Mohammed Morsi: Egypt's accidental president

Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's new president, spent his election campaign being derided as "the spare tyre" - a reference to his being the backup choice to the Muslim Brotherhood strongman Khairat Al Shater. As he trailed in the polls until a week before elections began, many said he had no charisma and would have a hard time making it to the second round of elections. But Mr Morsi had the last laugh.
As it turns out, charisma was not what was needed for the race. The Brotherhood's get-out-the-vote ability - their presence on the street and core of committed campaigners - was enough, and if anything Mr Morsi is the quintessential organisational man.
His opponents may have been aware of the Brotherhood's strength, but they still underestimated Mr Morsi's best-prized talent: electioneering.
Elite Cairenes like to joke about his awkward speeches, bad haircut and general lack of grace and direct manner. This may be true, but misses an important fact: to many Egyptians, this makes him look more down to earth (and, in person, he is like most of his countrymen, warm and polite).
Even so, Mr Morsi is no country bumpkin. Born in a village on the eastern delta of the Nile in August 1951, his provincial, middle-class origins propelled him to a successful academic career.
He spent his student years at Cairo University, from whose prestigious engineering faculty he graduated in 1975, at a time when the revival of the Islamist trend in student politics - encouraged by Sadat against the left - was in full swing.
He graduated to stints as an assistant professor of engineering at California State University, Northridge and at Nasa, where he worked on the development of space shuttle engines (while his speciality is in metallurgical engineering, in a sense Egypt's new president is a rocket scientist).
Returning to Egypt in 1985 - two of his five children were born in California and are entitled to US citizenship - Mr Morsi accepted a teaching position at Zagazig University, while also rising through the ranks of the Brotherhood, serving on its influential Guidance Bureau.
For more than a decade, he served as the Brotherhood's chief political strategist, taking the Islamists' presence in parliament from a handful in the 1990s to 17 in 2000, when he was first elected to parliament.
By 2005, when Egypt held parliamentary elections in the context of US pressure for democratisation, they won 88 seats, or 20 per cent. Between 2000 and 2005, he served as the head of the Brotherhoods' parliamentary group (he represented his hometown of Zagazig, in the eastern delta), and was credited alongside a handful of oppositions MPs for reviving parliament's feistiness.
At a time when many believed, including inside the Brotherhood, that contesting parliamentary seat was a pointless exercise, since the Mubarak regime would never allow their voices to count, he showed that there was a point to participation.
Mr Morsi took seriously parliament's role of providing government oversight at a time when it was little more than a rubber stamp. Still, the Brotherhoods' numbers meant their opinion could easily be ignored by the majority, and their objections and summons of ministers were an annoyance more than a serious challenge to the regime.
Yet Mr Morsi proved enough of an annoyance to make the regime intent on preventing his return to parliament. When he ran again, his district of Zagaziq was overtaken by security forces and the result rigged against him. Even if the regime allowed a far larger number of Brotherhood MPs in, they did not want the more articulate kind of troublemakers like him.
He went on to head the Brotherhood's own political committee, overseeing its new strategy of contesting every possible election between 2006 and 2011. This made him one of the Brotherhood's most powerful men - one of the six or so men who control the organisation's finances, administration, recruitment and political strategy. The last of these was Mr Morsi's forte, which made him a shoo-in for the presidency of the Freedom and Justice Party the Brotherhood founded after the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak.
For many, his political talent and academic career will be besides the point. The most common charge heard against Mr Morsi is that, as president, he would defer to the positions of the Brotherhood's leadership. This remains to be tested, as is his promise to be the "president of all Egyptians", even those who are not Islamists.
Mr Morsi is a conservative's conservative, from the more hardline wing of the group. His record in parliament shows that he is quick to insert questions of religion into everyday matters, such as whether government loans should be Islamically correct, as well as wage culture wars against books and films deemed too liberal (especially if they are produced with state funding). He did not protest when, in campaign speeches, he was compared to Abu Bakr Al Siddiq, Prophet Mohammed's closest friend and the first caliph after his death. Or when supporters spoke of recreating the Caliphate with Jerusalem as a capital. It is unclear how much he believes in that project.
In an article for the London Guardian newspaper last week he wrote: "I was jailed by the old regime. I belong to the middle classes that were sold out by the old establishment. I hold political and social views that are shared by many in our society but were suppressed or criminalised by the old regime. I understand the ambitions, values and standards held by many mainstream Egyptians."
Mr Morsi ran a classic two-round presidential campaign: in the first round, he focused on his conservative base to ensure he made it to the run-off; in the second, he attempted to broaden his appeal. He is now the president of a bitterly divided country, and his own powers are uncertain.
He may not be the great unifying leader many Egyptians hoped to see navigate the post-Mubarak transition, but he is the president they elected.
His task as Egypt's first democratically elected president is now to move from the behind-the-scenes strategising to leading a nation that still has a long way to go towards democracy.
* With additional reporting by Foreign Correspondents Omar Karmi and Hugh Naylor