"The terrible legacy of more than twenty years of his rule lies in two aspects:...
...what he has done—give a much freer rein to Islamists in the public, academic, corporate, religious and intellectual spheres while ruthlessly repressing Islamists when they use violence [my editorial addition: as well as suppressing them, along with everyone else, politically] —which has demoralized, subverted and rotted Egyptian society and public life—...
...and what he has not done — devoting the country’s resources and energy to economic growth, investment, infrastructure, education, etc. Egypt is overwhelmed by its demographic growth. It has become a Malthusian basket case.
The Egyptian Islamists were allowed a large and prominent PUBLIC voice - much more so than any other political opposition - even while they were politically suppressed like everyone else.
Just like the Saudi princes and their Wahabi clerics, that policy, allowing them prominent presence in academia and the media - was done to placate the fundamentalists. It doesn't; and it didn't.
It was a policy that HELPED the public strength of the Islamists grow because they were allowed to be very public and they could be identified in the public mind as part of those "opposed to oppression" (it could mean "Jews" and it could mean Mubarak as well), "siding with the oppressed" (it could mean "Palestinians" and it could mean suppressed Egyptian political forces as well} and "PART OF the politically disenfranchised" [known to be frozen out of a political role, like all political opposition].
While Mubarak kept them - the MB - out of government, he allowed them enough public voice to grow their "street creds" with average Egyptians. The size of their public voice was one secular democratic moderates envied and never had. It was a big mistake.
That jibes with what else I’ve learned over the years. Mubarak maintained a suffocating grip on the Egyptian polity, turning it into a grim, gray, impoverished tyranny, while throwing bones to the Islamists and only stomping on them when they did something violent. Meanwhile, he used the Muslim Brotherhood has his foil, continually telling us that it was him or them. Now, after thirty years of riding the tiger, it has finally bucked him off and is about to devour him, us, Israel and certainly itself. Dictatorships are not “stable”, they are inherently unstable. Dictators don’t cultivate their people, they suppress and exploit them. Egypt is indeed a textbook Malthusian nightmare. It is way too overpopulated for it’s resources and the recent inflation has proved the catalyst just like the climatic conditions of the 1780’s sparked the Bread Riots of the French Revolution.
If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, Egyptians will find themselves in a worse nightmare than they could have imagined. Close the Suez Canal? Declare war on Israel? How is that going to get them bread and jobs?