows, especially from the Gulf states. As Gouda put it: “They [Arabs in the Gulf] would like to invest here but prefer to do it through Islamic or Shari’a-compliant banks.”²⁶

However, opponents of these measures insisted that rather than liberalizing the banking sector and enhancing the autonomy of the CBE, these measures were aimed primarily at strengthening the economic and political clout of the Muslim Brotherhood affording them distinct advantage over the money supply in the country. Three important provisions of the draft law presented by JFP delegates to the economic committee of Majlis al-Sha’ab (Popular Council) in June 2012 sparked these fears. These included articles 1 and 2 which proposed that the governor of the CBE and his deputy be granted immunity from dismissal by the CBE’s Board of Governors and granted authority to the Islamic banks to generate capital from individuals and private and external sources without having to acquire permission from the Ministry of Finance. More controversial, from the point of view of opponents of the draft law, were articles 137 and 138.²⁷ These articles compelled the CBE to appoint three experts on Shari’a, to be appointed by the prime minister, and charged with overseeing and monitoring all financial operations of the Islamic and conventional banks in order to ensure transactions, investments, and lending policies do not contradict Islamic law. Furthermore, the members of this Shari’a board were entrusted with developing new rules and regulations that would introduce binding guidelines having to do with the appointment of managerial staff of CBE as well as the Islamic and conventional banks.

The perception that Brotherhood leaders were intent on the Islamicization of the financial sector increased on December 8, 2012, when Mursi issued a modification of two important articles governing the Central Bank. Taken together these new regulations granted Mursi more political and administrative authority over the most important financial institution in the country. The modifications reduced the number of board members from 12 to 6 and awarded the president the right to unilaterally nominate the CBE governor without the usual recommendations and oversight from the cabinet. These legislative measures were never implemented as a consequence of the removal of Mursi and the JFP from power by the military, but they would have meant a dramatic departure for an industry that had been carefully regulated under the regime of Hosni Mubarak.²⁸ Indeed, the debate over the draft law regulating the Central bank reignited the bitter conflict over Islamic banking, which is an enduring legacy of the Mubarak regime, pitting Islamists leaders and activists against their opponents in the military establishment as well as in civil society.

Confronting the Authoritarian State from Below: The Politics of Patronage in a “Weakened” State

The fiscal crisis of the state and the Mubarak regime’s efforts to contain the Islamist “threat” in combination with the increasing bureaucratic and legal regulation of what where previously largely informal financial and welfare institutions dramatically altered the strategies and tactics of the middle-class-based movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, while in the 1970s and 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood enjoyed great success in mobilizing thousands to their cause as a result of both financial success and greater political opportunity, in the 1990s and 2000s they faced severe political as well as economic restrictions, which were keenly felt at the local level.

But while the Mubarak regime managed to deepen its authoritarian rule in what is commonly called the era of political de-liberalization (i.e., imposing political restrictions in the context of political liberalization) it showed little interest and ultimately enjoyed far weaker capacity and legitimacy in forging patron-client linkages with communities residing in the vast informal settlements of greater Cairo. The 1992 uprising in Western Munira was certainly an important factor in the state’s increasing, albeit minimal, involvement in Imbaba, but the starting point of the government’s efforts to forge clientelistic linkages with local leaders originated in the rise in popularity of opposition parties in local elections.

Since the early 1970s, Imbaba was a district where the ruling National Party (NP) always won in all of the government-run elections. However, in 1984 the opposition obtained seats in parliament, which local NP officials saw as a “dangerous trend” and one that increased in the elections of 1987 and in the early 1990s. As a local National Party official in Imbaba informed me, the increasing competition between political parties motivated the National Party to focus on Imbaba, especially since some top opposition leaders were candidates in the area, which increased the level of competition and electoral campaigning.²⁹

Moreover, at a time when the National Party was complacent about Imbaba since, as one of its official’s noted, “the national party is not interested in any coordination [with other parties] because it has abundant resources,”³⁰ the opposition parties in Imbaba were engaging in an unprecedented level of coordination. In particular, candidates belonging to the Labor Party and the Brotherhood politicians coordinated closely in the 1995 elections across thirty-nine districts where each of the parties had one candidate, but in the other districts they agreed that the two parties would support an agreed-upon candidate running under the banner of the Labor Party. Interestingly, similar attempts to coordinate between the secular leftist Tagammu and Nasserist candidates, who were successful in other parts of Giza, failed in Imbaba.³¹ This was primarily because they could not compete with the high level of coordination and popularity of the Islamist coalition in the area.

There were two primary reasons that Islamist enjoyed popularity among local residents in Imbaba, but it is important to note that, at the local level, this reflected socioeconomic and political factors far more than religious concerns.³² First, Islamist leaders generated a great deal of legitimacy by signaling to residents a deep knowledge and sympathy with the local context and the social and economic crisis affecting Imbaba’s residents. This was clearly evident both by their attempts to alleviate the unemployment problem and offer social services. However, in the context of the state’s increasing restrictions on the al-Iqtisaad al-Ikhwani (the Brotherhood Economy) these services were minimal and so Islamist leaders also used a particular brand of discourse that resonated with the local community. The combination of material assistance and normative framing evidenced in the sermons was an important reason they were able to mobilize a great deal of support.

All Politics Is Local: Mobilizing Islamist or Kinship Networks?

Most significantly, Islamist leaders, and those belonging to the Muslim Brothers in particular, were able to derive strong legitimacy through their involvement in local elections. This is illustrated by the nature of the candidates that competed in the 1995 elections in Imbaba. The candidates running included politicians from the ruling National Party, and the opposition Wafd, Tagammu, Nasserite, Labor, and Omma parties, with members of the Muslim Brotherhood running as independents. The most important candidates in the 1995 Imbaba elections included Abdel Hamid Barakat (Labor Party), Ismail Hilal (National Party), No’man Joma’a (Wafd), and the female candidate Fathiya ‘Assal (Tagammu). Of these candidates only the pro–Islamist Labor candidate had the legitimacy that earned him great support. Hilal was accused in the context of the local campaign of corruption and inaction, and Joma’a was perceived as out of touch with Imbaba since he resided in the nearby upper-class neighborhood of Zamalak and branded as one of the “Al-Zamak riches” that, as one local newspaper noted, “knows nothing about Imbaba’s problems.”³³

Similarly, while government newspapers and the well-funded campaign of the NP candidate, Ismail Hilal, went to great lengths to inform residents that he was an executive with the Ministry of Electricity and that his plan to install electricity in poor areas and fight illiteracy earned him their votes,³⁴ the NP’s historical absence and seeming disinterest in providing even a modicum of social services in Imbaba did not resonate favorably with local residents.³⁵ But the primary problems with the NP candidates, clearly outlined in the opposition papers at the time, had to do with the corruption of the NP and the state’s distance from the local problems facing Imbaba’s residents. Al Wafd, for example, ran a number of stories accusing the Ministry of Interior of “modifying” the list of eligible voters, the privatization of municipal services, and the allocation of budget outlays to the district without any consultation with representatives of the local residents.³⁶ For her part, ‘Assal’s candidacy on the Tagammu’ ticket was based, in her own words, on her awareness of the “poor conditions of Egyptian women, especially in Imbaba,”³⁷ but her campaign did not reflect a deep knowledge of the social and economic conditions of the population and as such her candidacy did not resonate with more conservative Muslim residents. Perhaps more importantly, ‘Assal ran her campaign against Islamic “terrorism” thus further alienating supporters of both the Muslim Brothers and the Islamic Group in Imbaba.³⁸

In contrast, an important reason that the Islamists running under the banner of the Labor Party at the time were more popular with Imbaba residents had to do with their social linkages with the local community and, more importantly, their candidate’s understanding of its social makeup and concerns. Indeed, the relative success of the candidates depended on the extent to which their respective campaigns focused on primarily economic and social issues and on whether the candidates enjoyed familial and kinship connections in the district.³⁹ The Labor candidate in 1995, Abdel Hamid Barakat, ran a relatively more successful campaign in Imbaba because his campaign paid closer attention to the poorer quarters in Imbaba. In addition, the Labor Party’s al-Sha’ab newspaper correctly pointed out that as someone from a rural and agricultural background, he had a great deal in common with the newly urbanized residents of the neighborhood. Specifically, the newspaper noted that he belonged to the Beni ‘Adi clan in Manfalout, Assiut in Upper Egypt, and it reminded voters that he was the president of the Ben ‘Adi Regional Association (Rabita Iqlimiyya) and further noted that security forces had banned his campaign appearances and prevented him from distributing campaign advertisements in their efforts to curtail Muslim (i.e., Islamist) candidates.⁴⁰

Abdel Hamid Barakat’s candidacy is illustrative of the reasons why Islamist candidates or those running on an Islamist platform continued to enjoy significant support in the neighborhood. In his campaign Barakat emphasized that he was running in Imbaba for a number of reasons all of which resonated deeply with local residents. First, it was because he is from Imbaba and it is where his parents moved to from Assiut. Second, his electoral platform included two important components. The notion that “Islam is the solution,” and that he wanted to establish new laws and regulations in Imbaba. His campaign statements cited Imam Hassan al-Banna regarding the importance of working toward applying Islamic law on all matters and building an Islamic state in Egypt.

But Barakat’s real legitimacy, as evidenced by the survey of voters in the neighborhood as well as my interviews with local residents,⁴¹ had to do with his own social profile. In his campaign he focused on the fact that he was from the small village of Mafalout in Assiut, that he was a second-generation migrant to Imbaba like thousands of other families in Western Munira in Imbaba, and he openly acknowledged his involvement in the political branch of the Muslim Brothers as well as his position as secretary general of the Labor Party at the time. He declared often that education was the key solution for all troubles and that the problems associated with the lack of education in Imbaba resulted in other problems such as unemployment, “moral disease,” and “fanaticism.” Moreover, while the other candidates focused on the issue of “terrorism,” promoted by the regime’s official discourse, Barakat appealed to the simple, everyday concerns of local residents and what he termed creating a “new spirit in the citizen” based on the principles of self-reliance, and an appreciation of the importance of education, raising awareness of environment degradation, and encouraging donations among Muslims in order to encourage religiously sanctioned private initiatives.⁴² In contrast, candidates running on the Tagammu ticket such as Fekri Taha Bedeir chose to appeal to larger national-level concerns which, for Imbaba’s residents, appeared to be intangible ideas far removed from pressing and more immediate concerns associated with the problems of poverty, infrastructural development, employment, and education in Imbaba. More specifically, the latter stated that they were running in the elections in order to make a difference in changing laws in parliament and to provide services to Imbaba such as health, employment, and “serve the public through parliament.”⁴³

Political Centralization and the Changing Strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood

At a time when much of the focus was on national-level politics and the contest between Islamist elites and the regime, the ramifications associated with the policies of state centralization were deeply felt at the local level. Moreover, they played an important role in altering the electoral strategy of Islamist activists at the municipal level as well as the very nature and the methods of recruitment. Importantly, by the late 1990s the most important constraint, which Brotherhood members in Imbaba cited, had to do with the increasing restrictions imposed by the Mubarak regime on political participation, which limited individual members’ path toward social mobility and hence the organization’s ability to expand its movement.

“Under Sadat,” as one Brother in al-Waraq noted, “there were only four political parties, but there was more democracy during that time, more room to maneuver than under Hosni Mubarak although there are many more parties registered.” Both leaders and rank and file members interviewed offered a critical appraisal of their activism in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Wagi Abdel-Raziq, “We did not take advantage of the events in 1977 (i.e. bread riots), and the 1981 crisis (i.e. Sadat’s assassination). We should not have kept a low profile at that time. We were overly ambitious.” Rather than the accommodationist stance that the organization’s leadership assumed vis-à-vis the regime, members of the Brotherhood, citing the regimes suppression of the Brotherhood’s political activity and its assault on the organization’s commercial enterprises, openly voiced regret that they did not take advantage of instability to wage a more radical opposition to the regime when it was “at its weakest.”⁴⁴ The rank and file members in particular openly criticized the general guide (al-Murshid al-‘Am) Telmasani’s historic decision to accommodate the movement’s objectives and strategies to the state with the view toward garnering more representation in parliament.

According to Wagih Abdel-Raziq Abu-Rawash, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood branch in al-Waraq, Imbaba, the strategy of the organization in the 1990s changed as the movement came under more restrictions. “We tried to reform the system from the outside; now we are trying to reform it from the inside.”⁴⁵

This change in strategy was a direct result of the state’s decision to alter the electoral system for elections to the People’s Assembly (Majlis al-Sha’ab). Whereas in the past candidates belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to form a coalition with small opposition parties such as the Labor Party (Hizb al-Sha’ab), the newly implemented winner takes all system essentially guaranteed that the ruling party would not only win the most seats but also that there would be a limited chance for independents to gain seats in the People’s Assembly. In the older system, at least “we had a chance even if we were allocated five percent of the seats like we had when we allied with Hizb al-Sha’ab in the elections.” Sayed Farouk Kamel, another brotherhood member complained that “at present if the Labor Party wins the majority of seats as they often did in the local council elections in Osim, Imbaba, the government simply cancels the elections – so there is no way to win except to infiltrate the ranks of the weak National Party.”⁴⁶ Consequently, the organization attempted to get their members to join the ruling National Party and run for local elections with the view toward promoting members to run in elections at the level of the Muhafaza (governate) rather than at the national level for seats in the People’s Assembly. “Our real objective,” according to another Brotherhood member, “is to get our people at the Governate, not the National level,” and the most effective way to do this was to recruit independents with no “past history” of activism within the Muslim Brotherhood in order to evade state surveillance and corruption.

However, it is important to note that this strategy represented a tacit alliance among a large cross section of residents in Imbaba rather than a strict ideological and political divide. Indeed, members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Imbaba, as well as government-appointed local council leaders and supporters of the Tagammu Party, bitterly complained about the increasing lack of political participation and voice afforded their community. Indeed, just as Brotherhood members complained of government corruption insisting it was not Mubarak, who, in the words of one Brother, “is a nice guy,” but rather his cronies Yusif Wali and Kamal al-Shadli, respectively, the deputy chairman of the ruling NDP and the minister of Parliamentary Affairs at the time, who were “running the country.” Staff members of the local council in al-Waraq, Imbaba, also bitterly complained of the increasing authoritarianism of the regime. This is because in contrast to other more affluent neighborhoods wherein local council members have closer clientelistic linkages with the state, this is not the case in the poorer quarters of Imbaba.

Indeed, for both the Muslim Brotherhood, and particularly for the government-appointed local officials, the main problem was that, by the late 1990s and into the 2000s, state centralization reduced political participation and eroded previous informal clientelistic networks and linkages to such an extent that it prevented them from providing the type of services needed to their community. “I had a cousin,” Farouk Kamel noted,

Not surprisingly political centralization resulted in an increasingly confrontational stance on the part of the Brotherhood vis-à-vis those institutions of the state that had the greatest impact at the local level. In my interviews with leaders and rank and file members of the Muslim Brothers in Imbaba, and particularly in al-Waraq where the Brothers enjoy support to this day, Ikhwan members cited a number of elements associated with political as well as social issues as reasons for joining and remaining loyal to the organization. These include the promise of upward mobility, grievances having to do with the long repressive arm of the state, restrictions on political participation, and genuine anger against the corruption at the level of local government. Naturally, as the Tahrir uprising demonstrated, this anger resonated among much of the population but it is also true that responses vary. The anger on the part of the Brother’s leadership, however, is genuinely vitriolic. As one Brother said of the governor of Giza, the primary official authority over communities in Imbaba, “he is a son of a Dog.” He also harshly criticized the deputy chairman of the National Democratic Party and the Ministry of Parliament under Mubarak, which he noted act as “watchdogs” in the local elections.⁴⁸

The Islamists and Fariq Al-Kura (the Soccer Club)

This profound disillusionment with politics on the part of the Brotherhood represented both a constraint and opportunity for the organization at the local level. On the one hand, the coercive arm of the regime constrained the organization’s efforts at mobilization requiring a change of strategy and vision. On the other, the ruling party’s persistent authoritarianism and corruption ensured that Islamist activists continued to enjoy significant popularity, particularly in the middle- and lower middle-class quarters such as al-Waraq, Imbaba. Indeed, if the political and social ambitions of the Brotherhood were increasingly undermined by a newer, more restrictive political arena generating deep anger against the regime and a new strategy among local activists in neighborhoods such as Imbaba, state repression and surveillance of the Islamist movement also altered the strategy of recruitment of new members.

More specifically, the methods of recruitment built on trust networks composed of close relatives, friends and neighbors that were so successful in the 1970s and 1980s (Chapter 1) were greatly undermined by state intervention. According to leading Brotherhood members in al-Waraq, a number of key constraints limited efforts at recruitment. Most notable was the lack of education and high rates of literacy in Imbaba generally, and the persistent divisive policies on the part of the representatives of the NDP in the area. “We cannot,” as one Brother put it, “count on the support of family members or even friends since they [the NDP] intervenes and gives money to your cousin or brother to turn against each other.” Indeed, by the late 1990s, the state’s curtailment of the Brotherhood’s was so severe that members of the Muslim Brotherhood took to calling their organization our “soccer club” (Fareeq al-Kura) rather than our “movement” (Haraka) in public conversations and in locations in Imbaba and other neighborhoods such as Matariyya where the Brothers enjoyed significant support from local residents and where informants and security forces were ubiquitous.

The Political Economy of Middle-Class Islamist Activism and Recruitment

As with social movements more generally, the Brotherhood’s recruitment process involves two essential challenges: motivating participation by offering the type of incentives that are likely to induce individuals to join and attempting to attract the right kind of recruit to the organization. But if, for the Muslim Brotherhood, the 1980s and much of the 1990s was al-ahd al-thahabi (the golden age)of recruitment and popular mobilization, by the late 2000s when I returned to conduct further research, local members of the movement explained that this “Golden Age” ended due to a number of developments that obtained in the latter part of Mubarak’s regime. These included the imposition of state laws restricting union organization and activity for professional syndicates, the prohibitions of freely run student elections, the regulation of the mosques of Ansar al-Fiqh, the closure of the Brotherhood’s Mosques or their replacement by the state-sponsored mosques. Moreover, in a development that prefigured the seemingly surprising popularity of Salafists in the aftermath of the Tahrir uprisings, the Mubarak regime promoted the rise of Islamist groups in order to diminish the popularity and threat posed by the Brotherhood. “The state,” as one Brotherhood leader explained bitterly, “has taken to closing our Mosques, putting others under al-Azhar’s jurisdiction, and they have established other Salafi Mosques to moderate the Islamists and provide competition between us.”⁴⁹

However, a key factor the Ikwhan noted is the persistent war against the “Islamic economy” of the country which targeted the financial base of the movement. They suggested that a profound blow in this campaign was the trial in April 2008 against two of the movements’ most important businessmen and financiers. Taken together these developments led to serious divisions among members of the Brotherhood, and most notably, between the younger and older generation. However, this conflict does not seem to stem from major doctrinal differences. In fact, few of the younger generation of the Islamists I interviewed expressed a radical departure from the Ikwhan’s doctrinal orthodoxy. However, what this intergenerational tension does demonstrate is a genuine disillusionment on the part of members, and a potential pool of recruits, with the inner workings and organizational structure of the Brotherhood. In addition, younger members speak openly about the movement’s increasing inability to adequately address their social and political grievances and aspirations. How deep and consequential these intergenerational divisions are was demonstrated following the January 25th Tahrir uprisings. Only a few months after the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) the organization not only witnessed major splits in its leadership, the party dismissed many young members who had played a role during the uprisings and who subsequently formed a new party: the Egyptian current.⁵⁰

This factor is clearly evident in the crisis over recruitment that emerged in the years prior to the ouster of Mubarak by the Tahrir uprising. By the late 2000s the Muslim Brotherhood had to shorten the lengthy taribiyya (recruitment) process from seven to five stages in order to meet these challenges and make it less arduous for potential recruits to join the organization, albeit at the cost of risking lower levels of commitment and loyalty to the organization. Leaders of the Brotherhood such as ‘Issam al-‘Eryan, the official spokesperson of the Brotherhood (who was imprisoned and sentenced to a life sentence by the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi) cited state repression as the primary culprit and argued that this curtailed the recruitment of laborers and the poor, limited dissemination of the Da’wa via the Ahali mosques, and restricted their capacity to provide social welfare services.⁵¹ No doubt, this is one reason why the Brotherhood organization began to lose recruits to other Da’was by the late 2000s. Their leadership at the local level resorted to rural recruitment for the first time, forming short-lived coalitions with leftists and liberals at the grassroots level and even attempting to work with Sufi-run mosques. In what at the time was an unprecedented effort, Brotherhood leaders also attempted to make inroads in government mosques in order to seek out potential recruits. “We know,” one Ikhwan recruiter in Helwan said, “that we have to focus on the Mosque itself rather than the individual Imam or the content of the khutbah [sermon] in these government Mosques.” The heightened level of state repression and the regulation and monitoring of Ahali mosques led to adaptation signaling a relatively new crisis in recruitment for the country’s Islamist movement that did not obtain during the boom’s “Golden Age.”

But while the role of the state is an important factor in this crisis for the organization, it is also clear that larger economic as well as political changes circumscribed and altered the recruitment process of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. While the state continued its repression of key members of the organization, equally important was the state’s role in attacking the financial assets of the movement, a policy that has continued under the present regime of Abdel Fatah Sisi. Moreover, the changing political economy associated with the rise of the service and financial sectors, and deindustrialization meant that the Brotherhood no longer concentrated its recruitment drives on semi-skilled workers where previously professional syndicates were the locus of recruitment. Political repression has led to decentralization of welfare provisions, and Ahali mosques are often driven underground where zawyas are now the place where the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to disseminate their message to members. Nevertheless, in informal settlements in Imbaba, Ahali mosques are still prevalent in these largely “ungoverned” areas of greater Cairo wherein one finds a paucity of law and order and educational institutions, a high number and expansion in unregulated housing and informal rather than formal workers in greater numbers. Students – once the central constituency of the Ikhwan – now join nonpoliticized salafi organizations or charismatic evangelists.⁵² One leader of the Ikhwan in Helwan explained the nature of these dynamics of recruitment and mobilization in terms of two important developments: a change of focus with respect to the social profile of new entrants to the Brotherhood, and the impact on the organization of new competing Da’was and organizations:

It is important to note that leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood at both the national and local levels have long harbored contradictory perspectives on the role of material incentives in particular, and changes in the larger political economy generally, in inducing men and women to join their movement. On the one hand, leaders and rank and file members of the Brotherhood in Imbaba repeatedly emphasized that economic issues associated with poverty or social inequality had little to do with why young men and women joined the Brotherhood. “Egyptians,” one prominent leader of the Brotherhood in al-Waraq insisted, are not “mobilized” by class rhetoric and “you can see rich and poor side by side with no conflict between them. This was never an important element in drawing new members.” As he put it: “I mean I was aware of poverty, but it had little influence on me at the time I joined the Ikhwan.”⁵⁴ Moreover, from the point of view of prominent leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, economic reforms introduced by Sadat’s open-door policy and the imposition of further neo-liberal policies under Mubarak did not influence the Islamist movement since, as Abdel-Hamid al-Ghazali, a scholar of economics and economic advisor to the general guide of the movement observed, it “has been very slow to have any concrete effect.” In any case, “most Egyptians,” he noted, “have become used to working in informal activities or moon lighting to supplement their incomes, or even relying on rashwa (bribes), rather than relying on the state for anything.”⁵⁵

On the other hand, local leaders of the Ikhwan in the quarter of Al-Waraq in Imbaba and in the working-class neighborhood of Helwan interviewed acknowledged that the persistent war against al-iqtisad al-Islami (Islamic economy) of the country, which has targeted the financial base of the movement, in combination with the state centralization policies of the “ruling gang” (al-‘isaba al-hakma), compelled the organization to alter its electoral strategy and methods of recruitment and mobilization.⁵⁶ According to Wagih Abdel-Raziq Abu-Rawash, in the 1970s both economic and political opportunities expanded the base and popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood. “During the Sadat era we were let out of prison, while thousands of others went to the Gulf. They came back from the Arab countries after Sadat’s death and ran in the 1983 general elections with great financial backing. They financed their run in 1983 with the help of rich businessman and voluntary contributions spanning a large network. They also encountered other Brothers while they were in the Gulf establishing businesses and raising money in the 1960s and 1970s for the movement. They [also] established networks to help others in Egypt travel to the Gulf were many became wealthy.”⁵⁷

Indeed, the opportunity of upward social mobility in particular during the boom years played a central role in the popularity of the movement. Following his time in prison, for example, one Brotherhood leader bitterly noted that he lost “most of his life” and was never able to make money and pursue a successful career and that he could only afford to get married late in his life in his forties. This social frustration associated with the increasing constraints on economic and political aspirations is shared widely among the rank and file members of the Brotherhood. Significantly, a number of Ikhwan not only criticized the socialist and the, often, violent anti-Brotherhood policies of Nasser’s regime, but also the paternalistic, albeit not necessarily patriarchal, nature of Egyptian society. Many leveled a sharp critique against their fathers for “putting limitations” on their ambitions. While the “sons of most families join traditional political parties or follow in their father’s line,” another Brother stated, “we want political independence.” Indeed, for many Brothers it was politics and not anti-state forms of activism that served as a primary avenue of upward mobility and career success. The grave disappointment shared by leaders and rank and file alike by the late 1990s and 2000s is that in the 1980s, many Ikhwan prospered in the context of the openness of the Sadat regime and in the early years of Mubarak. When one younger member confessed that he preferred to “stay out of politics,” a senior Brother quickly but gently reprimanded him and reminded him that he could do both simultaneously. That is, “pursue politics and still make a good living.”⁵⁸

Nevertheless, in the years immediately prior to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak it was evident that an unspoken class conflict had emerged within the Muslim Brotherhood. In great part this was driven by the attack on Islamic business and finance, compounded by generational divisions and schisms represented by youth openly critical of the leadership’s authoritarian organizational structure; the lack of transparency with respect to the manner in which Islamist candidates chosen to run in local elections are selected; the persistent discrimination against women in decision-making positions; the leadership’s short-lived cooperation with the Mubarak regime in the period before the Tahrir uprisings;⁵⁹ and the militant and markedly divisive statements promulgated by the Wahhabist wing of the Brothers.⁶⁰ Consequently, Brotherhood leaders acknowledged, albeit privately, the limitations they encounter in terms of recruitment based on a number of criteria. These include arguably subjective criteria such as the psychological, emotional, and professional attributes of the individual as well as more objective ones based on the middle-class nature of the movement, the generational divide and social distance between the leadership and the rank and file, the restrictions delimited by continuing government repression, and the drying up of funds for their social welfare programs and commercial enterprises, which was once an important source of financing and recruitment of the middle-ranking cadres of the movement.

Moderates versus Militants and Sufis

In the 1990s and 2000s, in great part as a result of a dramatic shift in the political economy following the recession, the Muslim Brotherhood witnessed an increasingly marked social and generational divide within what was a hitherto relatively cohesive movement. This period also saw a greater class as well as ideological divide emerge between the moderate and militant wings of the Islamist trend, which has continued to play a central role in contemporary Egyptian politics. Indeed, while Brotherhood members acknowledged that their movement joined with the more radical Jama’at (Groups) in the elections on the university campuses in Cairo and Upper Egypt in the 1980s, by the mid-1990s leaders in the Brotherhood openly cooperated with the Mubarak regime’s policy, which at the time was aimed at subduing the threat from Islamist militants through a combination of political repression and a policy of dividing the Islamist opposition in the country.

Understandably, leaders in the Brotherhood repeatedly distinguished their movement from that of the radical Islamist activists in terms of what they insisted is a more moderate ideology and accommodationist stance vis-à-vis the state. But even as Brotherhood members minimized the role of economic and social issues in inducing young men and women to join Islamist organizations, they nevertheless described the division between moderate and radical Islamists in terms that highlighted the stark social distance between the two wings of the Islamist trend. Importantly, rather than emphasizing a “natural” and seamless doctrinal divide among the different Islamists, the Ikwhan most often pointed to a combination of emotional, psychological, and professional attributes to explain why individuals may join radical rather than moderate organizations. As one member of the Brothers explained: “The Ikhwan [Brothers] are more subtle than the Takfiris. We represent those with ambitions. A Muslim Brother must have a profession to join the movement, the militants are the violent ones … they are those who failed in school and are often psychologically unbalanced.” Another leader, reflecting what remains a popular view of the Jama’a al-Islamiyya and other militant organizations, classified those who joined the group as “victims of their own innocence.”⁶¹

Importantly, and similar to Sudan, for their part Sufi orders in Egypt have historically opposed both the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist movements on political and ideational grounds. But in stark contrast to Sudan where they have long played a central role in political mobilization and pro-democracy mobilization, in Egypt Sufi orders have generally been subordinate to state authority or been used as instruments of political and economic control.⁶² This was demonstrated again in the 2012 presidential election whereby the Sufis threw their complete support behind Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmad Shafiq, and did not support candidates from any Islamic party.⁶³ Predictably, and owing in great part to a long history of co-optation by political authorities, the main Sufi party formed, following the Tahrir uprisings, Hizb al-Masryiin al-Ahrar (Free Egyptians Party), registered a poor showing in the 2012 elections.⁶⁴

Islamic Militancy and the “Satanic Settlements”

It is safe to say that the rise of Militancy in Imbaba shocked and perplexed middle-class Cairo as the state came to be threatened by a new, more radical, form of Islamist activism centered in the informal housing areas or spontaneous unplanned areas on the fringes of the City. Indeed, until the unprecedented Tahrir protests of 2011, the militant rebellion in Imbaba in 1992 was the most dramatic uprising in the capital. None of the major civil disorders in urban Cairo required the level of state emergency response or exacted such a toll in terms of life, injuries, and property damage and loss comparable to the Imbaba siege. The state-run media in particular was marshaled in an unprecedented fashion to cover what it termed the “satanic settlements” (manatiq shaytaniyyah).⁶⁵ Informal housing came to symbolize the problem of the existence and persistence of endemic forms of poverty, and by 1992, a fertile “breeding ground” for a new form of Islamist radicalism.⁶⁶ The fact that Cairo witnessed a rise in incidents of violence by militants in this period, coinciding with the phenomenal growth of informal settlements (or shanty towns) on the outskirt of the city, immediately led to speculation that these two developments were somehow linked.⁶⁷ However, given the great size, density of population, and social diversity of Cairo’s twenty-eight informal settlements the claim, promoted by the media and state officials, that they somehow engendered recourse to Islamist militancy said more about the social distance between middle-class Caireans and the socially marginalized residents of informal quarters such as those in Western Munira than about the root causes underlying the rise of Islamic radicalism. Indeed, far from a marginal phenomenon, by the late 1990s informal settlements housed half of Greater Cairo’s twelve million.⁶⁸ Yet it was chiefly in the poorest quarters of Imbaba that militant Islamists gained a stronghold in Cairo. In contrast to older, more socially cohesive informal settlements, the quarters of Western Munira are distinguished by their relative poverty and social marginalization as well as their close proximity to more affluent areas of urban Cairo.

However, clearly this new, more militant Islamist movement was not ubiquitous among Egypt’s poor. In Chapter 7 I address the important question of what led to the surprising popularity and increasing numbers of Islamic Group supporters in the Western Munira sections of Imbaba. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood spearheaded the most dominant trend of Islamist activism in urban Cairo. It was in this period that they managed to establish a wide range of civil society institutions through a successful social movement that was, unlike the al-Jama’a, largely nonviolent. Why then did Islamist activism in informal Cairo assume an increasingly militant form beginning in the late 1980s and 1990s? And, equally important, why has it continued to enjoy significant support in recent decades?

When on June 30, 1989, a group of middle-ranking army officers led by Brigadier Omer Hassan al-Bashir overthrew the civilian government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi in a coup d’etat, it was clear to most Sudanese that the coup leaders were ardent members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The new military regime was organized under the umbrella of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) but the planning and decision-making were spearheaded by what was then a clandestine organization that was known as the Council of Defenders of the Revolution, known at time among many Sudanese as the Council of Forty (al-majlis al-arbeen). What was most noteworthy about the council was that it was headed by the influential Ali Osman Taha, the then president of the National Islamic Front (NIF) and well known to be the disciple of Hassan Turabi.

There is little question that in its first decade in power the Bashir regime pursued radical measures in domestic politics as well as foreign affairs. The regime’s Islamist-radical credentials became evident as early as December 1990 when the RCC formally announced a more comprehensive array of shari’a laws and promised to implement them by force. The expansion of Islamic penal codes included more stringent laws against apostasy, the enforcement of Islamic dress for women, and the exclusion of non-Muslims from holding high positions in the state bureaucracy. Moreover, with more stringent Islamicization policies came greater militarization. Under pressure from the leadership of the NIF, the RCC almost immediately created a paramilitary force, the Popular Defense Forces (PDF), to secure the Islamic revolution, “expand the faith,” and combat the non-Muslim rebellion in the south.¹

In some respects the officers who made up the RCC followed in the pattern of the many other coups d’etats that have occurred throughout the African continent.² However, it quickly became clear that the coup in the summer of 1989 in Sudan was different from the pattern of the two previous coups that the country witnessed in 1958 and 1969. Indeed, while Francois Bayart has observed that in many weak African states the construction of a hegemonic (authoritarian) ruling elite is often forged out of a tacit agreement between a diverse group of power brokers, intermediaries, and local authorities, the Islamist-backed coup in Sudan represented (at least in its first decade in power) the first time in the country’s history where an ideological party bureaucracy has sought total dominance over both state institutions and the entire population. Indeed, following the coup of 1989, the Bashir regime quickly outlawed all political parties, professional organizations, trade unions, and civil society organizations. Furthermore, backed by the NIF, the Bashir regime expanded its dominance over the banking system, monopolized the transport and building industries, and took control of the national media. In addition, for the first time, a ruling regime in Khartoum waged a concerted campaign to destroy the economic base and religious popularity of the two most powerful religious sects: the Ansar but particularly the Khatmiyya and its supporters.³

In the 1990s radical politics at home was matched with a new form of Islamist radicalism in foreign affairs under the leadership of the leaders of the NIF. In 1991, less than two years after coming to power and under the leadership of the late Hassan Turabi, Khartoum established the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC), al-mutamar al-arabi al-shabi al-islami with the ambitious goal of coordinating Islamic anti-imperialist movements in fifty Muslim states. It was at this juncture that the Khartoum regime welcomed Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden not only opened accounts in al-Shamal, Tadamun, and Faisal Islamic Banks as a way to assist the regime financially, he also provided funds for al-Qa’ida camps on the outskirts of Khartoum.

But if the 1990s witnessed a strident form of Islamist radical politics, by the end of the decade Khartoum turned to more pragmatic policies withdrawing its support for Islamist radical organizations beyond its national borders. The turning point in Sudan’s support for international terrorism came in June 1995, when the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, assisted by the Sudanese intelligence service, carried out an assassination attempt against the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Adaba. In September, the African Union condemned Sudan for supporting terrorism, and by April 1996 the United Nations voted to impose diplomatic sanctions. Shortly after the sanctions were introduced, Sudan offered to turn Osama bin Laden over to the Saudi and US governments. Al-Qa‘ida’s ouster from Sudan represented a strategic break. The Islamist regime recognized that it was a losing proposition to support terrorists without considering their targets. Three years later, Sudan made peace with most of its neighbors and initiated regular counterterrorism talks with the United States. Following the September 11 attacks, the regime made a tactical choice to cooperate aggressively with US counterterrorism efforts as a way to reduce its international isolation.⁴

To be sure the increasing cost of sanctions did compel the Bashir regime to withdraw support for radical Islam. But the ideological evolution and the shift from radicalism to pragmatism on the part of Khartoum is better explained by domestic factors and, specifically, in the Bashir regime’s attempt to consolidate political power in the context of dramatic external and internal economic pressures. Indeed, in the first instance, the rise to power of Islamist politics in the 1990s represented a victory in the long-standing rivalry between Islamist radicalism, traditional Sufism, and ethnicity. Indeed, Sufism and ethnic loyalties have long provided a bulwark against the ideological appeal of Islamist radicalism of the type pursued by the Bashir regime. Nevertheless, under the leadership of the NIF, the Islamists (until recently) were able to prevail primarily because they were able to capitalize on a series of economic changes in the 1970s and 1980s. The NIF in particular developed a great deal of clout through its monopolization of informal financial markets as well as control of much of Sudan’s Islamic banking system.

The Islamists in Power and the Conflict over the “Black Market”

The recession of the mid-1980s triggered the turbulent politics that saw the passing of two regimes in less than a decade and the capture of the state by an Islamist military junta in the summer of 1989. As formal financing from the Gulf (as well as Western bilateral and multilateral assistance) dried up, giving way to the dominance of the parallel market, President Ja‘far al-Nimairi was forced to implement an IMF austerity program, removing price controls on basic consumer items. These measures sparked the popular uprising (intifada) that resulted in his ouster in 1985 and the election of a democratic government a year later. The civilian government, once again dominated by the old sectarian elites and characterized by interparty squabbling between the Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), proved ineffectual in the face of Sudan’s severe economic crisis. Blocked from formal assistance due to a dispute with the IMF, the civilian government attempted to capture the all-important remittance flows from Sudanese nationals abroad by instituting a two-tier foreign exchange system in the latter part of 1988, but this attempt met with little success.⁵

Not surprisingly the very weakness of the civilian government led to significant progress in peace negotiations with the south based on a potential agreement that called for the repeal of the shari’a-based laws implemented in 1983. These efforts were forestalled, however, by the 1989 military coup, which was backed by the newly ascendant Islamist commercial class. Al-Bashir and the other members of the coup’s military cadre had been recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood, who during the 1980s made use of their newfound wealth and access to petrodollar funding to establish a host of tax-exempted Islamic welfare and propagation organizations offering generous stipends and scholarships to a select group of mid-ranking officers.⁶

As discussed in Chapter 2, in the 1970s and 1980s the role of Islamic banks and the monopolization of informal financial transactions played a key role in the rise of the Islamists, organized under the umbrella of the NIF as an instrument of political authority. Nevertheless, the military coup of 1989 radicalized the Islamicization process in Sudan, and the new government gave immediate attention to the financial sector. Throughout the 1990s, the NIF consolidated their power through coercive extractive regulatory mechanisms, most notably the formation of a tax police to intimidate tax evaders, and the execution of black marketers belonging to politically marginal groups. The state’s weakening resulted in more predatory and rent-seeking interventions. In addition to extracting revenue from local taxes, licensing fees, and bank loans, the state tried to capture a share of the informal urban market, exacting taxes on a percentage of the rental value on all shops, sheds, specialized markets, special services, and local development schemes.⁷

Whereas the parallel economy had been a source of strength for the Islamists in their rise to power, once they captured the state, and property rights were thus reassigned to their benefit, the parallel economy became a threat. One of the first measures of the Islamist state was to “declare war on black marketers, hoarders, smugglers, and traders who ‘overcharge,’ threatening them with execution.”⁸ Sudanese expatriates working in Arab states were ordered to declare their money at the Khartoum airport; traders were directed to post official price lists in their shops; and many street vendors were imprisoned. Most significantly, the al-Bashir regime ordered the issuing of a new Sudanese currency and gave Sudanese only two weeks to exchange the hard currency in their possession at the free-market rate. Although this ruling initially enabled Islamic banks to garner a significant amount of hard currency in the short term, government policy did not address the underlying production problem that made black marketeering and hoarding an endemic part of Sudan’s economy. Moreover, most merchants simply closed their shops or completely withdrew certain goods from the market. The general result was the exacerbation of the scarcity problem and hyperinflation averaging more than 2,000 percent per annum.⁹

The NIF’s Islamist regime’s preoccupation with, and even fear of, the parallel market was warranted, given its potential in terms of capital accumulation – a potential that members of the Islamist commercial class utilized to great effect during the boom. In an interesting historical twist of fate, just as al-Nimairi was beholden to a private sector dominated by the Islamists in the 1970s and early 1980s, the latter found themselves with the unenviable position of fighting over rents in the parallel market while promoting liberal macro-economic policies designed to lure external assistance to replenish the depleted coffers of the state and revitalize the commercial sector of the economy. These polices included the transfer of assets to Islamist clients as opposed to privatization in a competitive sense.

Meanwhile, most earnings of Sudanese living in the Gulf continued to be remitted home via the parallel channels. Although the recession reduced the total volume of remittance flows (Figure 5.1), the bankrupt Sudanese economy meant that a broad spectrum of Sudan’s middle class relied more and more on informal finances from the Gulf. The parallel market in foreign exchange circumvented both the national banks and the Islamic financial institutions, thereby contributing to the virtual merger of these former rivals attempting to reverse their losses in the “battle for hard currency.” In essence then, the crackdown on the black market in the 1990s represented an alliance between the faction of the Islamist commercial class (organized under the banner of the NIF) dominating the commercial banks and their supporters in the state bureaucracy to try to capture a significant portion of the earnings of Sudanese working in the Arab countries of the Gulf.

Figure 5.1 Trends in remittances as proportion of GDP, exports, and imports in Sudan.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (World Bank, Washington, DC). https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators

Interestingly, conventional understandings of informal institutions commonly restrict informal markets to those not “officially” sanctioned by the state and assume, erroneously, that informal economic activities are generated exclusively as a direct result of excessive state intervention.¹⁰ In reality, and particularly in weak states, the expansion and operation of informal economic institutions are often produced by the actions and policies of the state elites themselves. In the case of Sudan after 1989, Islamist elites simultaneously countered and cultivated the expansion of black-market currency trade once they took over state institutions. Indeed, as in previous decades, the links between the formal institutions of the state and informal financial markets (i.e., black market) remained interdependent. But what changed after 1989 was that a shift occurred in the social and economic relations of power between a newly ensconced NIF-dominated state and rival sectarian and ethnic groups in civil society.

The crackdown against black-market dealers, for example, targeted only those black-market dealers who did not have links with the now Islamist-dominated state. Indeed, revenue generated from the black market continued to benefit key Islamist state officeholders. So despite the takeover of the state by the Muslim Brotherhood this did not curtail black-market transactions. Nor did it end the pattern of state collusion in parallel markets. Many of the black marketers before and after the coup of 1989 were Brotherhood supporters. Important NIF bankers, such as Shaykh ‘Abd al-Basri and Tayyib al-Nus, and the well-known currency dealer Salah Karrar, having become members of the Revolutionary Command Council’s Economic Commission, continued to speculate in grain deals, monopolize export licenses, and hoarded commodities in an effort to capture as much foreign exchange as possible. Moreover, while the Bashir regime implemented a “privatization” program this policy amounted to no more than the large-scale transfer of government-run public property into the “private” hands of Islamists. What is most notable is that Islamist financiers bought these assets with money made from currency speculation associated with remittance deposits.¹¹

Having managed to gain control of the state, the Islamist-backed Bashir regime went about the task of consolidating power as quickly as possible. But while the NIF had built a strong middle class of Islamist-minded supporters they hardly had a hegemonic control of civil society. This was clear as early as the general elections of 1986 wherein the NIF managed to win approximately 20 percent of the vote but fell behind the two more popular Sufi-based parties: the UMMA and Democratic Unionist Party. Indeed, financial clout did not immediately translate into hegemonic control in civil society for the Islamists. As a result, following the coup of 1989, the Bashir regime considered it vital to marginalize rival factions of the middle class, while continuing to expand their urban base, built in the 1970s and 1980s, among a new commercial Islamist class. Since the informal economy represented an important source of revenue generation for a wide range of social groups the NIF-backed regime immediately targeted this important avenue of revenue generation. It is in this context, and in order to intimidate the big business families, which did not have any links with the Islamist movement or the NIF party in particular, that the junta accused several members of these rival business families with “illegal” black-market currency dealing and summarily executed them.

If the Islamist regime sought to take complete control of informal finance, they simultaneously went about consolidating their hold on the formal financial institutions of the state. The appointment of ‘Abd al-Rahim Hamdi and Sabri Muhammad Hassan, two of the most renowned individuals among Sudan’s Islamist financiers, as minister of finance and governor of the Central Bank, respectively, left little doubt as to the Muslim Brotherhood’s overwhelming dominance of the state’s financial institutions. This monopoly did not go unnoticed. In protests coordinated primarily by students, workers, and professional associations belonging to the Modern Forces (al-Quwwat al-Haditha) in 1993 and 1994, it was Islamic Banks, rather than public offices, that were stoned, ransacked, and burned.

The regime’s relationship with the IMF was particularly contentious. In 1986 the IMF declared Sudan ineligible for fresh credits because of its failure to enforce economic reforms. In 1990, the IMF went further, declaring Sudan “non-cooperative” due to the fact that it owed more than USD 2 billion in arrears and, in an unprecedented move, it threatened Sudan with expulsion. The government openly sought to improve its relations with the IMF, and under the guidance of Hamdi, floated the Sudanese pound (resulting in a six-fold rise in the value of the US dollar in relation to local currency), liberalized prices of key commodities, and reduced subsidies on a number of consumer commodities. But as the IMF continued to withhold assistance – as did most of the Gulf countries in reprisal for Khartoum’s support of Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and its support of Islamist movements in the region – the al-Bashir regime was forced to reinstate subsidies in order to avert unrest in the urban areas.¹²

As the cost of living soared with the implementation of a wide-scale liberalization program, fears of potential social unrest prompted al-Bashir to dismiss Hamdi, a prominent advocate of the neoliberal economic policies. Hamdi’s removal was a sign of the state elites’ disenchantment with an economic liberalization program that was designed, but ultimately failed, to lure foreign assistance. But it was a cosmetic change: Hamdi’s successor as finance minister, ‘Abd Allah Hassan Ahmad, a former manager of Faisal Islamic Bank with strong ties to Europe- and Southeast Asia-based Islamist financiers, continued the neoliberal reforms. With the appointment of Sabir Muhammad al-Hassan, a high-ranking member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and former head of the Bank of Khartoum, as director of the Central Bank of Sudan, the Muslim Brotherhood continued to dominate fiscal and monetary policy. And members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters continued to benefit from preferential allocations of bank loans, customs exemptions, and foreign currency for imports. The most important Islamist businessmen enjoyed lucrative asset transfers from the privatization of textiles, agribusiness, telecommunications, and mineral rights. Meanwhile, economic austerity measures, compounded by massive inflation, impoverished the majority of the Sudanese population, including civil servants and those engaged in the private sector but not affiliated with the Brotherhood. Only two sectors of society could meet the prohibitive cost of living: families receiving expatriate remittances and NIF members and their supporters.

While the Islamists demonstrated great willingness to liberalize practically every sector of the economy, they singled out the financial sector – the basis of their support – for regulation. In December 1994, the Transitional National Assembly (TNA) amended the Foreign Currency Dealing Act. The new amendment to the law closely regulated foreign exchange transactions, prohibiting the acquisition of foreign currency without official documents, and recommended that foreign exchange payable to the government be exempt from customs. This was designed to provide a strong incentive for expatriate Sudanese to deposit their remittances in state banks – a clear indication of the state’s foreign exchange shortage.¹³ The amended law also reduced the penalty for currency violations and called for the confiscation of currency instead of previous punishments, which ranged from twenty years’ imprisonment to hanging, and also recommended that a distinction be made between legitimate “possession of” and illicit “dealing in” foreign currency.¹⁴ The changes demonstrated the extent to which the state was willing to specify property rights in ways that would maximize revenue accruing to a small elite rather than to rival constituents in civil society. But these changes were too little and came too late to capture the gains from remittances. The regime’s brutal crackdown of black marketeering, as well as the onset of the Iraq war, saw a steep decline in expatriate remittances from the Gulf that fed the parallel market sent to the formal banks of the state. Moreover, Sudan’s deep economic crisis in the 1990s led to increasing migrations abroad with the result that remittances continued to fuel the parallel (informal) market and, from the perspective of the regime, took away a significant amount of the hard currency earnings that could have, otherwise, been deposited in the coffers of the state. Interestingly, state institutions became so starved for remittance-based financing that the regime often solicited the support from some of the wealthiest black-market traders in the country in return for allowing the latter to continue operations in contravention of the state’s own laws against black-market currency dealings. When the country’s most powerful currency trader, Waled al-Jabel, was incarcerated for black marketeering, the National Bank of Sudan (then headed by a prominent Islamist technocrat) intervened on his behalf because he agreed to provide this primary formal financial institution with much-needed capital from his own coffers.¹⁵

In lieu of a solid fiscal base and a productive formal economy, Khartoum resorted to extreme ideological posturing as its primary mode of legitimation. Specifically, the government formed a tactical alliance with the Islamic regime in Iran in hopes of attaining political support and economic assistance. Iran’s chief contribution was to provide arms (worth an estimated USD 300 million) that the regime then utilized to escalate the military campaigns against the southern insurgency, ongoing since 1983, and to establish a repressive security apparatus, parallel to the national army, in northern urban areas. Not only were millions of southerners killed or displaced as a result of an escalation in the civil war, but religious and ethnic cleavages deepened.

The regime further consolidated its rule through a systematic penetration of the civil service, including the monopolization of the important Ministry of Oil and Energy, thereby creating a powerful network throughout the bureaucracy. Immediately following their assumption to power in 1989, the NIF-backed regime pursued a program of dismissals based on ideological and security considerations, targeting supporters of other political parties, secularists, non-Muslims, and members of sectarian organizations, trade and labor unions, and professional associations. The same policy was applied to the armed forces, and officers of anti-Islamist sentiment were dismissed en masse. The Popular Defense Forces (PDF) was established, and its members given extensive ideological and military training befitting the political objectives of the Islamist authoritarian regime. These measures culminated in the formal declaration of an Islamic state in 1991 and in the introduction of a “new” Islamic penal code.

By the mid-1990s the Bashir regime pursued policies abroad as well as at home that reflected a decidedly Islamist radical agenda. In 1991, under the leadership of Hassan Turabi, Khartoum organized the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC) hosted gatherings of known militant and terrorist organizations, and Khartoum gave moral, financial, and material support to mujahideen fighting in Bosnia, Albania, Somalia, and Chechnya. Thus, Sudan – one of the Muslim world’s most heterogeneous countries – became a center of international jihadism.

The Demise of “Islamic” Banking and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy

The Islamist elite’s continual efforts to consolidate their regime through their “war” against the black marketers, the implementation of a policy of de-statism (rather than privatization on a competitive basis), and their monopolization of import-export trade earned them the unflattering label of tamasih al-suq (market crocodiles). More specifically, building on gains made from Islamic finance during the oil boom in the Gulf, once in power, the Islamists continued in their efforts to strengthen the resource base of their movement. Indeed, they essentially took over the import-export sector, previously the territory of merchants belonging to the Khatmiyya sect. Indeed, throughout the 1980s commercial bank lending consisted overwhelmingly of short-term loans and remained focused on foreign and domestic trade rather than agriculture and other sectors (Table 5.1). Importantly, lucrative commodities like sorghum were exported through the subsidiaries of Faisal Islamic Bank and the African Islamic Bank, where Islamist stalwarts were senior executives.

However, the most important reasons for the regime’s increasingly predatory rent-seeking behavior was that by the mid-1990s the heyday in which Islamic banks were able to capture upward of 20 percent of the remittances of expatriate Sudanese and benefit from a veritable boom in capital investment from wealthy Gulf Arabs had come to an end. By the end of the decade, there was little question that, at least in economic terms, the Islamic banking experiment in Sudan had proved to be a dismal failure. In 1999, in its review of Sudan’s financial sector, the IMF reported that as much as 19 percent of bank credit was nonperforming. Even more devastating, the report further concluded that the Islamic banks had declining deposit bases and credit lending to the private sector (which had risen sharply in the 1980s in relation to other commercial bank lending) had contracted steadily in real terms from 1993 to 1999.¹⁶

There were both external as well as domestic political reasons for the failure of Islamic banking in the country. First, the economy in the 1990s was in dire straits as the regional recession deepened and the oil boom in the Gulf ended. The recession in the Gulf resulting from the slump in oil prices in the mid-1980s in particular had vastly reduced the inflow of remittances into the country and officially recorded remittances declined dramatically (Figure 5.1). A chief consequence of the diminution in remittance inflows was that the deposits from expatriate Sudanese into Islamic banks declined resulting in what the IMF observed as a dramatic decline in the capital base of these banks. In addition, the Sudanese domestic economy was in an increasingly weak position. Throughout the 1990s the annual rate of inflation exceeded 50 percent. In the context of a rapidly depreciating currency, commodity prices for cotton also fell just as oil prices were rising. The result was a worsening of the balance of payments and terms of trade. Toward the end of the 1990s, in a last-ditch effort to revitalize the hitherto unregulated financial sector, the Bank of Sudan introduced new restrictions on loans to members of the board of directors and prohibited credit to indebted clients, but this intervention was too little and came too late to save the Islamic banks.

The second reason for the demise of Islamic bank was political. The fact that Islamic banking was essentially utilized by the NIF as a source of finance to expand its patronage network in civil society meant that decisions were often made on political rather than rational-economic grounds. As detailed in Chapter 2, the major shareholders and members of the boards of directors who monopolized the banks’ capital resources were linked to the Islamist regime. This was evident in two important ways. First, the major shareholders and members of boards of directors were linked to the Bashir regime and consequently monopolized the capital resources of these banks. In fact, the shareholders also nominated the members of the boards of directors and appointed the senior management, and so they met few restrictions from within the banks themselves.¹⁷

Second, the clients that were favored in the lending patterns of these banks were chosen for their potential support of the Islamist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood organization in particular. The result of this politicization (and Islamicization) of the entire banking system was that, as one important report on the subject noted, these shareholders met few restrictions from regulatory authorities, and few clients felt any pressure to repay their loans at the agreed time. After all, if a chief objective was to recruit supporters to the Islamist movement there was little incentive to “pay back” the Brotherhood-dominated banks in financial terms. Consequently, not only were the Islamic banks short of capital as a result of the diminishing volume of remittance inflows, by the 1990s these banks suffered from very high default rates. This was primarily because of the unregulated environment in which they were allowed to operate by the regime. The central bank, for example, was simply not able to implement regulations on the financial system to limit corruption because they had to come into conflict with shareholders and bank managers with very close ties to the new NIF-backed regime. By the end of the decade it was clear to most Sudanese that Islamic banking was primarily successful in transferring wealth to a rising middle class and elite of Islamist financiers and businessmen. Indeed, by the late 1990s it was abundantly clear that Sudanese were disillusioned with the Islamicization of the financial sector and they no longer put their trust in depositing their money in the Islamic banking system.

It is important to note that many supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood did claim that the Islamic banking experiment was successful in religious if not financial terms. They argued that, after all, their movement was instrumental in converting national banking laws into those that conformed to the principles of shari’a. In reality, however, the mode of operations of the banks tells a different story in that they did not strictly conform to the shari’a’s key prohibition of interest or riba. In particular, the overwhelming use and misinterpretation of murabaha contracts by the majority of the Islamic banks meant that the latter did indeed derive what is often termed a “hidden form” of interest in their lending practices.¹⁸ Specifically, rather than fix its profit margin to avoid generating interest (riba) on a loan the Islamic banks arranged a repayment schedule overtime to determine the cost of the loan. As one study noted, the banks secured these loans against liquid assets rather than the physical commodity that is purchased by the client to start his or her business.¹⁹ In classical murabaha contracts the lender is supposed to take physical possession of the commodity in case of default rather than demanding security other than the commodity. In the case of Sudan, the record shows that the Islamic banks were more interested in acquiring profits in cash, which contravened the spirit, if not the law, of shari’a.

Significantly, much of the criticism with respect to the operations of the Islamic banks as well as the great wealth amassed by Islamist financers in a short period of time came from within the membership of the Muslim Brotherhood. This criticism was especially strident among the most ardent members of the organization in the campuses of the universities in the capital of Khartoum. The increasingly ostentatious lifestyles of high-ranking members of the Muslim Brotherhood became a source of great debate primarily because it contradicted the discourse that the movement had utilized to recruit new members. By the late 1980s, the Islamist-dominated financial empire that was built in the boardrooms of the Islamic banks gave rise to a veritable transformation of the urban landscape. In particular, the rise of an Islamist commercial class led to a veritable boom in the establishment and expansion of upper-class neighborhoods of al-Manshiyya, al-Riyyad, and al-Mohandesein. These new neighborhoods came to be labeled ghabaat al-asmant al-Ikhwaniyya (the Brotherhoods’ cement jungle) because of the high number of wealthy Brotherhood members who built new mansions in these neighborhoods. These new upper-class areas stood in close proximity to the poorer urban settlements; for many Sudanese this represented a stark contradiction between the populist rhetoric of the Brotherhood which often referenced Khomeini’s discourse of the dispossessed and underprivileged (musta’zafeen) and the realities of a new Islamist bourgeoisie that appeared more intent on securing a lavish lifestyle rather than the call (Da’wa) of Islam. The rapid transformation of the urban landscape in the capital city represented a highly visible image of the social and ideological contradictions of the ascendancy of the Islamists in the country leading many to label the new mansions of the new Islamist bourgeoisie hayaat al-mustakbereen, neighborhoods of the arrogant.

By the mid-1990s just as the Bashir regime had become increasingly unpopular among a wide segment of Sudanese, it was also severally isolated internationally as a result of its support for Islamist militants abroad. The turning point came following Khartoum’s role in the assassination attempt against Hosni Mubarak. In January 1996 the UN Security Council passed resolution 1044 imposing sanctions on Sudan for refusing to cooperate fully with the assassination investigation, and in April 1996, at the prodding of the United States, which still accused Sudan of sponsoring terrorism, imposed even harsher sanctions against Khartoum. Indeed, by 1996 the Bashir regime was deemed a pariah in the international community. International isolation, and the imposition of international sanctions in particular, led to a visible rift between the hard-liners and moderates among members of the NIF. Subsequently, following 1996, Turabi’s influence declined dramatically as Bashir and his inner circle moved to improve their image abroad. Specifically, the Bashir regime dissolved the PAIC, began to cooperate closely with US intelligence on counter-terrorism information, and saw to it that Osama bin Laden exited the country. For his part, on his departure, Bin Laden complained that he had lost more than $160 million after the Bashir regime terminated all his businesses and froze his bank accounts in Sudan.²⁰

In addition, in order to improve its authoritarian image, in 1996 the RCC dissolved itself by passing “Decree 13.” Its chairman, Omer al-Bashir, became president of the republic, and power was formally transferred to the civilian Transitional National Assembly (TNA). The TNA approved the “Charter of the Sudanese People” which defined the functions of the president and the national assembly (majlis watani) and approved the convening of national elections. Two years later in December 1998 al-Bashir signed into law the Political Associations Act that approved the convening of national elections and supposedly restored Sudan to multiparty politics banned since July 1989. In addition, he reorganized the NIF into his new ruling party: the National Congress Party (NCP). Naturally, this meant that the Islamist of the now defunct NIF maintained their dominance in Bashir’s new “civilian” government. The so-called opening up of an electoral process and multiparty politics was no more than a thinly veiled attempt to regain political legitimacy in the face of international isolation and internal dissent. Al-Bashir was elected with more than 75 percent of the vote in the first “elections” in March 1996 and remained in firm control of the military and security apparatus. It was Islamist politics as usual with a government completely dominated by the NIF and its members consisting of primarily young men who had secured the most important positions in the civil service, the military and the government and who did not represent the rest of Sudanese society.

To be sure the introduction of international sanctions against Khartoum in the mid-1990s isolated the Bashir regime both economically and politically, but the crucial shift from a radical to a pragmatic orientation associated with the Khartoum regime’s policies is best understood as a result of domestic economic exigencies rather than foreign policy considerations. Specifically, by the end of the 1990s, as a result of a shrinkage in deposits from expatriate Sudanese, the severe economic consequences of the war in the south, and the end of the boom of Islamic Banking, the NIF regime found itself bankrupt. In the 1970s and 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood were, with the aid of the incumbent regime at the time, able to finance their organization through the monopolization of informal financial markets and Islamic banking. But after a decade in power, the NIF leadership, crippled by a heavy debt and a severe balance of payment’s crisis, turned to another source of revenue to buttress the patronage networks of the Islamist-backed military regime: oil.

From Labor Exporter to Rentier State: The Economic Foundations of Islamist Pragmatism

By the 1990s the consequences of the end of the oil boom in the Arab Gulf, and the attendant decline in remittances as well as Arab financial assistance were reflected in Sudan’s increasingly deep economic crisis. In terms of remittance, in the 1970s and through the 1980s labor remittances did indeed increase dramatically as a proportion of Sudan’s general domestic economy. This is clearly evident in terms of remittance inflows as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) as well as exports and imports (Figure 5.1). In 1987, for example, remittances as a proportion of GDP increased dramatically from 20 percent to almost 80 percent. Moreover, between 1997 and 1998, remittances again peaked, this time even more dramatically, from 45 percent to almost 140 percent of GDP. However, following 1998, remittances registered a steady decline and by 2009 declined once again to 45 percent of GDP and 22 percent of imports.

However, while remittances continue to represent an important source of foreign currency their continued relative importance in Sudan’s macroeconomy is primarily due to the decline in export revenue over the last four decades. Specifically, what is most notable is the steady deterioration of Sudan’s exports over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Export revenue minus remittances (i.e., “non-remittance current account credits”) fell from a high level of US 2 billion dollars in 1981 to a low just below US 500 million dollars in 1993. This is the reason why in the late 1990s (during the period with the broadest sustained gap between exports revenue and import costs) remittances surpassed the financial aid (i.e., “net financial flows”) as a source of foreign currency and briefly reached a level equal to total export revenue in 1998 (Figure 5.2). The major economic problem for Sudan in the 1990s was that while the regime was focusing on the financial sector as a source of revenue, commodity exports flattened and dwindled to just above 500 million dollars while imports stayed well above 1 billion dollars for most years. Consequently, as a means of financing these imports, Sudan ran a very high financial debt that, by the early 1990s, had dramatically worsened its balance of payments and crippled the national economy. By the mid-1990s the debt was more than $17 billion, and the annual deficit equaled 25 percent of GDP with hyperinflation running between 80 and 100 percent. A good indicator that showed that the economy was in deep crisis was the steep decline of the Sudanese pound from SL17 to SL500 to the dollar in the summer of 1994, and between 1993 and 2002 there were frequent periods where the country had no foreign currency whatsoever.

Figure 5.2 Sudan’s balance of payments trends with a focus on remittances and deteriorating exports.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (World Bank, Washington, DC). https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators

In the context of the deep economic crisis in the 1990s, the Bashir regime increasingly sought to hold on to power by developing oil resources in the southern regions of the country. From the perspective of Bashir and his ruling NCP the exploitation of oil in the south was imperative for economic as well as political reasons. On the one hand, within the context of deteriorating exports, a relative decline in remittances, and the diminishing profitability of Islamic banking, Islamist bureaucrats turned their focus increasingly toward the oil sector as a way to sustain their patronage networks. On the other hand, the increasingly fierce southern insurgency was jeopardizing their hold on political power, and most particularly, their hopes of exploiting the oil wealth in the south. Specifically, the NCP understood the need to secure the oilfields and moved toward gaining control of strategic areas in the south by implementing a cordon sanitaire, a task that would be led by proxy jihadist-inspired Mujahideen militias.

However, Chevron – which had acquired oil concessions from Khartoum in the 1980s – had by this time grown weary of revolving military and democratic governments in Khartoum throughout the 1980s and was unconvinced that the NIF would do a better job of suppressing the rebellion in the south. In 1992 Chevron sold its production rights to a Sudanese government-owned company (Concorp), and two years later, in May 1994, the small Canadian company, Arakis, acquired Chevron’s previous concessions and agreed to construct the 1,000-mile pipeline from Heglig oil field in Southern Sudan to Port Sudan. However, in search of more financing, the Sudanese government and Arakis agreed to enter into a partnership with China and Malaysia. On December 2, 1996, the Greater Nile Operating Petroleum Company (GNOPC) was founded consisting of Arakis holding 25 percent interest, China’s CNPC 40 percent, Malaysian Petronas Caragali 30 percent, and the Sudan National Petroleum Corporation (Sudapet) only 5 percent.²¹

It is China, however – with the most urgent energy demands – that continued to dominate the oil sector in Sudan. It was CNPC that took the lead of the GNPOC in 1997 when the Canadian Arakis sold much of its interest in the consortium. It quickly bought the latter’s concessions, and the CNPC bought a similar commanding share in the Petrodar Operating Company (PDOC) of Upper Nile State. In each of the CNPC’s concessions China maintains the majority share as operator in partnership with the Sudanese government’s Sudapet and other foreign oil companies. In addition to giving CNPC a commanding share of Sudanese oilfields, the Bashir regime developed a close strategic relationship with China. Beijing invested in various economic sectors in Sudan, outside of the oil industry, providing soft loans to Islamist businessmen, and giving Khartoum greater access to military arms. On the political stage, China also frustrated and stalled Western efforts at the United Nations Security Council to apply economic and political sanctions against Khartoum for its violations of human rights in its military campaign against the insurgency in Darfur that began in 2003.

In 1999, with China’s oil giant CNPC in the lead, Petronas and Sudapet completed the construction of the first oil pipeline in the country transporting oil to the Red Sea port for export. At an export capacity of 250,000 barrels a day, oil exportation enabled Khartoum to enjoy its first trade surplus in 1999–2000 when oil exports first went online. Government oil revenues rose from zero in 1998 to almost 42 percent of total government revenue in 2001. Oil exportation vastly improved the balance of payments situation and the impact of the infusion of petrodollars saw the GDP rising to 6 percent in 2003, thanks primarily to the export of oil. Indeed, between 2002 and 2006, Sudan witnessed a veritable oil boom that had an enormous impact on the national economy (Figure 5.3). While in 2002 Sudan’s total revenue amounted to less than USD 2 billion by 2006 the Bashir regime was enjoying upward of USD 8 billion. It was oil, and not remittances, that now financed the bulk of imports into the country and the balance of payments improved dramatically by 2004.

Figure 5.3 Sudan’s balance of payments trends reflecting the change in remittances versus non-remittances sources of revenue.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (World Bank, Washington, DC). https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators

The oil boom enabled the al-Bashir regime to distribute patronage and bring in formerly excluded social groups into the governing coalition. Just as in the 1970s and 1980s the boom in remittance inflows and Islamic banking enabled Islamist elites to mobilize Islamist commercial networks to buttress their movement; during the mid-2000s oil boom, after a decade of austerity, the Bashir regime and his NCP expanded their patronage network to selectively include a wider group of supporters and bureaucrats while simultaneously excluding Islamic Sufi social groups and networks.

Oil: Boom and Curse

Not surprisingly, during the oil boom of the mid-2000s the state quickly conformed to the general patterns of what is commonly called the “resource curse,” which uniformly contributes to the weakening of state capacity in many oil-export economies. Specifically, with the exploitation of oil resources, Sudan quickly transformed into a “rentier” state and, as a consequence, the Bashir regime faced two central challenges: the building of legitimate institutions and the exacerbation of the civil conflict in the south where the oil concessions were concentrated. Natural resources greatly weaken the capacity of state institutions because governments are able to extract capital without establishing extensive tax or market infrastructures.²² Indeed, the case of Sudan following the oil boom conformed closely to the common observation associated with the “resource course”: that is, that the profusion of natural resources and the inflow of external rents generated from those resources leads to poor and uneven economic growth, flawed governance practices associated with greater corruption, and an escalation of civil conflict and militarization. Furthermore, these trends occur most visibly in countries like Sudan, which possess heterogeneous societies governed by authoritarian regimes that greatly limit political contestation.²³

Consequently, while oil revenue vastly improved Sudan’s macroeconomic indicators in the 2000s there was scant reward or benefit for civil society at large. To be sure, there is little doubt that Sudan’s emergence as an oil producer allowed for new claimants to be added to the patronage systems staving off significant dissent and unrest in civil society. However, the pattern of public spending in this period set the stage for greater social and economic inequality and contributed to the emergence of ethnic-based insurgencies in the marginalized regions of the north. On the one hand, the oil boom allowed for the creation of state governments across northern Sudan, putting tens of thousands on the public payroll. Under the austerity programs of the 1990s, government expenditures were less than 10 percent of GDP, but rose quickly to reach 23 percent in 2006, at a time when GDP was growing from 6 to 10 percent annually.²⁴ But although the economy grew rapidly and dramatically (Figure 5.3), the benefits were distributed very unequally. The capital city of Khartoum remained a middle-income enclave, while regions such as Darfur and the Red Sea remained extremely poor and underdeveloped. Indeed, the allocation of services, employment, and development projects by the Bashir regime did not follow the logic of need, but the logic of political weight. In the early 2000s, almost 90 percent of infrastructure spending occurred in Khartoum state, in response to the political leverage of the urban constituency in Khartoum, and the profits to be made from contracting and import-based commercial enterprises. Following the peace agreement signed with the southern rebels in 2005, about 60 percent of development spending went to five major projects, all of them within the central triangle in the north, notably around the Merowe Dam.²⁵

Figure 5.4 Oil exports as share of total exports, GPD, and remittances in Sudan, 1995–2010.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (World Bank, Washington, DC). https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators

In addition, the lion’s share of the revenue from what was to become a short-lived oil boom was spent on the military. In 2001, for example, military spending was estimated at costing USD 349 million. This figure amounted to 60 percent of the 2001 oil revenue generated from exports, which was USD 580.2 million. According to Human Rights Watch, cash military expenditures, which did not include domestic security expenditures, officially rose 45 percent between 1999 and 2001 and this rise reflected the increased government use of helicopter gunships and aerial bombardment against southern insurgents belonging to the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the south.

Oil, Civil Conflict, and the Emergence of the Politics of Ethnicity

By 2005, on the eve of Khartoum’s formal signing of a peace agreement with the southern insurgents of the SPLM that ended four decades of war, Sudan’s transition from a remittance economy into a rentier oil-exporting state effectively altered the nature of the patronage networks of the regime. For a brief time, the oil boom seemed to signal that Bashir and members of the ruling NCP were becoming accustomed to being more secure in office than at any time during their struggle to consolidate power. Indeed, a precarious state of political affairs was set wherein Bashir and his supporters from the security forces would enjoy the support of a rich class of businessmen so long as the state did not interfere in the latter’s pursuit of profits. This meant no political harassment, theological intimidation, and, most of all, inhibiting bureaucratic regulations. The problem, however, was that newly pragmatic leaders in Khartoum came to rely on a narrower base of support than that of the broad Islamist social movements that they cultivated in previous decades. In the context of regional-based rebellions, this development ultimately served to exacerbate the multiple civil conflicts in the country and set the stage for an historic and profound political change: partition.

While the civil war in Sudan has been routinely depicted as rooted in a conflict of national identities between “Arabs” and “Africans,” or a religious quarrel between Muslims and Christians,²⁶ it is best understood as one of several violent disputes between the central state in Khartoum and the regions on the periphery. These include, most notably, the south, the Nuba mountains, the eastern provinces, and the western Darfur region. Indeed, following the Islamist-backed coup of 1989, the Khartoum regime reacted to the various rebellious regional forces with increasing violence, precisely in order to discourage the historically marginalized peripheral regions such as Darfur from rising up in a united front against the central state dominated by a Muslim Arabized riverine elite.²⁷

The eruption of the civil conflict between the south and successive central governments in Khartoum began shortly after independence in 1956. Following a brief experiment in parliamentary democracy, in 1958 Sudan witnessed the first of three military authoritarian regimes, that of General Ibrahim ‘Abbud. Under ‘Abbud, sporadic warfare between the national army and southern guerrillas began in earnest. The fighting outlasted several central governments, both military and civilian. To be sure, the government bureaucracy and the army officer corps have always been dominated by Muslim northerners whose native language is Arabic and who claim Arab lineage, whereas the south is populated by tribes who profess Christianity or animist religions. That is, cultural and religious differences have contributed to the fighting, particularly since Khartoum imposed “Islamic” penal codes in 1983. For its part, the SPLM increasingly defined its identity as African and looked to Sudan’s African neighbors for support and patronage during the four-decade-long civil war. What is noteworthy, however, is that having asserted an African identity by resisting what they perceived as Arab domination, the south set an example for other regions, such as Darfur and the eastern provinces, which similarly demanded equality and a more equitable distribution of power and resources.²⁸

Despite the SPLM’s mobilization of African identity, the core grievances of the south were not only related to issues of cultural identity as such. They also greatly hinged on the issue of the inequitable distribution of economic resources and political power. The promise of oil wealth was a driving force behind the escalation of the conflict and the hardening of interethnic violence in the 1990s.²⁹ Although the primary cause of Sudan’s civil war cannot be attributed to natural resources alone, Sudan’s increasing dependence on natural resources determined the conduct of both the civil war and the negotiations that ended military confrontation.³⁰ Following the discovery of oil, the Bashir regime was keen to ensure that there would be no opposition to its designs to develop the oil economy. In a strategy used later in Darfur to devastating effect, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), along with armed militias, conducted devastating aerial bombardments against civilians in the oil-rich areas of the south. In addition, because the regime in Khartoum was unable to find willing recruits to join in what it termed a “jihad” in the south, it encouraged ethnic tensions, in effect using local communities in a proxy war. This it accomplished essentially by arming Misiriyya and Baqqara nomadic tribes and allowing them to pillage and destroy the communities of the Dinka and Nuer pastoralists in the south. In the early 1990s, the Bashir regime had expanded its military campaigns against civilian populations in the south and the Nuba Mountains, and this campaign became more deadly as Khartoum began to profit from increasing oil revenues.³¹

Paradoxically, while the discovery of oil exacerbated the civil conflict in the south it also contributed greatly to the eventual cease-fire and peace agreement between the SPLM and Khartoum. The transformation of Sudan’s political economy is the main reason for the emergence of more pragmatic and less radical politics on the part of the Bashir regime in the mid-2000s. It is also the primary reason that Khartoum agreed to sign a peace agreement with its former adversaries in the south and, moreover, oversee the partition of the country. This change, in what was a self-proclaimed “jihadist” military campaign in the 1990s, was mainly due to the fact that the regime’s governing system and survival was highly sensitive to cash flow. As the state budget expanded as a result of oil exports, the ruling NCP was able to increase its support base and allow more members of the northern elite to benefit, either directly or through dispensing patronage to them. The national budget, which was less than $1 billion in 1999, increased at a dramatic rate after oil exports began at the end of that year, reaching $11.8 billion in 2007. Even more significant than the expansion of its patronage networks in the north, the Bashir regime now realized that they could afford to bring the SPLM into the government following a peace agreement and thereby gain both economic and political dividends from this pragmatic move. It would open up the opportunity for the exploitation and exploration of more oil fields, and furthermore, it would enhance the potential of improving relations with the United States and the opportunity of receiving US refining technology and other forms of foreign direct investment. Consequently, the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was a direct result of the oil boom and the ways in which it underpinned the increasing pragmatism of a regime still nominally dominated by Islamist elites.

Secession and the Evolving Quest for Patronage Networks: Hamdi’s Arab-Islamist Triangle

If the Islamist project has in many respects disintegrated, its exacerbation of national divisions had grave consequences for Sudan’s national identity and unity.³² On January 9, 2011, in a referendum in the south on the question of self-determination, the people voted to declare independence. The Bashir regime’s willingness (and even eagerness) to oversee the historic partition of Sudan in 2011 remains a puzzle to even some of the most astute analysts of contemporary Sudanese politics. Indeed, South Sudan is the first country in contemporary world history to win independence through peace negotiations, however strife ridden, rather force of arms. There are few governments who would risk such a formidable threat to their sovereignty and political legitimacy as to comply by an internationally supervised agreement that insists on granting an entire swath of territory an “exit option” of this magnitude. In this regard, Khartoum’s implementation of the southern referendum in 2011, as stipulated by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, begs an important question as to why Bashir and his ruling NCP took such a political gamble at the risk of the regime’s survival.

Why did the NCP then risk Sudan’s partition? The answer lies in the fact that the patronage networks underpinning the Islamist-authoritarian regime changed in tandem with Sudan’s evolving economic transition from a labor exporter in the 1970s and 1980s to an aspirant oil exporter in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, this structural transformation was accompanied by a marked ideological transformation of the Islamist-backed regime that pragmatically traded in an ideology of global “jihad” in its first decade in power for stability, or rather, for the objective of consolidating political power in the context of increasingly strong insurgencies in the south as well as Darfur. There is, arguably, no individual Islamist who better exemplifies how the state’s patronage networks changed over time than Dr. Abdel Rahim Hamdi. As one of the most influential Islamist policy makers and thinkers of Sudan’s Islamist movement, Hamdi’s own career charts very closely and meaningfully with political, economic, and ideological transformations that have characterized the Islamist-authoritarian evolution of the past four decades. Abdel Rahim Hamdi is a former Islamist financier-turned-investor in an oil company and famously supported southern secession. Hamdi, who, as noted earlier served as Finance Minister throughout most of the 1990s, continued to function as an important economic advisor to the Bashir regime until the latter’s ouster in April 2019. Indeed, he continues to represent the overriding economic outlook of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in economic affairs, which harbors a decidedly favorable view of neoliberal market reform as part and parcel of the Islamicization of the economy. Hamdi has been an ardent member of the Muslim Brotherhood since he was first recruited into the organization as a student at the University of Khartoum in the 1970s. His career reflects the important ways in which Islamic financial institutions and energy production linked up with the state as an important source of financial patronage. Hamdi, a self-proclaimed student of Milton Friedman³³ with a degree from the University of London, was chiefly responsible for accelerating and broadening the country’s privatization program that began in earnest in 1992 under what the regime termed the “economic salvation plan.” Under his guidance and expertise, the state dramatically and abruptly reduced subsidies on fuel and state-owned enterprises. As Hamdi put it at the time: “We have hit the people with horrendous measures, 500 percent increases in the price of bread, a devaluation of 30 percent and they have accepted it. They have seen the government is working in a very sincere way and, more importantly, in a very uncorrupted way, and, therefore, people have accepted it and endured.”³⁴ Significantly, Hamdi, who is also a long-time executive (and shareholder) with al-Baraka Islamic Bank, insisted on holding on to the position as an al-Baraka’s representative in their London-based branch when Bashir appointed him as the Minister of Finance in February 2001. Moreover, in April 1997, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Canadian Arakis Energy Corporation (AEC), which was the first to begin oil production in the Sudan following the departure of the American Chevron oil company.

Indeed, Hamdi’s career reflects the important ways in which the state sought to finance its patronage networks as Sudan shifted from a remittance to an oil-export economy. But his ideological orientation also presents an important picture of how the Bashir regime sought to consolidate political power through building state-society linkages along exclusivist social networks grounded in very specific cultural, ethnic, and geographic terms. Indeed, as the extractive and military capacity of the state to both generate revenue and prevent insurgents from launching attacks in the capital diminished, Bashir and supporters of his regime emphasized its Arab cultural character in an effort to revitalize the waning ideological legitimacy of the state. In 2006, Hamdi presented a controversial proposal to the ruling NCP conference that became known as “Hamdi Triangle Dialectics.” The key moral of his thesis was that the Islamists should begin to turn inward and focus on an Arab-Islamic constituency of the “Riverine North.” According to him, this was critical for winning the general elections of 2010 mandated by the CPA and managing its future destiny in the likely event of the partition of the country. In other words, from the perspective of the majority of the Islamists, the division of Sudan should not necessarily be the “natural” outcome of the southern referendum but a result of the Arab-Islamic North’s own choice to secede from the rest of the country. It also reflects an important critique of the majority of the Sudanese opposition in the north which has long located the country’s primary crises as rooted in an exploitative state that perpetuates the dominance of the center on the peripheries such as Darfur, the east, and southern regions. Indeed, it is this vision of an Arab-Islamic “triangle” that represented the Bashir regime’s avenue for political consolidation under the weight of an increasingly bankrupt state battling insurgencies in the outlying regions of the country that guided the high-ranking Islamists in the government before and after the secession of the South Sudan.

The Resurgence of the Black Market and the “Threat” of Democratization

Nevertheless, by the late 2000s, it was clear that the Bashir regime’s efforts to consolidate political power through oil rents following the end of the boom in remittances effectively ended with the secession of South Sudan in summer 2011. Subsequently, the weakened Sudanese pound, high rates of inflation, and rising fuel prices resulted in a resurgence in black-market currency trading that dominated the local economy in the 1970s and 1980s, and this has continued to the present. In a pattern reminiscent of the era of the remittance boom of the 1980s, Sudanese now make regular trips to black-market dealers to buy or sell dollars to take advantage of the difference with the official rate. In response, in a drive to stabilize the exchange rate and curb the expansion of the black market, in May 2012, the central bank licensed some exchange bureaus and banks to trade at a rate closer to the black-market prices. As in previous decades, this was a concerted effort to induce expatriate Sudanese to send more dollars home. But black-market rates stayed higher than the licensed bureaus’ prices. In mid-July 2012 the dollar bought 6 pounds on the black market, while in the licensed bureaus it traded at around 3.3. As one Sudanese financial expert pointed out, “when confidence in a currency erodes, it fuels a cycle of speculation and ‘dollarization’ that makes more depreciation a self-fulfilling prophecy: when you enter this area it is very difficult to escape.”³⁵ In addition to the loss of the all-important oil revenue as a result of the secession of South Sudan, the regime’s financial crisis was compounded greatly by the costly rebellions in South Kordofan and Darfur that sapped state finances, and non-oil sectors like agriculture, long neglected by the Bashir regime’s economic policies, continue to lag behind their potential.

But the real problem was the Bashir regime’s dwindling legitimacy among a cross section of groups and parties in civil society. In June 2012, six years prior to the mass protests that led to Bashir’s ouster from power, and at a time when the attention of the international media was focused on the historic victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate in Egypt, street protests of a scale not witnessed for two decades erupted in Khartoum and other major cities in Sudan. They began on June 16 with students protesting the announcement of a 35 percent hike in public transportation fees and calling for the “liberation” of the campus from the presence of the ubiquitous National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS). As was the case with the historic December 2018 popular uprising, the catalyst of the 2012 demonstrations was the Bashir regime’s decision to abolish fuel subsidies and the imposition of a wider austerity package that had resulted in a spiraling inflation rate that peaked at more than 30 percent in May 2012.

The June 2012 protests were a direct result of the regime’s economic policy decisions linked to the secession of South Sudan in the summer of 2011. Following years of unprecedented oil exports that fueled economic growth, wherein some years featured double-digit growth figures, the financial basis that had served to maintain the resilience and patronage networks of the regime dwindled overnight. In response, and immediately following the south’s secession, the Bashir regime placed restrictions on the outflow of foreign currency, banned certain imports, and reduced state subsidies on vital commodities such as sugar and fuel. With a budget deficit estimated at 2.4 billion dollars, on June 18, 2012, Bashir imposed another round of more expansive austerity measures lifting fuel subsidies and announced the stringent enforcement of higher taxes on capital, consumer goods, telecommunications, and a wide range of imports.

At the time the Bashir regime argued that the deep economic crisis was beyond the government’s control and that it was, in the words of one NCP member, the result of “malicious traders operating in the informal economy who are smuggling fuel and hard currency at the expense of the Sudanese people.” However, the students, and youth activists that confronted the security forces in the streets of Khartoum, and members of the professional syndicates, and the leaders of the NCF (an umbrella group of opposition parties) argued that the roots of the economic crisis are related to the fact that the bulk of the national budget is allocated to the escalating military campaigns in Darfur and the escalating clashes along the borders with South Sudan that began in earnest in April 2012.

Moreover, at the same time that the regime imposed deep austerity measures in the summer of 2012, the NCP announced the expansion in the offices of government no doubt deeply concerned with sustaining its patronage networks and security apparatus in the context of small but persistent protests calling for the removal of the regime. Ironically, the influential vice president at the time, Ali Osman Taha, blamed the economic crisis on the Sudanese themselves who, as he put it, have been “living beyond their means.” In a country where the majority of families rely on remitting money from expatriate relatives (i.e., Sudanese workers abroad) for their livelihood, Taha publicly stated that the tendency of Sudanese to maintain extended families – where one individual works and ten others rely on his income – is the real reason that local production and incomes are at such low levels.³⁶

To be sure the loss of oil revenue following South Sudan’s secession and the imposition of economic austerity policies inspired the protests in the summer of 2012. Nevertheless, the timing of the protests and organizational strategies utilized therein were clearly related to the protests and transitions in the larger Arab world. In the wake of the Arab uprisings that begin in Tunisia in late 2010, observers of Sudanese politics were near unanimous in declaring that the Sudanese government will “not buckle” to popular protests anytime soon. Indeed, following in the lines of scholars of Arab authoritarianism, these analysts noted that Sudan’s military establishment was beholden to the government just as they have been since Bashir first took power via a military coup in 1989. That is, that the upper ranks of the military are still loyal to his rule, that the formal political opposition is weak and discredited, and that civil society is even more divided than that of Tunisia and Egypt. As one Sudan analyst aptly put it: “[T]here is certainly discontent with the regime, but it’s unclear if enough of the right factors are present to complete the equation in Khartoum [because] protests undertaken thus far have not taken root with a broad section of the population.”³⁷ The influential International Crisis Group similarly argued that “years of subjugation at the hands of the ruling NCP have yielded both political apathy and a weak opposition.”³⁸ Indeed, the wide-scale popular protests of December 2018 came as a surprise to many precisely because the general consensus among analysts was that, in the case of Sudan, the heavy hand of the security services and corresponding fears among the population act to inhibit such a pro-democracy uprising.

The question having to do with whether Sudan will remain resistant democratization then, as now, hinges, on an understanding of factors long associated with the durability of the authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. These include the fact that Arab countries possess weak civil societies, have middle classes beholden to state patronage for their survival, and opposition political parties which are either weak (i.e., Egypt, Sudan) or simply nonexistent. However, as the events in Tunisia and Egypt have shown, none of these conditions precluded the move toward democratization. Indeed, what they have demonstrated is that a weakly organized opposition does not necessarily prevent mass mobilization although it certainly plays a central role as an obstacle to democratic consolidation.

How then can we evaluate the deep popular discontent among Sudanese which resulted in the 2018 popular mobilization calling for yet another period of democracy in Sudan. For the Sudan the answer is relatively straightforward: It lies in the regime’s capacity to maintain a monopoly on the means of coercion. As scholars of authoritarianism have persuasively argued, when the state’s coercive apparatus remains coherent and effective, it can face down popular disaffection and survive significant illegitimacy. Conversely, where the state’s capacity of coercion is weak or lacks the will to crush popular protests, democratic transitions in the Arab world and elsewhere can occur.³⁹

Consequently, in the case of the Sudan, the first key question is, how can we best understand the weakening of the Bashir regime’s capacity for coercion vis-à-vis a resurgent civil society opposition in the lead up to the December 2018 popular uprising in the country? What the examples of Tunisia and Egypt have demonstrated is that the answer to this question depends on the state’s fiscal health, the level of international support, and how entrenched (i.e., institutionalized) the state security sector is in civil society. As in the other Arab countries, taken together, these factors determine whether the level of popular mobilization outweighs the capacity of the coercive apparatus of the regime.

Consequently, the durability of Bashir’s authoritarian regime eventually ended due to a number of reasons. First, the level of international support was extremely low. Indeed, only a few months after southern secession the United States reimposed economic sanctions on the Sudan. In combination with the standing ICC’s indictment of Bashir issued in July 2010, this increased Bashir’s pariah status. More importantly, this diminished any hope on the part of the NCP to generate much needed foreign direct investment and international as well as local legitimacy.

Second, following almost a decade of remarkable growth in GDP (real gross domestic product) averaging 7.7 percent annually, thanks to oil exports, growth declined sharply to 3 percent since 2010.⁴⁰ The economic crisis was further compounded by a sharp decline in oil-export revenues as a result of the secession of the oil-rich south, deteriorating terms of trade, and minimal flows of foreign investment outside the oil sector. Consequently, the Bashir regime suffered from an enormous scarcity of foreign currency with which to finance spending to shore up its support base. The financial crisis resulted in the imposition of economic austerity measures leading to cost of living protests beginning as early as 2012. Perhaps more importantly in political terms, it also weakened Khartoum’s capacity to suppress dissent since more than 70 percent of oil-export revenue prior to South Sudan’s secession was funneled to support the military and PDF in the country. Third, as witnessed by the protests in Khartoum and throughout the north beginning in 2012, a wide cross section of Sudanese already mobilized in opposition to the regime. In addition, protests – which spread to central Sudan in al-Jazira, Kosti, and the Nuba Mountain region as early as 2012 – were accompanied by cyber activism. In a pattern similar to Egypt and Tunisia, this maintained the link between Sudanese in the country and the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese citizens in the diaspora.

Taken together these factors served to further weaken the capacity of the Bashir regime in ways that could not forestall the call for democratization indefinitely. But the most telling and important reason for the Bashir’s regime’s diminishing authoritarianism was in the fact that the hitherto institutionalized security sector became increasingly fragmented and the top leadership gravely divided. Following the country’s partition, political power became centered on Bashir and a close network of loyalists. Moreover, concerned about a coup from within the military establishment, Bashir purposely fragmented the security services, relied increasingly on personal and tribal loyalties, and the formerly strong NCP party no longer had a significant base of social support even among hard-line Islamists.⁴¹ This division was clearly illustrated as early as 2011 by a public dispute between two of the most influential figures in Bashir’s government: Nafie Ali Nafie (presidential advisor and head of state security) who along with Bashir represented the hard-line faction opposed to constitutional reforms and Ali Osman Taha (second vice president) who called for inclusion of some opposition parties to help in drafting a new constitution.

In the shifting post-secession landscape Bashir tried to pursue a two-pronged strategy aimed at reviving the state’s financial capacity and political legitimacy. On the one hand, the regime imposed economic reforms as part of an effort to strengthen the financial capacity of the state by further reducing the state’s role in the economy and already meager public service provisioning. On the other hand, while Omar Bashir routinely insisted on the vigorous reimposition of stricter shari’a legislation, other prominent members of the NCP made strong overtures to the regime’s political rivals in a clear bid to revive the state’s waning political legitimacy among groups in civil society.

This is largely a result of the fact that civil society opposition grew stronger following the partition of the country. Most notably, in July 2012 after two decades of interparty squabbling, the main opposition parties allied under the National Consensus Forces (NCF) signed the Democratic Alternative Charter (DCA) calling for regime change “through peaceful means.” The NCF included the National Umma Party (NUP) of former prime minister Al-Sadiq al-Mahdi and the Popular Congress Party (PCP) led by the late Hassan Turabi, the Sudanese Communist Party, and a coalition of professional associations and labor unions. The NCF agreed on a three-year transition period governed by a caretaker cabinet and a presidential college with rotating chairmanship to rule the country when the NCP’s regime is overthrown. In response, and just days after the signing of the DCA, the first vice president, Ali Osman Mohammed Taha, announced that the government was willing to approach the opposition parties for dialogue on the “alternation” of power. What remained to be seen was whether the Bashir regime would extend this accommodationist stance to the rebel coalition of the Sudanese Revolutionary Forces (SRF). The SRF, the most important military insurgent opposition, includes the factions of three groups from Darfur in addition to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement North (SPLM-N), in South Kordofan, who had been fighting to topple the regime through military means. Nevertheless, it was clear, on the eve of the popular uprising of 2018, that the significant divisions in the ruling NCP party, in combination with the country’s international isolation, the deep economic crisis following the south’s secession, and persistent levels of popular discontent and mobilization were strong indications that Sudan – a country that witnessed two previous popular revolts that dramatically turned the tide of national politics – would find itself drawing important inspiration from its own history as well as its northern neighbors while following its own path and distinctive “Sudanese” trajectory.

Just fall, that is all: Sudan’s 2018 Popular Uprising

Nevertheless, when the wide-scale protests erupted in Sudan in December 2018 and continued unabated calling for President Omer Bashir to step down few would have predicted that this latest iteration of a popular uprising in Sudan would be the first step toward paving the way for a transitional interim period intended to usher in multiparty democracy. This is because, not surprisingly, as with similar protests in the past, the Bashir regime sought a military solution to quell the protests deploying the police and paramilitary security forces against peaceful protestors in Khartoum and throughout the country. By the time Omer Bashir was ousted from power on April 11 the following year more than 200 people had been killed, many as a result of torture in the government’s “ghost houses,” and more than 2,000 anti-government activists were held in detention despite the regime’s repeated insistence at the time that they were intent on releasing political detainees.

Significantly, and despite the government’s frequent pronouncements that the protests were relatively small and would therefore have little impact on the regime, or that the demonstrations were essentially sponsored by saboteurs, thugs, or “foreign elements,” the popular intifada not only produced significant policy changes on the part of the regime, it clearly undermined the rule of Omer Bashir in ways that led to the overthrow of his thirty-year authoritarian rule. By April 11, 2019, in the wake of continued and sustained demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins across Sudanese civil society, Bashir was compelled to put in place policies to upgrade his authoritarian rule. He was forced to postpone a constitutional amendment that would have allowed him to run for a third term in office, declare a state of emergency in Khartoum, disband the federal government, and replace local governors with senior army officers in a desperate attempt to maintain his power. However, these policies of both appeasement and repression emboldened anti-government protestors further. These policies were designed to give carte blanch to the security forces to use greater violence against the protestors and to further restrict political and civil liberties as well as to crack down on activists and opposition political parties. Immediately following Bashir’s announcement of a state of emergency, protestors went back on the streets in more than fifty neighborhoods throughout the country, and particularly in Khartoum and Omdurman, calling once again for Bashir’s removal chanting, among other slogans, one of the most uncompromising and popular refrains of the uprising: Tasqut Bas (Just fall, that is all).

The “Periphery” as Catalyst of the Revolution

The protests erupted on December 19, 2018, in the working-class city of Atbara in River Nile state approximately 200 miles north of Khartoum. They were sparked by a three-fold increase in the price of bread. They began with protests led by secondary school students. They were very quickly joined by thousands of the residents in the city of Atbara. Within days anti-government demonstrations expanded across a wide range of cities and towns throughout the northern region and in the capital city of Khartoum. Chanting slogans such as the People Want the Fall of the Regime, inspired from the Arab Uprisings of late 2010 and 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively, the demonstrators quickly expanded their demands in ways that reflected deep-seated and wide-ranging political as well as economic grievances with the thirty-year authoritarian rule of Omer Bashir and his ruling party, the NCP.

However, despite the fact that political grievances and demands were at the forefront of the uprising, there is little question that these particular protests were first sparked by economic grievances that date back to the consequences of the secession of South Sudan in 2011. This led to the loss of 75 percent of oil revenue for Khartoum since two-thirds of the oil resources are in the south, and consequently approximately 60 percent of its foreign currency earnings. As a result, as noted ealier the Bashir regime implemented austerity measures in 2012 which resulted in similar anti-austerity protests at the time, although these were mostly centered in Khartoum and hence were more centralized than the 2018 protests. Similarly, one of the main factors for the demonstrations was the implementation of IMF-backed austerity measures which led to lifting of the subsidies on bread and fuel and quickly sparked the first of the demonstrations on December 19, 2018. What is important to emphasize, however, is that these protests were not only rooted in opposition to economic austerity measures. They were crucially a result of a widely understood opposition to decades of rampant corruption, including “privatization” policies that transferred assets and wealth to the regime’s supporters, and the theft of billions of dollars of profits from the period of the oil boom in the country as well as, in more recent years, the theft of gold.

A New Pattern of Mobilization and Protest

Following the lead of cities in the periphery, in Khartoum, the demonstrations also began in protest against a deep economic crisis associated with the rise in the prices of bread, fuel, and a severe liquidity crisis. But these demands quickly evolved into calls for the ouster of Bashir from power. Importantly, the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA), which had taken the lead in organizing and scheduling the protests, had initially marched to the Parliament in Khartoum in late December demanding that the government raise wages for public sector workers and for the legalization of informally organized professional and trade unions. However, after security forces used violence against the peaceful protests, these demands quickly escalated into the call for the removal of the ruling NCP, the structural transformation of governance in Sudan, and a transition to democracy.

These demands were similar to those associated with previous popular protests against the regime, including those of 2011, 2012, and 2013. However, what is most important to note with respect to the 2018 protests is that they were unprecedented in terms of their length and sustainability, their geographical spread throughout the entire country, and the remarkable coalition of youth groups, civil society organizations, and opposition political parties that joined in these protests which continued for over six months and ultimately resulted in a power-sharing agreement between a transitional military council and the main opposition coalition the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC). Equally important is that the coordination of these demonstrations followed a remarkably new, innovative, and sustained process. This is important to highlight because it clearly shows that, just as the authoritarian regime of Omer Bashir had historically implemented policies designed to weaken the opposition in order to prevent any threat to the regime by dismantling labor and trade unions, establishing a wide range of paramilitary militias linked to the state, and putting down armed opposition as well as anti-government activists in civil society, demonstrators also learned from the unsuccessful anti-regime protests of the past. Led by the newly established Sudanese Professional Association, a network of parallel trade and professional unions composed of doctors, engineers, and lawyers among other unions, the demonstrations were coordinated, scheduled, and essentially designed to emphasis sustainability over time rather sheer numbers, spread the protests throughout middle, working class, and poor neighborhoods, and coordinate with protestors in regions far afield from Khartoum, including the Eastern State on the Red Sea to the East, and Darfur to the far west of the country. In addition, the slogans promoted and utilized by the protestors also were purposefully framed to incorporate the grievances of the wider spectrum of Sudanese, including workers in the informal sector, and not just those of the middle class and ethnic and political elites centered in Khartoum and the Northern regions of the country. These slogans were essentially framed in ways designed to mobilize support across ethnic and racial categories, to emphasize that the only way forward is to oust Omer Bashir and the ruling regime from power, and to highlight not only the endemic and unprecedented level of corruption of the regime and its allies but also decades of human rights violations against civilians in the country by a wide range of security forces, and the wars waged by the regime in Darfur, the Blue Nile state on the border of South Sudan, and the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan.

Indeed, perhaps one of the most notable aspects of the 2018–19 protests requiring closer analytical explication, and which distinguished them greatly from previous uprisings, was not only the sheer regional scale of the demonstrations but the hitherto unprecedented high level of solidarity across class, generational, and regional lines in the country. Youth activists and members of the professional associations not only challenged the political discourse of the state; they played a significant role in engineering cross-class alliances in the context of these demonstrations. Over the course of the six-month-long protests, strikes, work stoppages, and sit-ins were held not only on university campuses and secondary schools, but also among private sector and public sector employees and workers. Among the most important examples were the strikes by workers of Port Sudan on the Red Sea demanding the nullification of the sale of the southern Port to a foreign company, and several work stoppages and protests led by employees of some of the most important telecom providers and other private firms in the country.

Understanding the Unraveling of Islamist Authoritarianism

Indeed, while many students of Arab and African authoritarianism in general, and Sudanese politics in particular, did not predict the onset of the new mobilization dynamics associated with the 2018 protests that ultimately led to the ouster of Omer Bashir, for more than a decade there were a number of indications that the era of Islamist authoritarianism was unraveling. In addition to the deepening of internal rivalries within the regime and the significant rise in socioeconomic grievances resulting from the economic crises, regime change came to be dependent not only on political opportunity; it was also a result of a number of crucial factors that were in clear evidence during my research prior to the protests of 2018. These included the fragmentation of a previously cohesive Islamist movement, a youth movement which had for a decade forged a new strategy linking formal as well as informal networks of collective action, the emergence in the strength and cohesion of opposition in civil society, and the fragmentation of the NCP’s security forces into what Sudanese commonly refer to as Quwaat al-Dawala al-Muwaaziyyah (the forces of the parallel state). Taken together these developments explain why, in contrast to previous protests, the popular uprising of 2018 was successful in toppling Omar Bashir’s three decades long authoritarian rule.

To be sure, the post–oil boom era played an important role in the disintegration of the regime of Omer Bashir. The decline in oil revenue resulting from the secession of South Sudan on July 9, 2011, led to the deepening of the economic crisis and eroded the authority of the state over the economy. As noted earlier, this, in turn, eroded the patronage networks of the regime, strengthened the rivalry within the NCP leadership, and exacerbated social and economic grievances across a wide spectrum of Sudanese in both urban and rural areas. During the pre-partition period, oil accounted for 50 percent of domestic revenue and 95 percent of export earnings. Following the south’s secession, Sudan lost 75 percent of its oil reserves and this resulted in a major adjustment to Sudan’s fiscal situation.⁴² The fiscal crisis of the state also aggravated the already stark imbalance between urban and rural regions in terms of social and economic development. According to the Bashir regime’s own Ministry of Welfare and Social Security (MWSS), the loss of oil resulted in cuts to development and federal transfers to the states by 26 and 20 percent, respectively. It also resulted in the depreciation of the Sudanese pound against the US dollar resulting in a dramatic spike in the average inflation rate, which rose to 42 percent in the summer of 2011 up from an average of 13 percent in 2010. Moreover, since most food is imported the rise in inflation worsened poverty levels and impoverished many in the middle class.

As a consequence, the loss of oil revenue dramatically changed the social and economic landscape of the country, and it proved a key element in expanding grievances across the social and geographical spectrum undermining the ruling NCP regime. This is what laid the groundwork for the 2018 popular protests. During the period from 2000 to 2009 real growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) was growing at an average of 8 percent. In addition, and more importantly in terms of the livelihoods of the population, per capita income increased from $US 776 in 2004 to $US 1,570 in 2009.⁴³ Moreover, the revenue from the oil boom during this period and associated inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) led to a boom in the service sector. The service sector contributed 40 percent of GDP, surpassing agriculture as the leading sector in the economy. This afforded employment opportunities for thousands of Sudanese, particularly in the urban centers buttressing the resiliency of the regime. It also enabled the NCP to expand its patronage networks in society. During this period, the regime embarked on the creation of state governments across the country and funded the payrolls of thousands of local government bureaucrats. However, although the economy was expanding, the benefits were unequally distributed. The allocation of services, employment and infrastructural projects remained concentrated in Khartoum state and reflected a distinct political logic designed to appease urban constituencies. As one World Bank study noted, during the CPA period, approximately 60 percent of development spending was on five major projects located within the central triangle in the north.⁴⁴ Moreover, while FDI expanded during this period it was primarily directed to the oil sector, construction, and services. By contrast, the agriculture sector and other traditional exports were neglected. This further worsened poverty and unemployment in rural areas since upward of 50 percent of the rural labor force is engaged in agricultural activities.

This regional and socioeconomic imbalance was a result of state spending that was disproportionally focused on the center; it reflected a particular strategic political vision on the part of the NCP regime. It was a vision that contended that the ruling elite would be able to survive without the West, East, and other peripheral regions. As noted earlier, this was a vision that promoted a policy of investing development finance in Khartoum and the central part of the country in order to ensure a higher rate of return on capital investment. But this vision also had a political component in that it advocated this policy so as to serve as an insurance strategy against the possibility of the fall of the regime in the context of the insurgencies in the periphery. Significantly, in the context of the secession of the south and the loss of oil revenue, this vision became a de facto reality until the fall of Omer Bashir. Moreover, given the regional imbalance in levels of poverty and other social indicators between Khartoum and other regions this trend exacerbated the economic and social grievances among Sudanese outside the capital city in ways that would lay the groundwork for the peripheral regions sparking the historic protests in December 2018.

Fragmentation of Islamist Networks: Al-Sayihoon (The Wanderers)

Another factor associated with the demise of the Bashir regime had to do with the divisions within the Islamist movement itself and specifically the emergence of a new Islamist oppositional movement that came to be known as the Sayihoon or the Wanderers. In fact, some of the causes underlying the power struggles within the NCP regime emerged as a legacy of the evolution and fragmentation of a once-unified Islamist movement that held sway over state and civil society for three decades. The Sayihoon represented those who became disillusioned by the financial and political corruption of the regime, its departure from the “Islamic call” (or Da’wa), the partition (or “loss”) of South Sudan, and the constant divisions and squabbling among the leaders of the ruling NCP. However, rather than reflecting a unified ideological front, or Islamist political agenda, the Sayihoon were composed of three factions, or fragments, of the Islamist movement: supporters of the late Hassan Turabi and other disillusioned Islamists who returned to his fold and joined the PCP; hard-line Islamic militants who, as former members of the PDF militia, had fought in the “Jihadist” wars against the south and the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s; and a younger generation of Islamists who viewed themselves as moderate, democratically inclined “reformers.” The latter, in particular, continue to represent the newest trend of the Islamists movement. They are an influential component of the Sayihoon in that they have greater legitimacy in Sudanese civil society. These self-proclaimed reformers are led by Ghazi Salih al-Dein al-Atabani, who while a member of the NCP had long been estranged from the upper echelons of the regime, and his former patron, Ali Osman Taha. This reformist group attracted many younger Islamists in the country by acknowledging the mistakes the movement has made in the past, calling for the revitalization of the Islamic Da’wa, an anti-corruption agenda, and grassroots mobilization that would pave the path toward a “peaceful” transition to democracy.

Another important trend in the increasing fragmentation of the Islamist movement is associated with the rise of a militant Salafist group. Consequently, by the time regime Bashir fell, the Islamist movement came to be divided along the lines of Islamist reformers led by Atabani, hard-line Islamists formerly linked to Bashir and the military, and an emergent Salafist movement of a far more militant variety. The emergence of militant Islamists, both tacitly and directly supported by the Bashir regime, deepened grievances among moderate Muslim organizations and women. Salafi militants openly launched attacks on Mosques frequented by members of the more moderate Sufi movements, and they also engaged in a series of violent attacks against unveiled women on the streets of Khartoum.

Importantly, however, the Bashir regime’s policy of supporting militant Islamists to divide the Islamists opposition led to the unintended consequence of backfiring against the regime itself. Specifically, militant Islamists vociferously criticized their own patrons within the NCP establishment. On March 5, 2013, for example, the pro-Salafist newspaper, al Muharir, ran an editorial in which it described Bashir and other government officials as “engaged in usury, looting and manipulating the nation’s faith and religion.”⁴⁵

Linking Informal and Formal Networks: The Youth Movement and Collective Action

Although Sudan witnessed two previous popular protests that succeeded in toppling military authoritarian regimes in 1964 and again in 1985, the wide-scale scope of the December 2018 uprising was unprecedented in the country’s history. More specifically, the coordination and linkages forged between informal (i.e., unregistered) trade and labor unions, civil society organizations, and youth activists with the popular and working-class segments of the population who are essentially workers in the informal economy was one of the most important reasons for the durability of the protests. Ultimately, it was the success in organizing across the formal-informal social spectrum that sustained the protests. The idea that informal networks (commonly referred to as al-Mujtama’at al-Muwazziyyah) of professional and trade unions should engage more closely with street activists and workers in the informal economy was not one that had been vigorously envisioned or promoted by many political actors involved in previous popular protests. This development played a key role in sustaining the protests and in undermining the Bashir regime in ways that could not easily have been predicted when the uprising first erupted in Atbara, the city in the outlying northern province of River Nile State.

Importantly, in the course of my research on youth activism in 2013, it was clearly evident that leaders of such youth movements as Girifna (We are fed up) and Sudan Change Now (SCN) had carefully begun to craft a new form of opposition to the Islamist authoritarian regime. Like youth movements elsewhere, the Sudanese youth movement can be generally described as a political and social reform movement consisting chiefly of youth between the ages of 15 and 24. However, this common definition of what constitutes “youth” does not accurately reflect the demographic and social changes in Sudan, nor the grievances motivating their political and social activism. As of 2012, labor force participation and the unemployment rates among the young stood at 32.9 percent and 22 percent, respectively, compared to 43 percent and 11 percent for adults.⁴⁶ Moreover, Sudan’s labor market is highly underdeveloped and heavily dependent on agriculture and the informal sector. These factors, along with Sudan’s high birth rate, have resulted in a relatively young population and a high proportion of young people of working age. Indeed, like many countries in Africa and the Arab world, Sudan has struggled to create an adequate number of jobs for new entrants to the labor market and continues to be faced with a bulging youth population with unemployment rising sharply particularly among highly educated young people.

These demographic changes have altered the very structure of family life, as a whole generation of lower- and middle-class Sudanese cannot access regular employment and afford to marry. As one scholar has noted, as a result of these societal changes, “youth’’ is no longer a fleeting phase between traditional childhood and adulthood; it represents an “extended generational stage that presents both new opportunities and a different set of challenges and responsibilities to young people and the society at large.”⁴⁷ The Sudanese youth movement which played such an important role in the protests of 2018–2019 emerged from this context. It represents a loose coalition of working, middle-class Sudanese, as well as youth in the informal sector, many in their twenties and thirties, who deftly utilized faster communication and social media to voice both political as well as social grievances against the regime, the older generation of politicians, and even the traditional patriarchal family.

In strategic terms and following in the model of the “Arab Spring” and earlier intifadas in Khartoum, the leaders of the youth movement in Sudan engaged in forging links with a broad spectrum of groups in civil society including independent unions, middle and lower segments of businessmen and traders not linked to NCP patronage, some segments of the upper classes, and expatriate Sudanese. Specifically, as early as 2011, they linked up with the informally organized unions of physicians, pharmacists, lawyers, secondary school teachers, and a revitalized bus drivers’ union, all of which organized a series of strikes over issues of health care, education, and increases in benefits and wages for public service workers almost a decade prior to 2018. It is important to note that since the early 1990s the regime had co-opted most union activity and repressed independent union activity. However, as early as 2011 “informal” or “parallel” unions emerged. These include not only the unions noted earlier but also new informal associations comprising individuals previously dismissed by the regime such as Ittihad al-mafsuleen (Association of the Dismissed), Ittihad al-Ma’sheen (Association of Retirees), and Tajumu Umaal Qita’ al-‘Am al-Mafsuleen (Union of Dismissed Public Factory Workers).

Interestingly, despite some claims by traditional political leaders to the contrary, youth leaders I interviewed in 2012, 2013, 2014, and late 2018 insisted that they were certain of having support among a wide spectrum of Sudanese, which they said comes from their experience and linkage with the evolution of student activism on campus. Specifically, their strategy was to focus on social and economic issues, which unites a wide range of civil society organizations and populations in marginal areas as a key component of political change. They noted that the traditional political parties have lost support because they continue to focus on the mechanics of political change and the distribution of political power rather than on socioeconomic issues relevant to the vast majority of Sudanese. The youth leaders, therefore, tended to dismiss reformist policies such as the 2015 elections orchestrated by Bashir to revive his legitimacy in society; rather, they pursued, in their own terms, a less “institutionalized political agenda” for change.⁴⁸

Equally important, given the role ethnic divisions have played in impeding collective action in Sudan, youth activists were instrumental in bridging the ethnic and racial divide among many in civil society by working toward bridging the social distance between those belonging to Arab ethnic groups residing in the Arabized riverine center and north and Darfurian citizens in the west. An important example in this regard emphasized by a number of youth activists I interviewed occurred in 2012 following the killing of Darfurian students by security forces on the campus of the University of Gezira. In December of that year students protested the dean’s decision to compel all students to pay fees including students from Darfur who had previously been exempted because of the war. During two days of strikes and protests the National Security and Intelligence Service (NISS) detained student leaders and killed four students from Darfur placing their corpses in shallow water as a way to deter further protests. In the aftermath, youth organizers mobilized thousands of protestors and forced the police and the NISS to withdraw from campus. In the same month, larger youth-led protests followed in Khartoum calling for solidarity with Rabitat Awlad Darfur (the Darfur Student Associations) a large, cross-campus student organization in the capital. In the context of the war in Darfur, and the incendiary racist discourse often utilized by the state, this was considered a breakthrough by the youth movement on issues that bridged a divide between residents from marginalized regions and those from central and north Sudan.

Importantly, and as recent scholarship on informal workers in Africa has observed, in economies where a broad section of workers rely primarily on the informal labor market for employment and income generation, any understanding of the new dynamics of, and potential capacity for, popular mobilization and collective action must take analytical care not to view laborers in the informal economy as “passive targets” for recruitment by formal unions and associations; rather, we should consider people in the informal economy as actors capable of various initiatives, including organizing themselves, despite the many obstacles they face. Indeed, as the historic 2018 popular protests demonstrated, organizing across the formal-informal spectrum should be assessed from the perspective of informal actors and activists and not merely from the vantage point of formal trade and labor unions and institutions.⁴⁹

It is a central irony in the war on terrorist finance that it has proved counterproductive in the context of Somalia. A key assumption in counterterrorism policy is that weak and collapsed states serve as a breeding ground for terrorist recruitment and a refuge for global terrorist cells. Yet the regulatory constraints imposed on informal financial transfers have had the unintended consequence of potentially undermining state-building efforts in the very region of the world which is in most need of building and strengthening formal institutions. Somalia represents an important example in this regard. The hawwalat system continues to represent the most important conduit of capital accumulation. Moreover, in addition to ensuring the survival of millions of Somalis, the hawwalat have the potential to play an important role in ongoing state-building and consolidation efforts. A key determinant of state formation is the ability to both encourage and tax private economic activity in order to consolidate political control and expand the infrastructural reach and power of the state. The case of northern Somalia has clearly illustrated that achieving success in this sphere both reduces clan-based conflicts and stems the tide of extremism and terrorism.

In the more stable regions of Somalia (i.e., northwest and northeast) where I conducted my field research, political leaders have managed to gain the trust and cooperation of the Somali businessmen operating the hawwalat companies, who have earned windfalls from the lucrative trade in remittances and foreign currency. As a result, state builders, most notably in Somaliland (i.e.,northwest Somalia), have established a high level of peace and stability and revived governance institutions.¹ In November 2017, Somaliland witnessed an unprecedented fourth round of democratic elections with no violent incidence of extremism reported in any parts of the territory.² With the financial assistance of the Dahabshil³ hawwalat and the cooperation of the business community, in northern Somalia, government employees collect revenue; salaried and uniformed police keep law and order; courts administer justice; and ministers dispense public services. In this respect, criminalizing major parts of the informal sector threatens the fragile peace and state building that has been achieved in some parts of Somalia.⁴

The Origins and Legacy of State Collapse

To understand Somalia’s contemporary economic and political dynamics, it is important to examine the underlying reasons for the collapse of the state. As Jamil Mubarak has keenly observed, “most of the resilient features of the post-state-collapse economy, which are attributed to the informal sector, emerged in response to the policies of the [Siad Barre] government.”⁵ Indeed, in Somalia while the boom in labor remittances in the 1970s and 1980s signaled a resurgent private sector the bulk of the country’s labor force was “accommodated mostly as apprentices or family aides in a vast network of shops and workshops” – the informal sector, as distinct from the parallel sector from which the former received its money.⁶ Moreover, when the recession period set in, it led to a great deal of unemployment. In fact, as early as 1978, a survey of the urban labor force demonstrated that officially registered wage earners numbered only 90,282 persons out of an estimated labor force of 300–360 thousand.⁷

By the mid-1980s the drop-in oil prices and the consequent slump in the Gulf countries increased unemployment (reaching as high as one-third) and remittances drastically declined. For a society that had for over a decade relied on its livelihood to be financed by remittances from family members outside Somalia the effect was devastating. Moreover, while many relied on supplementary income derived from informal, small-scale businesses financed by remittances, or some support from relatives who were farmers or pastoralists, the 1980s would signal increasing economic competition, pauperization, and social discontent. Moreover, the livestock trade which had always been transacted on the free market and whose profits accrued to private traders operating along fragmented markets that helped to both create and expand the parallel sector also declined drastically in 1983. In that year, Saudi Arabia imposed a ban on cattle imports from all African countries after the discovery of rinderpest. Livestock export earnings plummeted from $106 million in 1982 to $32 million two years later.⁸

This played a large role in Somalia’s crisis. By the late 1980s, the overall economic picture for Somalia was grim: manufacturing output, always small, had declined by 5 percent between 1980 and 1987, and exports had decreased by 16.3 percent from 1979 to 1986. According to the World Bank, throughout the 1980s real GNP per person declined by 1.7 percent per year.⁹ What was at stake in political terms was control of the exchange rate and hence the parallel market which constituted the financial underpinning of the clientelist system underpinning Barre’s dictatorial rule. Eventually, mounting debt forced President Siad Barre to implement economic austerity measures, including currency devaluations, as a way to channel foreign exchange into the central banking system. However, this belated attempt at economic reform, and particularly financial liberalization, failed because Barre could no longer compete with the remittance dealers. The hawwalat continued to offer better rates and safer delivery than the state’s extremely weak and corrupt-ridden regulatory and financial institutions could provide. Barre resorted to increasingly predatory and violent behavior, particularly as opposition, organized around clan families, grew. He singled out the Isaaq clan, the main beneficiaries of the remittance boom, for retribution. In Mogadishu and other southern towns, the government attempted to destroy the financial patrons of the Isaaq-led Somali National Movement (SNM) by arresting hundreds of Isaaq merchants and professionals. Generally, Barre’s policies against the Isaaq aimed to marginalize them both politically and economically. For example, because the Isaaq enjoyed a monopoly over the livestock trade – a monopoly made possible by their control over the northwestern port of Berbera – Barre placed tariffs on livestock exports from the northern ports. He also outlawed the sale of the mild narcotic qat, a profitable source of revenue for the clan. This policy of economic repression, coupled with Barre’s arming of non-Isaaq militias to fight and displace the Isaaq from their lands, further consolidated Isaaq clan identity and solidarity against both the state and neighboring clans, such as the Darod-Ogadenis.¹⁰

The ensuing civil war naturally exacted a debilitating cost on the economy. A rising import bill (petrol prices rose by 30 percent in 1988 alone) resulted in acute shortages of basic consumer goods and led to hoarding and the circulation of fraudulent checks as a popular form of payment. Barre’s lifting of all remaining import restrictions in an effort to stimulate imports had no effect since most of the population were by this time outside government control either because of active opposition or because they were engaged in informal activity. Even Barre’s attempts to keep his military alliance intact by raising its pay 50 percent and doubling military rations did not forestall opposition within the ranks as at first the Ogadenis and then other clans went into opposition.¹¹

Barre’s policies also meant that remittances from the Isaaq diaspora came to play an increasingly key role in financing both clan members’ economic livelihoods and the SNM’s insurgency against the regime. Prior to the outbreak of civil war in 1990, members of the Isaaq represented more than 50 percent of all Somali migrant workers, partly as a result of their historically close ties to the Gulf and their knowledge of Arabic. A large proportion of their remittances went to supply arms to the rural guerillas. In 1990 delegates of the SNM received USD 14–52 million; and the total remittances transferred to northern Somalia were in the range of USD 200–250 million.¹² The SNM provided crucial financial and logistical support to the Hawiye and other rebel clans, and guerilla warfare spread quickly to the central and southern parts of the country. In January 1991, the Hawiye-based United Somali Congress (USC), led by Gen. Muhammad Farah ‘Aidid and backed by the SNM, ousted Barre from Mogadishu.

By the time Barre’s regime fell, the Somali state ceased to exist as reinforced clan identities were asserted in the struggle over territory and increasingly scarce resources. In the North the Somali National Movement dominated. The Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), consisting mainly of the Majeerteen, a subclan of Barre’s own Darod clan, became active once again in the northeast and central regions. Formed as early as 1978, this was the oldest opposition force, but it had little success due to the absence of an autonomous financial base. In the south the Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM) was made up of the Ogadeni, another subclan of the Darod. Between the Juba and Shebelle rivers in the southwest the Rahenwein were represented by the Somali Democratic Movement (SDM) whose weak social position reflects their agro-pastoral base. Possessing the most fertile region in the country, the Rahanwein became the main victims of the war-induced famine and violence as powerful neighboring warlords sought to displace them. Also caught in the fighting in what became known as the “triangle of death” were other riverine populations, namely the Bantus who as descendants of slaves retained an inferior social status. In the center, around the capital of Mogadishu, the epicenter of conflict, was the Hawiye-based United Somali Congress (USC). The USC, founded only one year prior to Barre’s ouster, was a relative newcomer to the conflict, but came to occupy a prominent position in 1990 mainly because of its hold over the capital. When the USC broke up the following year into the Hawiye subclans of the Haber Gidir led by Ali Mahdi and the Abgal led by Mohamed Farah Aideed, internecine violence increased dramatically.¹³ The fateful decision of southerner Ali Mahdi to declare himself president in a hastily convened 1991 “reconciliation” conference in Djibouti within days after Aideed’s forces had driven Barre into exile in Kenya caused an escalation of the violence in Mogadishu. Aideed refused to recognize Mahdi’s appointment and attacked his forces in the capital, while years of northern resentment came to the fore resulting in the Isaaq’s unilateral declaration of an independent Republic of Somaliland in May 1991.

In ensuing years clan militias emerged to fill the vacuum of the collapsed state. Across the early 1990s, all of Somalia, but particularly the southern and central regions, witnessed a pattern of increasingly violent interclan and intra-subclan fighting. These conflicts broke out largely because of competition over economic resources as well as violent struggles over political authority. Most notably, the USC was divided into two Hawiye sub-subclans: the Hawiye/Habr-Gedir/Abgal clan of ‘Ali Mahdi and the Hawiye/Habr-Gedir/Sa‘ad clan of Gen. ‘Aidid.¹⁴ Tension between the two factions arose when in the wake of Barre’s ouster, the Abgal faction unilaterally formed an interim government and appointed Mahdi as president.¹⁵ The two opposing movements claimed sovereignty over Mogadishu and utilized their subclan networks and militias to regulate entrance and exit from these areas by demanding payment and protection fees.¹⁶ Initially, this was represented by the division of the city between the north and south, which were controlled by ‘Ali Mahdi and Gen. ‘Aidid respectively.¹⁷ Eventually, the conflict led to the disintegration of the USC – a harbinger of the heightened level of violence that has plagued southern and central Somalia to the present day.¹⁸

As newly organized subclan networks rapidly proliferated in a society absent institutions of law and order, the business of protection within Somalia’s unregulated economy quickly came to dominate large swaths of southern and central Somalia. The new subclan networks that coalesced over different territories used coercion and violence to extract taxes from village harvests and commercial establishments. They also took hostages for ransom. Indeed, the “economy of war” in Somalia took several forms. Youth gangs began to engage in activities such as robbery and looting as a means to generate income. More profitable, however, were illicit informal economic activities, including the embezzlement of foreign-aid funds; the printing and circulation of counterfeit money; the smuggling and exportation of charcoal, qat, copper, and machinery; and, more recently, piracy.¹⁹ Piracy, in particular, became a sophisticated economic activity primarily because it is facilitated by a very profitable alliance between some members of the business community and clan militias.²⁰ Writing poignantly in the wake of state collapse, Somali scholar Abdi Samatar noted that the “opportunistic methods with which groups and individuals marshaled support to gain and retain access to public resources finally destroyed the very institution that laid the golden egg.”²¹

Variations in State Building

One of the main legacies of the collapse of the Somalia state was the strong emergence of clan-centered forms of social organization throughout the country. In the wake of the disintegration of the formal institutions of the state, clan solidarity emerged as the primary basis of political, social, and economic organization. However, while interclan and subclan conflict continues to plague much of Somalia, in the northwest state builders have successfully established a relatively stable and democratic state resulting from a highly complex process of negotiation and reconciliation between clans. This included the demobilization of armed militias and the restoration of law and order.²² Remarkably, since it broke away from the rest of Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has managed to build internal stability without the benefit of international recognition or significant foreign development assistance. Indeed, few international organizations participated in ending internal conflicts or substantially invested in establishing security through disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration or to promote democratization.

Somaliland’s remarkable success in transitioning from a clan-based system of governance to multiparty elections was a result of a contentious and often violent process that included the use of traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution. In a constitutional referendum held on May 31, 2001, the vast majority of eligible voters in Somaliland approved a new democratic, multiparty system, thereby eliminating the institutionalization of clan leadership that had existed under the previous system of governance.²³ In 2010 and again in 2017, Somaliland further consolidated its nascent democracy by holding successive rounds of presidential elections, which brought a new political party to power in its capital of Hargeisa. Although Somaliland is now widely recognized as a legitimate state among its population, it has not been granted formal recognition by the international community. Nevertheless, Somaliland has consolidated its state building efforts. Ken Menkhaus, a foremost expert of the politics of the region, has noted that Somaliland has made a relatively successful transition from a clan-based polity to a multiparty democracy by holding local, presidential, and legislative elections and even overseeing a peaceful constitutional transfer of power following the death of the influential president Muhammad Ibrahim Egal in 2002.²⁴

In contrast to Somaliland, the semi-autonomous northeastern region of Puntland, once touted as a success of the grassroots approach to reestablishing national stability and widely viewed as one of the most prosperous parts of Somalia, continues to experience high levels of insecurity and political tension. At its root are poor governance, corruption, and a collapse of the intraclan cohesion and pan-Darod solidarity that led to its creation in 1998.²⁵ In contrast to Somaliland’s leaders, none of the four presidents “did what was needed.”²⁶ They did not embark on institution building, establish a proper development and regulatory framework, or build legitimate and efficient security arrangements. Nor has the leadership played a positive role in national reconciliation. In contrast to Somaliland’s political elite, they have not managed to forge peace among different clans and subclans within Puntland or with their neighbors. “It was,” in the words of one Somalia scholar from the region, “a lost opportunity since civil society was overwhelmingly supportive of the idea of an autonomous Puntland.”²⁷ Indeed, when I returned to conduct further research in 2010 the state of security of the region was profoundly precarious. Residents routinely complained that salaries were not paid on time for public officials; police officers were forced to work on a volunteer basis; and competition over resources, including land, fuel, and fishing rights, led to intermittent conflict between nomads, agro-pastoralists, and fishermen. As one resident of Eyl, in the Nugal province of Puntland, put it: “[W]e have no police force to enforce the law; elders continue to try to intervene to settle disputes since there is an absence of a strong administration and no security. Only mobs and thugs prosper in a community without order.”²⁸

Standing in starker contrast to both Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia – that is, the southern and central regions of the Republic of Somalia that remain, at least, nominally, a part of that state – has failed to build durable state institutions. It remains beset by continued clan conflict, Islamist extremism, and displacement. Unlike Somaliland, which has benefited from a more united and cohesive clan structure organized under the Isaaq clan family, Somalia is home to a far more diverse and less unified constellation of different clans and subclans. In recent years, the rapid rise of militant Islamist activism has influenced state building efforts in variable ways. In April 2006, the Somali capital city of Mogadishu came under the control of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a cross-clan organization comprising Somalia’s Islamist organizations. The UIC seized power from the then increasingly weak clan-based Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in an attempt to establish a system of governance based on shari‘a instead of clan loyalty.²⁹ After sixteen years of intraclan fighting and conflict, the UIC implemented a particularly austere and militant version of shari‘a (including huduud punishments) to institute law and order. As a consequence, the Islamic courts achieved a short-lived measure of stability in the city before the UIC was ousted in 2007 by an alliance of Ethiopian and US military forces.

Developments in Somaliland, Puntland, and the Republic of Somalia represent alternative approaches to state building that transcend conventional understandings of the role of ethnic and Islamic networks in state formation. Examining these contrasting political trajectories helps illuminate how the transnational character of Somalia’s civil war was not only an obstacle to peace building but also, in the case of Somaliland, an opportunity for state formation in the context of an increasingly internationalized economy. Examining the state building projects in Somaliland and Puntland alongside the emergence of Islamist militancy in Somalia also reveals how war, state making, and clan and Islamist networks are related in variable ways.

State Building in Weak States

Considering the civil conflict underpinning the disintegration of the state in Somalia, a closer analysis of the balance between civil conflict, protection, extraction, and state making is required in order to understand the trajectory of state-building efforts in contemporary Somalia. As scholars of state formation have long observed, historically state building has been ancillary to war making.³⁰ To support and finance their wars, rulers developed centralized control over private armies, developed institutions to settle disputes, and established rules and courts to control the behavior of the people within their boundaries. Most important, war makers strive to develop fiscal and extractive capacities since success in war depends on the state’s ability not only to tax its subjects, but also to generate revenue from domestic and transnational financial sources.³¹

In the case of Somalia, this framework usefully highlights the interaction between war making, state making, and capital accumulation (i.e., extraction). Moreover, this model has important implications for our comparative analysis of state building efforts in Somaliland, Puntland, and Somalia. This is because all the regions have experienced intermittent interclan strife while simultaneously embarking on efforts at state building and state consolidation. Consequently, variations in the way the actors have attempted to collect taxes, make war, and eliminate their local rivals are important and highly unpredictable. Throughout Somalia, the business of “protection” – “the racket” in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay tribute through threats of violence – has indeed determined political developments and the social organization of collective action in various parts of the country. The emergence of regionally based political organizations and initial attempts to establish local currencies, and institute law and order though military and ideological means, are very illustrative here.

Nevertheless, this understanding of the state building process in post-conflict settings falls short in two important ways. The first problem is that this framework’s focus on interstate war as the mechanism underpinning state formation obscures the fact that this type of war is a rare occurrence in the developing world and in Africa in particular.³² Indeed, as a number of scholars have documented, since 1945, intrastate wars have dominated armed conflict.³³ This empirical reality associated with the frequency of intrastate wars has led students of state building to refute the applicability of Tilly’s model, asserting that in the absence of an external threat and the presence of an internal one, the state can no longer penetrate society to extract resources.³⁴

What has not been sufficiently analyzed, however, is this influential model’s eurocentrism. According to Charles Tilly, the history of state formation reveals that “states built upon religious organizations were significantly weaker than secular states, as the latter were less fragmented and, therefore, more capable of accumulating capital and means of coercion.”³⁵ But this line of reasoning assumes a priori that a state based on Islamic institutions, or for that matter clan networks, cannot survive in the modern state system. Contrary to this conventional understanding of state formation, state building experiments in Somalia, though based on clan identity and invented tradition, may, depending on the interplay between formal political authorities and identity-based trust networks, represent legitimate alternatives to secular institutions. The fact that Islamist experiments such as the Union of Islamic Courts in central Somalia have failed is due to a combination of external and internal dynamics. This is clearly in evidence when we compare the variations of state building across this Muslim country.

Equally important in the case of Somalia is the fact that developing states are far more vulnerable to regional and international interventions than European states were at the time of their formation. They are also crucially affected by shifts in the global economy. However, what still needs to be explained is the precise manner in which international economic imperatives are interacting with local economic and cultural variations in ways that are decisively shaping political developments in the northwest and northeast. For example, why are clan-based cleavages enjoying greater political salience and popular legitimacy in Somaliland, while Islamist identification is making more inroads in the more homogenous northeast (Puntland)?³⁶ Indeed, without understanding the impediments as well as opportunities posed by international economic linkages in state-building efforts, any understanding of these developments in Somalia can only be partial. In particular, given the fact that remittance inflows represent the largest source of foreign exchange and are relied upon as a major source of income by 46 percent and 38 percent of all urban households in Somaliland and Puntland, respectively, it is also important to address the latter’s complex role in contemporary political developments.

Clan Networks and State Disintegration

As Charles Tilly famously observed, over most of history, no regime has been able to survive without drawing on resources and the support held by trust networks such as religious or kinship groups. “Rulers’ application of various combinations among coercion, capital and commitment in the course of bargaining with subordinate populations produces a variety of regimes.”³⁷ Tilly focused on the threat that contemporary democracies may face if major segments of the population withdraw their trust networks from public politics, but this development has far more profound consequences for weak states like Somalia where it can jeopardize the very foundation of state institutions leading to the collapse of central political authority. In order to properly examine Somalia’s civil unrest and its implications for state building we must first turn to precolonial traditions that once regulated the country’s social, political, and economic order. In doing so, a clear distinction can be drawn between traditional social organizations and the divisive politicization of clanship that occurred during and after the colonial period.

The nature of precolonial Somali society depended largely on communal interdependence rather than rigid hierarchal authority.³⁸ Patrilineal kinship ties are derived from one of six clan families – Dir, Isaaq, Hawiye, Darod, Digil, and Rahanwein. Somaliland consists mainly of the Isaaq, Dir, and Darod clans, while southern Somalia is comprised of the Hawiye, Digil, and Rahanwein clans.³⁹ Subclans known as diya-paying groups (blood compensation groups) were derived from these larger clan families and served to unify kinsmen within a mediating structure. More specifically, kinsmen under these groups are bound by a contractual alliance based on collective payment for wrongs committed by any group member. In effect, this alliance serves as a political as well as a legal entity.⁴⁰

However, beyond patrilineal genealogy and blood ties, cross-clan cooperation was manifested in both the tenets of Islam and customary law or Xeer. According to I. M. Lewis, Islam is “one of the mainsprings of Somali culture,” and historically, Somalia’s religious leaders have positioned themselves outside of the conflict between clans.⁴¹ Similarly, Xeer served as a unifying structure, which was “socially constructed to safeguard security and social justice within and among Somali communities.”⁴² This structure, utilized in the ongoing processes of state building in Somalia, thus served as a Somali-wide social contract in that it governed and regulated economic relations as well as social life. In a society that lacked an overarching state structure, where the household was the basic economic unit, and where the means of daily survival were widely distributed, the Xeer prevented the exploitation of one’s labor or livestock.⁴³ Moreover, within precolonial Somalia there did not exist individuals or groups who could monopolize coercive power or economic resources. Clan elders were restricted from exercising such control beyond their households, and their status as political leaders was limited to their role as mediators within and among their clans.⁴⁴ In effect, Somali society was regulated by traditional principles of interaction based on clanship, Islam, and Xeer.⁴⁵ The Somali scholar Ahmed Yusuf Farah explained the complex interaction of these three aspects of Somali communal life in eloquent terms:

The introduction of the colonial order, beginning in the early nineteenth century, drastically transformed these traditional networks of the precolonial period. The direct effects of this transformation disrupted the equilibrium of clans and the management and distribution of resources.⁴⁷ Although northern and southern Somalis were exposed to different colonial strategies, both regions experienced a high level of intrusion into their social and political systems. Both British and Italian administrative apparatuses politicized the leadership of clan elders. This created a system of chieftainship whereby the role of the clan elder was transformed from regulating clan relations and resources to regulating access to state benefits.⁴⁸ In Somaliland, for example, clan chiefs were paid a stipend to enforce diya-paying, thus justifying the British colonial strategy of collective punishment.⁴⁹ This practice of chieftainship throughout Somalia undermined the legitimacy of clan elders and their traditional authority by violating the very traditional social structures that had once mitigated against hierarchical authority.

Importantly, however, the colonial experiences of northern and southern Somalia varied in certain respects in ways that illuminate the context of present variations in the success of peace and state building in the different regions of the country. Specifically, the Italian colonialists adopted a method of direct rule, economic intervention, and commercialization of the pastoral economy in southern Somalia. In contrast, British Somaliland was left economically “undisturbed and governed by indirect rule.”⁵⁰ The economic effects sustained in southern Somalia undermined the traditional system of “communitarian pastoralism” by producing and distributing agricultural goods according to political motivations rather than household or communal necessity.⁵¹ The commercialization of the economy and direct taxation of livestock produced a nascent class system that privileged merchants and political elite while exploiting the agricultural producers – a process that was previously prevented by the institution of the Xeer.

It is this class system that set the stage for the transformation of clan networks into a hardened clannism under the authoritarian rule of President Siad Barre whereby certain clans enjoyed the political and economic largesse of the state. Upon taking over the presidency in 1969 Siad Barre began an aggressive campaign to eradicate clan loyalties in favor of an irredentist Pan-Somali identity and he went so far as to outlaw any acknowledgment (public or private) of the existence of clans.⁵² Contrary to this policy of nationalism, however, Barre engaged heavily in the instrumentalization of clan politics. In order to strengthen his power, he adopted “a divide and rule through blood ties” strategy that pitted one clan or subclan against the other.⁵³ Through such a policy, he was able to elevate his clan and that of his family members to a level of prominent political and social status. I. M. Lewis has argued that it was the Darod subclans of Barre – the Marehan, Ogaden, and Dulbahante – that dominated representation in parliament.⁵⁴ Aside from its supremacy over the political arena, by the 1970s this new political elite controlled most of Somalia’s businesses particularly when Barre took over the formal financial sector.⁵⁵

By 1977, Barre had extended his irredentist campaign beyond the territorial boundaries of Somalia, supporting ethnic Somali movements in Kenya, French Somaliland, and Ethiopia. The most significant demonstration of this support was extended to militants from his mother’s clan, the Ogadeen in Ethiopia of both the Somalia Abo Liberation Front (SALF) and the Western Somalia Liberation Front (WSLF).⁵⁶ This prompted a forceful retaliation by the Ethiopian government, Somalia’s long-time rival, thus commencing the Somali-Ethiopia war. Though the war initially engendered national solidarity, Barre’s regime came under heavy scrutiny as a result of the influx of hundreds of thousands of Oromo and Ogadeen refugees and Somalia’s defeat in 1978.⁵⁷ Such scrutiny resulted in an attempted coup by military officers and political opponents of the Darod/Majeerteen clan in 1978. Upon the failure of the coup, many of the perpetrators fled to Ethiopia and, by 1981, had organized under the movement the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF). Though it was comprised of Darod, Hawiye, and Isaaq clan members, by 1992 it was apparent that the SSDF was a Majeerteen militia.⁵⁸ Abdullahi Yusif, the first president of Puntland following the collapse of the state, was among the leading cadres of SSDF throughout the 1980s. Less than thirty years after attempting to overthrow the Barre regime through a clan-based militia and building strong ties with rival Ethiopia, Yusif was made president of Somalia’s internationally supported Transitional Federal Government.⁵⁹

Importantly, while Barre’s polices institutionalized political preference along the lines of those clans and subclans that were closest to his own, they repressed other clan groups. The Isaaq, in particular, Somaliland’s majority clan, were politically and economically marginalized under Barre’s predatory regime.⁶⁰ The Isaaq were often subject to violent interclan violence instigated by the regime directly or by proxy-militias. Barre’s tactic was to “militarize the clans be creating militias, giving them weapons, and then implicating them in the repression against a targeted clan segment” in order to fragment potential opposition to his regime.⁶¹ In the early 1980s, for example, Barre resurrected Darod/Ogadeeni-Isaaq clan disputes over access to grazing water in the northern pasturelands. By extending his patronage to Ogadeeni fighters through arms supply, Barre encouraged them to fight the Isaaq and any disloyal Darod subclans.⁶² By 1988, Barre’s army had destroyed much of Somaliland’s two major cities: Hargeisa and Burao. In response to the increasing strength of the Ogadeen and the alienation of the Isaaq clan under Barre’s regime, it was at this historical juncture that the Somali National Movement (SNM) was created in 1981 and based in Ethiopia until 1988. Importantly, its origins lay in the strength of the Isaaq diaspora in the Gulf, whose remittances contributed significantly to Somaliland’s economy. The creation of the SNM provoked hostile retaliation and further alienation from Barre’s regime, which in turn strengthened the legitimacy, popularity, and internal cohesion of the various Isaaq subclans.

The Isaaq SNM movement was a clear example of both the utilization of clan networks for political interests and the increasing need for Somalis to seek political and economic refuge in clan identity from a repressive authoritarian regime. However, it would not have succeeded in producing a coherent and united opposition to Barre if the movement did not benefit from their engagement in informal economic activities in general and labor remittances in particular. Due to the economic alienation and state repression of Somaliland under the Barre regime, northern businessmen sought protection within clan-based credit systems, or abbans to manage their business networks and organize informal remittances from overseas.⁶³ The abbans connected local businessmen to the hawwalat, which utilized subclan norms of reciprocity to facilitate the trade.⁶⁴ This allowed northern businessmen to finance the armed struggle through remittances and informal networks during the Barre regime.

In addition to the Isaaq-led SNM, a large number of clan-based militant groups emerged in the late 1980s that played a key role in Barre’s ouster. The Hawiye clan movement – the United Somali Congress (USC) – was based mostly in central and southern Somalia and formed its own militia in 1989. Indeed, by 1991 the tendency was for “every major Somali clan to form its own militia movement.”⁶⁵ However, in a development that would be a key factor in future state-building projects in the country, aside from the Isaaq in later years, the general tendency was that most clan-based movements were plagued by intraclan rivalry among subclans in the post-collapse era. To be sure, interclan as well as intraclan feuds had certainly existed in precolonial Somalia, but the violence under Barre and in the civil war period was a drastic deviation from the traditional relations governing clan interaction.⁶⁶

The legacy of the Barre regime was thus one of political, economic as well as societal destruction facilitated through the manipulation of clan networks in an attempt to strengthen his supporters and his increasingly personalized form of authoritarian rule. The result was the emergence of centrifugal movements centered on clan and subclan networks. From within this environment emerged insurgent militias who employed the sentiment of clan in order to rally allegiance, legitimate their authority, and extract resources – a far cry from the role of “traditional” clan elders. But just as these movements such as the SNM, SSDF, and UCM, based on clan networks, challenged and eventually overturned centralized coercive power and extractive capabilities (i.e., the Barre nation state), in the aftermath of the collapse of the state they also embarked on building new state institutions, albeit with varying degrees of success.

Clan Networks and State Building in Somaliland

Paradoxically, Somaliland, which was devastated by two waves of violent power struggles involving intraclan warfare (in 1992–1993 and 1994–1996), and which has a more heterogeneous population, has achieved better results than Puntland in reviving the basic institutions of governance. The Republic of Somaliland was established in 1991 as a result of the Grand Conference of the Northern Peoples of Burao, where the Somali National Movement joined with clan elders from the various subclans to establish an interim government. The government was given a two-year mandate with the tasks of accommodating non-Isaaq clans into the state structure, drafting a constitution, and preparing the population for presidential elections.⁶⁷ Due to its weak revenue base and inability to mediate among intraclan rivals, rather than subverting traditional authority, the government assiduously turned to clan elders to manage local security and reconciliation.

Somaliland’s relatively cohesive and united clans, forged in the long and violent struggle against Siad Barre’s regime, is certainly one of the root causes of its stability. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that the Isaaq-dominant region was not immune from internal divisions following its unilateral declaration of independence. Fighting erupted in Somaliland among intraclan rivals immediately following the creation of the SNM-led government headed by ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Ali Tur. As in southern and central Somalia during the same period, subclan competition over power and resources fragmented former SNM militia leaders along five major Isaaq subclans. This was followed by fierce violence in March 1992 when the government attempted to gain control over Berbera port and its very lucrative revenue. Indirect taxation at the port at this juncture would have provided crucial resources for state building efforts. Not surprisingly, the other subclans, not wishing to cede their local revenue to the state, rejected the move.⁶⁸ Although a peace conference in 1993 reestablished some security, by 1994 intraclan conflicts were resurrected over the issue of resource extraction. Until that time, the airport in the capital of Hargeisa had been controlled by the Idagele subclan of the Isaaq, which enforced its monopoly over air taxes and landing fees. This conflict was sparked when the state, headed by Abdulrahman Ali Tur, tried to take control of the Hargeisa airport away from the Idagele subclan. The conflict led to over a year of violence in Somaliland and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians.⁶⁹

In the wake of intraclan conflicts in 1991 and 1992, Somaliland’s elders convened two conferences in Sheikh and Borama. These conferences, referred to by their Somali name shir beeleed, made use of the traditional role of clan elders as community mediators, signaling a return to the Xeer system.⁷⁰ The 1993 Borama conference was overseen by a guurti, or national council of clan elders, and produced both a peace charter and a transnational charter. The former reinstated Somalia’s precolonial traditional social order by establishing a Xeer in accordance with the tenets of Islam as a mechanism through which to govern both inter- and intra-clan relations.

The transnational charter established an innovative bicameral legislature, oversaw the transfer of power from interim president ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Ali Tur to the democratically elected President Muhammad Ibrahim Egal, and called for a formal constitutional referendum under Egal’s new government.⁷¹ As such, it struck a balance between traditional Somalian and Western state forms: local clan elders were encouraged to utilize their traditional roles as a way to eradicate interclan enmities while also participating in a temporary power-sharing coalition until a constitutional draft could be agreed upon by the elders of all the clans in Somaliland. Though the shir beeleed established the parameters for peace, intraclan violence in Somaliland persisted under the Egal administration. Once again, clan elders convened to mediate among the communities under a second national reconciliation conference held across 1996 and 1997. This pivotal conference successfully ended the war and adopted an interim constitution that called for presidential elections and the establishment of a representative multiparty system of governance.⁷² By 1999, a draft constitution was prepared, and on May 31, 2001, it was accepted by 97.9 percent of the population.⁷³

But how precisely did the new constitution transcend the clannism forged in the colonial period and that had been so devastating to the country throughout the last decades? First, accredited political parties were obliged to draw at least 20 percent of electoral support from four of Somaliland’s six regions, thereby ensuring that no party ran solely on a clan-based platform.⁷⁴ Second, to demonstrate the Guurti’s adherence to the precolonial era’s non-hierarchical clan tradition, the constitution replaced the nonelected council of clan elders with directly elected district councils. Moreover, under the Egal administration, the new government of Somaliland forged mutually beneficial clientelist ties with clan elders. In particular, the Hargeisa government allowed elders of the most prominent clans significant control over a large proportion of the influx of remittances and sufficient autonomy to invest these capital inflows in livestock markets and other sectors of the local economy without imposing heavy taxes. These ties of cooperation have allowed the government to have a degree of social control over clan elders. Moreover, by ensuring that remittance inflows remain unregulated by any formal bureaucratic authorities, officials in Hargeisa have kept them from falling prey to political entrepreneurs. In light of the government’s isolation from the global financial system, these connections have been vital for the survival and growth of Somaliland.

The state building model adopted by the government and clan elders of Somaliland represents a viable alternative to a system of top-down patrimonial politics that allows for a certain degree of clan loyalties at the grassroots without imposing a repressive political order from above. In this instance, political order for a society in crisis is rooted in local politics built on clan networks rather than built by the heavy hand of the state. Somaliland serves as an example of how informal social networks and traditional authority can be utilized in the service of peace rather than war. Indeed, the relative success of Somaliland’s approach to state building and democratization was crucially underpinned by a lengthy, self-financed, and locally driven interclan reconciliation process through the 1990s, leading to a power-sharing form of government, providing an important base for Somaliland’s enduring political stability and for the reconstruction and development in the region. One female community leader from Hargeisa eloquently captured the remarkable, conciliatory, and nonpunitive elements, underpinning the indigenous conflict resolution method that played a crucial role in rebuilding trust between previously warring clans and subclans:

Importantly, a key element in the success of the resolution of clan conflict in Somaliland had to do with settling marital disputes as an important way of addressing the larger, and often violent, conflicts between kinship groups. I personally participated in a high number of deliberative meetings designed to restore marital relations, which I quickly came to understand as a pivotal aspect of the peace-building process. This is because since the clans were intermarried prior to the conflict, deliberations over marital issues were not only common; they were rightly perceived by clan elders and the general community as central to resolving a wide range of social as well as economic disputes between clans and subclans.

Going It Alone: Building a State in the Absence of International Recognition

Nevertheless, the lack of international recognition has been a mixed blessing for Somaliland. On the one hand, Somaliland has managed to avoid the legacy of aid dependence that bedeviled the postcolonial state under the Barre regime. Indeed, the Republic of Somaliland’s existence is in direct violation of UN Resolution 1514 (1960), which forbids any act of self-determination outside the context of former colonial boundaries. Since the African Union upholds the official UN position, it too denies recognition to Somaliland, a neglect that seems to have had positive results for the state.⁷⁶

On the other hand, the lack of international recognition has had grave consequences for the development and strengthening of formal institutions. International commercial law denies certification to Somaliland on the grounds that it would infringe upon the preexisting certification of Somalia, thereby nullifying all contracts made under this certification.⁷⁷ Because formal participation in the global economy is impossible, transnational norms and institutions that regulate foreign and trade agreements cannot be enforced in the country. Thus, while Somaliland has succeeded in entering the global economic order through informal financial networks, it remains largely isolated from foreign aid and technical assistance. Somaliland’s groundbreaking peace conferences of 1992, 1993, and 1997 were entirely self-financed.⁷⁸ While for some scholars this has meant that Somaliland operates in the “shadows” of the global economy, empirically this claim does not hold for two very important reasons. First, this characterization of a Somaliland operating under the radar of the global economy underestimates the importance of remittance inflows. Second, it obscures the importance of the role of locally generated taxes (i.e., direct taxes) in building the kind of state that has proved more stable than its counterparts in Puntland and Somalia.

How, in the face of this neglect and economic exclusion, has the Somaliland state been able to maintain control over its territory and achieve a relatively peaceful state of affairs? Part of the answer lies in the careful crafting of a power-sharing system undergirded by newly revitalized clan networks and traditional authority. As Mark Bradbury, Adan Yusuf Abokor, and Haroon Ahmed Yusuf have asserted, this power-sharing system has proven critical to the process of reconciliation and recovery in Somaliland, succeeding where numerous efforts in Somalia have failed.⁷⁹ In addition, the leadership and policies of the late president Muhammad Ibrahim Egal played an important role in laying the groundwork for durable state institutions. Thirdly, the Somaliland state has established a working relationship with hawwalat owners and other members of the business community, which allowed the state to strike a delicate balance, crucial to state formation, of encouraging unregulated remittances flows while taxing other forms of private economic activity. By winning the trust and cooperation of the hawwalat owners, the state managed to establish a system for taxing the largest source of revenue generation and also to encourage private enterprise. Somaliland leaders have done this by substantial structural changes since the early 1990s. Rather than regulating the remittance economy, authorities have dissolved monopolies, done away with rigid economic controls, and pursued a deregulated free market economy that has enlisted the trust and cooperation on the part of the business community.⁸⁰ It is in this way that Somaliland authorities have achieved remarkable gains in establishing a delicate balance between taxing and encouraging private economic activity.

Under President Ibrahim Egal’s tenure in particular, Somaliland’s leaders also managed to reduce clan-based conflicts, most of which were sparked when faction leaders tried to extract revenue from different ports in order to gain political control. The success of both Egal and his successor Dahir Riyale Kahin in these efforts resulted both in a substantial peace and an impressive stability as state builders sought to revive basic institutions of governance.

Labor Remittances and State Building: Resource Curse or Social Safety Net?

Somaliland’s success in state building is even more remarkable given its heavy reliance on remittances in the context of relatively weak formal institutions. Indeed, while work on the political impact of remittances remains sparse, recent scholarship has generally argued that remittances maybe a “resource curse” akin to natural resource rents and foreign financial assistance. This is because, as one important study noted, “they are revenue sources that can be substituted for taxes and serve as a buffer between government performance and citizens.”⁸¹ In other words, the informal (or parallel) channels through which remittances are transferred often insulate recipients from local conditions and reduce incentives to participate in politics. However, given the sheer volume of remittance inflows, in the case of Somaliland, remittances have played a very important, albeit indirect, role in generating effective government performance. A closer examination of the popular resistance on the part of hawala bankers to several attempts at regulation, and the response of Somaliland’s leaders to this resistance, demonstrates that a bargain was eventually struck between nascent state builders and the most powerful agents of revenue generation in the territory.

In Somalia remittance inflows have the potential to obstruct state building in two key ways: they are difficult to tax by central authorities, and their mode of operation privileges clan networks rather than cross clan or Islamic cleavages. State builders thus face a strong challenge in generating revenue needed for governance and encouraging cross-clan cooperation, which is crucial for peacemaking, national reconciliation, and legitimating political authority. Indeed, we cannot fully understand the path that development has taken in northern Somalia without appreciating how international economic linkages – in the form of remittance inflows – pose impediments as well as opportunities to state building. Labor remittances represent the largest source of foreign exchange, and the majority of urban households in both Somaliland and Puntland rely upon them as a major source of income. Because the average Somali household is composed of eight members whose daily income together totals less than 39 cents, transfers from family members living abroad are crucial for securing a livelihood. Indeed, as much as 40 percent of Somali urban households rely on such funds. Moreover, the benefits of remittance flows are felt across the spectrum of Somali subclans, albeit in unequal terms. For example, only one of the four subclans of the Isaaq, which has historically supplied the majority of migrant workers, revealed 8 percent of its households receiving remittances from abroad, whereas approximately 31 percent of the Habr-Awal subclan’s families count on informal transfers (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Remittance recipients by Isaaq subclans in Somalia.

Source: Khalid M. Medani, “Report on Internal Migration and Remittance Inflows in Northwest and Northeast Somalia” (Nairobi, Kenya: UN Coordination Unit [UNCU} and Food Security Assessment Unit [FSAU], 2000)

Remittances are usually a supplementary source of income; in addition to receiving assistance from relatives, a Somali family typically has more than one member involved in informal economic activities. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that Somalis in both Somaliland and Puntland rely heavily on money from overseas relatives sent through the hawala agencies. This is clearly evident when one considers the proportion of remittances vis-à-vis other sources of income in both the northwest and northeast (Table 6.1).

Following the collapse of the Somali state, the family unit has come to encompass three or more interdependent households. In addition to assisting poorer urban relatives, a large proportion of urban households support rural kin on a regular basis. While only 2 to 5 percent of rural Somalis receive remittances directly from overseas, Somali’s nomadic population still depends on these capital inflows. In northern Somalia, for example, 46 percent of the sampled urban households support relations in pastoralist areas with monthly contributions in the range of USD 10–100 a month; of these 46 percent, as many as 40 percent are households that depend on remittances from relatives living abroad. Consequently, the link between labor migration, urban households, and the larger rural population is a crucial and distinctive element in Somalia’s economy.

As the most important source of foreign exchange and a key source of daily income in both Somaliland and Puntland, remittances thus play a pivotal role in the contemporary state-making enterprise. Indeed, state building in Somaliland has been largely successful because the Isaaq-backed leadership has also been able to encourage remittance transfer and gain the cooperation of the wealthy “remittance barons” with whom they share a kin relation. Consequently, in Somaliland, the Isaaq largely control revenues accruing from remittances, organized by the private hawala agencies, as well as taxes from the port of Berbera. The Somaliland government, particularly under Egal’s tenure, thus was able to partially finance governmental institutions, including an effective police force, throughout its territory.

Once Somaliland’s leaders realized the important role remittances play as a social safety net for the local population, they negotiated a delicate, albeit often contested and conflictual, bargain. This bargain consisted of government authorities ensuring that hawalas remain unregulated by state authorities while the former pursued a more transparent and less-repressive taxation policy.⁸² Importantly, the fact that remittances insulated the majority of the population from economic and social deprivation of the kind that would lead to protest and civil conflict greatly facilitated the eventual reduction of taxation in Somaliland thereby bolstering the political legitimacy of the new state among its citizens. In other words, in the case of Somaliland, while remittances remain untaxed by government officials this does not suggest that this engenders a weak link between state institutions and remittance recipients. Indeed, rather than demobilize citizens, the fact that remittances increase incomes dramatically and provide a social safety net for government officials pursuing economic policies means that they have increased civic engagement in ways that not only can be discerned from several protests against government policies deemed unjust or illegitimate, but also in participation in local and presidential elections thereby helping to consolidate democracy.⁸³

Somaliland’s much touted ability to generate locally generated revenue to finance the building of state institutions absent foreign assistance is greatly facilitated by the fact that remittances support the type of welfare services that often reduce the burden on government finances. Over time, this has made it possible for the government to collect taxes and license fees from business and real-estate owners and impose duties on the trade in qat as well as imports and exports through the port of Berbera with a decreasing level of opposition in civil society. Most of these businesses and real-estate properties have been financed, at least in part, by remittances from Somalis living abroad. Remittances also provide the much-needed hard currency that has led to the expansion of the important livestock trade and even allowed Hargeisa to reduce taxes and fees as, for example, in the elimination of fees for primary and secondary schooling. The success of these policies is related to the important role remittances continue to play in supporting general household expenditures.⁸⁴ A rare study on this subject put it succinctly:

Moreover, while the role of traditional clan elders (Guurti) was indeed a critical institution in terms of the success of the series of meetings that focused on putting a stop to hostilities (Xabad joogi) and promote reconciliation (Dibu-heshiisiin) between the hitherto waring subclans of the Isaaq and non-Isaaq clans, these meetings shared three important characteristics: they were funded largely by Somaliland communities themselves, including those in the diaspora; they involved the voluntary participation of the key figures from each of the clans affected; and decisions were taken by broad consensus among delegates.⁸⁶ As I observed by participating in several mediation efforts led by traditional community leaders in both Hargeisa and Bossaso, the process is not only a lengthy one; it is also costly in that it requires the dispatching of carefully selected leaders, deemed legitimate by the local communities, to conflict areas. Since formal law enforcement institutions and local authorities were ill-equipped to provide adequate sources, it was often left to regional and local authorities to solicit funds for these peace-building missions from the community, particularly from notable remittance brokers, livestock traders, and prominent Somalis living abroad. This was especially important, in the rural parts of Somaliland such as Boroma, Burao, and Yirowe where formal authorities lacked adequate financial resources for even basic operational and logistical needs.

If remittances have served as a social safety net enabling the peaceful pursuit of taxation policy, the role of the diaspora has often played an even more direct role in facilitating the success of the state-building enterprise over time. Given that Somaliland has not generally benefited from international recognition or significant foreign development assistance, remittances from the diaspora have played a key role in the state-building enterprise. Indeed, as one Somalilander who was intimately involved in a series of conflict resolution negotiations stressed, “peace building in Somaliland would not have succeeded were it not for the help, resources, and contributions of our diaspora.”⁸⁷ To be sure the diaspora has not always played a positive role in Somaliland’s rebuilding process. During the civil conflicts of 1992 and 1994–1996, they provided funds and other support for their clan militias. Nevertheless, by the late 1990s, remittances sent by members of the Somali diaspora were invested in businesses, and they helped to reestablish basic services that, in serving as a safety valve for Somalilanders, sustained the peace-building and state-making processes. Importantly, and in the context of the absence of international engagement and the relative weakness of its state institutions, Somaliland serves as an important case study in that it shows the importance of international remittances and diasporic communities in the process of rebuilding states in the aftermath of severe civil conflict.

However, this negotiated bargain in pursuit of state building was not achieved without wrenching political conflict. In the early 1990s, as intra-Isaaq clan enmities and divisions between former SMN leaders led to successive rounds of civil conflict, non-Isaaq clans intervened to make peace in the important conference held in Sheikh town. It was at this conference that the most important source of revenue for the state, the port at Hargeisa, reverted to Abdulrahman Tur (the first president of Somaliland). It was also at this conference that the council of elders (Guurti), which became the cornerstone of the hybrid political system bringing together clan networks and the modern institutions of the Somaliland state, was established as a key informal social institution in the state-building project.⁸⁸

Nevertheless, for all of its rightly touted political success, Somaliland remains constrained by limited avenues to generate resources and revenue for the central state. This is because the majority of Somalilanders are nomadic and engaged in the livestock trade which is difficult to tax. Tax revenues are predominately generated from international trade acquired from the port at Berbera. Consequently, throughout the 1990s the nascent state not only expended a large portion of its budget to build a military and police force, under Egal’s presidency, patronage politics reemerged that threatened to undermine state-building efforts. Prior to changes in policy, the Somaliland administration faced severe opposition after it imposed financial controls and restrictions, which greatly alienated the private sector including the Hawala bankers and the large livestock traders.

The narrow resource base and weak extractive capacity of the new state compelled the government in Hargeisa to resort to printing money thereby creating inflation.⁸⁹ The introduction of new currency by Hargeisa in the mid-1990s also had grave political as well as economic consequences; it was one of the main reasons for the reemergence of conflict between the Isaaq subclans in the mid-1990s. One former SNM member in Burao, in the region of Toghdeer, explained succinctly how and why this policy exacerbated intraclan conflict at the time:

Importantly, and despite strong resistance against any form of government intervention on the part of many traders I interviewed, the livestock trade, the cornerstone of the domestic economy, was gravely and adversely affected by the unregulated environment in the aftermath of the collapse of the state. This naturally led to mistrust among clans throughout the country. In Somaliland, the livestock trade operates on the basis of a hierarchical structure consisting of a network of brokers who collect livestock from several markets throughout Somalia on behalf of seven or eight large traders. An important source of recurring conflict is that it is difficult to get the traders to cooperate in an unregulated and highly competitive environment. During my time in several livestock market hubs in Somaliland, I observed that the large livestock traders were from the Haber Jalo and Haber Awal Isaaq subclans. The Haber Younis often complained that the Haber Awal not only dominated the trade, but with the assumption to power of Egal at the time they were viewed as dominating the government as well. Livestock brokers routinely cited evidence that since the Haber Awal dominate Berbera and the outlying region where the port is located, they have long dominated the livestock trade.⁹¹ Ultimately, however, the Egal administration was able to provide services and build an association of livestock traders which, over time, introduced a distinct corporate culture to the livestock trade. The result was that the trade recovered and in so doing helped to create more generalizable trust across the clan divide and in the Hargeisa administration itself. Thus, another important reason for Somaliland’s success is that governmental authorities in Hargeisa were able not only to cooperate with the hawala brokers soliciting loans and contributions from them; they were also able to negotiate an acceptable and legitimate level of regulation of the all-important livestock trade. Consequently, in this way they were able to built trust among the most important actors in the local economy.

Puntland and the Struggle to Build a Viable State

In contrast to Somaliland, state building in Puntland has stagnated after making significant inroads in the 1990s. So far, popularly legitimate formal structures of modern governance have played a negligible role in the affairs in northeast Somalia. Ultimately, the relative failure of state building in Puntland has been the result of the ambivalent vision of “statehood” that underpinned the foundation of the state, the predatory behavior of successful leaders, and the failure to pursue economic policies in ways that would generate trust and legitimacy among the different subclans of the Darod, the dominant clan family in the region.

Puntland initially followed a similar pattern of state building to neighboring Somaliland. In May 1998 it was established as a result of the intervention of clan elders of the Darod-Harti subclan in the city of Garowe. The Isimada, or clan elders, of the Harti instituted a regional administration that encompassed northeast Somalia, including Sool and Sanag which continue to generate serious tensions between Puntland and Somaliland. Headed by Abdullahi Yusif, the leaders of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) at the time enlisted the cooperation of clan elders in order to establish an autonomous state. Importantly, however, the primary motivation was political survival rather than independence. The Majeerteen, Warsengeli, and Dhulbahante subclans of the Darod in particular felt strongly that they needed to unite in order to avoid emerging as losers in the nation-wide clan struggle for power and territory. In addition, they felt that territorial control would serve as a powerful bargaining chip in their attempts to recreate a central national territory.⁹²

Initially, Puntland managed to form a functioning regional state. Clan elders elected Abdullahi Yusif as president, a charter was adopted following a long consultation process among the different subclans of the Darod, and a regional parliament chosen by the clans was established. Yusif also managed to dampen intraclan hostilities by including non-Majeerteen Harti clans in the Garowe Conference that formally established the state of Puntland. In so doing he weakened the political influence of elites of his own Majeerteen subclan, which engendered a significant, albeit short-lived, level of trust in his administration from the other clans in the region.⁹³ Moreover, in the early years and in a pattern similar to Somaliland’s, a relatively more efficient tax and revenue collection system was put in place, and courts and prisons were rebuilt that improved security in most of the major towns. There was, as one study noted, enthusiasm for the new regime and its attempts to create functioning institutions, and a sense of freedom allowed civil liberties and independent media to take root.⁹⁴

However, Puntland’s leaders, and Abdullahi Yusif in particular, quickly demonstrated that they were more intent on reestablishing an authoritarian regime rather than embarking on a genuine grassroots peacebuilding process and state-making enterprise. By the early 2000s, infighting between subclans reemerged; the judiciary and civil service became politicized, administrative corruption intensified; and any elections held by Puntland’s authorities were tightly managed, manipulated, and controlled.⁹⁵ Ominously, and in a pattern similar to that of the ousted Barre regime, cabinet posts and economic privileges were allocated to loyalists drawn mainly from Abdullahi Yusif’s Omar Mahmoud sub-subclan, and businessmen, including hawala brokers and livestock traders, were forced to pay large fees to operate or pay bribes for access to export licenses which most of the latter allocated along clan lines. The consequence of these increasingly predatory policies was to erode inter- and intra-clan cohesion and undermine the short-lived security arrangements that had sustained peace in the first years of Puntland’s foundation. One resident of Eyfen district explained the state of affairs in Puntland that reflect the authoritarian nature of the Garowe administration, which stands in marked contrast to the situation in Somaliland:

To make matters worse, Puntland’s leaders had to contend with a strong local ideological rival represented by the militant Islamist organization, al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI). The rise in the popularity of al-Ittihad in the early 1990s was a result of the lack of strong governance structures, and the failure of local leaders to deliver law and order in the aftermath of state collapse. At the height of al-Ittihad’s popularity, the forces of the SSDF were simply not able to administer the important port of Bossaso, and consequently AIAI was able to fill the security vacuum and eventually take over the running of the port. It was through their access to the port that they were able to import arms to strengthen their movement and to generate revenue from port taxes which they used as the financial tool with which they recruited followers.⁹⁷ During my research in Bossaso and Garowe, it was clear that al-Ittihad’s popularity extended beyond Bossaso port. This is because the organization also managed to build strong commercial networks by forging close relationships with influential clan elders in the region and thus were able to wield great economic as well as political influence in civil society. However, this was often accomplished through the use of coercive and violent means. As one resident of Bossaso put it: “[P]eople wanted law and order and better administration, not a religious dictatorship.”⁹⁸

The Political Economy of State Building: Somaliland and Puntland Compared

Compared to Somaliland, the relatively homogenous Puntland, which is populated primarily by the Majeerteen, a subclan of the Darod, should by some conventional accounts be the stronger state. Yet it is Somaliland – devastated by two waves of violent power struggles involving intraclan and interclan warfare and with a heterogeneous population consisting of many rival clans belonging to three large families – that has achieved better results in reviving the basic institutions of governance. What explains the underlying factors for these divergent developments?

An important reason for this divergence has to do with the war-making phase associated with the state-building enterprise. Both de facto states have experienced intermittent ethnic strife, but only Somaliland president Muhammad Egal was able to defeat his military rivals, which he did after a series of violent conflicts centered on control of the port of Berbera. This factor was crucial to Egal’s success at state building and his efforts at consolidating political rule. By contrast in Puntland, the conflict between Majeerteen elites and Islamists belonging to al-Ittihad continued, albeit with a modicum of accommodation in recent years. In contrast to Puntland, Somaliland has been able to win the ideological battle over potential Islamist rivals. Clan solidarity among the Isaaq in particular has emerged as a strong element in the success of the state-building enterprise. In Puntland, in the context of persistent intraclan tensions between the subclans of the Darod, Islamist identification continues to make inroads despite the fact that the population is more homogenous in terms of clan affiliation.⁹⁹ To be sure by the mid-1990s, Puntland authorities were able to effectively suppress the military wing of al-Ittihad al-Islami. However, following their defeat by the forces of the SSDF and the loss of control over the lucrative Bossaso port, al-Ittihad altered their vision and strategy. They formally stopped advocating violence and turned toward building support in society through peaceful means. Consequently, they increased their social welfare provisioning including building schools, hospitals, and offering humanitarian services, while simultaneously focusing on expanding their business and trade networks with the Gulf.

In Puntland, by the end of the 2000s, the experiment of indigenous state building that combined a system of clan representational side by side with formal parliamentary rule declined.¹⁰⁰ The fragile political system wherein every subclan of the Darod-Harti family would nominate a parliamentarian endorsed by subclan leaders fell apart resulting in the failure to build a viable state in the northeast. An important aspect of this state-building dilemma was that, in addition to facing external threats, the Puntland project’s architects had to contend with the influence of a strong Islamist movement that enjoyed more popularity in civil society than the increasing narrow subclan-centered administration. Indeed, one reason Gerowe effectively ended its efforts at genuine electoral reform to usher in a fledgling democracy as occurred in Somaliland is that it feared the strength of the Islamist opposition. But the central problem that explains the failure of state building in Puntland is, as one analyst put it succinctly, an unresolvable conflict “between the ideal of an indigenous, consensual political system underpinned by a mix of traditional and modern governance institutions, and the reality of a top-down repressive system.”¹⁰¹

Ultimately, variations in economic policies, including the essentially political struggle to create a new currency, shaped state building in Somaliland and Puntland. Currency delimits the economic boundaries of the state and plays a pivotal role in revenue generation. Given the importance of informal financial markets to the Somali economy, aspiring state builders introduced new currencies based on geographic and political, rather than strictly economic, considerations. This is part of an overall strategy to create markets through instituting new currencies, collecting taxes at ports, and establishing militaries and police to oversee these new arrangements. The Isaaq in Somaliland have been more successful in these efforts than the Majeerteen in Puntland, but neither clan has managed to acquire complete monopoly in the legitimate use of force across the various regions under its jurisdiction.

Importantly, in their pursuit of state building, political leaders in Puntland proved the least interventionist in terms of macroeconomic policies. They did not take part in the proliferation of new currencies that were introduced in various clan-based territories following the collapse of the Somali state. Whereas Somaliland authorities (and the two large Hawiye-backed factions controlling the southern and northern parts of Mogadishu) all printed new currencies that are tender in their respective domains, Puntland retained the old Somali shilling as its official currency. The old Somali shilling remains the preferred local currency because of its stability and local convertibility into other currencies. In Bossaso, the largest market in the northeast uses multiple currencies. In addition to the old Somali shilling, the US dollar, the Gulf countries’ various currencies, the Ethiopian birr, and the Kenyan shilling all are freely exchanged. The informalization of financial markets and the proliferation of international money dealers have facilitated the transfer and exchange of money, but they have not yet transformed themselves into formal financial institutions and are unlikely to do so in the near future.

Unlike the Majeerteen leaders of Bossaso, Somaliland’s leaders introduced a new local currency, creating inflation and disincentives for merchants, moneychangers, and local consumers to convert their remittances and other income into Somali shillings. This etatist policy has also been the one reason for the intermittent incidents of civil strife, which have slowed down the economy in the decade following the establishment of the state. This is because neighboring clans (the Issa, Warsengeli, and Gadabursi) view Hargeisa’s policy of manufacturing money – that is not guaranteed by any bank – as exclusively benefiting the Isaaq clans. Further aggravating clan enmities, during the Egal administration the Somaliland government introduced policies reminiscent of the Barre regime and attempted to heavily tax livestock exports and a wide range of commodity exports. This led to some short-term financial and political gains for Somaliland but undermined interclan cohesion. For a society that is mistrustful of formal institutions of any kind, these policies recalled the “predatory” and authoritarian policies of the previous regime, threatening the hard-won legitimacy garnered by the aspiring state builders.

Puntland, where leaders pursued an essentially “free market” policy, achieved significant economic gains, and its booming economy induced non-Majeerteen clans to migrate and settle in the region. Bossaso residents enjoy a relatively high standard of living: while urban residents of Hargeisa earn, on average, about one US dollar a day, Bossaso residents earn over four.¹⁰² This differential is evident even in comparisons of the more marginalized clans in the two regions. In my survey of non-Isaaq and non-Majeerteen clan families in Hargeisa and Bossaso, respectively, those in Bossaso earned 50 percent higher daily incomes than their counterparts in and around Hargeisa. There are a number of reasons for these variations. First, in Bossaso the Majerteen clan established political stability by defeating al-Ittihad and capturing the port in 1992. Subsequently, a fragile peace was maintained by the good offices of traditional elders (Isimo). The Isimo managed to promote social and economic stability, but the periodic bouts of violence, the conflict between Puntland’s leaders, and the ultimate failure of the state-building enterprise suggest that clan-based peacekeeping cannot substitute for the law-and-order functions of a modern state. Ultimately, Majeerteen clan elders failed in their attempts to establish a regional council and to redistribute tax revenue not only for security, but also to neighboring clans of the Bari region. Second, while businessmen in Somaliland have managed to set up a formalized chamber of commerce on a regional level to encourage deposits from livestock merchants and currency dealers, this has not occurred in Puntland.

Ultimately, and particularly following successful indigenous peacebuilding between the region’s clans, Somaliland’s relative success at state building was aided by the establishment of the Somaliland shilling which, while it led to strong opposition in civil society in the late 1990s and 2000s, proved effective in redirecting revenue from the private sector into state coffers. This, along with Hargeisa’s control of tax revenues from Berbera port, and a carefully crafted alliance with the Isaaq business elite, enabled the state to assert some of its fiscal authority. In Puntland, leaders continue to utilize the old Somali shilling and thus have failed to demarcate the economic boundaries of their new state in ways that would generate sufficient revenue to finance strong formal governmental institutions.

Contrasting policies with respect to the informal financial sector also help to explain the divergence in the two regions. As is the case throughout Somalia, in Somaliland and Puntland, the unregulated hawwalat continue to finance the bulk of imports, provide windfall profits for those engaged in transferring these funds, and make resources available for investments throughout the country. However, in contrast to livestock trade, remittances remain unregulated and untaxed and therefore hinder the establishment of formal, reliable, extractive, and regulatory institutions; at the same time, moreover, they promote identity-based modes of collective action. Consequently, remittance inflows, a large component of Somaliland’s and Puntland’s local economies, have posed a significant challenge to the long-term economic and political objectives of state builders.

In Somaliland an increasingly unified Isaaq business elite emerged as important beneficiaries of the remittance sector. In this regard, it is important to note that while Somaliland is dominated by the subclans of the Isaaq, it is a state that encompasses a number of other clans that have often come into conflict with the Isaaq commercial and political elite. This is clearly reflected in economic terms. The Isaaq leaders of Somaliland benefit from their kin’s monopoly on the remittance trade in the region. In fact, 60 percent of remittance-receiving households receive funds via the Isaaq-run Dahabshiil remittance agency. Prior to its closure, al-Barakat, which is largely run by the Darod clan, possessed only 15 percent of the market in Somalia, but controlled the lion’s share of the business in the northeast, an estimated 90 percent in Puntland. This is not surprising, given that in Somaliland Dahabshiil enjoys the trust of the majority of the wealthier Isaaq subclans and the political leaders. This mutual trust and cooperation are the reason why businessmen in Somaliland managed to set up a formal regional chamber of commerce to encourage deposits and contributions from livestock merchants, moneychangers, as well as the major commodity importers. Moreover, by 2010 Dahabshiil, the largest hawwalat agency in Somaliland, had invested approximately US 100 million in the Telecom services industry. While this was largely the result of the burgeoning competition in the financial services sector it also reflects the increasingly strong relationship of cooperation that has emerged between the Isaaq business elite and political authorities.

In contrast, while Somaliland’s political elite managed to generate revenue from, for example, taxing the major telecommunication companies based in Somaliland such as Hormut and Gulis, Puntland has not been able to do the same with the largest telecom business based in Puntland, Sahal. In Puntland, none of the hawwalat or telecom companies pay taxes to the Gerowe administration. The general manager of the Amal Hawwalat company operating in Puntland explained:

Given the nature of northern Somalia’s economy, political elites in both Somaliland and Puntland also need direct access to the lucrative livestock market. Direct access, in turn, requires regulatory oversight over this trade enforced by an administrative and military power capable of maintaining control over the ports of Berbera and Bossaso, respectively. Somaliland’s Isaaq clan established a monopoly on tax revenues from Berbera port, but in Puntland, al-Ittihad’s bid to control the port of Bossaso – and thereby pursue its own state building project – failed. In the early 1990s, al-Ittihad’s aim to build an Islamist state in Puntland appeared feasible. In 1992, the inability of the political establishment, dominated by the Majerteen subclan’s Somali Salvation Democratic Front, to effect political change left a political void that provided al-Ittihad, which already dominated informal finance in the region, the opportunity to gain control over the livestock trade. Initially, al-Ittihad was welcomed in the northeast, where local leaders entrusted it with two urgent tasks: managing the port of Bossaso and maintaining law and order. Consequently, in the formative stages of state formation and at the height of al-Ittihad’s popularity, the leaders of Puntland were not able to administer the important port of Bossaso, and al-Ittihad was able to not only fill the security vacuum; they eventually took over the running of the port and controlled the collection of the port’s tax revenues.¹⁰⁴

Al-Ittihad’s monopolization of informal finance and the struggle over import/export trade centered around the port of Bossaso hindered Puntland’s leaders’ efforts at state building by curtailing their attempts to benefit from a veritable economic boom in the region. Historically, successful state building has been associated with the concentration of urban populations and government expenditure. As such it can potentially offer the informal economy invaluable opportunities to capture economies of scale. These economies of scale are most significant in the development of trade and finance. In the livestock sector, opportunities for trade creation and economic specialization also depend upon the central government’s ability to establish a tax system that channels rural production (i.e., livestock) into the market. The fact that this advanced further in Somaliland than Puntland is another reason Somaliland’s leaders have been more successful in financing their state building efforts.

There is little question that the Isaaq were able to monopolize and regulate livestock trade and remittances to aid the process of state building. However, cooperation among the subclans of the Isaaq (Idagelle, Habr-Yunis, Arab, and Habr-Awal) would not have been possible had they not possessed a prior history of uninterrupted resistance to the Barre regime. This historical experience more than some adherence to a fixed notion of clan solidarity facilitated collective action and a shared ideological orientation that has enabled the Isaaq subclans to make significant advances in the process of market and state reconstruction. In contrast, the Majeerteen clan of Bossaso represents a relatively new arrival to northeast Somalia, and its complicated political alliances and kin relations with Siad Barre’s Darod clan hampered its ability to undertake collective action and forge politico-ideological cohesion. The Majeerteen have proved to be proficient economic entrepreneurs but have been less adept at political cooperation than their Somaliland counterparts. The relative strength of this moral economy of clannism has determined the nature of political action, social conflict, and the success of negotiated agreements in the two regions. In Puntland (as well as in Mogadishu), where there are more diffuse and fragmented clan networks than in Hargeisa and where neither the Majeerteen nor the Hawiye clan has an institutionalized history of collective action against the previous regime, Islamist activism serves as a moral economy of last resort. It is no coincidence that al-Ittihad enjoys its greatest foothold in Puntland and in the socially fractious regions in and around Mogadishu where clan networks are less cohesive. As one Somali Scholar explained: “[I]n the northwest kinship ties are very strong and serve as the basis for cooperation and economic assistance. The Darod are a more complex clan family like the Hawiye. These are older lineages that are more fluid and flexible in terms of assimilating other clans … they rarely cooperate as a clan family.”¹⁰⁵

Somaliland’s more unified and stronger Isaaq elite stands in stark contrast to the state of affairs in Puntland. Consequently, another important obstacle to collective action and state building in Puntland is the absence of a distinct and organized economic elite. This is a state of affairs that needs to be explained rather than assumed. Merchants and traders play a central role in the informal trade economy, linking rural producers with local centers of trade, and northern Somalia with external markets in the Gulf. Nevertheless, despite their economic prominence in recent years, local merchants and financiers have not yet developed the ideological makeup or corporate interest that is necessary to establish basic institutions of governance, maintain law and order, lobby for the provision of public (and semi-public) goods, and provide even rudimentary social services like education or health care. In Puntland, and to a lesser extent in Somaliland, local merchants are fiercely competitive individual traders who remain bound above all to their kin groups for the protection of their lives and property and for business opportunities.¹⁰⁶

A related impediment to collective action across ethnic or religious lines is the fact that while clan networks facilitate economic exchange, they also promote particularistic notions of identification that effectively prevent more broad-based social organization. Consequently, the new, more flexible structure of production and distribution that the clan networks have created is limited in its scope and effectiveness. Moreover, the tendency of ethnic and clan networks to intensify under economic crisis has tended to make many Somalis operating in the largely informal economy vulnerable to the political machinations of more powerful groups among the same clan and subclan affiliation. This combination of both patronage and exploitation has meant that class and economic divisions have been blurred – a common feature of informal relations generally. Dominant and subordinate groups are represented in a multiplicity of forms of interaction, and this has served to nullify basic class divisions. In other words, what appears as ethnic or religious solidarity conceals a mechanism of control and accumulation in which basic antagonisms are ideologically sublimated.

The general tendency of informal institutional arrangements to simultaneously facilitate cooperation and promote modes of social control is the main reason that Islamists are more successful in recruiting new members in Puntland and Mogadishu, where solidarity and shared norms of subordination provided by clan networks are relatively weak. Since the disintegration of the state, al-Ittihad has predictably shown a high degree of ideological cohesiveness and propensity for collective action and “good works.” In recent years, these Islamist activists have taken advantage of the divisions among the traditional economic elite in Puntland to provide social services, operate local newspapers, build mosques, and attain employment for their members. They also have close links with Islamists in Sudan, primarily in the form of Sudanese-funded educational scholarships.¹⁰⁷ This is an important reason why, after losing control of the Bossaso port to the Darood-Majeerteen-backed SSDF, al-Ittihad activists successfully integrated into the local community as teachers, health workers, and businessmen.

Dilemmas of State Building: Networks of Inclusion and Exclusion

The informal finance and export sectors in both Somaliland and Puntland have succeeded remarkably well in feeding local communities in both urban and rural areas, with food imports being exchanged for proceeds from local exports and remittances. Indeed, following the collapse of regulatory and planning institutions in the north, the unregulated markets in many parts of the country have recorded impressive economic dividends for a small, albeit influential, segment of the population. However, it is important to point out that these regional economies have not been able to consolidate these gains across the clan divide or address deep-seated inequality. In Puntland, and to a lesser extent in Somaliland, the largely unregulated economy has spawned an increasing trend of the appropriation and wholesale commercialization of communal and public assets. This development is a logical outcome of attempts by state makers and individuals to establish property rights in order to capture returns from their own entrepreneurial endeavors. In northeast Somalia in particular, this process has resulted in persistent bouts of civil conflict and continues to threaten the most productive base of the local economy. Moreover, alongside the expansion in import/export trade, an extensive market in illicit and criminal trade has developed. This includes the trade in arms, the illegal export of female livestock and wildlife, and piracy (itself spawned by unregulated fishing along the coast of Puntland). In this regard, the flourishing unregulated economy cannot replace the functions of effective formal public and financial institutions. While the booming informal economy has led to the accumulation of wealth by a significant number of Somalis, it has not fulfilled the social needs of the poor and vulnerable, who comprise the vast majority of residents in both Somaliland and Puntland.

In the case of Somalia, and just as economic sociologists and institutional economists would predict, absent formal institutions, wealth accumulation is linked primarily to the networks of contacts that build over time between individuals and communities, and not to income or any other quantitative index of wealth. In other words, it is the density of social networks that determines income generation and helps to secure economic livelihoods. Thus, while clan and familial networks represent the main avenue for the transfer of remittances, who benefits from them is dependent on the possession of previously held social and economic assets. For example, while more than 40 percent of the Isaaq subclans in Somaliland receive remittances from expatriate relatives (Figure 6.1), only 5 percent of the socially and politically marginalized clans (who have enjoyed far more limited access to out-migration in previous decades) in the northwest enjoy the same benefits (Figure 6.2). In addition to their vulnerability stemming from their ethnic and political marginalization, members of the marginalized clan families such as the Gadabursi, Ajuran, and Rahenweyn as well as the Bantu suffer from the lack of access to remittances and consequently have less weight in terms of a voice at the level of the community or government. Moreover, this economic marginalization compounds their relative deprivation and leaves them open to recruitment by Islamist organizations such as al-Ittihad or the more militant al-Shabbaab.¹⁰⁸

Figure 6.2 Remittances by selected clans in northwest and northeast Somalia.

Source: Khalid M. Medani, “Report on Internal Migration and Remittance Inflows in Northwest and Northeast Somalia” (Nairobi, Kenya: UN Coordination Unit [UNCU} and Food Security Assessment Unit [FSAU], 2000)

Clearly, as Figure 6.2 demonstrates, the benefits of state building do not accrue to all of the Somaliland’s communities and have even exacerbated processes of social and economic exclusion. The Ajuran, Bantu, and other socially excluded minorities, for example, commonly rely on begging and work in the informal sector including a wide range of petty trade activities, handicrafts, domestic work, garbage collection, and the building of latrines. Moreover, while the construction boom in Hargeisa offers opportunities in the building trade, it is a labor market that is segmented along clan lines and favors members of the dominant Isaaq subclans. Consequently, those hailing from minority clans and social groups such as the Bantu, Ajuran, but also non-skilled farmers from the Digil and Rahanwein, find employment only in the lowest, unskilled rung, of the labor market. “We depend on labor in construction if we can find it, or petty trade like selling water or building cement reservoirs. Basically, we collect gravel and sell it to construction firms in Hargeisa,” noted one laborer. Moreover, in contrast to the stronger clans, socially marginalized men and women enjoy minimal access to services offered by the state or social networks of a kind where they are able to benefit from their relatives or kin. As I observed from my research, in both urban and rural areas of Somaliland and Puntland, residents from the socially marginalized groups rarely enjoy financial support from relatives in ways that have secured economic livelihoods for the majority of Somalis. One young man from the Ajuran clan put it simply: “The more relatives you have abroad the more money you receive. We don’t have remittances; we don’t have relatives outside of Somalia.”¹⁰⁹

The Challenge of Islamist Recruitment and the Failure of State Building in Southern Somalia

In contrast to the successful state building in Somaliland, southern Somalia has witnessed the emergence of militant Islamist organizations battling for political control. In order to fully understand the Union of Islamic Courts’ (UIC) takeover of Mogadishu in 2006, its subsequent attempts at state building, and its ultimate failure at the hands of external actors, we must first place the courts within their historical context. While much attention has been paid to the recent rise of Islamist radicalism in southern Somalia, in reality, Somalia’s Islamists are characterized by a lack of internal cohesion, a high level of factionalism, and strong competition between Islamist and clan-based organizations. Consequently, the attempts made by Somalia’s Islamic movements and shari’a courts to jointly create viable governing administrations to establish security in Mogadishu represented a contrasting example wherein both clan and Islamist networks came to be utilized in state building. As a consequence of violent conflict between the internal militant group al-Ittihad al-Islami on the one hand and Ethiopia and local Somali warlords on the other, the rise of the UIC in 2006 posed a strategic threat to both regional and external powers. This fact, coupled with the US administration’s allegation at the time that Somalia served as a haven for al-Qaeda terrorist cells, and that al-Ittihad represented one such cell, ensured the vulnerability and ultimate failure of the UIC’s Islamist state building project.

In contrast to the unifying, albeit wrenching conflicts, in Somaliland which ultimately united the various Isaaq subclans, the early civil war period in Somalia resulted in the division of Mogadishu along rival Hawiye “warlords” based on subclan lines. By 1994, Ali Mahdi had been greatly weakened vis-à-vis his local rival General Aideed. In an attempt to establish security, uphold law and order, and restrengthen his position in northern Mogadishu, Mahdi decided to implement the first experiment in shari’a courts. The courts managed to do what was thought to be unthinkable for over two decades. Under the charismatic leader Sheikh Ali Dheere, the courts succeeded in establishing security and gaining public support manifest in the recruitment of clan militias and judges during its initial years. These judges and militias, however, were divided into opposing clans and subclans, thereby subjecting the courts to criticism over the validity and neutrality of their judgements. Indeed, as Cedric Barnes and Harun Hassan have observed, during this early period, “the Islamic Courts were part and parcel of clan power in Mogadishu.”¹¹⁰ As such, upon the death of General Aideed in 1996, Sheikh Dheere and the courts came to be viewed as a direct threat to Mahdi’s authority and, thus, the courts were dismantled by 1998.

Nevertheless, General Aideed’s death presented the opportunity for Islamist organizations to remerge stronger and take root in southern Mogadishu, an area previously hostile to such groups under Aideed. By 1998 the long-standing rivalry between Hawiye subclan militias had failed to provide a secure environment for local businessmen’s investments. In 2000 Mogadishu’s powerful business elite supported the creation of the Union of Islamic Courts under Hassan Dahir Aweis, the commander of al-Ittihad. Subsequently, the UIC came to serve as an umbrella organization for different clan-based shari’a courts to exercise legal authority in particular areas of the city.¹¹¹ Though the courts were largely rooted in clan networks, representing the Saleban, Ayr, and Duduble subclans of the Hawiye/Habr-Gedir, the presence of al-Ittihad represented the unifying influence of political Islam.¹¹² This point is particularly salient, as the UIC’s association with al-Ittihad as early as 1998 largely determined its relations with both local and external actors.

The rise of Islamist politics was due to the long, organized presence of Islam in Somalia. A number of the organizations are mainstream Muslim associations of a social, educational, and/or religious nature, and more recently some militants, promulgating a program of coercive and violent expansion with international connections and ambitions emerged. Of the various Islamic associations, the one that laid the roots for modern forms of Islamist militancy, including the Union of Islamic Courts, is al-Ittihad al-Islami. The movement was founded in 1984, bringing together two earlier Islamist organizations: Wahda al-Shabaab al-Islami and, most significantly, the Somali branch of the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood). Both these organizations were formed in the 1960s but suppressed by former president Mohamed Siyad Barre. How diverse Islamist politics is in Somalia is reflected by the increasing tension between these modern Islamist organizations and the more traditional, Sufi groups. Most prominent among the latter, is Ahl al-Sunna wa al- Jama’a (People of the Sunna and the Community). Ahl al-Sunna was established following the collapse of the Somalia state in 1991. It is self-avowedly opposed to militant and “reformist” Islam and claims to represent traditional, mainstream Muslims in Somalia. They specifically tried to counter Salafist-Wahhabist versions of Islam and thus inevitably became involved in politics. Its efforts to mediate between politics, radical Islam, and Somali Muslim traditions have placed it in a difficult position. In late 2008 it started to form militias to counter the al-Shabaab insurgents.

Of greater political importance has been al-Ittihad al-Islami. Al-Ittihad was first led by the Somaliland Sheikh Ali Warsame, a Saudi-educated Wahhabist cleric. Since the early 1980s it has been a constant presence in Somalia in various forms, both as a social movement with its own services and propagandist-educational activities and as a militant Islamist organization. While al-Ittihad had a social component, it was primarily a political Islamist movement of militants aiming to install an Islamic state in Somalia. It became embroiled in violent disputes and military confrontations with both clan militias and Ethiopian forces along the border with Ethiopia throughout the early 1990s. Its bases in the Gedo region just across the Ethiopian border provoked a campaign by the Ethiopians in 1996–1997 that dislodged the organization and killed many of its leaders. After this defeat, al-Ittihad abandoned its international jihadist ambitions and developed a domestic agenda aimed at creating a semi-legal social network within Somalia society, which was essentially modeled after the National Islamic Front in Sudan before the 1989 coup. Indeed, linkage with al-Ittihad and Sudan is formative and dates back to the early 1970s. In May 1973, five Somali students at Khartoum University who had officially joined the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood founded the first chapter of the Somali Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor to al-Ittihad.¹¹³

However, in contrast to the Islamists of Sudan and Egypt where the bulk of rank and file members were recruited from university students and the educated middle class, the Islamists who joined al-Ittihad generally came from a different social segment. Of particular consternation for the leaders of the organization was the fact that potential recruits had a poor knowledge of Arabic and Islam. Consequently, the recruiters of al-Ittihad tried to overcome two important challenges that continue to pose a similar challenge to subsequent militant organizations, including al-Shabbaab. First, leaders had to deal with the low level of education, and particularly rudimentary Islamic learning, and poor Arabic language skills. Second, and most important, they attempted, with varying degrees of success, to overcome the durability of clan and Sufi sectarian loyalties in their efforts to unify Somalis under the broad banner of an Islamist movement. Indeed, their recruitment methods, which owe a great deal to their original influence from the Muslim Brotherhood, follow a familiar methodology but were adapted to meet these challenges which are specific to the Somali context. As with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, potential recruits have to pass through the three stages of identification, training, and recruitment. Similarly, the recruit undergoes a socialization process whereby his commitment and activities are evaluated through the conduct of duties and obligations composed of Da’wa outreach, the payment of monthly contributions, and other activities designed to develop and determine the recruit’s level of commitment. Moreover, while potential members of the Brotherhood in Egypt must pass seven stages in this process, al-Ittihad’s recruits had to successfully “graduate” through four stages: Nasir (aspirant), Muntasib (member), Amil (effective member), and Naqib (full member).¹¹⁴

What is noteworthy, however, is that this process of screening and vetting of potential recruits while more efficient in Islamist organizations like that of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is far more precarious in Somalia’s more conflict-prone political landscape. Moreover, while clan and sectarian ties may be far less pronounced in Sudan, and even less so in Egypt, in Somalia the competition over identity-based loyalties is far more complex and insecure. Wherein intraclan divisions and Sufi-Islamist conflicts come into confrontation Somali Islamists routinely experience organization vulnerability and internal divisions. In particular, the deaths and displacement which is a common feature in central and southern Somalia routinely undermine the unity and cohesion of al-Ittihad and other Islamist organizations. As the Somali scholar Abdurahman Abdullahi has persuasively argued, while Islamists in Somalia devise a number of innovative strategies to meet these challenges, including shortening the duration of the recruitment process and holding meetings at a “general location,” this often leads to a problem of “excessive recruitment” that dilutes the organizational discipline and the religious commitment of the individual to the organization.¹¹⁵ Consequently, while most scholars have focused on Ethiopia’s crackdowns against al-Ittihad forces since the early 1990s to explain the latter’s weakness, a more important factor has been the challenges associated with the recruitment process. In other words, al-Ittihad and Islamist militant leaders in general have faced significant political and cultural obstacles in their efforts at recruiting committed, disciplined, and relatively educated, skilled cadres to their organizations. As a result, the recruits of al-Ittihad have been far more susceptible to militant ideologies and strategies than other middle-class-based Islamist movements. Existing in somewhat of a state of ideological ambivalence and unable to forge a stable and cohesive organizational structure, al-Ittihad – like other Islamist militant organizations in south-central Somalia – has simply been unable to monopolize and deploy the “legitimate” use of violence as part of building durable state institutions.

Nevertheless, while it was able to establish an Islamist social movement as in Egypt or Sudan, by the early 1990s, al-Ittihad did emerge as a political force, distinguished from other clan-centered militias by its cross-clan Islamist ideology.¹¹⁶ In 1991, the group engaged in violent conflict with two local warlords: General Aideed and Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf, whose struggle against the Islamists was backed by Ethiopia. Before joining the Union of Islamic Courts in southern Mogadishu, al-Ittihad was a target of continuous attacks by Ethiopia, which viewed this group as a significant threat to its security. Ethiopia has long been considered an enemy to Somalia, a perception exacerbated by the 1977 Ogaden War, the 1998 Ethiopian-Eritrean War, and now the threat of Islamist militancy along the Somalia-Ethiopia border. In light of the regional and international opposition to the emergence of Islamist militants in Somalia, it came as little surprise that the UIC’s emergence as the strongest political and military force in Mogadishu by mid-2005 led to external military intervention and an internal proxy war. Moreover, the UIC’s staunch opposition to the 2004 Transitional Federal Government (TFG) established by Ethiopia and the United States renewed rivalry with certain Hawiye subclan groups and exacerbated suspicions surrounding the courts.

By 2005, the TFG had lost all legitimacy among residents of Mogadishu. The Somali Reconciliation and Rehabilitation Council (SSRC), a loose coalition of Ethiopia-backed and anti-Islamist factions, supported the government and remained as its primary base of support. The TFG-appointed the late president Abdullahi Yusuf who supported Ethiopia and formed an alliance with Addis Ababa against the Islamists of Mogadishu. Perhaps most importantly, unlike the state builders in Hargeisa, the TFG failed to transcend clannism and resolve debilitating interclan conflicts in the region. The 13th Somali Conference, which was held in Kenya under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD)¹¹⁷ and with the support of the UN and European Commission, established a three-phase process to broker peace in Somalia. These were a declaration of cease-fire, resolution of the key conflict issues, and power-sharing in a revived central government. However, Somali delegates were unable to make progress over the second phase and, in order to move ahead with the negotiations, the participants moved on to the final phase without effectively reconciling their differences. Moreover, in stark contrast to Somaliland, the power-sharing arrangement was designed in such a way as to institutionalize rigid clan identity and division, whereby seats were designated to clan-family members, and negotiations over representation took place within rather than between clans.¹¹⁸ Indeed, the interventions by external actors also played a significant role in preventing the creation of an indigenous Somali state form as witnessed in Somaliland. As a result, clannism persisted and by mid-2005 the government was incapacitated by deep internal divisions.

In light of the threat posed by Yusuf and the TFG’s illegitimacy, by 2005 the UIC was strengthened, allowing it to mobilize its base of support. As a result of an ostensible increase in Islamic “fundamentalist” power, a US-backed coalition of businessmen, militia leaders, and Hawiye “warlords” formed the Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism in March 2006.¹¹⁹ Fighting broke out between the UIC and the loosely organized Alliance and, by the first week of April, the UIC had seized most of Mogadishu. By the summer, the UIC gained complete control over the city and ousted the Alliance and warring militants.

The UIC achieved many successes during the first months of its instalment in Mogadishu, not least of which was establishing security and control in the city. It had earned a monopoly over both coercive and extractive power and received high levels of public support. Unlike the TFG, the UIC attempted to formulate a state structure that eradicated clannism by upholding unifying Islamic traditions and law. For Somalis who had experienced over three decades of interclan warfare, Islamic law interpreted mostly for its “law and order” function proved a viable and attractive option. However, as a new legitimating ideology for a nascent state, shari’a law would not have proven successful were it not for the fact that the UIC’s executive apparatus was consistent with traditional Somali clan institutions including the Xeer, and that its leaders refrained from institutionalizing their power at the expense of traditional clan authorities. The representative decision-making body within the UIC effectively bridged clan identity, incorporating subclans of the Hawiye, Rahanweyn, Isaaq, and Darod families. While the executive consisted of a chairman and cabinet, it incorporated such traditional governing bodies as a shura, or consultative committee, and its primary governing branch was composed of the independent shari’a courts.¹²⁰

Similar to that of Somaliland, the state building approach attempted by the UIC in 2006 sought to combine both clan ties and Islamic norms in ways that would reconcile Mogadishu’s rival clans and lay the groundwork for more stable state institutions. Moreover, by the summer of 2006, the UIC provided southern Somalis with an alternative to the TFG’s externally driven state building project, incorporating “indigenous” Islamic principles of particular relevance to the Somali context. Much like the experience in Somaliland, and contrary to much writing on state formation, the UIC’s approach to state building highlighted the possibility of a state built on local cultural as well as political realities.

This experiment, however, was short-lived. The emergence of UIC authority in Mogadishu was declared by the parliament of Ethiopia as posing a “clear and present danger” to that country. The Ethiopian government, as a result, granted the late prime minister Meles Zenawi the authority to defend the TFG and Ethiopian sovereignty “by any means necessary.” As a result, the Ethiopian military supplied the TFG with troops and arms in order to rid Somalia of the UIC. On December 20, 2006, clashes arose between the TFG and UIC. The nascent UIC forces were loosely organized and vastly outnumbered by the Ethiopia-TFG coalition. On December 28, the short-lived Islamist project of the UIC ended as Ethiopian and TFG forces entered Mogadishu unopposed. Not surprisingly, in place of the state-building experiment that sought to combine both Islamist and clan loyalties in what is Somalia’s most divided region there emerged a far more radical and militant Islamist organization: al-Shabbaab.

In contrast, to Egypt and Sudan, Islamist activism in Somalia arose precisely due to the strength of political clannism reinforced during the remittance boom. The oil boom era did in fact witness the genesis of the modern Islamist movement in Somalia. However, this development was primarily a result of Somalia’s weak state rather than the consolidation of Islamist activism across a broad spectrum of Somali society. Moreover, while both Sudan and Egypt developed a strong middle-class-based Islamist movement, albeit with different levels of success in political terms, this has not been the case in Somalia. Indeed, the factors that have resulted in the proliferation of Islamist militant organizations in south-central Somalia can be attributed to the general absence of an Islamist social movement in the country as well as external interventions.

Also, in contrast to the Islamist movements in Sudan and Egypt, in Somalia clan politics continues to dominate political and social life. Indeed, ‘Islamism’ in Somalia is fundamentally an externally driven phenomenon; it’s ascendance in domestic politics can be traced to the 1970s when thousands of Somalis traveled to find employment in the Arab oil producing states. Moreover, whereas in Egypt and Sudan the political ascendancy of Islamist organizations has been determined by the interplay of state-society relations rather than by external actors, in Somalia the more militant aspects of Islamist mobilization are rooted in Wahhabist influences on some Somalis originating from Saudi Arabia. Al-Ittihad and other Somali Islamist organizations began building the organizational structure of their organizations and constructing the ideological edifice of their movements abroad. Ultimately, however, the real political and ideological battle in south-central Somalia has been the conflict between a small group of Islamist militants and the far more politically salient politics of clannism.

In Egypt, by the 1990s, both state policy and broader external forces played a role in the rise of Islamist militancy in informal Cairo. To be sure the persistence in the popularity of the Jama’a al-Islamiyya following the siege of Imbaba was in great part a response to the blatant abuse of security forces, which incarcerated scores of Islamists and the litany of abuses on the part of state security services, which included the use of local traditional authorities in the monitoring and surveillance of “terrorists.” However, the rise in the popularity of militant Islamists in Imbaba was a response to broader external economic forces that had increasingly isolated the quarters of Western Munira, geographically and economically, from the mainstream of Cairean society. These included structural changes in the national and local economy; persistent neglect of the community by state institutions, including local municipal officials, and nearly two decades of authoritarian policies that severely circumscribed avenues of political participation and adversely affected the quality of life of residents of Western Munira and accelerated the decline and deterioration of their neighborhood.¹

The context for Islamic militancy in this period is closely associated with broader economic and political factors that in the 1970s and early 1980s combined to produce a transformation in terms of the articulation of urban space, social organization, and Islamist political activism. As detailed in Chapter 1, in the Sadat era and the early years of the Mubarak regime expatriate workers heavily invested their earnings in housing stock, which resulted in a dramatic boom in informal housing and, by extension, informal labor (especially labor in the construction sector), concentrated in informal settlements such as Western Munira in Imbaba.

In the post-1986 recession era, the combination of the drying up of remittance inflows from migrant workers and economic reforms in the form of price liberalization effectively undercut black-market currency trading and the power of informal financial institutions. However, it did not result in the demise of all segments of informal economic activity. Economic reforms encouraged the further expansion of informally organized wage earners and the expansion of informally organized production and work. That is, the old Nasserite economic system rooted in a social contract between large firms and a stable, unionized industrial labor force gave way to a new regime based on service occupations and a dramatic reorganization of labor markets and wage structures. By 1995 upward of 62 percent of Egypt’s economically active population was engaged in informal sector activities in at least one of their primary, secondary, or tertiary economic activities.² Moreover, as in other labor-exporting countries, the general investment boom associated with the internationalization of the Egyptian economy led to an expansion of the informalization of the markets in housing, land, and labor. As a result of the reduction of subsidies and social welfare (as well as the continued increase in the rates in population growth and urbanization), Islamic Welfare Associations (al-Jam’iyyat al-sharia al-Islamiyya) and numerous private mosques (ahali) expanded dramatically. Taken together these developments altered social relations and political developments at the community level in a dramatic fashion.

As discussed in Chapter 4, by the 1990s, thousands of these Islamic voluntary associations managed to develop a parallel economy and a parallel welfare system. In some instances, these modes of informal organization translated into an Islamist-inspired challenge to the state. Moreover, where radical Islamist activists of the Islamic Group were able to exploit informal financial networks and procure informal labor contracts for their supporters in the informal settlements around Cairo, they used these as bases of power and influence. Using private financial sources that often bypassed the strict regulations of the state to activate social networks and establish and fund a dense network of private mosques, activist leaders of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya sought to build, literally, a “state within a state.” However, contrary to some accounts, this new, more militant Islamist movement was not ubiquitous among Egypt’s urban poor. Rather, al-Jama‘a’s “takeover” of parts of Cairo’s informal settlements grew out of the ascendancy of an informal labor force that relied on the expansion of informal markets in housing and labor. In the informal settlements of Cairo, al-Jama‘a leaders adapted “traditional” Egyptian rural norms in ways that allowed them to supplant the political power of local notables while institutionalizing extortion practices and implementing their own brand of “law and order.”

Al-Jama‘a militants exploited the high levels of social and economic uncertainty in Cairo’s informal housing areas while simultaneously framing their message in ways that resonated with the conservative norms of many local residents. Indeed, an important reason for the popularity of al-Jama‘a in this period among local residents was its ability to settle local disputes, albeit often through highly coercive methods, and to enforce informal labor contracts for its members, while simultaneously preaching against the ills of conspicuous consumption and imposing strict Islamic modes of conduct. The socioeconomic conditions that played a key role in the popularity of Islamist radicalism were made possible by economic change at both the international and domestic level. However, despite its violent confrontation with militant Islam, the Egyptian state, until the historic uprisings of 2011, demonstrated relative political continuity in the context of drastic economic policy transformation.³

A Comprehensive Strategy of Militant Mobilization

The link between these political and economic developments and the rise in the popularity of more militant forms of Islamist activism in the informal quarters of Imbaba is rooted in four factors: First, the social organization of the informal labor market in Imbaba was particularly conducive to drawing the rank and file of adherents to the militants. This, as I argue later, was because it mirrored the structure, organization, and normative framework of al-Jama’a as it developed in the informal quarters. Moreover, while these informal labor markets are characterized by the absence of legal and bureaucratic institutions, they are nevertheless regulated by informal institutions such as customary norms, kinship ties, and in the case of some of these ascriptive ties in Western Munira in the 1980s and 1990s, Islamist networks. As scholars of informal networks have long established, informalization implies that labor control relies less on the associative pattern of social organization (e.g., collective bargaining or corporatist arrangements) and more on authoritarian forms of “indigenous networks” which are knit together by family, friends, kinship, and regional affinities.⁴ Naturally, which of these ascriptive ties and networks (i.e., religious, kinship, regional) are mobilized at a particular historical moment requires close examination of locally specific institutional settings.⁵

Second, militant leaders benefited from the weakened role of local traditional leaders and institutions. As detailed in Chapter 1, informal councils (majalis ‘urfiyya) and dispute settlement committees (lijan sulh) which had traditionally maintained social order saw their traditional authority greatly undermined by the late 1980s as a result of drastic demographic, political, and socioeconomic transformations. But in the 1990s and 2000s the latter’s authority in the quarters of Imbaba was further eroded as a result of the regime’s persistent “war on terrorism” against militants, which essentially transformed the bulk of local traditional leaders into security agents of the state exacerbating the grievances of local residents against state authorities.

Third, the role of Islamic Welfare Associations, and particularly the dense network of private Mosques in Western Munira, and the dissemination of particular Islamist norms via the congregational sermons provided both the material and normative orientation for young men to join the ranks of the militants. And, finally, an important factor associated with the popularity of the Islamic Group in mobilizing members in Western Munira, and the violent nature of this type of mobilization had to do with the way in which militants established mafia-like “protection rackets.” Indeed, the manner in which militants attempted to “build a state within a state” conforms closely to Tilly’s description of local strongmen – forcing merchants to pay tribute under threat and actual use of violence. The militants also routinely used intimidation and violence to settle local disputes and procure and enforce labor contracts for new and potential members. One sympathizer of al-Jama’a in Western Munira summarized their strategy succinctly:

Consequently, the leaders of al-Jama’a utilized a comprehensive strategy, which entailed approximating social relations and normative frames familiar to local residents, enforced strict “Islamic” modes of conduct to safeguard the “Islamic” family, and used coercive as well as noncoercive methods to settle disputes and enforce contracts in a highly competitive, and unstable, informal labor market. As a result of the combination of these factors militant activists in the quarters of Western Munira were able to mobilize a significant number of adherents to their organization and ultimately pose a threat to the state.

Joining the Militants

The primary reason that the crisis in Imbaba had such dramatic political consequence is that it represented a new phenomenon in the modern history of the Islamist trend in Egypt. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the initial phase of the Islamist trend in urban Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood primarily spearheaded Islamist activism. In this period the Ikhwan managed to build a wide range of financial and civil society institutions through a successful social movement that was, unlike the Jama’a, largely nonviolent. The siege of Imbaba made it abundantly clear that an important element of the Islamist movement had gone through an important transformation in terms of its social profile in two important respects.

First, many of these militants came from rural backgrounds. But they also drew in segments of Cairo’s lower-class residents living in the informal settlements, or shantytowns, lying on the fringes of the city. Of great significance is that by the 1990s there was an unprecedented rise in the recruitment of juveniles by the Islamic Group in Western Munira, Imbaba.⁷ Lower-class youth emerged, for the first time, as central players in what was to become a more radical element of Islamist activism. Thus, while the Muslim Brotherhood continued to represent middle-class and lower middle-class aspirations, militant activists reflected a new socioeconomic profile. Specifically, compared to their counterparts in the 1970s and 1980s, by the 1990s, they were younger (ranging from fifteen and twenty old), and less educated.⁸

Second, the fears on the part of the state surrounding the growth of informal settlements represented the regime’s anxiety about the informal, or casual, laboring class, which represented a large segment of residents in the poorest quarters of Imbaba. In the quarters of Western Munira, children, fifteen years old or younger, representing the lowest rung of the informal labor force in Imbaba were attracted to the militants in the neighborhood. Moreover, as one study observed, these “youths were often recruited as entry points into households and utilized to recruit additional members of their respective families.”⁹

The small “convenient” sample in Table 7.1 collected from interviews with ten leaders of the Jama’at and twelve of its rank and file members in the 1990s is instructive in shedding light on the social and economic profile of the leadership and rank and file members of the organization and it demonstrates the linkage between informal labor and membership in the Islamic Group.¹⁰

First, it is important to note that while the majority of members of the Jama’a were primarily employed as casual, or informal, laborers in construction and other trades, albeit at different levels of the labor market, there is a distinct social distance between leaders and rank and file members. Indeed, while the majority of the local leaders of the militants are of a higher social class,¹¹ rank and file members generally represented those in the lower-skilled segment of this labor market. Second, it is evident that the majority of young men (all of whom were in their late teens and early twenties at the time) and who joined in the late 1980s and 1990s were either underemployed or unemployed.

Finally, and of equal significance, in my research among former members of the Islamic Group in Western Munira I found that the bulk of rank and file members in Western Munira were young men, or Subyan, often the most-exploited laborers in the informal construction firm (dulab). Even in the best times, the subyan receive the lowest wages of the dulab’s employees though they undertake the most strenuous form of work, and due to the high degree of intra-market competition, they are rarely in the position to negotiate terms with the contractor. This concrete, day-to-day exploitation – more than some amorphous sense of alienation or psychological attributes – explains why so many of Imbaba’s subyan joined the ranks of al-Jama’a. The fact that these subyan joined in significant numbers is evidenced by one study, which confirmed the unprecedented increase in the number of juveniles (fifteen and under) in the rank and file membership of al-Jama‘a in ‘Izbat al-Mufti – the Western Munira quarters of the neighborhood of Imbaba where informal labor is most highly concentrated and where the Islamist militants enjoyed their strongest following.¹²

Tariq Hassabo, a former member of al-Jama’a, represents an illustrative example of the profile of those who joined the Jama’a in the late 1980s and 1990s. In 1998 Tariq was twenty-nine years old, married with one young daughter, and a long-time resident of ‘Izbat al-Mufti. He joined the Jama’a when he was twenty-two and noted that most of the members of the Jama’a in the quarter were, like him, in their twenties and worked mostly in the informal labor market. Tariq himself worked as a casual laborer as a wall-fixer and painter on a casual basis. His daughter is of a different mother while his mother and father live in the adjacent apartment. He did have a younger brother whom he described as a “baltagi” and who died in a knife fight in the neighborhood. Like so many in ‘Izbat al-Mufti, Tariq Hassabo is off rural origins. His father is originally from al-Munifiyya governorate and an active member of the regional association of ahl al-Munifiyya, although he was born in Imbaba.

Tariq was drawn to the Jama’a gradually and for a combination of reasons linked to socioeconomic as well as moral reasons rather than political. Indeed, he rarely mentioned politics, and while many in the leadership stressed politics as the door to recruitment, it is not a factor that was highlighted by Tariq and other former members of the organization. According to his own account, what drew him to the Jama’a was the piety and morality of the leadership, their attention to the social and moral ills of ‘Izbat al-Mufti, and what he termed the “passion and fire” of the preachers at the Jama’a mosques. Like many in the quarter, he was particularly drawn to an important leader in the quarter: Sheikh Mohamed Ali. Sheikh Ali, Tariq recollected, gave the poor sheep and meat during festive occasions, assisted the poor and ill with alms, and instructed members of al-Jama’a, including Tariq, to pay visits to the poor in their homes as part of a good-will campaign. Sheikh Ali also organized sessions on “Arab issues” in his apartment where potential members would speak and discuss the politics of the day in the Arab world and, as Tariq put it, discuss the corruption of non-‘Muslim’ tyrants (Tagha). But while “enjoining the good” meant paying visits to the poor, “forbidding evil” was, if certainly more punitive, equally attractive to the young members to the organization. “We often broke up marriages where men and women congregated, closed brothels in the ‘Izba, and made sure that people in the neighborhood would inform us (the Jama’a) of where these brothels were. We would then beat the men operating them and cut the hair of the women.” At first, he continued, “[T]he residents of the ‘Izba appreciated and supported these actions.”

He used to pray regularly at Masjid al-Nur in al-‘Izba, where he first encountered Sheikh Ali, the brother of Sheikh Gabir who led the uprisings in 1992. Subsequently, he began working and spreading the Da’wa under the instruction and guidance of Sheikh Ali. He was also given a specific task in the organization’s recruitment efforts. Specifically, he was charged with the assignment of accompanying a group of fellow “Muslims” to persuade young men “loitering” in the neighborhood’s street corners to join in the street prayers (salat al-masaha). “We began with only six individual ‘Muslims’ but our group,” he noted with some degree of pride, “increased to thirty within just two months.”

From Boom to Bust: Informal Labor Markets and the Advent of Militant Islam in Informal Cairo

For the young men and boys in Imbaba like Tariq who during the construction boom had come to rely on wages from casual labor, the recession of the mid-1980s struck especially hard. Out of work and destitute, this already demoralized workforce found no social services or social institutions upon which to depend. As the young men of the neighborhood sought out some semblance of social cohesion, stability, and predictability in their daily lives and those of their families, activists from al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya found themselves, in the latter part of the 1980s, well positioned to take advantage of this state of affairs.

During the 1970s, the infitah polices of Anwar Sadat had profoundly restructured the labor market, and lower-skilled labor, such as the non-skilled segment engaged in construction, had paid the highest price for the state’s neoliberal economic policy. Because the emerging job market demanded skilled labor a large segment of lower-skilled workers relocated to the informal sector, which meant that they faced higher levels of economic insecurity and lower wages. Semi-skilled craftsmen, in particular, who had learned their trade through many years of apprenticeship, were less flexible about changing their occupations and as result they were particularly hard-hit in terms of finding new employment opportunities.

The key problem is that in Egypt, there is a stark distinction between the nature of the relationship of the state and contractual relations in the formal and informal labor markets. Workers in the formal sector enjoy legal protections that are based on a class-based social organization of production closely linked to the state and thus more favorable to collective action. By contrast labor relations in the informal labor market in informal quarters such as Western Munira are essentially locked into dependent contractual relations with jobbers, recruiters, gang bosses, and other intermediaries, often kinsmen or co-villagers, which reduces their capacity to pursue their collective interests. Moreover, this “immobilizing effect” caused by informal work is increased not only by the pressure to invest in informal social ties, it is made more precarious in the context of volatile markets dependent on both the national and world economy.¹³

An important aspect linking informal settlements to the national economy is evidenced by the informal labor markets’ vulnerability to boom and bust cycles. In the 1980s procuring work in ta’ifat al-mi’mar (construction sector) was crucially dependent on contracts available in the informal housing sector financed by the wages of remittances of migrants working in the Arab oil-producing countries. As informal workers informed me, at that time informal work was not only available in Imbaba but Masr al-Gadida and all of the many middle- and upper-class neighborhoods built up by the boom in out-migration. Construction workers often spoke of this time of great opportunity and that even if you lived and worked in Western Munira you could find employment as far afield as Sinai and Sharm al-Sheikh. One worker recounted how he found a “great” job working on building the Baron Hotel in Sharm al-Sheikh, and he proudly noted that an Egyptian rather than a foreign construction firm built it. The fact that many laborers lived in the informal settlements was because it was cheaper and wages for informal work were low and fixed by the subcontractors despite the availability of work. Indeed, it is important to note that workers still expressed frustration because wages were not adjusted upward even when, as one worker put it, “the contractor got more money from a private sector firm.” Nevertheless, these social, class, and spatial divisions were greatly subdued during the boom since as one scholar aptly noted, the ethic of group solidarity (both vertical and horizontal) was a key element in procuring gainful employment and of achieving some modest measure of upward mobility for those at the lowest rank of the informal labor market.¹⁴ As one subcontractor noted: “I was responsible for resolving conflict [and] during the boom this was not a crucial problem since work was relatively plentiful and informal housing affordable.”¹⁵

Upon the onset of the recession, however, a severe crisis in the informal labor market emerged as the supply of labor became plentiful as a result not only of the severe economic downturn associated with the slump in oil prices but also because of the increased saturation of the market in affordable land for housing. The real-estate heyday joining land speculators and middle-class Egyptians slowed by the late 1980s. Whereas in 1985 the Egyptian construction industry was touted as the largest construction market in the region,¹⁶ by the end of the decade, rising costs in building materials and falling confidence signaled the end of the era of large-scale infrastructural development that had begun after 1973.¹⁷ The seasonality of the construction business also contributed considerably to the glut of unskilled and semi-skilled informal labor in Imbaba. In general terms, unless the supply of labor is limited, industries that have seasonal peaks of production tend to produce a labor supply in excess of normal needs. During the boom years, when contractors needed a continuous level of employment but faced labor shortages caused by wide-scale out-migration to the Gulf, they heavily recruited workers from Upper Egypt to work in construction throughout greater Cairo. In the case of the neighborhood of Imbaba, workers were most often recruited from the regional associations (rawabat iqlimiyya) created from rural-to-urban migrants originating chiefly from the governorates of Assiut and Sohag.

With the recession, construction companies sought to quickly cut down costs, announcing that they would keep labor and material expenses to a minimum.¹⁸ Whereas during the boom, employers kept laborers on salary, in the recession there was little incentive to maintain a continuous level of employment, and contractors targeted semi-skilled and unskilled labor for sharp cutbacks. Subcontractors (i.e., craftsmen) said that by the late 1980s they had to implement a number of strategies to remain competitive and find employment. Under pressure from the big contractors, they had to ration labor or dismiss “redundant” workers, workers had to lower their wages in order to attract contractors, and both had to build a “good reputation” to find work.

While in the past family, kin, or in-law relations mitigated social tensions and served as important networks to find employment, in the recession regular employment was increasingly maintained by a combination of intangible qualities: hard work, a reputation for trustworthiness, and the friendship of an employer or contractor. Skilled and semi-skilled traders who had a reputation for insubordination or tardiness or whose poor health or age was thought to constitute a liability were the workers hit hardest by the downturn in the construction boom. Magdi Mohamed Hussein, a craftsmen specializing in steel support and concrete molding (Naggar Musalah) explained the nature and consequences of the bust for informal workers in the building trade in eloquent terms:

In the Western Munira quarters of Imbaba, a subcontractor, referred to locally as a ra’is or commanda, no longer found it profitable, or feasible, to maintain a dulab – a full team of building operatives who are contracted informally – and he was forced to ration work in ways that led to the increasing immiseration of semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Employers shortened working hours, adjusted salaries downward, and laid off nonessential workers and apprentices.²⁰ “As the ra’is,” Mr. Hussein explained, “I am responsible for resolving disputes. There is often a problem with six subyan (apprentices) because I cannot use them all since the work had disappeared. I try to rotate them, so everyone has a chance.”²¹ Indeed, as a consequence of the decline in employment opportunities in the building trade, informal laborers were forced to adjust in a number of ways, including simply by living below subsistence.

The severity of the intra-market competition resulting from the recession, and in the construction sector, was gravely compounded by the lack of any social protection or insurance for those who relied on informal work for their livelihood. Kin, familial, and friendship ties served residents well in the boom years, but in the recession these networks lost the material incentives that sustained and secured the economic livelihoods of individuals and families residing in the poorer quarters of Western Munira. In the boom years it was sufficient to rely on ties of family, friends, and kin to procure work; in the recession the scarcity of work and the oversupply of labor meant that workers with stronger links to the formal economy and acquaintances outside the neighborhood enjoyed greater access to new information about job opportunities that might otherwise remain unknown.²² For its part, the state never showed any willingness to insure informal laborers to any degree, introduce legislation to improve work conditions, fix minimum wages, or curb child labor. Indeed, the great capacity of the state bureaucracy to tightly control product and labor markets stands in stark contrast to its inability to organize and regulate informal labor relations, a fact captured in the official usage of the term al qita’ ghayr al-munazam to describe this “unorganized sector” of the economy. Moreover, neither public nor private firms, which seek flexibility in the labor market in order to keep wages low, were willing to provide any social benefits to their employees.

Almost overnight, disputes over wages became more common and social tensions intensified in Western Munira, pitting contractor against worker and unskilled laborer against semi-skilled craftsman. Workers began to prefer public construction companies to the previously more lucrative private ones. Informal workers reported that although the public enterprises paid lower wages, they offered stable work. As one worker put it, “at least they [public-sector firms] paid wages in advance, rather than in installments like the corrupt private companies.”²³ The recession had proved less of a burden for the large public sector corporations, which, unlike the private firms, operated without the demand for profitability. Because large government-funded projects continued to be the preserve of the large public sector firms, they could offer more stable and reliable contracts for construction workers. Moreover, with the onset of the privatization of the industry in the late 1990s the competition between subcontractors, craftsmen, and unskilled workers for even these shorter-term and less-stable contracts in what emerged as a far more competitive private sector further intensified competition and social tensions between those dependent on the informal labor market for their livelihood in the Imbaba.²⁴

What is important to note, however, is that these opportunities continued to be dependent on vertical patron-client ties since employers tend to hire workers they know personally, and workers strive to foster such personal ties to get jobs. In Imbaba procuring employment in the informal labor market is not only dependent on the stock of connections, and access to information and social networks, it is also a function of place of residence. Higher-status workers (i.e., contractors) possess long-standing relations outside the neighborhood and stronger links with the formal economy. As a result they are able to acquire new information about job opportunities that remain unknown to workers lower down the labor market hierarchy. By contrast, subcontractors and lower-status workers residing in Western Munira noted that they simply did not have the connections to procure work in the public sector and, moreover, they could not trust that a contractor (Muqawil) from outside Imbaba would meet his contractual obligations. As one worker put it: “On the Sharm El-Sheikh job, the contractor was from outside Imbaba and refused to pay fully after we completed the job. In the ‘Izba this would never happen because the contractor has to interact with us face to face.” The primary problem for the casual laborer was that no formal contracts regulated these arrangements, and the laborers – and to a lesser degree, the contractors – had to rely on the good reputation of their employers. As one ra’is (head of a dulab) explained:

In-migrants who became unemployed waited, despite the recession, in anticipation of further construction work instead of returning to agriculture. As James Toth has noted in a study of workers in rural Egypt, “despite the inflated size of the workforce, both the intermittent nature of construction work and the paternalistic ties to employers made this expectation possible.”²⁶ Indeed, as I witnessed first-hand in the informal settlements of ‘Izbat al-Mufti, Beshteel, and al-Waraq, the informal settlements, in Western Munira, the very nature of informal labor lent itself to a particular type of job insecurity in which a large portion of the workforce remained in a casualized limbo, filling short periods of employment by invading an already overfilled, generally unskilled labor market.

To make matters worse, in the context of the recession and increasing land competition in rural Upper Egypt, scores of in-migrants, particularly from Fayoum and Assiut, migrated to Imbaba and came to represent what Egyptian scholars refer to as al-proleteriat al-ratha or the lumpenproletariate.²⁷ These young men possessed little education or skills and they essentially filled the ranks of Umaal Ugari, day laborers or odd jobbers, and lived in the worst conditions in the poorest quarters of the neighborhood. In Imbaba, this led to intensified competition reflected in severe and dangerous tensions along regional and sectarian lines. Thus, Muslim “fellahin” (farmers from the Nile delta) stood against “sa‘ayida” (upper Egyptians), and the two against Coptic Christians. As one fellahin laborer put it, “The sa‘ayida are like Christians. They know how to take care of themselves.” In addition, since the cost of living was increasing, the informal labor market also received a steady stream of Cairo denizens ousted from their regular occupations or simply unable to make a living wage in the neighborhoods of middle-class Cairo. This has meant not only that the poorer quarters of Imbaba were assuming a more heterogeneous makeup (similar to the original quarters of the neighborhood and some other informal settlements), but also that there was increasingly stiff competition in the informal labor market between Cairenes and in-migrants.

Another important consequence of the employment crisis that came to be exploited by Islamist militant leaders was the breakdown of the traditional kinship-based patron-client relations through which the dulab operated. With the introduction of severe competition, trust became rare and fragile, allowing al-Jama‘a members to enter the market as intermediaries between contractors and laborers. Very quickly, leading members of the Jama’a procured the limited number of contracts from the head of the dulab for those young men who supported them and, moreover, they acted as guarantors to clients of their choosing guaranteeing to the firm that laborers under their patronage would work for an agreed-upon wage and working hours. In this way, al-Jama‘a supplanted the traditional Upper Egyptian patrons in the informal labor market over a short period. The key difference was that al-Jama‘a, unlike traditional labor recruiters, often resorted to coercive and violent means to enforce contracts. Selim Hafiz, a long-time resident of ‘Izbat al-Mufti, and not affiliated with al-Jama’a observed that prior to the recession “there was no need for the Islamic Group” if you belonged to a “big family” because the big families were able to offer “protection” to their members and find them secure employment. However, he added that with the recession, the big families found it hard to “prevent their sons from joining.”²⁸

Mirroring the Dulab: Militancy and the Informal Labor Firm

The linkage between the emergence of a radical Islamist social movement that emerged in the 1990s in Imbaba and informal labor markets rests on a empirical affinity between small-scale informal establishments on the one hand and social marginality and the absence of state regulation on the other. Because of their limited start-up costs and the ease with which they enter and exit markets, small firms provide the most appropriate setting for informal practices such as casual labor recruitment. In addition, this informal market is linked to identity-based forms of mobilization as a result of two of its essential features: the segmentation of work conditions (i.e., barriers to entry) along class, kinship, gender, regional and class lines, and the vertical forms of dependency in which the casual laborer is compelled to enter into a contractual relationship with a labor recruiter, subcontractor, and other intermediaries often kinsmen.²⁹

In the case of the informal market in construction in Western Munira where I conducted my research two elements stand out. The first is the dulab, which structures employment contracts and casual labor relations between individual employers and workers. The dawaleeb are also the site of skill acquisition through apprenticeship, which in turn depends on patriarchal forms of social control that prevail in family- or apprentice-based workshops. The second are construction coffee houses, which define the relationship among workers, and between workers as a group, and employers as a group. Since formal trade unions are irrelevant for most construction workers, coffee houses serve as the primary locus of interaction between workers and craftsmen, and it is here where social networks and contacts are made, workers hired and paid, and craftsmen socialized as an “insider” to procure contracts and work.

Al-Jama‘a in particular found, to the initial surprise of some of their leaders,³⁰ that Western Munira (Munira al-Gharbiyya) – the poorest section of Imbaba – was fertile ground for recruitment in part because of the similarity of its social organization to that of the dulab. The informally organized institution of the dulab operates on a system that is hierarchical and built on norms of paternalism, deference, and discipline. For its part, al-Jama‘a, at least as it functioned in Western Munira, in many ways mirrored this social institution. The close fit between its own hierarchy, norms, and organization and those of the informal labor market facilitated entry for new recruits. Indeed, newly recruited members easily understood and appreciated the fact that al-Jama‘a could serve both as an alternative source of income generation and a source of discipline.

Specifically, what workers in the quarter term Shuruut al-‘Amal, the rules and conditions of work in the informal labor market, particularly as they applied to day laborers and the subyan, closely aligned with the preferences of militant activists in their attempts to draw these laborers to their cause. If subcontractors preferred what one laborer described as “strong, able bodied young men” ranging from eighteen to twenty years old with a reputation for a “strong work ethic, dedication to the job” and less inclined to pursue “frivolous and costly forms of entertainment like the young men of the Bandar (City),” another casual laborer and former member of the Jama’a noted that the organization generally selected recruits for these same attributes and further noted that education for the sabi and hence a potential member to the organization was deemed a liability: “[T]o get the job done, you have to have a strong body, not a certificate or diploma.”³¹

Moreover, two additional conditions frequently noted by informal workers in ‘Izbat al-Mufti facilitated entry in terms of joining the militants in the quarter: a strong belief that class stratification was part of the natural religious and social order as reflected in the frequently cited Quranic injunction of Wa ja’lnakum foqa ba’dikum darajat (and we have made of you different classes), and an equally strong perception of the real possibility of upward mobility through sabr (patience) and hard work, born out of their own experience with the apprenticeship system of the informal labor firm which in the boom years all but guaranteed reaching a higher position in the informal labor market over time so long as one is “clever, has a strong work ethic and maintains a good reputation for clean work.” In addition, the hierarchical and paternalist structure and the rules of conduct and penalties associated with the work conditions of the sabi mirrored those enforced by the Jama’a on its rank and file membership. Indeed, just as Jama’a leaders enforced strict modes of conduct and applied penalties against rank and file members for a variety of infractions, the sabi in the informal labor firm is under the complete authority and responsibility of his patron or Mu’alim al-sabi (teacher). In a similar process utilized and adapted by militant leaders to generate loyalty among its rank and file, a sabi who does not complete his assigned work in time, “causes problems” with higher-ranked members of the dulab, or does not abide by Shurat al-‘Amal of another craftsmen he is assigned to work with, is reported to his Mu’alim who decides on the appropriate penalty.

This is an important point because while most analysts of Islamist militancy in Egypt have focused on the role of rural-to-urban migration from Upper Egypt in the transplanting of al-Jama‘a’s structures and politics to urban Cairo, this in itself is not a sufficient explanation. While the first generation of the leadership of al-Jama‘a was, by and large, of rural origin, most of the rank and file of the second generation of leaders, including Shaykh Jabir, were born and raised in the neighborhoods of Imbaba. Shaykh Jabir had originally worked as an informal laborer – he was a plumber by profession.

The social organization of the dulab is hierarchical (see Figure 7.1). The firm itself is headed by a subcontractor known as the ra’is (head or job boss) whose chief responsibility is to procure work from a contractor (muqawil) belonging to one of the large public or private construction firms. Immediately below the ra’is is the semi-skilled craftsman (hirfi or sani’), who serves as the contractor’s chief assistant. He is hired by the subcontractor on a causal basis and for this reason he must rely heavily on his own personal contacts and social networks to find employment. Lowest in the dulab’s hierarchy is the unskilled apprentice, or sabi (plural, subyan), who is usually no more than fifteen years old but who is, nevertheless, chosen for his strength to withstand the heavy tasks assigned to him. Most often this includes handing out mortar and it is only after many years of apprenticeship as Musa’id al-sina’iyy (craftsman’s assistant) when he learns the more advanced technical aspects of the minha, or profession, that he is allowed to perform the task of the master’s trade eventually qualifying him to become a full-fledged assistant. At this point, he may work in the same workshop as his former boss or open his own depending on available resources. In addition, there is a separate market for a common laborer (‘amil). These workers, known as ‘Umaal Ugrah, day laborers or odd jobbers, are also hired by the subcontractor and are often found outside the coffee houses waiting to be hired on the spot on an impersonal basis. They are often newly arrived small peasant farmers or farm workers.

Figure 7.1 Hierarchical structure of the Dulab and al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya in Imbaba, Cairo.

Source: Data compiled from interviews conducted in the course of the author’s field research. Western Munira, Imbaba, Cairo

This hierarchy conforms to strictly paternalist lines and this is reflected in the common reference to the contractor as commanda, the subcontractor as ra’is, and the apprentice as simply sabi (literally, “boy”). The ra’is is usually relatively affluent, dressed in an expansively tailored Upper Egyptian ‘ibayyah, and he has the added social privilege of sitting with the Kibar, the elders of the clan. Indeed, the nature of this hierarchy and paternalism was one reason why so many youth belonging to the lower rungs of the informal market and the social system joined the Jama’a. While some former members of the Islamic Group stated that a friend or family members recruited them in the quarter, others revealed that subcontractors who had also been recruited by the Group and with whom they had a long-standing relationship recruited them. Naturally, the line between “friendship” and labor boss is often an ambiguous one. Nevertheless, the same paternalism that underpinned the social relations of the informal labor market mirrored and was in many ways replicated by the Jama’a in Western Munira in ways that served to remove some of the social as well as economic barriers to entry for potential recruits.

Another reason Islamic militant leaders were able to recruit successfully among juveniles is simply because they exploited the high levels of social and economic uncertainty which stemmed from the very nature of this informal labor market. Indeed, the demand for “boy” labor, or the sabi, is one of the causes of endemic poverty in Imbaba and, moreover, he is one of the most exploited workers since the supply of young boys exceeds demand. Employers use inexpensive sabi labor to lower costs as much as possible. As one subcontractor informed me, “You can always find a sabi whenever you need one.”³²

The subyan are often employed as masons and errand boys. Since there are few vocational schools in Imbaba, they have no alternative but to depend on the apprenticeship system to acquire a higher level of skills – a process that can take up to ten years. Moreover, while the apprenticeship system does provide a sabi with the chance for upward mobility over time, in the context of recessionary downturns he faces a higher level of economic insecurity than the more skilled craftsmen who may find employment opportunity in artisan firms outside of the quarters of Western Munira. Those able to work jobs demanding physical strength found regular employment, but most subyan simply could not transition into other more skilled forms of work. Nor is pursuing education an option for the majority of boys and young men in the neighborhood: there is one secondary school in Western Munira. By the time they reach adult age, these youths find themselves without any general or special industrial qualifications and little access to a stock of personal contacts that would enable them to find steady work. Thus, a stream of young men from industries that rely upon sabi labor continually replenishes the mass pool of the unemployed. Cast adrift, these young subyan filled the ranks of al-Jama‘a, although many continued to work as informal laborers following their entrance into the organization.

The key point here is that the structure and social organization of the informal labor market resulted in a highly precarious state of affairs in terms of job security for a large segment of the working population in the neighborhood. The increasing reliance on informal social networks and kinship ties means that death of relatives or familial conflict could jeopardize one’s chances for work, and the increasing number of bankruptcies of small informal firms working in construction meant that cyclical economic downturns expel a worker into the unskilled labor market at the threshold of adulthood. Indeed, it is difficult to describe the state of frustration, alienation, and depression of these men and their deep resentment against those who, as one worker put it, derive income “fi al-Bandar (in the City) from shuffling paper” (i.e., white collar jobs).³³

This is the reason why the rank and file of the al-Jama‘a was increasingly characterized by a younger and less-educated membership composed of essentially two groups: informal laborers who were generally no longer employed in the industry and other workers who continued to find casual employment in the informal market. The latter group benefited from the fact that the leaders of the Islamic Group often served as intermediaries in a tight market securing them work and enforcing their informal contracts.

Social Networks and Qahawi Ta’ifat Al-Mi’mar (Construction Sector Coffee Houses)

The social and political consequences engendered by the severity of intra-market competition in the construction sector that resulted from the nation-wide recession could be discerned at the level of the community from observing the casual laborers in the coffee houses (qahawi ta’ifat al-mi‘mar) in the poorer quarters of ‘Izbat al-Mufti and Beshteel in Imbaba. Since formal trade unions are irrelevant for most construction workers, coffee houses serve as the primary locus of interaction between workers and craftsmen, and it is here where I observed social networks and contacts made, workers hired and paid, and craftsmen socialized as an “insider” to procure contracts and work.³⁴ Of great significance is that these coffee houses, whose sheer number (upward of forty) in Western Munira suggests that informal labor is the backbone of the local economy, are themselves institutionally differentiated according to the segment of the informal labor market, as well as social and regional lines.

The main lines of social division are between craftsmen who serve as subcontractors for potential employers, lower-skilled apprentices (subyan), and common laborers who possess the lowest social status. Thus, one can observe coffee houses for craftsmen such as industrial workers (qahawi al-sani‘un) and blacksmiths (qahawi al-haddadeen), and others frequented primarily by apprentices such as the one for bricklayers (qahawi al-kharasanjiyya), and common laborers or day jobbers (‘umal) congregate in their own coffee houses referred to more generally as qahawi al-mi‘mar (construction coffee houses). The latter are rarely accepted as social equals and are looked down upon by the craftsmen and the local merchants, shopkeepers, and small businesses owners in the quarter. As a result, they usually congregate in their own separate establishments or simply stand on the nearby streets awaiting recruitment. In addition, there is segmentation in the market along the lines of place of origin as evidenced by several coffee houses established by, and for, rural migrants from Sohag and Assiut.

It is to these coffee houses, so unlike their social and jovial counterparts in other parts of Cairo that often “provide social ease from anxiety,”³⁵ that craftsmen as well as lower-skilled laborers arrive in the early morning to acquire information about possible work, and to which they return in the evenings to receive their pay. In Western Munira the workers, mostly in their early to mid-twenties, hardly speak to one another and none play the board game of backgammon popular in Egyptian coffee houses. The only link among the youth is one of a shared social and economic insecurity, which, as one labor explained, is a result of a “very competitive environment; we are all competing in an already tight labor market.”³⁶ New entrants are seen immediately as competition because contractors hire laborers on the spot making sure to keep wages low. The result is that the worker must put in an offer for his pay for a certain job. Consequently, there is great pressure on the laborers to compete with each other by bidding as low possible in order to be hired. In this context, family and kin ties neither mitigate social tensions nor render social relations more palatable; place of residence and friendship do so only minimally.

Moreover, the recession and rise in labor competition in Western Munira meant that the subcontractors and higher-skilled workers lost control of the work process. More specifically, they lost the ability to induce workers to accept their authority and elicit their cooperation in controlling the content, pace, and scope of the work. The division between craftsmen, who relied on their stock of personal contacts to procure contracts, and laborers who most often relied on friends and kin to find work, broke down in the context of increasing competition.

Indeed, in the context of work shortages, laborers were able to find work more efficiently than the craftsmen primarily because more low and menial work was available. As one laborer explained with some pride, “the Sina’iyyi (crastmen) or Mihni (professional) cannot work without ‘amil ugari (the odd jobber) since no matter how skilled the craftsmen is in measuring, cutting and laying the bulat (brick), it is the ‘amil who must mix, pour and carry the cement to the job site.”³⁷ Importantly, since in Western Munira the distinction between subcontractor, usually a craftsmen, and common laborer followed regional lines there emerged a distinct element of cultural competition. As one craftsman noted in frustration, “they [the contractors] only hire Upper Egyptians … only the ones who can do menial, tough work.”³⁸ During al-Jama‘a’s reign in Western Munira, many of these young casual laborers joined its ranks. One of the key advantages of joining the militants, according to former Jama’a members working in construction, was that they no longer had to wait on the streets outside the coffee shops “like slaves.” Instead, they typically would congregate in front of the nearby mosque and the contractor would be forced to approach them to give them their wages for the day’s work. In the past craftsmen not only distinguished themselves from labors in social terms, they also would not allow the laborers into the Coffee Houses. These members proudly acknowledged that their membership in the organization afforded them special status for their first time in their lives.³⁹

Ta’amul Ma’a Al-Waqi’ Hawlana: The Erosion of Trust Networks and Social Conflict

In ideological terms the Jama’a distinguished itself from the Muslim Brotherhood and other accommodationist Islamist activists in its reinterpretation of the doctrine of Hisba (al-amr bi al-ma’ruf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar) or commanding the right and forbidding wrong as a collective rather than an individual obligation (fard kifaya) designed to establish an Islamic state by force (bi-al-quwaah). In this regard the Jama’a laid the ideological foundation for other Islamist militant and Salafist organizations. However, the Islamic Group also laid an important legacy for other clandestine militant organizations in strategic terms. The latter is evident in the manner in which it sought to overcome the central challenge of generating commitment among its rank and file members in order to implement this new responsibility of al-amr bi al-ma’ruf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar. Consequently, after 1984 when the Jama’a first began to make inroads in the informal settlements of greater Cairo a significant change took place in its Islamic program (al-manhaj al-Islami) that reflected new strategic considerations. Specifically, its leadership recognized that in order to popularize their movement they had to pursue a course of militant action and a process of recruitment of cadres that was relevant to local social and economic conditions. This is the reason that in the mid-1980s their program stated clearly that the ways in which the organization “interacts with the reality around us” (ta’amul ma’a al-waqi’ hawlana) and finds “means of changing it” depend on the Imams that are presented by God.⁴⁰

In the case of Imbaba, and Western Munira more specifically, local conditions were influenced in great part by the nature and very structure of the informal labor market associated with the construction sector. This meant that at no time was there a unified, homogenous class pursuing informal work. This is in stark contrast to the unity and class-consciousness associated with industrial labor, which in the Nasser era represented the majority of new migrants to Imbaba. During that period of state-led development, a clear class-consciousness was present among the factory workers residing in Imbaba’s government-subsidized housing, but by the late 1980s the great majority of labor in the neighborhood had become informalized. In the 1970s when formal labor organizations waged a short-lived struggle against Sadat’s liberalization policies on working-class grounds, a similar brand of class-consciousness did not, and could not, develop among workers living in the informal settlements. Structural inequities had come to be accepted as part of a fatalistic religiosity – in rhetoric if not in practice. This meant that by the late 1980s and 1990s al-Jama‘a’s discourse sublimating class grievances into issues of morality, the status of the women and the home, and antistate resistance found a much more receptive audience.

This social conflict, reflected along cultural lines, and one that was readily exploited by the Jama’a leaders, had to do with the fluidity of the trust networks that underpinned the organizational and social structure of the informal market. During the boom craftsmen could easily rely on their personal contacts and “friends” to acquire construction contracts. In the recession these trust networks broke down as evidenced by my observations of the Coffee Houses where the competition over any kind of job was a central feature of the increasingly somber cultural life of Qahawi al-Mi’mar, and more significantly, the increase in the number of violent conflicts between kin-backed laborers and non-kin-related craftsman. It is in this context that the Jama’a were able to enter the market and recruit from the socially frustrated and downwardly mobile craftsmen as well as the socially elevated common laborer.

The social detachment of these young men was made worse by the fact that in the construction trade, social relations are not oriented around the stable system of reciprocity (mujamala) that in other, higher-skilled trades allows for a sense of loyalty and community. Instead, there is a severe form of social stratification between laborer and local contractor or subcontractor. This is easily observed in mode of dress as well as conduct. Typically, the far more affluent contractor, the ra’is, dresses in the Upper Egyptian ‘abaya (robe) and sits across, rather than within, the coffee shop. In contrast to the socially stigmatized casual laborer, the contractor enjoys an elevated status and is held in high esteem by middle-class residents and certainly by the elders of his clan (kibar al-qabila). Indeed, class tensions in the neighborhood exacerbate the social exclusion of these underemployed laborers. In spite – or rather, because – of the difficulty of their work, informal laborers are looked down upon by Imbaba’s middle-class residents, many of whom own property such as small businesses or retail shops.⁴¹

An important factor underlying the popularity of the Jama’a in the quarter is that its leadership demonstrated a keen and intimate understanding of these class and cultural tensions, as well as the general economic insecurity faced by casual laborers in Western Munira, and devised its recruitment strategies and offered incentives likely to motivate individual participation.

Al-‘Umaal Shaylin Al-Balad (The Workers Are Carrying the Country)

As one local resident who joined the Islamic Group but later left the organization in opposition to their increasing use of violence against their local rivals in the quarter put it, “they [al-Jama’a] recognized that these workers Shaylin al-Balad (are carrying the country).”⁴² Importantly, al-Jama‘a recognized debt payments are a crucial problem in settlements like ‘Izbat al-Mufti, Bashteel and Osim where they continue to be a source of a great many disputes, often resulting in violent confrontations. Indeed, it is rare that in the course of one month one does not observe two or three disputes over unpaid debts in ‘Izbat al-Mufti. The problem is that daily wages fluctuate arbitrarily while the cost of living steadily increases. Furthermore, because the meager daily wages do not cover household expenditures, to say nothing of allowing for personal savings, most residents live on credit, which is difficult to pay back. Al-Jama‘a assisted debtors in settling disputes, repaying or postponing payments on credit, and in general introducing some semblance of stability if not necessarily social peace. Indeed, al-Jama’a regularly utilized coercive means to assist their members and sympathizers to resolve their outstanding debts. Specifically, the Jama’a leaders made use of baltagiyya, local strongmen, who through the threat of violence were tasked with extracting compliance from debt collectors. Many of these baltagiyya worked as day laborers and a significant number joined the ranks of al-Jama‘a.

Al-Jama‘a also offered assistance to its members who suffered from a work-related accident. Whereas the subcontractor often refused to pay any form of compensation for on-site injuries and merely dismissed the laborer from the construction site, al-Jama‘a would often collect funds for health care provisions and even provide a small pension. They also took care of the family of the injured worker until he could get back on his feet. In instances where the organization was not in a position to actually disburse funds, it would attempt to find the worker a form of employment that was less strenuous than construction work. In cases where the education of the worker (usually very modest) and his skill level are relatively low al-Jama‘a neighborhood leaders would assign him the job of collecting the zakat (alms) from local residents.⁴³

Al-Jama’a also provided a form of work compensation for casual laborers among their membership who were taken ill for a long period of time in the course of their difficult work in the building trade. In these situations, the al-Jama’a leadership would provide regular payments to the individual and his family generated from contributions collected from other members of the organization. Moreover, since al-Jama’a members were under close surveillance, particularly following the 1992 siege of the neighborhood, the organization would provide less-visible forms of employment within the organization for loyal members released after being incarcerated by state security forces. Since these members were registered as “terrorists” or militants by state security after their release they were unable to find employment in the construction trade as they had often done in the past due to the constant surveillance by the police and state security that stigmatized their reputation among the contractors. Subsequently, the Jama’a would provide these loyal members administrative positions within the organization. Significantly, these members also gained higher social status within the organization. In Western Munira only al-Jama‘a members who had been registered after being detained and released by state security wore the Islamist dress (jalabiyya and sirwal) and grew the customary long beards. These markers were signs of status within the organization; especially among the rank and file, the members who were thus distinguished, and who harbor the greatest loyalty to al-Jama‘a, evoked great admiration.

Furthermore, the insecurity of men’s labor means women must work to provide the necessary supplementary household income. In Western Munira women often work as fruit-and-vegetable sellers, hawkers, domestic servants, and sex workers. However, the very importance of women’s work in Imbaba has resulted in its denigration by some male members of the community, and economic and social hardships among local residents continue to manifest themselves in domestic disputes, a high divorce rate, and absentee husbands. In practical terms al-Jama‘a worked to lower the social expectation of women in the neighborhood. In the sermons in Masjid al-Mursileen which I attended in ‘Izbat al-Mufti during my research in the quarter, preachers regularly sermonize about the proper place of women as “caretakers of the home” (Rabuti al-Bayti) and enjoined men to remember that they are the primary “caretakers of their women.” Moreover, two recurring themes of the sermons, which resonated strongly with local residents, pertained to the increasing illicit drug use by the youth in the quarter which was generally understood as a primary reason of juvenile delinquency and the call of a boycott against foreign goods and imports to address the ills associated with conspicuous consumption. Indeed, in contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood which has long maintained a favorable view of foreign investment and economic liberalization policies more generally,⁴⁴ the Imam of Masjid al-Mursileen called for residents in the quarter to participate in a boycott of imported consumer goods citing, in one sermon, the example of India’s Mahatma Gandhi who waged a successful campaign of noneconomic cooperation associated with his campaign of civil disobedience against British colonialism.

Embedding the “Message”: The Relevance of the Khutba (Sermon)

That Imbaba, however poor, enjoyed rising social and economic fortunes during the boom in informal housing was a key component of why grievances, exacerbated in the bust, laid the context for the transformation of parts of the neighborhood into a stronghold of militant Islamist activism. However, it is important to note that, as in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, the recruitment of rank and file members into al-Jama’a was very much a process that involved the provision of both material and normative incentives designed to frame joining the organization as a moral obligation if not as an economic necessity. As Salwa Ismail has noted, there is no seamless web between social and economic immisseration and the turning toward militancy.⁴⁵ Indeed, among the important factors that made the difference in the case of al-Jama’a is the careful manner in which the organization’s leadership articulated a discourse that simultaneously sought to wage a political and moral campaign against the state, as well as to address the grave social and economic conditions that resulted from the profound economic and social transformations in the quarter. Not surprisingly, an important objective of the sermons was to strengthen the resolve of the organization’s members and potential activists against state repression:

Nevertheless, during my attendance of the highly popular sermons that followed the Friday congregational prayers in Western Munira, the Imams often gave more time to social and economic factors such as the problem of juvenile delinquency, social and moral corruption, and the importance of rehabilitating the patriarchal family which, from the perspective of the Imam’s of the Jama’a and many residents, was under threat than to antistate rhetoric. The role of women, in particular, was frequently highlighted in ways that were clearly designed to center the moral reputation of women as both a problem and the potential solution for much of what ails the community. One female resident, critical of al-Jama’a at the time, insisted that the militants were intent on what she termed “lowering the social expectations of women” by insisting on the Niqab, calling for anti-consumption behavior and enjoining the men of the family to protect and serve as caretakers for the family.⁴⁷

Another regularly reiterated theme of the sermons of particular relevance to residents of Western Munira had to do with what one resident termed al-Inhyar al-Ijtima’iyy (societal breakdown); for many, this was the central reason behind the grave social ills and everyday conflicts afflicting the quarter ranging from the rise in thuggery and crime (baltagiyya) to juvenile delinquency evidenced by the increasing sale and consumption of drugs by the youth. One sermon, an example of several others, addressed this issue offering both a diagnosis and a not-so subtle critique of the ineptitude of both state institutions as well as traditional male authorities in dealing with the problem.

Indeed, the legitimacy of the content of the sermons of al-Jama’a was effective not only because it was tailored to the lived experience of residents and resonated with their own political orientation; it was also greatly enhanced because it contrasted sharply with the sermons of the government-regulated mosques elsewhere. While Jama’a Imams in Western Munira were preaching against state policy, the ills of conspicuous consumption, and the need to reinvigorate the traditional Islamic family, the government-run mosques promoted an idealized Egypt ruling over compliant and docile citizens and insisted on strict adherence to the laws of what was, from the perspective of al-Jama’a, an unjust and heretical state. Government Imams asserted a notion of the territorial boundaries of national citizenship, stressed the importance of inter-sectarian harmony, and spoke of the need to reform the family structure but only in vague terms. Importantly, rarely did they speak of issues having to do with state corruption. In the government-run mosque in the nearby neighborhood of ‘Aguza, for example, the Imam often repeated these themes:

The Politics of Tarbiyya (Religious Education)

Other members who joined were simply true believers following a relatively long process of tarbiyya or religious education. They fervently and sincerely believed in the message of hell, damnation, and heavenly redemption. The sincerity of these followers should not be underestimated. The sermons that conveyed this message in the storefront mosques of the neighborhood drew thousands of men, young and old alike. These sermons are very attractive to young men who find no temporal explanation for their social conditions and see no prospects for a better life outside the informal settlement. Indeed, the cultivation of piety and a particularly religious form of communal space in the neighborhood played an important role in the success of al-Jama’a in this period. But it is important to note that a primary reason for this success was that the sermons helped make sense of otherwise inexplicable social conditions and, moreover, addressed real-world politics in ways that built on the lived reality of many residents in the quarter.

Religious education (tarbiyya) took place in two important ways. The first was through essentially private religious or Quranic lessons, and the second was via the Friday and Tuesday sermons. The religious lessons, attended by Jama’a members, included, most notably, the writings of Ibn Taymiyya and Sayid Qutb, and readings on Islamic Fiqr, as well as Quranic memorization. In addition, members were instructed in the writings and ideas of Sheikh Ahmed Abdel Sattar, an important discipline of Sheikh Omer Abdel-Rahman, the then spiritual guide of the Jama’a. Importantly, members of the Jama’a noted that the oral lessons in particularly were extremely important because “many of us were illiterate at that time, and it was not possible for us to read the Quran and the other writings on our own.”⁵¹

The second method of disseminating the message was achieved through the Khutba or sermon. On the third Friday of every month, all members of the nearby mosques would attend prayers at Masjid al-Ikhlas on Luxor Street in central Cairo, which, at the time, was the headquarters of al-Jama’a. Following the sermon members would discuss not only religious but “political” matters which were the subject of the sermon. Most notably, in addition to the discussion of the writing and ideas of Qutb, Ibn Tayimah, and the “Blind Sheikh” Omer Abdel-Rahman that was certainly noted by former members, what seemed to impress the young men, was the ways in which these religious instructions went hand in hand with the discourse of social welfare and politics.

Naturally, the sermons consisted of the resuscitation of Quranic verses, but they were also accompanied by what members termed “al-Nashrah” or the news segment. During al-Nashrah that followed the official sermon members would hear commentary on events in Bosnia, and Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, and would often be shown videos (al-Manassa films) on the struggle between the “Nasara” (heathens) and Muslims throughout the world. Importantly, during al-Nashra and often during the screening of the videos the Imam of the al-Jama’a Mosque would collect donations from the organization’s members and others in the congregation. As one example, Sheikh Ali Turki in ‘Izbat al-Mufti was heavily involved in gathering donations for the cause in Bosnia and for the private (Ahali) mosques of al-Jama’a in the neighborhood and for the Ikhwan held in prison and their families.

Nevertheless, there is little evidence that al-Jama’a contributed significantly in terms of providing a wide range of social services to their members or the general resident population. As one member put it, “the Jama’a do not have the means to provide social services. Most of these services are provided by the Ikwhan or al-Da’wa wa al-Tabligh.” Nevertheless, much of the services provided by al-Jama’a had more to do with the religious and moral campaign that was extremely important to religiously minded residents. On Tuesdays after Maghreb (dusk) prayers, the al-Jama’a brought and distributed clothing and some money to the poor all over the neighborhood; on Youm al-Wakfa, banners of al-Jama’a unfurled and children asked to recite Quranic verses in public; and on Eid al-Adha, al-Jama’a members would lead a masira (march) bringing cows, sheep, and rice to the poor, and during Ramadan on Shari Luxor they organized a free iftar (Ramadan breakfast) for hundreds of poor residents. Most of the members organizing these services would be paid salaries, and the families of members imprisoned by the state security provided with some limited provisions.

Equally significant, according to the members who joined the organization at the time in the neighborhood, was the role of al-Jama’a in terms of assisting in marriages in what is a very poor community. As a member of al-Jama’a members of your family were entitled to an al-Jama’a wedding (Zawaj al-Jama’a) wherein food would be provided by the Masjid, the Mazoun (officiate) paid for transportation and for his services, and Wakeel al-Arusa (the Bride’s advocate) would be transported to katb al-kitab (wedding ceremony). In addition, the organization would also arrange for the Masira (wedding procession), even while women would not be visible and asked to stay at home. It is important to note that these services were often accompanied by far more coercive and unpopular campaigns. Al-Jama’a members, often under the instruction of the leaders of the organization, burned down video stores, broke up marriage celebrations to prevent the mixing of sexes, and beat up any singers, musicians, and artists in the neighborhood that did not conform to proper “Muslim” practices.

Moreover, despite al-Jama’a’s relative success in providing a modicum of “services,” material as well as symbolic, members also recounted the divisive role of the organization in the neighborhood, particular in terms of exacerbating Muslim-Christian tensions. The role of the Copts was often part of the sermon and it helps in some measure explain the rise of inter-sectarian conflict in Imbaba at that time. Indeed, the conflict between Muslims and Copts in Imbaba is well known and it continues to the present day. The sermons often consisted of allegations that the Copts in the neighborhood were not only Nasara (Christian “heathens”) but also that they monopolized commerce and trade in the neighborhood. This perception, among many in the quarter, was increasingly popularized on the ground in part due to the sermons of the Imams which alleged that Copts practiced riba (usury), monopolized the Gold and retail markets, and charged exorbitant prices for medicine. This is an important reason why Muslim-Copt attacks became commonplace in this period leading to a dangerous spiral of violence. According to accounts by former members themselves, as the Jama’a mobilized larger numbers to their cause by the early 1990s, the violent clashes between Muslims and Copts in the quarter increased significantly.

The social and economic immiseration of the local population in the context of the recessionary downturn, and particularly those who worked as causal laborers, was an important contributor factor that motivated many young men to join the Jama’a’s ranks; it also helps to explain the timing associated with their popularity in the late 1980s and 1990s in particular. The informalization of the economy in Western Munira provided the context for radical mobilization in the quarter and afforded the Jama’a the opportunity to provide selective social, economic, and ideational incentives relevant to many young men in the quarter, which it used to mobilize new cadres. Naturally, however, this was hardly a sufficient condition for militant activism. Moreover, while state repression, which was considerable particularly following the 1992 siege of the neighborhood, played a role in the persistent popularity of the militants in Western Munira this factor does not fully explain why individuals in Western Munira joined the militant al-Jama’a rather than the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood Islamist trend and, moreover, why they continued to remain fervently committed to al-Jama’a’s cause at very high risk to themselves. Answering the questions of why members chose a militant rather than an accommodationist form of political and social activism and why Jama’a leaders employed particularly radical and often violent modes of collective action requires a closer analysis of the organization itself and the local context in which it thrived in the poorer quarters of Western Munira.

Mobilizing Militants: The Challenge of Generating Commitment and Trust among the Rank and File

The most important way to understand how militant organizations are able to pursue effective recruitment campaigns and generate commitment is to examine the challenges these organizations face in securing loyalty to the organization and generating trust among their ranks in the context of severe state repression.⁵² In the case of the Jama’a al-Islamiyya in Western Munira, three additional elements stand out as key factors that enabled leaders of the organization to accomplish these objectives: the organizational structure of the organization, its methods of recruitment and socialization of new militant activists, and the context-specific Islamist ideology disseminated through the congregational sermon (Khutbah) in the unregulated institutions of the private (Ahali) mosques.

The Role of the Ahali Mosque

In Imbaba as in many neighborhoods in Cairo, Islamic welfare associations (al-jami’at al-shar’ia al-Islamiyya) filled the gap between government services and cost-prohibitive fully privatized social services. In so doing, they presented a “third way” that has proved highly successful particularly among the middle and lower classes. In Western Munira in Imbaba, for example, the sheer density of Islamic charitable associations and the fact that most of the private (ahali) mosques in the area had some form of health care unit or clinic indicates the important role Islamists played in providing key social services. However, to say that the Islamic trend in Egypt was invigorated by the spread of Islamic welfare associations does not necessarily implicate them in the rise of al-Jama‘a in Imbaba. A far more significant factor was the density of small private mosques in the neighborhood. It is here that Islamist preachers delivered persuasive sermons to the community and youth found the opportunity to fashion a new, more “moral” way of life.

There is no large-scale survey available that accounts for the entire organization and its many branches in the 1990s. Indeed, studying the entire organizational makeup of any clandestine organization is a naturally difficult task. However, my ethnographic research in Imbaba among former members of the Jama’a provides an important lens through which to understand how a militant organization, in this case the Jama’a in Western Munira, was able to build their organization in the context of state repression and generate trust networks of the type that generated relatively high levels of commitment to their cause. One of the main arguments I make, building on my interviews with al-Jama’a members and attendance of the organization’s sermons, is that while ideology and the framing of the message played an important role in generating high-risk behavior this in itself is not a sufficient explanation to explain the relative efficacy in recruiting and mobilizing new members.

According to former members of the Jama’a, the first Masjid of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya established in Western Munira was Masjid al-Rahman li al-‘Itimad, which was established in 1986–1987. At that time, the Amir of the neighborhood of Imbaba was Sheikh Ali Abdel Bakri, and the Amir of Western Munira was Sheikh Mohamed Za’ar who was born in Aswan in Upper Egypt and migrated to Cairo. It was at this time that the network of mosques of the Jama’a was established. These included Masjid al-Nur, Masjid al-Ikhlas, and Masjid al-Rahman, and each of these was led by an Amir of the respective Masjid. Overseeing all three was Sheikh Hossam al-Rayyan. Importantly, the link between these mosques that made up this network was based on weekly interactions and close coordination between the respective mosques of the organization. Every Tuesday, rather than Friday, primarily to avoid state surveillance, the different branches and groups from the mosques would congregate at the Masjid in Shari Luxor. These meetings included Jama’a members not only from Imbaba but members of the organization residing in other informal settlements including Bulaq al-Daqrur and al-Umraniyya. Imbaba alone brought 7,000 persons from as many as twenty-five different mosques, which, according to one former member, were the “largest groups of Jama’a members of any other neighborhood.”⁵³ It was in this period that Sheikh Jabir served as the “military” rather than spiritual or political leader chiefly responsible for military and “jihadist” operations.⁵⁴

In addition to the close coordination among the various mosques, the organizational structure of the Jama’a was carefully institutionalized and embedded in the quarter through a strict hierarchical structure. At the level of the executive there were the heads of the area (Amir al-Mantiqqah), the mosque (Amir al-Masjid), and the organization itself (Amir al-Jama’a). Overseeing the operation of these units, was a consultative council (Majlis al-Shura), which included all the Amirs and comprised the decision-making body of the organization on the ground. Finally, the day-to-day operations were the responsibility of officers responsible for finance, general security, and military operations.

Importantly, in order to successfully recruit individuals in the quarter, the organization also appointed an official spokesperson (mutahadith rasmi) at the level of the community who would speak on behalf of the Jama’a in Imbaba. It was the responsibility of Amir al-Masjid, who possessed intimate knowledge of the local community to personally appoint every one of the local officers of the organization. Masjid al-Nur in Western Munira serves as a good example of this organizational structure. In the late 1980s and 1990s Amir al-Mantiqqa was Sheikh Hossam al-Saed, and Amir al-Masjid was Sheikh Ahmed Abdel Wahab. In this period, Amir al-Jama’a of Imbaba was Sheikh Emad Gohar who succeeded Mohamed Za’ar, and the spokesperson for al-Jama’a was Mohamed Abdel Yousef. During the 1992 clashes, it was Abdel Yousef who became Amir al-Jama’a.

In addition to Amir al-Mantiqqah and Amir al-Masjid, these local officers collected dues, organized the military wing, oversaw the security operations, and recruited youth. In Masjid al-Nur, which was the center of recruitment, Amir al-Mantiqqah, Hossam al-Rayyan, was the one chiefly responsible for these aspects of the organization. Significantly, al-Rayyan was a second-generation migrant from Upper Egypt and as such had great legitimacy among local residents. Indeed, in contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood in this period, al-Jama’a continued to privilege the organization’s security and military wings, which included an emphasis on military training and the training of cadres in methods to evade state security forces. Fridays were the days of training wherein selected members were instructed in karate and other martial arts and engaged in role-playing with other members who would play the role of the state’s security forces. Sheikh Gabir, the head of the military wing at the peak of the organization’s popularity in the neighborhood in the late 1980s and 1990s, personally trained new members in athletics and sports, especially football. Importantly, this training was conducted from early dawn to ten in the morning following which everyone would attend the Friday khutbah most often in Masjid al-Ikhlas in ‘Izbat al-Mufti, a stronghold of al-Jama’a influence at the time.

The congregational prayers in particular offered a social, spiritual, and political outlet and a distinctly congenial and communally oriented cultural space amid the squalor of daily life. These prayers were regularly held on the street (Salat al-Masaha) to accommodate the large numbers of devotees who eagerly looked forward to them. Unlike the spatially individuated mosques of middle-class Cairo, which are often built on very expansive grounds and set apart from daily street life, the storefront mosques of Imbaba are integrated into the street. It is here that a particular form of community ethic is fostered and where young children are given microphones and encouraged to introduce the prayers before the multitude of men who make up the congregation. As a consequence, those who joined the ranks of al-Jama‘a were rewarded with a profound sense of community and “fellow feeling.” Rank and file members often expressed great affection and loyalty for their “brothers” in the movement. When a member is imprisoned by Amn al-Dawla (state security), al-Jama‘a members often banded together, in collecting the necessary funds in order to employ competent lawyers for their friends “inside” (fi al-dakhil) and also to support the families of those incarcerated. This message of brotherhood, which was disseminated frequently by the Imams in their sermons, had particular resonance and appeal to residents in the informal settlements. This is because the majority of them, particularly those residing in the quarters of Western Munira, were living in a context of deeply fractured social relations, difficult and unpredictable forms of work, environmental hazards, and claustrophobic dwellings.

Another important service provided by al-Jama‘a was to improve the literacy of those youth who joined its ranks. Most young men in Western Munira, where there was only one elementary school and no secondary school at the time, said that they saw no future in education. Moreover, rarely could families afford to forego the labor of any member, no matter how young. The organization’s mosques partially compensated for the limited educational opportunities neighborhood residents faced. Former members of al-Jama‘a noted that through the memorization of the Qur’an and weekly religious lessons conducted by the shaykhs in the neighborhood mosques, youths learned how to read and write properly. To be sure, these lessons were conducted under strict disciplinary guidelines, and the young men coerced into memorizing verses from the Qur’an under threat of penalties. Nevertheless, these lessons offered the hitherto rare opportunity to receive a modest education at no cost.

Rules of Conduct and Militant Recruitment

In contrast to the recruitment of Muslim Brothers, but similar to other clandestine militant organizations, al-Jama’a implemented a far more stringent code of conduct designed to secure loyalty and to maintain a high level of commitment among its rank and file. According to former members of the Jama’a, members who do not follow certain obligations are punished in ways that guarantee loyalty to the organization and signal to other members not to stray.⁵⁵ A key method of accomplishing this is through Ta’zeer or ostracism. Members who do not comply by the rules of conduct and certain obligations in the form of attending prayer meetings and khutbahs regularly or dispute the strategic decision or moral positions of leaders faced a number of penalties. Most notably, these include financial penalties that are paid to the Jama’a’s leadership directly from their wages, and a form of social ostracism designed to generate discipline among the ranks and strengthen the loyalty of adherents to the cause. In the case of the latter, Jama’a leaders commanded members not to talk to the noncooperative individual and they rescinded the member’s privilege of participating in any collective activities of the organization. Former members noted that Ta’zeer was a particularly mulim (hurtful) form of punishment since by this time they were isolated from their families and other forms of social support and networks. Another punishment utilized is ‘Itikaf (meditative seclusion) whereby the individual is instructed to spend a period of up to one week inside the mosque, eat, sleep there, conduct daily maintenance, and, most importantly, is compelled to conduct additional prayers in isolation.

A number of actions warrant the penalties of Ta’zeer and ‘Itiqaf. First, this can occur when individual members conduct certain actions without the supervision of the leadership or amir. One example occurred in ‘Izbat al-Mufti when the Beni Hamed clan came into conflict with the Jama’a and Sheikh Ali Gabir attacked the Beni Mohamed without first consulting the leadership, which, in this case, was the amir of a Masgid in Imbaba. Under the guidelines of the Jama’a, any lower-ranking member in the organization must inform the amir prior to any retaliatory action against individuals or groups outside of the Group. Second, if a member is instructed to conduct an operation and he does not fulfill this act the local amir of the mosque reports this infraction to Amir al-Mantiqqa who decides on the punishment for the individual. Former members informed the author of a number of these actions. These included minor and major offenses to the leadership such as when a member is told to clean the Masjid, collect donations, memorize the Quran in its entirety, or spread the Da’wa (Islamic call) in the neighborhood to the satisfaction of the emir of the settlement.

Given these stringent codes of conduct the key question is, why do members join in the first place? There are of course those true believers who join for religious reasons and are genuinely inspired by the religious classes and moral message associated with the congregational sermons and the Da’wa. As one former member recalled, one amir used to gather us Shabaab (youth), read to us the Quran because we couldn’t, and give each of us one pound after each lesson.⁵⁶ He gave us a “sense of community … a sense of communal love.”⁵⁷ Others joined simply for reasons of social security and a sense of solidarity. As one former member put it, “some of us joined so that we could feel stronger … and to have others stand with us in times of need and trouble.”⁵⁸

Doubtless these are factors that induced many to join the middle-class Muslim Brotherhood organization. However, the profound social and economic transformations in Imbaba since the 1970s meant that many who joined the militants did so as a result of reasons unique to the informal settlements of Cairo. As former members acknowledged, some individuals who joined were “criminals” and they made their way into the Jama’a to engage in theft and extortion. A number of others joined to escape blood feuds (Tar) in their home villages in Upper Egypt. Indeed, a number of residents noted that those Upper Egyptians that joined, and there were a number who did, arrived to ‘Izbat al-Mufti, Beshteel and Osim to escape conflict in their town of origin although they also acknowledged that the majority migrated for economic reasons to “make money” in the city.⁵⁹

Finally, it is important to highlight that in the Western Munira sections of Imbaba, a large number of young men and juveniles who joined the militants did so as a second choice when they experienced socioeconomic barriers of entry with respect to their aspiration to join the Muslim Brotherhood. This was evident in both spatial and class terms in two ways. First, the Muslim Brothers in the neighborhood often utilized Masjid al-Rahman in the more socially and spatially distant middle-class sections of Imbaba “far away from Munira beyond Shari al-Buiyyi.” A second important barrier to entry into the Brotherhood for the young men in Western Munira was simply their lack of education, prospects, and general economic and social marginalization. This is the reason why a number of members regularly complained that even when they attempted to join the Ikhwan they were not chosen since the Brotherhood required upwardly mobile, middle-class, and lower-middle-class recruits. “They want,” one lamented, “those who have ras maal (capital) or a university degree so they can make use of them.”⁶⁰

Explaining Militant Violence: Tagheer Al-Munkar and the Struggle for Law and Order in a Heterogeneous Community

One of the most important challenges for clandestine organizations and social movements is not only to generate commitment among their rank and file, but also to establish a source of legitimate law and order. Islamists have only been partially successful in this endeavor. In this regard, and in the case of militant organizations in particular, the central principle of taghher al-munkar, which serves as a key source of ideational legitimacy, recruitment, and popular mobilization, also functions as a central instrument in securing territorially based political and economic control. However, in the context of a community divided along the lines of sect, class, kinship, and gender militant activists not only faced state repression, they also encountered a daunting challenge in establishing a monopoly over law and order in their efforts at building a “state within a state.” This is evidenced in the way militant members clashed with the Copts as well as kin groups and women in the informal settlements of Western Munira.

In this poorer quarter of Imbaba the attraction of many local residents and young men to the principle of tagheer al-munkar had very much to do with a perceived moral and social corruption (al-fasad al-akhlaqi) in the neighborhood. It is a state of affairs that the Jama’a were intent on remedying, albeit often through coercive and violent means. One incident, which exemplifies the “protection racket” aspect, associated with the Jama’a’s methods, inspired Tariq, a long-standing member of the Jama’a at the time, to renounce his membership in the organization. In this instant, a married landlord solicited an unmarried woman living in one of the apartments in the neighborhood for sex, and he threatened to evict her if she did not comply. Subsequently, she sent word to Jama’a members who then forcibly removed the man from his home and physically assaulted him. However, the man eventually donated 1,000 pounds to Masjid al-Rahman in al-‘Itimad street and persuaded the Jama’a to evict the woman from her apartment. When Tariq went to the amir of the Masjid to complain and criticize the expulsion of the woman from her home he was duly punished for insubordination, forced into ‘itikaf (meditative seclusion), and fined a fee of twenty pounds. It was this incident, among others, that led to his withdrawal from the Jama’a.

Yet another example illustrates the way in which the implementation of tagheer al-munkar by militant activists in the neighborhood regularly resulted in fueling what emerged as a pattern of inter-sectarian tensions and violence. In this one instance, a coffee shop owner and Coptic Christian in ‘Izbat al-Mufti, Abdel Labib was commanded by a well-known member of the Jama’a, Mustafa al-Rayan, to shut down his coffee shop on the grounds that he allowed the consumption of alcohol on his premises despite there being no formal ban against alcohol consumption. A fight quickly ensued between the Copt and al-Rayan and, as al-Rayan informed me, he made a complaint to Amir al-Jama’a at the time, Amir Mutwali, but received no response. After four days with no response from any members of the leadership of the organization, al-Rayan organized Jama’a members at a meeting in Masjid al-Rahman al-‘Itimad and formed what Jama‘a members term the Khamsaat, a formation of five rows each consisting of five individuals who stand side by side in the Masjid, and refer to themselves as martyrs. In this instance al-Rayan led a Khamsaat in military formation to the coffee house of Abdel Labib. By Mustafa al-Rayan’s owned admission they “destroyed” the coffee shop, stole the video player and television, and caused what Abdel Labib said was more than seventy pounds worth of damages. In retaliation the Copts in the quarter responded and attacked members of the Jama’a, which escalated into a larger inter-sectarian conflict in the quarter.

To these inter-sectarian tensions, rooted in the marked increase in economic competition and rivalries in the quarter, the Jama’a interjected what proved to be an incendiary message directed toward some of their most ardent and committed followers intended to legitimize anti-Copt violence on “religious” grounds. One example of this message relayed through one of their Imam’s sermons cast doubt on the moral intentions and character of Ahl al-Kitab (the People of the Book) as well as unbelievers (Kufar):

If the Jama’a came into frequent conflict with Copts in ‘Izbat al-Mufti resulting in violence, another equally important source of conflict had to do with the organization’s relationship to members of the newly urbanized kinship groups. However, the relationship between Islamists and kinship networks is a complicated one. To be sure, far from an archetype of the past, kinship networks in Cairo’s informal fringe continue to have great influence among the local population especially among the poorer and more recent migrants from rural areas. Nevertheless, the nature and consequences of violence between the militant activists and clan elders and larger kinship-based associations reflect a pattern of violent conflict as well as tacit cooperation.

One illustrative incident involved a violent conflict between the Beni Mohamed clan, led by Safwat Abdel Ghani,⁶² whose members represent new rural migrants from Assiut and Sohag to ‘Izbat al-Mufti. When the wife of a member of the Jama’a (wearing the Niqab) disposed her garbage in front of the coffee house of Mohamed Ali Magbouli, a member of the Beni Mohamed clan of Assiut, Ali insulted her and she complained to Amir Masjid al-Nur who then organized a Jama’a Khamsaat, marched to Magbouli’s coffee shop, and assaulted him. In retaliation, members of the Beni Mohamed clan fired on a number of the Jama’a. Quickly the violence between the Islamists and the Beni Mohamed escalated. Sheikh Gabir organized his own personal security force drawn from Masjid al-Ikhlas and Masjid al-Nur and marched to ‘Izbat al-Mufti in a show of force, beat Magbouli, and vandalized his car. In the Friday prayers that followed a group from the Beni Mohamed went to Masjid al-Ikhlas and fired into the mosque killing one person. At a Tuesday Jama’a meeting held at Masjid Sayid al-Mursileen, and after three days of clashes, the Imam, himself from Assiut, resolved the conflict, vouching for the Beni Mohamed as “good Muslims” and persuading the Jama’a to make peace with them. The conflict was resolved when the leader of the Beni Mohamed paid damages to the Masjid and, according to local residents, built a second story for Masjid al-Ikhlas. Importantly, in this instance, while traditional conflict resolution mechanisms were used to resolve the dispute the reason that this proved effective was primarily because those members of the Jama’a chiefly responsible for negotiating an end to the conflict with the elders of the Beni Mohamed hailed from the same clan.

Nevertheless, despite frequent conflict between Islamist militants and individuals belonging to local clans in the neighborhood, the notion of tagheer al-munkar found a popular resonance among a wide range of local residents. Indeed, a number of former members of the Jama’a as well as local residents not formally aligned with the organization acknowledged that they were deeply attracted to the militants understanding of tagheer al-munkar. That is the notion that it was a collective rather than an individual obligation. They felt strongly that this interpretation established both a sense of peace and religious morality in the neighborhood, and this attraction was markedly evident by the hundreds of residents who attended the khutbahs on a regular basis and who clearly found the message of morality associated with the idea of commanding the good and forbidding evil an obligation as well as a necessity in their conflict-ridden quarter. They noted that the idea of changing “immoral ways” by hand (al-yad) and not just via Jihad was crucially important in that it gave them a sense of authority in the neighborhood and a great deal of ihtiram (respect).

Importantly, former members of the Jama’a spoke of tagheer al-munkar in very similar terms as their notions of tar or blood feud and it was clear in my interviews that the notion of morality, honor, punishment, and justifiable reprisals associated with the tradition of tar was perceived as a form of tagheer al-munkar. In this respect, tagheer al-munkar resonated deeply with Upper Egyptian norms, which despite the fast-paced developments of Imbaba still resonate strongly in certain quarters of the neighborhood. The adherence to, and implementation of, tagheer al-munkar also provided militants with an ideological advantage and legitimacy in the neighborhood vis-à-vis the Muslim Brotherhood. According to former members of the Jama’a, the Ikhwan not only do not abide by the proper understanding and interpretation of tagheer al-munkar as part of their strategy and Da’wa; they also “do not hold conferences or Khutbas against the government.”⁶³ While this was not always the case even in the late 1990s, it was indeed a time of political accommodation on the part of the Brotherhood’s leadership, a state of affairs that the Jama’a routinely exploited in their efforts at popularizing their own brand of Islamist activism and to outbid the Muslim Brotherhood in mobilizing adherents to their cause.

As inter-sectarian violence continued in the neighborhood long-standing socioeconomic as well as religious divisions have deepened. Indeed, as a stronghold of Cairo’s Coptic minority, housing five Coptic Churches and four Anglican Churches within a space of only three blocks, Imbaba continues to be a site of inter-sectarian tensions and frequent incidences of violence. This pattern of violence pitting Salafists against Coptic Christians, which emerged in the 1990s, increased in the years just prior to Mubarak’s ouster and in the aftermath of the Tahrir uprising. On May 12, 2011, less than four months after the uprising, the Supreme Court of Prosecution arrested twenty-three Salafists for their alleged involvement in inter-sectarian clashes that followed the burning of Saint Mena Church in Imbaba earlier that month. The Salafists were charged with terrorism and murder as well as vandalism and the destruction of public and private property. The ensuing violence left fifteen Copts dead and injured hundreds of others reigniting dangerous levels of religious violence. In response to the violence, and as a result of a notable absence of a legitimate and impartial police presence in the neighborhood, members of the Coptic community organized small groups of “self-defense” units to protect not only the churches but also small businesses and coffee shops owned by Copts.⁶⁴

The Role of the Local Strongman: Baltagiyya Al-‘Ataat and the “Market” in Coercion

The association of al-Jama’a with the institution of the local strongman, or Baltagi, provided the organization with another source of recruitment as well as another important source of conflict. From the point of view of the Jama’a, these strongmen served three important functions in the organization’s attempts to expand its popularity among local residents and to build a shadow government under the radar of state authorities: the coercive enforcement of informal contracts, the extraction of “taxes” from local residents and merchants, and as a means of providing material incentives in the form of monetary compensation for some rank and file members, albeit generated from illicit and coercive means.

According to former members in ‘Izbat al-Mufti and Beshteel, leaders of the organization preferred “clever people” who were “healthy and physically strong.” Some, albeit certainly not all, of these “strong” youth were well known in the neighborhood as baltagiyya (strong men) and they were selected to be part of the military wing and to participate in antistate “defense campaigns” (Hamlaat al-Tameen). In addition to the strong men recruited by al-Jama’a, young boys (subyan), ranging from thirteen to fifteen years old, were also recruited into the organization’s Istihlal (praise) wing. The latter’s primary responsibility was to ride their bicycles and man checkpoints to detect state security personnel, particularly during the Tuesday and Friday prayers and meetings. Leaders, responsible for recruitment at the time, acknowledged that the baltagiyya rarely joined for religious reasons and many did not attend prayers regularly. Rather, they joined because, as one former recruiter put it, “street life is dangerous and there is a great deal of competition, rivalries and violence between the Baltagiyya.” Thus, joining al-Jama’a was not only a good way of joining a large group of like-minded people; it “assured the Baltagi the opportunity to earn income.”

Indeed, while the Baltagiyya phenomenon is commonly associated with general criminality, in its modern manifestation it is closely linked to the increasing levels of wealth and socio-spatial disparity, and most particularly to the great expansion of informal labor concentrated in informal housing areas such as those in Imbaba. To be sure the baltagiyya are distinct from informal labors and marginalized youth in the neighborhood in important ways (most notably in their propensity to engage in violence and to participate in the outsourcing of coercion) but because they often must take on informal jobs, it is difficult to separate the two groups in socioeconomic terms. Many of these baltagiyya work as day laborers or odd jobbers, and a significant number joined the ranks of al-Jama’a. Importantly, in the case of Western Munira, recruiters acknowledged that most of the baltagiyya who joined the al-Jama’a did so not so much for the opportunity of engaging in new forms of racketeering, but simply because they had no other alternative. “There is,” as one activist noted, “little work in the informal settlements and no infrastructure or transportation to the City to find work.”⁶⁵ It is this state of constant economic and social insecurity, rather than simply the poverty or high unemployment, that can quickly transform these youth into “Baltagiyya,” serving as freelance operators who can, as Adel Iskander has aptly noted, act like an “unofficial urban mercenary force providing services to the highest bidder.”

Moreover, local residents in Imbaba distinguish three varieties of Baltagiyya with only two categories of urban mercenaries linked to the security arm of the state or militant Islamist activism, albeit in different ways. The first group is known as Baltagiyya al-Bashawat (thugs of the elite or aristocracy) and, among local residents, these are considered the “thugs” who are linked to the State Security forces and who do the dirty work of the political and military elite. The second category is Baltagiyya al-Futuwwa or the chivalrous baltagiyya. Traditionally these young men were revered (and feared) by local residents and generally considered a legitimate segment of social and political life. They served as agents of protection buttressing the legitimacy of traditional authority by aiding in the enforcement of informal social contracts following the resolution of local conflicts via traditional methods. The Jama’a recruited some of these Futuwwa into their military wing because of their legitimacy among local residents and also because they are known for their physical prowess and knowledge of the security forces.

Finally, and most importantly, in terms of those considered opportunists and freelance operators of coercion are the Baltagiyya al-‘Ataat (literally, the enforcers of contracts or “bids”). In the context of the erosion of traditional authority, the Baltagiyya ‘Ataat emerged as powerful agents of coercion in the neighborhood. Many were enlisted by militant leaders to serve two important functions denoted by their name, ‘Ataat: the enforcement of informal labor contracts, and the extraction of revenue, or “taxes,” generated from local residents and commercial establishments. These were the youth who regularly used violence or the threat of violence to extort fees from the Suq (market). This included implementation of an informal tax regime on informal street peddlers, on vehicles parking or passing through the neighborhood’s narrow alleys, and on formal commercial establishments and retailers.

But if the baltagiyya provided an opportunity for the Jama’a leadership, they also presented a key dilemma for the organization. On the one hand, the association of al-Jama’a with the institution of the local strongman provided the organization with an additional source of recruitment and they were an important component of the military wing of the organization. On the other hand, Jama’a leaders experienced great difficulty in generating discipline and ideological commitment from them in a sustained fashion. Initially, the organization’s leadership was able to institute a modicum of law and order by recruiting the baltagiyya into their ranks, but ultimately they were not able to limit the latter’s violent excesses in Western Munira which served as a key constraint in the expansion of their popularity among local residents and resulted in defections of a significant number of rank and file members of the organization. Three key issues were important in this regard: the method of recruitment of the baltagiyya, the coercive methods used by strong men to generate revenue for the organization, and the attempt on the part of local leaders of al-Jama’a to sanction the coercive methods of the baltagiyya on religious grounds. The latter had the unintended consequence of undermining the ideological legitimacy of the Islamic Group in the quarter.

Importantly, local residents describe the recruitment of Baltagiyya al-‘Ataat by militants in starkly different and far less selective terms from the one used to generate high levels of commitment from the organization’s general rank and file, but one uncannily similar to the process and guidelines (kuras shuruut) job recruiters employ in contracting informal workers in the construction firms in the neighborhood. One resident familiar with the process explained: “When there is a demand for them [Baltagiyya al-‘Ataat], the patron offers a tender [‘ataat] at competitive prices and whosoever has good reputation in the market wins. Of course, some in the ‘Izba have regular clients that they have built over time.” The difference of course is that in the heyday of the Jama’a’s recruitment drives in Western Munira the “contractor” of Baltagiyya al-‘Ataat was oftentimes a local resident harboring strong allegiance to the organization in the quarter.

As is the case with the recruitment of cadres, generating revenue is another key challenge for any clandestine organization operating in the shadow of an authoritarian state. In the case of the Jama’a it is important to note that the organization generated funds through noncoercive as well as coercive means. Indeed, the bulk of the funding was locally generated and based on local donations, dues, and fees collected on Tuesdays and Fridays at prayers and meetings where as many as 7,000 to 8,000 individuals were in attendance. The financial system was underpinned by the dense networks of small Masajid not registered by the Ministry of Religious Affairs all of which were linked to the memberships and maintained by weekly meetings and prayer groups. That is, while the funding was gathered informally it was done through a highly centralized fashion overseen by the amir of Financial Affairs. Moreover, most of the investment and funding sources of the Jama’a centered on smaller enterprises focused on the domestic market. Retail chains such as Tawhid al-Nur and other small shops specialized in selling Islamic dress, clothing, belts and other attire, and income from livestock raising projects (Nishat Tarbiyyat al-Mawashi) and the selling of meat from livestock raised in Assiut, al-Minia, and other Upper Egyptian cities provided another source of legitimate revenue. Another source of funding was in the sale of cassettes of sermons of Egyptian as well as Saudi Arabian Wahhabist preachers sold at the mosques in the neighborhood. This was designed not only to generate profit but also to raise the consciousness of followers. At the height of the Jama’a’s popularity former members noted that each Masjid sold approximately 250 cassettes that would be collected by the leadership of the organization from all the mosques generating annual revenue of upward of 2 million Egyptian pounds. Since these cassettes were not licensed or taxed by the state, they represented an important source of funding from informal trade for the organization.

A second source of funds generated primarily through coercive means involved the participation of the Baltagiyya al-‘Ataat. Under the authority and guidance of Amir Majlis al-Shura who was responsible for the financing of the organization, many of these baltagiyya were put in charge of organizing and staffing “Zakat Committees” and collecting, in the words of one participant, “donations from the street.” By their own admission, even some of the most devout members stated that they would keep a small amount to themselves with the tacit approval of the Jama’a leaders in lieu of, or as a supplement to, their regular salaries. However, what distinguished the discursive designation of which individual among the ranks was a Baltagi Futuwwa or a Baltagi ‘Ataat hinged on who joined the organization primarily for opportunistic reasons. To be sure, the Jama’a recruited from both groups, which often resulted in rivalries and conflict among the baltagiyya and between the latter and the Jama’a organization.

Nevertheless, a former committed Jama’a member informed me that the Baltagiyya al-‘Ataat in particular joined because they found it lucrative and that they regularly extorted money form store owners, coffee house owners, housewives, and “anyone they could.” Indeed, from the perspective of the Jama’a, as well as many local residents, these were the most divisive variety of baltagiyya since they not only extracted ‘ataat (fees) from local residents by force, they were also involved in selling and distributing illicit drugs thus further degrading the moral status of the community. The challenge for the Jama’a leadership was not only that the lines of division between these categories were blurred, but that the rules of conduct and obligations so important to generate commitment and trust did not apply to those recruited but who were more interested in racketeering rather than the ideological program of the Jama’a. The challenge for the Jama’a leadership emerged as the lines of division between Baltagiyya al-Futuwa and Baltagiyya al-‘Ataat blurred, and coercion for opportunistic reasons became indistinguishable from that formerly deployed by al-Jama’a in the service of mobilizing resistance against the authoritarians state. At the heart of the problem was that the rules of conduct and obligations so important in generating commitment, trust, and discipline among the ranks did not apply to those baltagiyya more interested in racketeering and personal gain rather than the ideological and political program of the Jama’a.

If the excessive forms of coercion and violence deployed against local residents and commercial interests diminished the organization’s popularity among local residents, its legitimacy was further undermined by the efforts of the Jama’a to legitimate the coercive tactics of those baltagiyya under their charge in religious terms. Specifically, leaders in the organization referred to the extortion of revenue and “taxes” from local residents and merchants as a form of Fard al-‘Ataat, that is, a religious duty for those working on behalf of the cause of the organization, and some leaders and some rank and file alike went as far as to promote the idea that stealing from gold shops, groceries and coffee shops owned by Copts (Kufar) is Hallalu al-Sirqa (a permissible, albeit illicit, form of primitive capital accumulation) and an important aspect of their campaign of Tagheer al-munkar wa al-amr bi al-Ma’ruf.

Economic Crisis and the Erosion of Traditional Authority: Militants versus Kin

If a major objective of any clandestine organization is to build institutions of law and order so as to establish hegemonic control and a monopoly of coercion over local populations, a major challenge in this endeavor for militant activists is how to successfully supplant, or displace, the authority of local rivals. In the case of Imbaba, the most important source of rivalry for al-Jama’a was the customary judicial systems, which underpin traditional kin or regionally based local authorities. Among the most important of these were the regional community associations (rawabit iqlimiyya), which traditionally resolved disputes among kin through reconciliation committees (lijan al-sulh) of an informal deliberative council (al-majlis al-‘urfi). A major reason that al-Jama’a were able to establish what their leaders termed the “Emirate of Imbaba” (i.e., “a state within a state”) in Western Munira was because they were able to capitalize on the erosion in the legitimacy and social relevance of these institutions to local residents. Moreover, an important source of grievance among local residents that played an important role in many joining the Jama’a had to do with the erosion in the authority of local notables which was greatly diminished as a result of two developments: the economic transformations, predating the rise of al-Jama’a, which profoundly altered the socioeconomic conditions in the quarter, and the increased regulation and co-optation of these informal institutions by state authorities through legal as well as coercive means.

Under traditional law and custom, it was the wealthy and notable family elders, most often possessing an average of 10–20 feddans, that controlled the village and resolved local disputes. Importantly, these local notables also appointed individuals to the lejan al-sulh (reconciliation committees), and while strict hierarchies were enforced the latter generally enjoyed the legitimacy of local authority among local residents. In great part this was due to the manner in which the Omdas (village governors) were appointed. The traditional requirements for appointment included three important criteria that ensured their legitimacy among local residents: that he is nominated by the local residents of the village, perceived to hold a “good reputation,” and that he be a medium landowner, neither poor nor exceedingly wealthy but sufficiently “comfortable” to ensure a form of evenness. The wealthiest landowners were rarely chosen to be Omdas because of the perceived bias such wealth would necessarily engender.⁶⁶

The legitimacy of these traditional authorities was further enhanced by relatively transparent, if not democratic, process of dispute settlement. Prior to 1992, informal councils (majalis ‘urfiyya) were presided over by the Omda and the Sheikh, the religious authority of the village who served as the Omda’s assistant. The disputants would meet at the Omda’s house, deliberate until a decision is made, and, in accordance with custom, the disputant who lost the case would be awarded with a gift by the one who was awarded the favorable decision. Moreover, the proceeding would be presided over by the reconciliation committee (lajnat al-Musalaha), which comprises kin elders of two or more clans involved in the dispute. Prior to 1997, when the state formally intervened in the neighborhood, and according to Sheikh Osman Mohamed of Osim village, these committees comprised five large families who would elect a representative to the committee who in turn would be formally approved by the Omda.⁶⁷

However, by the mid-1980s these customary justice systems underwent drastic changes as a result of three interrelated social and economic transformations: the influx of rural-to-urban migration, in-migration from other lower-class sections of Cairo, and the cyclical depression associated with construction trade during the era of the informal housing boom which was an important source of employment for many men and youth in Imbaba. Indeed, what is noteworthy is that, as a consequence of the absence of strong and legitimate state institutions and formalized labor relations, residents of the poorest sections in Western Munira came to increasingly rely on informal social institutions to negotiate their social relations. However, over the years, and prior to the mid-1990s, social and familial conflicts in Western Munira, and Osim, Beshteel, and ‘Izbat al-Mufti in particular, worsened in the context of the economic crisis and increasing competition in the informal labor and housing markets.

The disputes were often over agricultural plots in the home village. In the past these disputes were often mitigated by a brother who came to the city to find work but following the recession in the 1980s in Osim and ‘Izbat al-Mufti, the Omdas I interviewed in Western Munira noted that these brothers often laid claim to their lands back home in upper Egypt, and families were no longer able to resolve the situation on their own. Increasingly, problems of inheritance were referred to the police and the Omda and Sheikh would be asked by the police to appear before the judge to legitimate as well as to formalize the legal decision already reached by state authorities. Indeed, Sheikh Osman recalled that in the past, the majority of disputes he had to resolve had to do with tar (blood feuds), killings in addition to disputes over inheritance. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, the most common were inheritance problems, which usually occur among brothers. “We have had very little problems with ‘unsuriyya (clannism) or taifiyya (sectarianism) here in the past although tar (blood feud) was our biggest security problem in the old days.”⁶⁸

“Putting Out Fires”: Surveillance and the Securitization of Traditional Authority

However, while dramatic economic and social transformations undermined traditional authorities in ways that provided the context and opportunity for militants and some of their baltagiyya emissaries to fill the vacuum of sociopolitical life, this should not obscure the role of state coercion and surveillance that played a crucial role in exacerbating grievances of many residents that enhanced the popularity of al-Jama’a.

The ubiquitous nature of surveillance in authoritarian states is of course a matter of common knowledge and public concern. However, rarely are the consequences of this form of not-so hidden coercion apparent in terms of its consequences at the level of the community. Indeed, a key element associated with authoritarian states is the overlap and linkage between the formal regulatory and coercive arm of the state (whether legal, military, or intelligence), and the informal institutions at the level of the community that, taken together, are intended to simultaneously subdue dissent and expand and consolidate state power. However, the unintended consequences of this are the erosion of traditional authority, the enhanced popularity of antistate organizations, and, in the case of some of Cairo’s informal areas, the expansion in the market for informal sources of coercion.

Following the pivotal events of 1992, the Mubarak regime intervened in Imbaba and effectively upended the already weakened authority of the informal councils, Omdas, and Sheiks in the neighborhood. In contrast to previous decades, for example, the Omda is directly appointed by the Ministry of Interior and automatically becomes a member of the ruling party at both the local council and village level. Moreover, he receives funding directly from the state⁶⁹ rather than from local residents or from his land, as was the case in the past. Furthermore, while in the past the Omda wielded great influence in selecting the member of the Local Council (the local branch of the National Democratic Party at the time), the latter is now more often chosen from one of the wealthiest families. As one resident in Osim put it, “big families and wealth are [now] the two main means of getting into the Local Council.”⁷⁰ By the late 1990s, for example, in al-Waraq representatives of Malis al-Sha’ab were members of the most powerful and largest clans, the Hamdiyya and Amer clans, and the Local Council, the administrative arm of the National Party in Imbaba, was dominated by the clans of the Salmaniyya, Shawaykha, and Ashmuniyya. These are all families, which while not representing the biggest clans in Imbaba generated great wealth through land speculation (Chapter 1). Consequently, a major reason the government-appointed “leadership” of the local councils lost legitimacy is that they catered almost exclusively to the more affluent members of the local community. Moreover, in the eyes of most residents, local councils stood as a poor substitute for the traditional notables, whose weakened role was exemplified by the shallow reach of informal councils and reconciliation committees. Traditionally, these bodies arbitrated disputes, but the erosion of formerly legitimate institutions of social cohesion and control had rendered them increasingly irrelevant in Western Munira.

In 1997 the state further regulated the traditional institutions in Osim and other satellite villages in ways that transformed them into a veritable security arm of the state. In that year the regime passed Qarar Ta’ayeen al-Omid (Law of Appointing Omdas).⁷¹ Thus, by 1992 and formally in 1997, the Omda and Sheikh (Omda’s assistant) were appointed by the regime rather than by local residents; the membership of Lajnat al-Sulh had to be approved by the security forces; and the police rather than the informal councils took the lead in resolving familial as well as social disputes in the neighborhood. Moreover, the Ministry of Interior now forwarded selected individuals from the community and compelled the Omda to nominate them to the local council and assign them the task of monitoring residents. While the Omda in Osim informed me that the new system was “no problem,” it was very clear that the inability of having independence in appointments and the ill reputation it engendered among local residents were a source of great consternation for what are still traditional minded rural migrants with great attachment to their community.

A central function of the government-appointed Omdas became one of security rather than resolving local disputes. The Sheiks and Omdas were essentially transformed from Ghuffar, traditional caretakers of plots of land or apartment buildings in Cairo, to what local residents derisively termed Ghuffar al-Nizam, caretakers of the regime. “Our two main concerns are criminals in the village and security problems.”⁷² If the Omda is disconnected from local residents, the Sheikh or Omda’s assistant also lacks legitimacy. Residents complained that the Sheikh was not only appointed by the Ministry of Interior but that he had no religious background whatsoever and “comes from a military background: the Omda is paid not by the Minister of Education and the Sheikh but the Minister of Interior.”⁷³ To make matters worse for state-community relations, as one resident, ‘Alaa noted, “few government-appointed Imams at the Mosques in Osim are respected by local residents.” Indeed, they are treated with open disdain. For example, in the late 1990s, Sheikh Hassan Sa’eed appointed by the Ministry of Religious Endowment and who ran the Masjid in Osim was the only one of the government’s appointed Imams that the Omda and Sheikh noted as having any authority.

The responsibility of the Omda and Sheikh is to resolve local disputes, register voting-age residents for elections, issue personal IDs, confirm competency for the military drafts, and oversee issues having to do with security, farming fertilizers, and the irrigation of land from ground wells, and assist orphans. However, the Omda and Sheikh in Osim, Western Munira, acknowledged that by the late 1990s, the “most important duty” is to work with security authorities and “even if the resident is rich and has land to make sure he has moderate, democratic values.” They noted that the lieutenant (liwa) of the security forces informed the Omda and Sheikhs that their main role is now to build the “new social order” (bina Ijtima’ jadeed) which is composed of three issues: civil defense, the emergency laws, and to “put out fires.”⁷⁴ One Omda in Western Munira described succinctly the exact manner in which the former Mubarak regime designed and orchestrated its surveillance through the use of local intermediaries:

It is within this context that, and at the peak in their popularity, that militants were able to capitalize on the erosion of traditional authority in very specific ways. Specifically, the militant Islamic Group found it possible to diffuse a particular form of family-based Islamic norms through the establishment of the dense network of unregulated private mosques that provided a wide range of social services. While these social services were minimal, they were nevertheless far more substantial than those provided by kin-based or state institutions such as the local councils (majalis mahliyya) and governmental Developmental Associations (munazamat tanmiyya). As a consequence, Islamists largely supplemented both the state and the traditional Regional Community Associations (rawbit ‘iqlimiyya).

Furthermore, Islamist militants used their newfound institutions to legitimize their stringent codes of social control and they intervened to settle disputes in the quarter formerly resolved through customary judicial systems. They routinely imposed a strictly enforced code of behavior and discipline legitimized via the espousal of norms of social justice (al-‘adl al-ijtima’iyy) and presented local residents an “alternative lifestyle” in the context of very poor and squalid conditions.⁷⁶ These norms resonated strongly in the local community since they stood in marked contrast to both the neglect of the state and the ineffective and co-opted traditional kin-based institutions; that is, they approximated the normative outlook and “lived experience” of a large segment of Cairo’s urban poor.

Following the 1992 siege, the state did intervene to underwrite some basic infrastructural development. Yet as late as 2000, the rehabilitation of Imbaba’s poorest areas was only partial and failed to bolster the legitimacy of the state in the view of local residents. The minimal social services the state provided following Imbaba’s siege were largely financed by foreign aid rather than domestic sources. The bulk of these funds were allocated to extending electricity and paving roads – allocations made out of security considerations rather than a sincere interest in improving the material conditions of the community. Members of the local council (the local branch of the then ruling National Democratic Party) remained apprehensive about al-Jama‘a’s presence in their neighborhood. They expressed great frustration with the government’s less-than-sufficient assistance and were well aware that residents held them in low regard in comparison to al-Jama‘a.⁷⁷ Indeed, when I returned to visit in the summer of 2015 very little State or foreign assistance was in evidence and, by most accounts, the changes following the 1992 siege have been superficial: unemployment remained high, housing scarce, and health problems prevalent. As one resident put it, the Islamists did not spread in Imbaba just because there was sewage or there was not sewage.⁷⁸

How Poverty Matters

The vast literature on political radicalization and terrorism has reached a somewhat troubling consensus that relegates social and economic conditions to the back burner in terms of explaining the “root causes” of religious, and particularly Islamist, militancy. Scholars such as Alan Krugman and Marc Sagemen, for example, contend that since most militant leaders are generally from a middle- or even upper-class backgrounds, this indicates the lack of correlation between economic status and political radicalization, militancy, and terrorism.⁷⁹ In other words, poverty is not an explanatory variable. The problem with this line of analysis is that the attempt to formulate a generalized model of radicalization that presupposes an equally generalized conception of poverty obscures the locally specific economic contexts and networks within which the process of radicalization is deeply embedded. What the case of Egypt demonstrates is that it is not poverty as such that sets the stage for militant recruitment. Rather, it is the condition of economic and social insecurity that is gravely compounded by economic downturns and recessionary cycles. I do not mean to imply that this exacerbated insecurity is both a necessary and sufficient condition for militant recruitment. There is little in the way of a consensus on a generalized theory of political radicalization, and some scholars, most notably Martha Crenshaw, have argued that it is both a process that evolves over time and that it is context specific. In the case of Imbaba, for example, historical contingency and an externally induced economic crisis combined to set the stage, giving young men a motivation to join the militant al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya. Neglected by the state and acutely aware of their social marginality in relation to the more prosperous middle-class quarters, the young men of Imbaba were drawn to a particular discourse that was crafted to accommodate all manner of grievances. Moreover, al-Jama‘a promised, however unrealistically, to provide employment, social cohesion, and moral uplift.

While these types of conditions provide an enabling environment for recruitment into social movements generally, they do not adequately address the question of why some join Islamist moderate movements as opposed to militant organization. This requires the difficult task of empirically grounded research. In the case of Egypt, socioeconomic conditions provided the context for recruitment for both moderate and militant organizations. What really made the difference were the opportunity structures that are grounded in class and social dynamics. The most poignant experiences that I had interviewing militants in Imbaba were when I asked why they did not join the Muslim Brotherhood. The response was always immediate and unanimous: “We have tried to join them, but they will not have us.” The barriers to entry guarded by the middle-class moderate Islamist movements were insurmountable for the scores of lower-class and poor Egyptians. In Imbaba, the young men wanted desperately to be included in a movement that promised social mobility and political voice. They simply did not have the social and cultural capital to do so. The exacting and complex screening and vetting processes barred them from entry, denied selection, or led to their expulsion at the latter stages of the recruitment process. As a result, many young men who might otherwise have become moderate Islamists were thus left vulnerable to recruiters from militant groups whose history of violent confrontation with the state reflected not simply their protest against its negligence and coercive apparatus, but an extremist project of toppling Arab regimes and promoting jihad worldwide.

Transnational Linkages and Islamist and Ethnic Mobilization

One of the central arguments of this book is that economic globalization is not a homogenous process. The course of economic and political development, even within the constraints of the international economy, produces a variety of outcomes based on the type of transnational economic linkages, the balance between state elites and civil society groups, and locally specific cultural traditions. This comparative study of Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia provides some general conclusions with respect to the relationship between shifts in the international economy, the expansion of informal markets, and the emergence of new identity-based forms of collective action.

First, the increase in “internationalization” (i.e., the increase in capital and labor mobility) in the form of remittance inflows does indeed produce similar macro-institutional responses. In the cases of Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia, in the boom, these capital inflows circumvented official financial institutions and undercut the states’ fiscal and regulatory capacities while simultaneously fueling the expansion of the informal market in foreign currency. In each case, the integration of domestic financial sectors with international financial markets increased with the expansion of parallel, or black, market activities. The consequence of this capital mobility was to weaken the effectiveness of capital controls imposed by formal banking institutions. During the era of the boom in labor remittances, this forced state elites in all three countries to forego some control over the allocation of these capital inflows in the hope of capturing at least a fraction of these resources.

Second, absent bureaucratic regulation, these informal markets came to be “regulated” by indigenous religious and ethnic networks. However, while these informal markets expanded in the context of the ineffectiveness of legal and bureaucratic institutions, they did not represent the free interplay of market forces. Moreover, the expansion of informality over the last three decades cannot be attributed merely to globally induced economic changes; it was caused primarily by deliberate state policy including excessive state regulation, cutbacks in social services as part of economic austerity measures, and extreme levels of state repression. In addition, the consequences of these developments have varied depending on the specific socioeconomic features of each country.

Finally, since capital accumulation generated by the monopolization of labor remittances generally accrued to private groups, state elites met this political challenge with brutal reprisals against newly mobilized groups in civil society operating within the informal economy. Ultimately, despite their initial similarities, the divergent outcomes in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia attest to the crucial role of informal institutional arrangements in explaining political developments, namely identity-based forms of collective action. In this instance, the development of Islamic and ethnic politics in the three countries reflects prior political conflicts between state elites and actors in civil society over the monopolization of informal markets. Informal social networks, particularly religious and ethnic-based trust networks, played a key role in collective mobilization by regulating informal financial and labor markets and controlling entry into lucrative informal economic activities.

Informal Markets, Collective Action, and the State: Breaking Down the Conventional State-Society Dichotomy

Whereas most scholarship on the state and civil society in Africa and the Middle East has often assumed a falsely dichotomous and antagonistic relationship between state and society in developing countries, the politics of informal markets in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia has confirmed speculation that they are closely intertwined. In these countries, the state and groups engaged in informal activity have operated both symbiotically and in conflict – the latter at moments when the state has perceived the parallel economy as depriving it of significant revenue; the former when key state agents, who are engaged in currency trading, sought to accumulate wealth and cooperate with informal entrepreneurs. In Egypt and Sudan, state elites not only participated in the burgeoning expansion of black marketeering but also eventually promoted Islamic financial institutions in an attempt to corner the market on these foreign exchanges. Ironically, this development allowed for the consolidation of an Islamist commercial class that facilitated the latter’s subsequent capture of state power in Sudan and promoted the political profile of the Islamists in Egypt.

Similarly, over the same period the dictatorial regime of Siad Barre in Somalia encouraged the not-so-“hidden” economy by removing all restrictions on remittance inflows and instituting a system whereby merchants could import goods on a free market basis. Due to historical and institutional conjunctures and the social structure specific to Somalia, these policies aggravated clan cleavages, facilitating the societal collapse that ensued. While the state in all three countries enjoyed a systemic connection with, and even stimulated, informal economic activities as a way to promote political patronage, all three states eventually had to react violently against what Polanyi has termed “market society.”¹ As the informalization process continued, all three societies conformed to the dictates of a self-regulated market in the context of weak regulatory institutions. In Egypt and Sudan, the development of Islamic financial institutions offered protection for the few inspired by ideological linkages with political Islam by organizing their access to money supply under an institutionalized market system. In Somalia, no institutional protection was forthcoming and with the collapse of traditional structures a new and unprecedented level of social disintegration set in.²

To elaborate on these general propositions in more specific empirical terms, in the first section of the book I provided an analysis of the oil boom years and their effect on state-society relations in ways that resulted in the rise of a new politics of identity in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia. The subsequent three chapters detailed the relationship between the inflow of labor remittances and its role in Islamic and ethnic politics in the three countries. Chapter 1 on Egypt detailed the ways in which workers’ remittances and the flow of petrodollars in the boom provided initially capitalization of Islamic banks and a host of Islamic investment companies that operated outside the system of state regulation. Along with labor migration this new “Islamic economy” resulted in raising the political profile of the middle-class Islamist movement in Egypt. I also argued that the boom in labor export and remittance inflows helped shape Egyptian national economic policy in important ways. In particular, out-migration and the expansion of the informal economy afforded the Egyptian state enough “relative autonomy” to expand the private sector and accelerate the decentralization of the country’s economy, which led to the internationalization of the Egyptian economy. However, these policies had two important unintended consequences. First, economic reform policies opened the door for Islamic financial institutions, which helped popularize the Islamic movement in Egypt. Second, it inadvertently facilitated a boom in informal housing and the informalization of the labor market in the poorer sections of Cairo. The latter, in particular, helped set the social and economic conditions that were to provide a fertile ground for the recruitment of Islamist militants.

Chapter 2 chronicled the political economy of Sudan during the same period. As in Egypt, in Sudan the remittance boom produced a similar macro-institutional response as the flood of labor remittances similarly circumvented official financial institutions, undercutting the state’s fiscal and regulatory capacity and fueling the expansion of informal foreign currency trade. I showed that these initial developments paralleled those of Sudan’s northern neighbor in two interrelated ways. First, as in Egypt, the boom witnessed the rise of a distinct Islamist-commercial class. Second, Islamists activists were able to successfully monopolize both informal finance and the Islamic banking sector. However, in contrast to Egypt, by the summer of 1989 Sudanese Islamists were able to take over the levers of state power via a military coup. I attributed this divergent political development to Sudan’s weaker state capacity, the extreme weakness of Sudan’s formal banking system, and the uninterrupted overvaluation of the Sudanese pound in this period. Consequently, in contrast to Egypt, the financial power of the Muslim Brethren (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen) continued to increase in relationship to the state, and the latter continued to profit from the informal financial (i.e., “black”) market.

Chapter 3 addressed the impact of remittances on clan politics in Somalia during the boom. In comparison to Egypt and Sudan, Somalia possesses the weakest state capacity with almost no formal financial institutions of any kind. While I showed that the boom in remittances also reduced the Somali state’s ability to regulate the economy, I also highlighted the fact that the consequences of this development differed in important ways. Specifically, in contrast to both Egypt and Sudan during the boom, in Somalia informal financial networks facilitated a thriving commercial sector comprised of firms oriented around kinship networks (i.e., clans). It was not religious or class affiliations, but rather ethnic mobilization that became the most politically salient. The Somali case poses the important question: why would a country with an exclusively Muslim population not go the way of Egypt and Sudan? I attributed this difference to two factors: first, the very dearth of private, formally organized institutions necessitated the reliance on household economies; second, the manner in which the informal channels utilized to transfer remittances operated had the consequence of reinforcing the clan and subclan cleavages in economic and political terms.

In the second section of Black Markets and Militants I examined changes in state-society relations in the three countries in the context of recession, economic reform, and, in the case of Somalia, state collapse. I maintained that this period of economic contractions was indeed positively correlated with new levels of political violence, albeit with different consequences for civil society in the three countries. More specifically, I argued that the post-1986 period, characterized by “shrinkage” in the size of informal foreign currency trade and economic reforms, resulted in the reconfiguration of informal economic and social organization with different consequences in each country. In all three countries, as the financial and political power of groups engaged in the informal economy rose, state elites struck back against the informal realm. Beginning with Egypt, in Chapter 4, I showed that only in Egypt was this successful. Specifically, in 1991 the Egyptian government liberalized the exchange rate in order to discourage foreign currency speculation and to re-direct labor remittances into formal institutions. As intended, financial liberalization did undercut the Islamist monopolization of informal finance. However, rather than eliminate informal economic activities altogether, these policies altered the social composition of the informal economy. In particular, as in other labor exporters, a key consequence of the internationalization of the Egyptian economy was the expansion of the informalization of domestic markets in housing and labor. In the third chapter on Egypt (Chapter 7) I showed how this development played an important role in the rise of Islamist militancy in the informal quarters of Imbaba, Cairo. Specifically, I illustrated in detail the ways in which radical Islamist groups were able to exploit new conditions of economic uncertainty to recruit from among the denizens of the some of the informal housing quarters of greater Cairo. An important reason behind the popularity of radical Islamists among the underemployed residents was due to the ways in which their leaders utilized highly coercive methods to settle disputes, enforce scarce labor contracts in the informal labor market, while simultaneously preach against the ills of conspicuous consumption in their sermons. In other words, both material and ideological factors played an important role in the popularity of the militants.

Chapter 5 chronicled the assumption to power of the Islamists in Sudan. In contrast to Egypt, in Sudan the recession and attendant economic reforms resulted in the consolidation of an Islamist-commercial class that forged an alliance with the military and captured the state. Whereas in Egypt the state “won the battle” over the informal economy, and its competition with the Muslim Brotherhood over rents accruing from labor remittances, Sudan witnessed the opposite outcome. In contrast to developments in Egypt, in Sudan the Islamists were successful in monopolizing informal finance and Islamic banking which they used to finance their movement and eventually realize their greatest political ambition by taking over the levers of state power. Moreover, having gained control of the state, the Sudanese Islamists considered it vital to marginalize rival groups in civil society, enact economic reforms geared toward maintaining power, and recruit jihadist elements particularly among the poorer segments of the population. However, I also demonstrated that in the context of Sudan’s changing political economy from a labor to an oil exporter, the jihadist experiment of the Islamists declined in political terms as opposition from subnational groups increasingly isolated the regime in Khartoum. Two consequences of this “fall” of Sudan’s jihadist policies have been the impending separation of South Sudan, and the remarkable and historic pro-democracy popular uprising, which ultimately led to the fall of the Islamist-Authoritarian regime of Omer al-Bashir in April 2019.

The final chapter on Somalia (Chapter 6) chronicled the fateful and fatal consequences of the collapse of the Somali nation-state. I argued that in the wake of state disintegration Somali politics continues to be greatly influenced by its internationalized economy. Specifically, I showed how the informal economy’s relative efficiency in facilitating the transfer of labor remittances, and the extent to which informal social networks in the form of both clan and religious networks control the wages of expatriate Somali labor continues to determine the political fortunes in many parts of the country. Moreover, in northern Somalia in particular, this has led to the emergence of regionally based political organizations and nascent state-building efforts, which have enjoyed varying levels of success. Thus, whereas Egypt and Sudan stand as examples of the shifting fortunes of Islamist activism within the context of economic and political change, Somalia calls into question the very principles and conventional understanding of national “sovereignty” where the modern internationally recognized state has simply ceased to exist.

Failed States, the Criminalization of Informal Networks, and the Global War on Terrorism

I conclude Black Markets and Militants with an analysis of some important lessons my comparative analysis of Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt provides with respect to some of the misconceptions and long-term repercussions associated with the global war against terrorism and Islamist extremism. The cases of Somalia and Sudan in particular help us to tackle two important questions: the first has to do with the linkage between informal hawwalat financial systems and Islamist extremism; the second is the question of whether failed states actually serve as an effective haven for militants and terrorists, as many have assumed. Building on my field research, and contrary to conventional wisdom, I have demonstrated empirically that rather than facilitating the rise of Islamist extremist groups (or financing terrorist organizations), the financial flows sent via these informal banks by Somali migrants have actually reinforced kinship networks as the most important political and social institution in Somalia. This is because these transfers are regulated by norms of reciprocity and trust embedded in clan and familial relations. Moreover, it is for this reason that militant Islamist groups in Somalia have not been able to monopolize these hawwalat transfers to fund their organizations. This is clearly evident by the fact that since the collapse of the Somalia state, Islamist militants have attempted to generate financing, not through the hawwalat, but by attempting to control the port economies of the country. Based on interviews with hawwalat operators, I have also argued that the latter do indeed harbor an Islamist form of political identification. However, I have also shown that this is a form of moderate Islamism that is similar to other Islamist capitalists, which represents a moderate rather than a militant form of Islamist activism. Indeed, rather than focusing on informal banks as an arena of terrorist finance and risking a more militant version of anti-Western sentiment, policy makers should engage more moderate Islamists in Somalia to undermine the efforts of extremists to exploit an increasingly poor, uneducated, and young population in the country.

In addition, the absence of state institutions in much of Somalia does not necessarily provide a safe haven for terrorists. This is because the popularity of militants among local populations is dependent on their own capacity to provide public goods and contract enforcement more effectively than state authorities. In this regard, it is important to note that what made Afghanistan so useful to Al-Qaeda in the mid-1990s was not the failure of the state, but rather the fact that they relied on the state to protect its members from attack and to provide its leadership with important benefits.

Similarly, the “failed states” of the Horn of Africa do not afford global terrorists networks such benefits. This is due to four challenges that confront militant organizations. The first challenge is the lack of government-enforced order that is needed to provide security against local authorities. Second is the unreliability of local allies. As I have shown, clan ties are still the most important source of identification for Somalis, and terrorists cannot depend on the commitment of Somalis for Islamist extremist causes over their strong adherence and loyalty to their clan or subclan. The third challenge is that the better an area is for training militants, the more remote and sparsely populated it is and the harder it is to meet basic sustenance needs. Finally, on the question of terrorism financing, it is important to note that terrorists face the challenge of getting fiscal resources in place. In Somalia financial services continue to be weak. Most importantly, Islamist militants have not been able to effectively use the hawalaat to provide key financial services to terrorists in weakly governed areas. This is the reason why Somalia, with its collapsed state, has not served as a fertile breeding ground for global terrorism (i.e., al-Qaeda), despite popular arguments to the contrary. The al-Shabaab organization is indeed a militant organization, but the roots of its extremism are rooted in local and regional factors³ and not due to the expansion of hawwalat agencies in the country.

By contrast, as I demonstrated in the case study of Sudan, jihadists function more successfully under regimes that are able to provide both, security from external attack, as well as the necessary financing and labor recruitment to organize jihadists. In fact, existing security vacuums have not proven to be a viable base for exporting attacks abroad. From this perspective, policy makers should be concerned with “ungoverned” spaces only so far as they allow terrorists to operate openly. Instead, a greater focus should be paid to states that have promoted militant forms of Islamism and where terrorists have at various times found it useful to operate from. Indeed, what seems to be of the utmost importance to jihadist leaders is not the existence of a security vacuum and “fragile states” as such, but the potential of establishing new functioning state institutions under jihadi control as was the case of the Sudan.

If the cases of Somalia and Sudan demonstrate the pitfalls of locating the roots of terrorism in the absence of state institutions and informal financial markets, the case of Egypt highlights the misconceptions associated with the criminalization of Islamic Welfare Associations. The most important misconception here has been the persistent conflation of Islamic Welfare Associations with Islamist militancy, with little analysis as to the socioeconomic roots of extremism. What is crucial is for policy makers to distinguish clearly between the causes underpinning the rise of the moderate Islamist movement and extremism. On the one hand, I have shown that the rise in popularity of Egypt’s Islamist social movement was due to two linked developments. The first is associated with the retreat of the state from its provision of welfare services, and the related “absence” of viable formal state institutions in both the middle class as well as the poor neighborhoods of urban Cairo. The second related trend is the expansion of a host of Islamist Welfare Associations that have essentially filled the gap of welfare and social protection in the context of the diminished economic role of the state.

However, whereas a major assumption in the scholarship of terrorism assumes financial incentives to be primarily responsible for militant or terrorist recruitment, I have shown that Islamist extremism is contingent on locally specific economic, social, and political transformations that are exploited by a minority of militant activists. In other words, to say that the moderate Islamist trend in Egypt has been largely invigorated by the spread of Islamic Welfare Associations does not necessarily implicate them in the support and financing of extremist groups. Based on my research, far more significant has been the role of the density of small private mosques in the neighborhood. It is here that militant preachers deliver persuasive sermons to the community and where young children and youth are recruited via both material and social incentives and the promise of both upward mobility and an elevated social and political status. To be sure, over the last four decades, socioeconomic changes have altered the demography and job prospects of local residents in urban Cairo in important ways. But I have argued that Islamists militants were able to capitalize on these developments in very specific ways that had little to do with the role of Islamic charitable giving financing these groups. Specifically, the militant Islamic Group found it possible to diffuse a particular form of family-based Islamic norms through the establishment of a dense network of unregulated private mosques that provided a wide range of social services. Presently, many of the social services in the poorest sections of Cairo are underwritten by Islamist activists, rather than by state institutions such as the local councils (Majalis Mahliyya) and governmental Developmental Associations (Munazamat Tanmiyya). As a consequence, Islamists have largely supplemented both the state and the more traditional Regional Community Associations (Rawbit Iqlimiyya). This is not a state of affairs that is likely to change with the closure or regulation of these Islamic Welfare Associations. However, policy makers and local authorities can easily focus on the unregulated nature of the store-front Mosques rather than the Islamic Welfare Associations, which by offering social protection to the poor can actually curb any potential of another rise in militant or terrorist recruitment.

Furthermore, Islamist militants used their newfound institutions to legitimize their stringent codes of social control. They routinely imposed a strictly enforced code of behavior and discipline legitimized via the espousal of norms of social justice (al-‘adl al-ijtima’iyy) and presented local residents an “alternative lifestyle” in the context of very poor and squalid conditions.⁴ In my observations, I found that, far more than financial incentives, these norms resonated strongly in the local community since they stood in marked contrast to the neglect of the state; that is, they approximated the normative outlook and “lived experience” of a large segment of Cairo’s urban poor.

In this respect, the absence of significant state-funded social programs particularly in poor areas is a contributing (albeit not the only) factor in breeding extremism. Following the 1992 siege, the Egyptian state did intervene to underwrite some basic services in terms of basic infrastructural development. Yet over four decades later the rehabilitation of Cairo’s poorest areas is only partial and has so far failed to bolster the legitimacy of the state in the view of local residents. The minimal social services that were provided following the state’s self-proclaimed “anti-terrorist campaign” were largely financed by foreign aid, rather than domestic sources. This continues to be the case. The bulk of these funds were allocated toward extending electricity and paving roads out of security considerations, rather than out of a sincere effort to improve the social and economic conditions of the local community. Even members of the Local Council (Majlis al-Mahli), the local branch of the former ruling National Party remained apprehensive about the potential of extremism in their neighborhood. They expressed great frustration with the government’s less-than-sufficient assistance and were well aware that residents held them in low regard in comparison to the Islamists. Clearly, government policy that promotes domestic sources of economic development and social protection would play an important role in addressing some of the root causes of extremism among some of the most socially vulnerable. This is a category that has, in the past, represented an important source of rank and file recruitment.

The case of Egypt illustrates clearly the dangers of criminalizing informal networks without taking seriously the impact of economic changes in altering local social realities. Moreover, in an ironic development, blaming any facet of terrorism on Islamic Welfare Associations obscures the role (and responsibility) of domestic governments, which have in many ways abdicated their role in social protection and welfare vis-à-vis local communities. Taken together with the failure to liberalize the political system, extremism finds a more fruitful breeding ground. In the case of Egypt, the government-appointed “leadership” of the local councils continues to clearly represent the interests of the state. Moreover, these leaders cater almost exclusively to the more affluent members of the local community rather than the most vulnerable constituency. As a consequence, in the eyes of most poor residents, local government stands as a poor substitute to the weakened role of the traditional authority. This is exemplified by the shallow reach of informal councils (Majalis ‘Urfiyya) and reconciliation committees (Lejan Sulh). These kinship-based institutions, which had traditionally arbitrated disputes, now reflect the erosion of formerly legitimate institutions of social cohesion and control.

What the erosion of traditional authority has meant among the poor is that Islamic Welfare Associations, private Mosques, and zakat Committees will continue to be more popular and relevant to the lives of impoverished communities. This is most certainly the case in many parts of the Muslim world. It is to these social and economic developments that we must look if we are to understand both the social roots of militancy and the attraction of terrorism to a small minority. It is a grave mistake to transform these complicated social and economic conditions into psychological traits and “criminalize” the most vulnerable, as so much analysis having to do with the war on terror has been prone to do.

The larger policy implications of Black Markets and Militants are clear. In the short term, the best cost-effective strategy is to monitor ungoverned spaces in failing states more closely but not to assume that they are automatically breeding grounds for militant and terrorist organization. However, in the long term, the international community must devise a more comprehensive solution in order to undercut the popularity of militant Islam, which remains a minority movement in the Muslim world. Rather than waging a war against the “soul of Islam” as some analysts have suggested, it is far more effective to devise effecting measures that examines the “secular” challenges that militant organizations face themselves. In multiethnic societies in the Horn of Africa and Egypt, militants and Islamists have faced a host of overlapping ethnic and sectarian affiliations, insecurity, and a complex array of local political rivals and motivations. Until recently, it was only in the Sudan where militants were able to benefit from a safe haven, robust financial resources, and a regime that utilized functioning, albeit fragile, formal institutions and militias operating in parallel to the state to support and promote a transnational jihadist network.

Finally, Black Markets and Militants makes a strong case that social and economic crises do indeed play an important role in the success of Islamist movements. My findings suggest that rather than advising policy makers to be wary of pursuing polices of economic development in poorer states in the hopes of curtailing militant activism as most analysts have advised, it is vital to understand that particular forms of economic insecurity and externally induced recessionary downturns do indeed play a role in expanding the “pool” of militant recruits.