The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist movement by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham

Abstract

Carrie Rosefsky Wickham The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist movement New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013. 384 pp., US $29.95 (cloth) ISBN 9780691 149400The Muslim Brotherhood is Carrie Rosefsky Wickham's second book based on research project she began in the early 1990s on the Egyptian Brotherhood's political mobilization. The objective of the book is trace the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood's political participation within authoritarian settings. Wickham argues that political participation has engendered behavioural and ideational patterns of change within the Muslim Brotherhood. She emphasizes strategic responses the political environment as well as the internal organization and differentiation of the movement. The author's evidence is drawn from interviews conducted over 22 years of field research and historical analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood's more than 80 years of existence. The Muslim Brotherhood adds the literature on the Middle East, social movements, contentious politics, and the study of comparative politics at large.Wickham commences her analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood with historical overview of the organization's founding in 1928 and continues with its developments under Egypt's three authoritarian rulers. She focuses much of her attention on the Hosni Mubarak era, since it was Mubarak's promise of more openness that ushered in the Muslim Brotherhood's gradual political participation. By the late 1980s, only few years after the Muslim Brotherhood entered the political sphere, the organization had achieved tremendous success, becoming Egypt's largest official opposition. This success worried the regime, which responded with an anti-Brotherhood campaign and frustrated the Muslim Brotherhood's political activities. The movement made political recovery in the 2000s when international democratization efforts pressured Mubarak into political liberalization. However, brutal political repression followed these brief periods of political openness. Wickham compares the Brotherhood's strategy during this period to the swing of pendulum, seesawing between moments of self-assertion through forceful political participation, on the one hand, and moments of self-restraint with minimal political participation, in order avoid confrontations with the regime, on the other (96). In 2010 the Muslim Brotherhood abandoned this strategy and collaborated with other opposition forces push for concrete democratic changes.Analyzing the Muslim Brotherhood's practices since the group's inception, Wickham concludes that political participation has led change in the Muslim Brotherhood's rhetoric and practice. The group has toned down its commitment the application of sharia law and articulated liberal interpretations of Islam aligned with more general rather than conservative and literal principles. Another notable change is the Muslim Brotherhood's adoption of democracy, pluralism, and human rights as part of its agenda. In practice, change has been visible in its cooperation with, and sensitivity to, other segments of society, including secular and liberal forces. Wickham notes that the Muslim Brotherhood took pains emphasize that they wanted 'participate, not dominate' and joined other secular groups in the push for constitutional and political reforms (284). Some might interpret these changes as strategic and self-serving, yet Wickham holds that a strategic explanation of Islamist movement change does not capture its full range of causes (284). The changes also reflect an ideational shift induced by the Muslim Brotherhood's interactions with the rest of society.Wickham demonstrates the Muslim Brotherhood's ideational shift through an analysis of the group's internal dynamics, composition, variations, and developments-the second major contribution of her book. Rejecting the conventional view of the Brotherhood as unitary actor, Wickham portrays it as multilayered organization with three key factions: the old guard, the pragmatic conservatives, and the reformists. …