Ikhwanweb: A digital archive for a post-Islamist movement?

Abstract

The article looks at Ikhwanweb, the English website of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB), from its early days and through the years before the 25th January revolution. The archive is used as a theoretical concept to capture both the symbolic and material struggles that the MB faced while trying to articulate its political vision. As a nodal point where power and knowledge intersect, the concept of the archive was first theorized by Foucault and Derrida. Ikhwanweb is examined as a digital archive, a site for both knowledge and memory production. The first section deals with the main analytical concept; the second tells the troubled history of the material infrastructure required to run the website. Then two main threads are identified and examined. The need to distantiate the organization from political violence and that of reaching out ‘the West’ shaped the content of Ikhwanweb. The website also allowed the group to interact directly with policy-making circles and research institutions. Can this be said to be part of that process Bayat calls post-Islamism? The concluding section reflects on this question and suggests a more ambivalent picture.