Egyptian Islamist Rebellion in 1990's: Why did it fail?

Watching “My trip to Al Qaeda” where the journalist mentions the 1990’s violent movement of Islamists who tried to overthrow the Egyptian government (‘regime?’). Obviously it failed.

Why no Islamic revolution in Egypt? How popular could Hosni Mubarek be?

The heavy hand my friend, the heavy hand.

Ah, but the Tsar and the Shah had heavy hands too . …

Egypt gets billions of dollars of US aid every year, enough for Mubarak to buy off enough constituencies in the country to keep him in power. The Islamist faction in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, have their leaders constantly arrested, harassed etc. and seem to be imprisoned on a rotation basis. Egypt has been under a state of emergency since the 1950s or 60s and this allows the internal security forces a lot of leeway in breaking up demonstrations, public meetings and any organised dissent. Mubarak’s ruling party uses all the people in the government it employs to monitor their neighbours in a Stasi-like method of internal repression, meaning the eyes and ears of internal security include all government employees.

Mubarak feels confident enough with the grip he has on the country to have allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to stand for election a couple of years ago for 20% of parliamentary seats. They won everywhere they stood for election and this allowed Mubarak, who’d been hassled by the Bush administration to allow more democracy in Egypt, to show the Bush administration what the democratic alternative to him looked like. The Bush administration then went back to supporting his rule. Whether he has enough power to install his son as leader after he dies remains to be seen but if his son doesn’t take over somebody from the existing Egyptian establishment will and things will continue as before.

Basically Egypt has a massive and very sophisticated internal security system all overseen by a patronage system of government all backed up with billions of dollars of US aid. Take the billions of dollars out of the picture and the system would crumble eventually with the Brothers or the army the most likely successor.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12552582&postcount=58

[quote=“sassyfras, post:3, topic:553248”]

The Tsar had a World War to contend with. Meanwhile the Shah wasn’t exactly overthrown by an Islamist revolution per se - he was taken down by a broad-based coalition. It’s just that in the aftermath, the better organized theocrats with their central, galvanizing figure ( Khomeini ) succeeded in eventually squeezing everyone else out.

The Egyptian Islamists, like their Syrian counterparts, were unable to galvanize the mass of the population into a popular revolution and so were unable to make much headway against quite authoritarian governments. Similarly ( if much more ugly ) in Algeria.

Really Afghanistan is probably the only example of a successful Islamist rising and even that was incomplete before they went down and came on the tail of many, many years of civil war. The Taliban really can’t be said to have outfought a true centralized government. It was more that they emerged the dominant player out of a number of disparate, warring factions.

AFAIK know it was never a widespread popular movement, just a few Jihaddis (or as they were known back then: “Afghans”. As so many of them had been involved in the war against the soviets in Afghanistan) massacring foreign tourists and such. In fact some of the perpetrators of the most famous (and shocking) attack during that period the Luxor Temple attack were actually lynched by locals.