Reda, Amir Abdul. “Framing Political Islam: Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and the 2011 Uprising”. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2016): 1–22.

Reda, Amir Abdul. “Framing Political Islam: Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and the 2011 Uprising”. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2016): 1–22.

• The Syrian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently failed to gain political power, even during the period of intense anti-Baathist sentiment between 1977 and 1982 and the Arab Spring. Its uprising in 1982 resulted in its exclusion from Syrian political life until 2011, and it lost out in the Arab Spring to more radical jihadi factions of the opposition (2).
• The Brotherhood has been one of the best organized and resourced members of the Syrian opposition, having strong capacities from shortly after Syrian independence throughout its long period of exile. It is also one of the most recognized Syrian opposition groups, including by the Syrian government, which entered into talks with the Brotherhood in the mid-1990s and has tolerated its presence in Syria since at least the election of Bashar al-Assad (3).
• The Brotherhood managed to remain a key opposition player during its exile, organizing the National Honor Pact in 2001 and issuing the Damascus Declaration for National Democratic Change in 2005. It also succeeded in getting many of its members released from prison (3).
• In 2006, the Brotherhood allied itself with exiled former Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam, a deeply unpopular move that the Brotherhood reversed in 2009. It then sought to reach some sort of agreement with the Syrian government, with the AKP in Turkey serving as a mediator. It was following this strategy when the Syrian civil war broke out (3).
• Social movement theory predicts that the success of a political movement is determined by its resources and capability for mobilization, the political opportunities available to it, and its framing of events (3). The Brotherhood was organized and well resourced (3), and had a perfect political opportunity in the 2011 Arab Spring, so its failure must stem from how it framed political issues (4).
• This failure stemmed from the Brotherhood's inability to appropriately frame three elements of the political situation in Syria in 2011: the military struggle, economic policies and the poor, and religious minorities (4).
• The Brotherhood rejection of violence following the 2000s prevented it from playing a dominant role in the 2011 Syrian revolution. Their demilitarization meant that, despite Brotherhood sympathies among many militias, the Brotherhood was excluded from the early fighting. Its focus on electoral politics and neglect of violent options excluded it from politics as military power became more important (13-14).
• The economic policies proposed by the Brotherhood never captured the support of the Syrian poor, because the core economic grievances of that group could not be solved through market reforms. This meant that the Brotherhood did not greatly benefit from the defection of Sunnis from Bashar al-Assad, as the Sunni peasants and urban poor who had previously supported the government were not liable to support the Brotherhood. Instead, these groups mainly joined new rebel groups, including the takfiri jihadis (14-15).
• The Brotherhood focuses almost entirely on the Sunni population and offers nothing to Syria's religious minorities. Its conservative Sunni values have excluded other faiths and made them suspicious of the revolution, and thus more willing to back the al-Assad government (15).
• Although governed by the nominally socialist Baath Party, since the 1970s Hafez al-Assad has taken Syria through a series of neoliberal reforms and aligned it with other Shia powers in Lebanon and Iran. Despite its neoliberal policies, Hafez al-Assad's government and the Baath Party had their base of support in the countryside and poor, as well as support from the army, and some elements of the middle classes and the bourgeois (5).
• When Bashar al-Assad assumed power in 2001, he continued liberalization, alienating much of the Syrian poor while making allies among the upper ranks of the bourgeois and middle classes (5).
• The Brotherhood uprising from 1977 to 1982 took place after and as a result of the first round of 'infitah' liberalization reforms. These reforms created a new private sector made up of those in positions of military or political power, while alienating other sectors of society, particularly urban Sunnis. It also featured rising corruption, inequality, and stagflation, all of which weakened the government's support among the peasantry, urban poor, and civil servants (6).
• The Syrian government appeared weak in the late 1970s, so weak that both secular and Islamist opposition groups considered overthrowing it. The alliance between middle-class leftist and liberal opposition groups and the Brotherhood made success seem likely. This optimism was supported by the success of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, viewed as a sign that international support for the Syrian government was flagging (7).
• The al-Assad government was unable to react to the attacks and bombings launched by the Brotherhood and other Islamists due to internal division between liberals, who wanted to include the Brotherhood in normal politics through democratization, and hardlines, and had no comprehensive response until 1980 (7).
• The attempted assassination of Hafez al-Assad in 1980 marked a definitive change in the Syrian government's policy, as it gave hardlines a perfect justification for more extreme policies and silenced the liberal faction of the regime. The Syrian government then engaged in increasingly violent repression, culminating in the destruction of the Brotherhood at a standoff in Hama in February 1982 (7).
• The Syrian government won the conflict because its Alawi base managed to retain the support of the Sunni bureaucrats and peasants through existing government programs. The Brotherhood still failed to mobilize the support of the majority of Syrian Sunnis (7-8).
• The origins of the 2011 uprising in Syria also stem from the liberalization program initiated in the 1970s, which under Bashar al-Assad saw more privatization, the removal of many previous subsidies, and rising inequality. The 2011 revolution was a reaction of the lower classes that had previously received government largess to its cessation (8).
• Despite promises of political reform, Bashar al-Assad was even less willing to compromise than his father and proceeded slowly on political liberalization, normalizing regional relationships, and disengaging from Lebanon. The impulse for reform was further dampened by the Second Intifada, a war between Israel and Lebanon, and the US invasion of Iraq. Bashar al-Assad used all of these as excuses to delay reform (8-9).
• The 2011 uprising in Syria was also in response to similar uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, as oppositionists were inspired by victories in those countries (9).
• At the start of the 2011 revolt, the Muslim Brotherhood led the primary Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Council, based in Istanbul. The Council, like the revolution and the Brotherhood itself, was supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia (9).
• The rapid military gains of the Syrian rebels, as well as the total loss of support from Syrian Sunnis, made many predict that the conflict would be resolved by December 2012. A series of successful offensives in Summer 2013 crushed these hopes, as the Syrian government appeared stronger with the support of Iran, Hizballah, and Russia, while the opposition became discredited to the domination of takfiri jihadis in its ranks (9-10).
• The two main factors impacting how the Brotherhood thinks about politics are their Sunni orientation and an anti-populist form of Islamism. The group traditionally held a Qutbist line of an Islamic revolution creating an Islamic state, but in the 2000s, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence and pledged to adopt the democratic model of the AKP in Turkey. The Aleppo faction of the Brotherhood had most this transition after the catastrophe in 1982, but the Hama faction did not transition its political goals until the 2000s (10).
• The Brotherhood and almost all other contemporary Islamist groups portrayed the Syrian government as Alawi-dominated and anti-Sunni. This framing of the conflict as religious, including the Brotherhood's promotion of its own Sunni identity, prevented the group from attracting many supporters among Syria's religious minorities (11).
• The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had its strongest support among the urban middle classes and advanced their economic interests. This mainly involved support for a free market economy in opposition to the socialist state control exercised by the Baathist government. The Brotherhood economic policies did not change, despite growing popular dissatisfaction as a result of economic liberalization under the Baathists (11).
• Prior to the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria had a fairly liberal political agenda, seeking to establish an Islamic state through peaceful means and even then restricting that state to demands that the head of state be Muslim and that all law be, at least nominally, based on sharia (12).
• The al-Assad government's repressive policies at home and intervention in Lebanon convinced many Brothers that the government was anti-Sunni. Although its headquarters in Damascus remained more moderate, radical factions of the Brotherhood formed in Hama, Aleppo, and Latakia (12).
• Some disaffected radicals left the Brotherhood to found Kataeb Mohammad, founded by Marwan Hadid, and Hizb ut-Tahrir, founded by Abdul Rahman Abou Ghoda (12). 
• The entire Brotherhood moved towards radicalism with the election of Adnan Saadedine al-Hamaoui in 1975. He, alongside Ali Sadr al-Din al-Bayanouni and Said Hawa, published a 1980 statement endorsing violent Islamic revolution. Although they remained supportive of a liberal political order, the Brotherhood now endorsed violent means to achieve this goal (12).
• In the aftermath of the failed 1982 Hama uprising, the Brotherhood splintered between a liberal Allepo faction, open to reconciliation with the Syrian government and supported by Saudi Arabia, and a more violent Hama faction, committed to further violence and supported by Iraq (13).
• The divide between the two factions was healed in the 2000s, when the Hama faction renounced its violent goals and both sides agreed to pursue a democratic electoral model based on the AKP in Turkey (13).
• The failure of the Muslim Brotherhood to become a major force in the 2011 Syrian uprisings was not solely due to internal factors, but also because the group had been in exile between 1982 and 2011, and thus without a presence in Syria at the time of the revolution, and because the Brotherhood was outcompeted by other Islamist groups, especially takfiri jihadis like Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS (16).