**6. Conclusions**

The Muslim Brotherhood has long posited itself as the sole representative of Islam and its membership as the path towards obtaining God's satisfaction. The conception of 'the Muslim Brotherhood is Islam' has significant consequences including limited freedom of speech and difficulty when trying to leave the movement. Members were asked to blindly 'hear and obey' the orders of their leaders, gaining sanctification out of this 'contract' of leading the way towards God. A disgruntled member faces 'godly' disciplinary actions and leader's accusations of 'apostasy' and Satanic dispositions. A member seeking to 'stop and think' about the ideas of the movement has also to think of broader punitive measures related to their social relations and severance of relations when belonging to the 'society of Muslims'—a punishment which is costly, especially given the group's dynamics of recruitment and mobilization, which means members of the same real kinship family, i.e., brothers and sisters, and husbands and wives, and imagined kinship family, i.e., friends, are all connected by their membership in the group. In other words, losing the membership of the Brotherhood means losing these valuable social ties. This article therefore presents disengagement not only as discourse discerned via the frames of exiters in their texts but also a process of negotiating these social or ideological interactions. This made it necessary for exiters to engage in re-interpreting the tenets of Islam and verses of Quraan which the

<sup>156</sup> Hamza (2021). Phone Interview.

<sup>157</sup> M.E. (2017). In-Person Interview. Istanbul.

<sup>158</sup> M.E. (2017). In-Person Interview. Istanbul.

<sup>159</sup> See Chapter 2 of Menshawy (2020) Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood

<sup>160</sup> Fayez (2011). *Janat Al-Ikhwan*, p. 15.

Brotherhood took as its core values and the system of belief in order to prove the that they can be Muslims not Islamists. They also negotiated dominant meanings long stabilized inside the Brotherhood's ideology.

The discursive layered disengagement is contextualized. The Arab Spring provided opportunity to evidence and validate such de-coupling and also sped up disengagement as well. The Brotherhood's leaders in power were found to be mere political agents seeking to take over the existing political order rather than Islamist leaders moving towards replacing it with their envisaged 'Islamic state' or 'Islamic society'. Exiters felt disillusioned that the imagined 'Islamic project', long cultivated into their minds as an unrealized dream, gave way to pure power politics when Morsi came to power. Leaders were perceived as power-hungry brokers searching for political gains out of compromises with the older regime. More significantly, many members felt that the leaders are 'humans' who err and commit mistakes. Losing the aura of 'sanctification' \_ or the 'those who are above' as they are best known inside the movement led to demands for those leaders to 'be held accountable,' a revolutionary shift of thinking in a hierarchically shaped group that always asks members to obey leaders the same way 'a dead body poses in front of the one washing it after death'.

This article demonstrates that disengagement is a complex process, which makes the mission of understanding disengagement based on more layers of interaction including that between the past and present. Announcing that a member is out of the movement is just a *point of emergence* as the decision or steps leading towards it are all acts of the past, full of *points of evolution*. This makes sense as the process of ideological disengagement is partly cognitive. It began in the minds of exiters years or perhaps decades before it was articulated in texts announcing the disassociation. Many exiters cited earlier activities such as independent or even solitary reading practices as part of the journey of freeing themselves of the movement's highly censored curricula and collectivized cultural cultivation. Disengagement is an act of cumulation rather than an act of specific 'turning points' or 'stages' that some literature pay attention to. Additionally, language cannot be ignored as it not only describes or represents events of experiences of disengagement, but also creates them as the texts of exiters are full of patterns of actions to construct and reconstruct meanings which I aggregated and organized as frames and master frames. The process has a social or political side along with the cognitive side. All the frames operate within the changes after 2011, the year marking the beginning of the unprecedented exit wave. Take the Tahrir Square as epitomizing the kind of radical new society which members of the Brotherhood have long envisaged under the name of 'the Islamic project'. The square offered a more presentist and prefigured foundation for a different future. For many Brotherhood members, the utopian world is realized not imagined. As far as disengagement is concerned, this environment provided opportunities and alternatives including new ideological relations of belonging and a space shared with members of secular forces which organized and led the protests in the Square and even with other exiting members whom the Brotherhood always sought to isolate, demonize or even deny their presence. Exiters felt agency at the group's level as well, emboldened to question its unquestioned ideology due to actions of the Brotherhood itself including organizational division, the fragmentation of its identities and ideological bases. As this fragmentation continues, the Brotherhood's relationship with Islam and religion in general changes. It can no longer proclaim itself as the sole representation of Islam simply for two main considerations. The Brotherhood is no longer a single monolithic or united group to make such a claim. Secondly, there is no one single dominant version or interpretation of Islam which every member of the group has to abide under claims of unanimity or solidarity by consensus. There are many different interpretations of Islam (including those of the exiters as well as those of different factions seeking to justify their positions). Furthermore, a part of the change is the shift in accessibility. The Brotherhood can no longer disseminate its dominant ideology across the ranks of what is meant to be a well-organized hierarchically-shaped movement. Almost 50 percent of its members are 'inactive', according to some estimates

inside the movement, according to which many 'dormant' members stopped engaging in its activities as they feel 'alienated or traumatized'161. This could mean that the research on the Brotherhood has to give away its old assumptions of monolothism. Scholars can no longer deal with a single movement, a single ideology or a single identity.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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