Return to the shadows: the Muslim Brotherhood and An-Nahda since the Arab Spring

Abstract

In Return to the shadows, Alison Pargeter assesses the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya and An-Nahda in Tunisia. She is well equipped for the task. A specialist in the Middle East and North Africa with a focus on political Islamist movements, she has published widely, including The new frontiers of jihad: radical Islam in Europe (I. B. Tauris, 2008; reviewed in International Affairs 85: 3), The Muslim Brotherhood: the burden of tradition (Saqi, 2010) and Libya: the rise and fall of Qaddafi (Yale University Press, 2012; reviewed in International Affairs 88: 6). In the process, she has established herself as one of the foremost scholars of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. In the wake of the uprisings that began in Egypt in January 2011 and led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood moved quickly to fill the political vacuum. One year later, the Brotherhood had been toppled from power and entered one of the most extreme periods of repression in its eight-decade history. In explaining this sudden turn of events, the author highlights several critical moments, including the Battle of the Camels on 2 February 2011, the creation of the Freedom and Justice Party in April 2011 and the constitutional declaration on 22 November 2012, as decisive for the movement. After acknowledging the mountain of problems Egypt faced in 2011–12, Pargeter turns to more subjective factors to explain why the Brotherhood failed to meet the challenges of governing in the modern age. Arguing that the movement was out of its depth from the start, she rightly notes that it came to power with no real vision for the country and little understanding of the world in which it was operating. ‘For all its promises, holding onto power at all costs became the movement's primary objective. It was therefore little surprise that, when it came, the end was swift and merciless—and the Brotherhood seemed just as lost and stunned as it had been when the revolutions first broke out in January 2011’ (p. 87).