Mohamed Morsi

Biography

Mohamed Morsi was born in 1951 in El Adwah in Egypt's Sharqia governorate. He studied metallurgical engineering at Cairo University and earned a doctorate in materials science at the University of Southern California. He taught at California State University, Northridge, from 1982 to 1985, then returned to Egypt to teach engineering at Zagazig University, where he headed the engineering department.

Aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was barred from running under Hosni Mubarak, he won a seat in the People's Assembly as an independent in 2000. He was arrested with other Brotherhood leaders during the 2011 revolution and escaped from prison days later. After Mubarak fell he led the Brotherhood's new Freedom and Justice Party, which won the most seats in the 2011-12 parliamentary election.

He won the 2012 presidential election, the first in Egypt's history judged democratic, and took office on 30 June 2012. A November 2012 decree that put his decisions beyond judicial review, and a hurried Islamist-drafted constitution, provoked mass protests. After further protests in June 2013 the army removed him on 3 July 2013.

He was then prosecuted on several charges and sentenced to death, a verdict later overturned. He died in a Cairo courtroom in June 2019, amid claims that he had been denied proper medical care in custody.