Martin Meissner/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Hazem Kandil, a political sociologist, was among the first to speculate that Morsi would not complete his term. The key to his impressive foresight lay in his assessment of what at the time was an obscure Muslim Brotherhood problem.
The problem, he asserts, lay in the Muslim Brotherhood’s misrecognition of the ‘revolutionary time’ in which their term was embedded. In a later book he further expatiated on how the Muslim Brotherhood mistook their long-awaited moment of rise (through Islamist reform) for the moment in which they actually rose to power in Egypt (through a revolution). ‘Moment’ here being key.
However, what explains their defeat is the patience of their rivals, the security state, in recognising ‘the moment’. As Kandil highlighted:
