Review of three books on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

Abstract

I once presented a scholarly talk at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity on the life and legacy of the Islamist intellectual, Sayyid Qutb. After the lecture, two state department employees approached me and seemingly agonized about how there was such an enormous gap between what I was saying about Qutb and his doctrines, and the ideas that were floating around the halls across the street in Foggy Bottom. I showed them an article from theNew York Times about the substantial US government outlays budgeted to modernize Afghan youth and how this program was failing, notwithstanding the superficial appearances of jeans and sneakers. I said that Qutb would have been four-square against this kind of modernization that encourages Muslims to discard their own traditional values and accept Western ones, and that for the sake of ‘anti-terrorism,’ the state department ought to stop funding such projects. The problem, the two men went on to say (as if they had not heard me), was that there was an unbridgeable chasm between the Islamist discourse praising their own religion and rejectingmodernization, andUS foreign policy narratives that focus onmaking the world safe for (Western style) democracy and business. The two employees said it would beworthwhile for their colleagues to hear what the other side was saying. But even though we exchanged business cards, I never heard from them again. Three books on the Muslim Brotherhood are under review here—Carrie Rosefsky Wickham’s The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton Cont Islam (2016) 10:123–169 DOI 10.1007/s11562-015-0337-z