Mohamed Morsi
Egypt’s first democratically elected leader who lasted a year before being toppled in a coup after protests that he had exceeded his powers
MOHAMED MORSI, who has died aged 67, became Egypt’s first civilian head of state in June 2012 and the first Islamist to lead the Arab world’s most populous nation; but elation soon turned to anger when he assumed powers as great as those exercised by the ousted president Hosni Mubarak, and he lasted only one year in power before being ousted by the military the following July.
Morsi was sworn in in July 2012 after winning – by a small margin – a free election that gave Egyptians their first real choice of a leader, so it was said, in 7,000 years. It was a triumph for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement which had been banned since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952.
Morsi saw off a former general, Ahmed Shafiq, who was seen as a remnant of the hated Mubarak regime. His victory was greeted by spontaneous displays of jubilation throughout Cairo.
During his election campaign Morsi promised a presidency that would be based on Islam but would not be a theocracy – an inclusive “civilian state” that would embrace “all forces, presidential candidates, women, Salafis and our Coptic brothers”.
While he did not explicitly mention the 1979 treaty negotiated between Israel and the Egyptian government of Anwar Sadat, he said he had a “message of peace” and would “respect all international agreements”.
But even with the best will in the world Morsi would have found it hard to bridge the huge divisions in Egyptian society, and his task was made all the more difficult by the actions of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which had taken power when Mubarak stepped down in 2011.
In the run-up to the election, following a ruling by a Constitutional Court still packed with Mubarak-era judges, the council disbanded the Islamist-dominated parliament and passed legislation which gave it control over the drafting of a new constitution and immunity from any civilian oversight, effectively stripping the presidency of all authority.
Both sides made a show of unity as Morsi was sworn in at the Constitutional Court and made an address a few hours later at Cairo University as the ruling generals applauded politely.
Yet he made it clear he would not accept the status quo: “The [ruling]
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has honoured its promise not to be a substitute for the popular will, and the elected institutions will now return to carry out their duties as the glorious Egyptian army returns to being devoted to its mission of defending the nation’s borders and security.”
In August he pulled off a spectacular coup, gambling on disaffection within the junior officer ranks to issue a constitutional declaration revoking the Supreme Council’s powers. The declaration met with minimal opposition.
But the drafting of a new constitution was more problematic. In June political parties had agreed the make-up of a new constituent assembly, after the first assembly was dissolved by the Supreme Administrative Court on the grounds that it included members of parliament (who elect the assembly) in its membership.
The new assembly included political representatives, members of the armed forces, police, judiciary and trade unions, as well as Muslim and Christian leaders. However, during the ensuing months, most secular, liberal, Leftist and Christian representatives walked out, saying their voices were not being heard, leaving the Islamists with a relatively free hand.
As speculation mounted that this assembly, too, would be dissolved as unconstitutional, on November 22 Morsi issued a second declaration which stated that his decisions were “final and unchallengeable by any individual or body until a new constitution has been ratified and a new parliament has been elected”.
The declaration also said the constituent assembly could not be dissolved by the judiciary, pre-empting any ruling by the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) on its legitimacy. On November 29 assembly members began an overnight session of voting on a rushed draft of the constitution after the SCC announced that it would rule on whether the assembly should be dissolved.
While the draft banned the use of torture and enshrined some basic rights, promises of freedom of speech and freedom of religious belief were balanced by clauses banning “insults” against people or the Prophet. It also laid emphasis on preserving the “traditional Egyptian family”, raising fears of religious supervision of private lives.
The approval of the draft and Morsi’s call for a referendum brought together Egypt’s divided opposition factions in a National Salvation Front, united in resisting what they saw as a power grab by “the new pharaoh” in the presidential palace.
Tens of thousands of protesters poured into Tahrir Square calling for Morsi’s downfall. On December 5 there were several deaths when opposition demonstrators were confronted by Muslim Brotherhood supporters.
On December 8 Morsi bowed to the pressure and rescinded most of his 22 November decree. He did not, however, agree to the opposition’s demand that he postpone the referendum, in which the constitution was approved with 63.8 per cent of the vote on a 32.9 per cent turnout.
The result did little to quell the unrest, and on July 3 2013, after days of mass anti-government protests, Morsi was removed from office in a coup led by General Abdel Fattah el-sisi.
The son of a farmer and the eldest of five brothers, Mohamed Morsi was born on August 8 1951 in Edwa, north of Cairo, and raised in poverty. After taking a degree, followed by a master’s degree in engineering from Cairo University, he took a PHD from the University of Southern California then became an assistant professor of engineering at the California State University at Northridge.
In 1985 he returned to Egypt to head the engineering department at Zagazig University. He had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1977, when the movement (which believes in establishing an Islamic state through peaceful means) was banned, and became a member of the Committee to Resist Zionism.
In 2000 Morsi was elected to Parliament, where he headed the Brotherhood’s unofficial bloc. In 2005, however, he was arrested and jailed for seven months after taking part in protests supporting reformist judges.
By the 2010 parliamentary elections Morsi had become a spokesman for the Islamists and a member of their politburo. He was jailed again on January 28 2011, a day after the Brotherhood announced it would join the protests that would topple President Mubarak almost two weeks later. He and other Brotherhood leaders served only a few days before being sprung from jail.
Morsi was widely regarded as the least charismatic of the main candidates in the 2012 presidential election. An uninspiring speaker, he did not participate in televised debates with other candidates. But the Brotherhood’s well-oiled machine did its business and on June 24 Morsi was declared the winner with 51.7 per cent of the run-off vote.
Morsi’s victory came at a political price, however. Despite dropping their “Islam is the solution” slogan in order to prevent divisions in Islamist ranks, Morsi and the Brotherhood courted the ultra-conservative Salafis calling for the implementation of Sharia law.
In his first few months, Morsi seemed torn between his desire to appease liberal Egyptian and international opinion and to please his supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis. He fulfilled a campaign promise to resign from the Brotherhood and its political party, the Freedom and Justice Party, and chose a prime minister Hesham Qandil, known as a technocrat rather than a hardliner.
He also refrained from agreeing to Islamist demands that he ban the sale and consumption of alcohol, a concern of the tourist industry.
In late September, Morsi embarked on his first official visit to the United States to attend a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, using the opportunity to call on Washington to repair relations with the Arab world. A few days earlier, protesters had climbed over the wall of the US embassy in Cairo and burned the American flag in anger over Innocence of Muslims, a tacky low-budget short that mocked the Prophet and caused outrage throughout the Arab world.
Morsi was criticised by US commentators for not moving fast enough to condemn the protesters. To begin with he confined himself to instructing Egypt’s foreign ministry to sue the American makers of the film and rejecting “any kind of assault or insult against our prophet”. It was only later that he promised to bring charges against those who had scaled the embassy walls.
Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip confronted Morsi with a test of loyalties, to Hamas, and to Egypt’s long-standing peace treaty with Israel. He responded with surprising deftness, appeasing the Islamists by recalling Egypt’s ambassador to Tel Aviv, dispatching his prime minister on a solidarity mission to Gaza, calling on the international community to support the Palestinians and instructing the military to prepare defences near the border with Gaza.
At the same time, though, he refused to open Egypt’s border to Gaza and instead moved to try to shut down or blow up the tunnels from the Egyptian Sinai used by Hamas to circumvent an Israeli boycott, contending that they posed a security risk.
After being ousted from power, Morsi was convicted of crimes in trials which Human Rights Watch described as being “compromised by serious due process violations and [seemingly] politically motivated”. He languished in prison, kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. He was allowed three family visits in almost six years, and was denied access to his lawyers or a doctor despite suffering from health problems that included high blood pressure, diabetes and liver disease.
In 2018 a group of British MPS and international lawyers condemned his imprisonment as “cruel, inhuman and degrading” amid conditions which could “meet the threshold for torture in accordance with Egyptian and international law”. Morsi was attending a session in a trial on espionage charges when he collapsed and died.
In 1979 Morsi married his cousin, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud, who survives him with their four sons and a daughter.
Mohamed Morsi, born August 8 1951, died June 17 2019