Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Research Articles

The Muslim Brotherhood: evolution of an Islamist Movement

Carrie R. Wickham’s book The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement offers an in-depth analysis of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood [MB] since the group was formed in 1928. The book t...

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the South Sudan question: reconsidering moderation

This article examines the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) movement's stand on the South Sudan question. The aim here is to contribute to the ongoing debate over the MB's moderation. Throughout the civil war in Sudan, the MB consistently objected to South Sudanese secession. Yet, while it had traditionally framed its objection in religious terms, describing the South Sudanese struggle as a Christian conspiracy against Islam, in the decade preceding South Sudan's declaration of independence it moved to base its opposition on more practical grounds, revolving around issues such the absence of democracy, stability and infrastructure in South Sudan. This correlated with wider shifts in the MB. Since the 1990s, the movement has claimed to have undergone a transformation, adopting a moderate, pro-democratic stance. These statements persuaded many scholars that the MB has come to represent political moderation in both its domestic and international agenda. More recent works on the movement, however, have come to question the MB's moderation hypothesis, suggesting that even though the movement has changed its discourse and some aspects of its activism, this could not be seen as a linear process of moderation. This article uses the South Sudan case to further support this critique from a foreign policy perspective. It demonstrates that even though the MB changed its tactics and discourse, its goals remained unchanged— even when the circumstances and the normative environment changed dramatically. Moreover, it shows that at times of crisis, the liberal discourse gave way to the old-fashioned radical discourse of previous decades.

In the Name of Allah and of the Market: The Capitalist Leanings of Tunisian Islamists

Abstract Congruent both with Maxime Rodinson's theoretical reflections on the articulation between Islam and capitalism and with the embrace of neoliberalism by the Turkish AKP and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahdha can be shown to have skillfully combined Islamic ideology with capitulation to the dictates of international capital and its ideology of the free market. In particular, under the premierships of Hamadi Jebeli and Ali Larayedh, Ennahdha worked closely with neoliberal institutions to implement structural adjustment programs and to develop a supply-based, export-oriented economy in which public subsidies partly make up for shockingly low wages while religious discipline is used to keep workers from striking for improved working conditions.

MEDIA INVOLVEMENT AND COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND MECHANISMS OF THE EGYPTIAN MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD FROM 1928 TO 2015

In this paper, we highlight the various communication resources used by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (EMB) to recruit members or sympathizers. Based on the analysis, the media involvement and communication strategies and mechanisms used by the organization include a variety of traditional and available modern communication facilities. The goal of EMB’s efforts is to convey its ideology to Egyptians and “to rebut the challenges of the adversaries”. In this regard, the author selects the following elements to be highlighted: (1) the publications’ sections of EMB, (2) the vertical communication: The latter includes face-to-face meetings, group discussions, cassette recordings and the broadcasting channel that, the Brotherhood could use for propagating its agenda. The following section covers, (3) the conventional communication. The conventional communication presents the different publications served by the organization. This category covers periodic publications and books. The last section explains, (4) the use of information and communication technology (ICT).

THE BURDEN OF THE EGYPTIAN MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD’S HISTORICAL LEGACY: THE IDEOLOGY AND AGENDA

The aim of the study was the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s history focusing on its ideology and agenda. In this regard, the 18th century economic development in the Western Europe influenced the Arab and the Muslim Worlds in a way that Muslim scholars attempted to present an alternative system to the attractiveness of the Western modernization. However, the EMB founded in 1928, despite its tirelessly struggle, full of confrontations and flexibility at the same time towards the domestic as well as the international Community actors failed to achieve its first step agenda which is ruling Egypt. EMB’s regional and International expansionism ambition might be the reason behind its failure to be accepted by the regional secular parties, Egyptian Copts and the International Community main actors such as U.S. and UK.

Upended Path: The Rise and Fall of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

This article examines the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the 2011 uprising. It analyzes the Brotherhood's behavior and strategy since taking power in June 2012, exploring the underlying factors leading to their downfall in 2013. The article argues that the short-lived Islamist government's fall can be ascribed to three key factors: its lack of a revolutionary agenda, the Brotherhood's organizational stagnation and inertia, and its leaders' incompetence and inexperience in governance.1The abrupt rise and fall of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to power took many observers, commentators, and policy-makers by surprise. After only one year at the reins of government, the Muslim Brotherhood's path was upended and its future has become uncertain. While the Brotherhood leadership and sympathizers blame the old regime forces (i.e., the deep state) for their failure, the Brotherhood's own blunders and miscalculations cannot be disregarded. Their impetuous rush to power, the stagnant and rigid decision making-process within the movement, and the incompetent and weak leadership of President Mohamed Morsi all contributed to their fall. After the ouster of Husni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, the Brotherhood emerged as one of the key political forces in Egypt. Its Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) won the first parliamentary elections after the January uprising and party chairman Dr. Mohamed Morsi became Egypt's first free and democratically elected president. However, after only one year in office, Morsi proved unable to run the country effectively or to achieve the objectives of the January uprising, leading the military to take control in a coup on July 3, 2013, following an eruption of mass protests against Morsi on June 30.This article begins by tracing the debate over how to explain Islamists' behavior and strategy. It critically discusses the key theoretical trends dominating the terrain of Islamism over the past three decades. The second section probes the Brotherhood's role before and after the January uprising. It examines the ability of the Brotherhood to survive and endure under the Mubarak regime and how it became Egypt's key player in the post-Mubarak era. The third section focuses on the Brotherhood's downfall and explores the key factors behind it, particularly those related to the group's internal dynamics. The final section discusses the current crisis facing the organization and how it has thus far dealt with the post-coup regime, which has designated it as a terrorist group.DEBATING ISLAMISMOver the past few decades, Islamism has been a subject of inquiry and debate within academic as well as policy-making circles. Despite a plethora of literature on Islamist movements, capturing the essence of Islamism as a sociopolitical phenomenon is still an enigma. Scholars are not only puzzled by the changing faces of Islamism but also by the lack of methodological and theoretical tools that could help analyze and explain Islamists' discourse, behavior, and strategy.1 Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, two influential bodies of scholarship have dominated the study of Islamism. The first is the essentialist or culturalist approach, which treats Islamism as a rigid and immutable phenomenon. The advocates of this approach tend to view Islamism as nothing but a reactionary response to the crisis of modernity that has challenged Muslim societies since the early 20th century. This trend falls short in explicating the complexity and multifaceted character of Islamism, and tends to consider it within a reductionist, ahistorical, and culturist view of Islamic societies.2 Moreover, to prove their views, essentialists tend to conflate Islamism with Islam as a whole, focusing particularly on more conservative and violent forces that follow a rigid and regressive version of the religion. For these scholars, Islam is not a faith but rather an anachronistic ideology that does not cope with modern ideas. …

Neither Fulul nor Ikhwan

Since independence, the military and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) have exerted unmatched influence and control over Egypt. However, an “alternative current” is on the rise. In this paper, first, I survey the role played by the military and the MB. Second, I highlight one of the voices of this alternative current, Abdul Rahman Yusuf. The evolution of his thought in post-July 2013 coup era unveils the difficulties facing this alternative current in competing with the well-entrenched voices of both the military and the MB. Notwithstanding such challenges, I argue that suggesting the existence and eventual resilience and popularity of an alternative current that politically and intellectually defies both the military and the MB in Egypt is not a far-fetched aspiration should the leaders of this current articulate their ideas with clarity, embrace genuine reform, celebrate diversity and difference as prerequisites for constructive societal and political pluralism.

Review of three books on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

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

A commitment to politics: the trajectory of the Muslim Brotherhood during Egypt’s 2011–13 political opening

Prior to the 2011 Arab uprisings, Islamist parties in most Arab states had been systematically prevented from exercising any meaningful authority in government. Following President Hosni Mubarak’s ousting from power in 2011, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) established a political party – the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) – and formally entered mainstream politics, providing a rare opportunity to examine the role of an Islamist party in the context of democratic transition. Contrary to concerns that the MB might use Egypt’s political opening to install an undemocratic regime, the movement instead committed itself to electoral politics and consistently adhered to the framework for political transition. An analysis of the MB’s political trajectory during the 2011–13 timeframe reveals that the movement endeavoured to protect Egypt’s democratic transition against the encroachment of the military and the judiciary. Despite the FJP’s efforts, sustained interference by non-elected institutions brought Egypt’s democratic experiment to a premature end. This course of events confirms that an Islamist movement is capable of fully committing to politics, but also indicates that political commitment alone is insufficient to ensure a successful transition to democratic governance.

Blurring boundaries: aesthetics, performance, and the transformation of Islamic leadership

This article demonstrates the importance of performance – and in particular performances that blur boundaries between aesthetical styles – to the emergence and impact of ‘new religious intellectuals’, a group that radically transformed Islamic leadership in the twentieth century and were involved in setting up the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from 1928.This article builds on previous work on performance and the legitimation of Islamic leadership to show that aesthetics should be considered alongside education and discourse as a differentiating factor between new religious intellectuals and the ‘ulama’. Drawing on Birgit Meyer's approach to aesthetics, it argues that aesthetical styles formed a crucial part of the vocabulary of the performances through which leadership and group belonging was legitimised in interwar Egypt. This emphasises further that the legitimation of leadership is about more than demonstrating intellectual mastery of information and techniques, whether Islamic or European-influenced. Finally, the article demonstrates the importance of blurring boundaries to sociocultural change and specifically to the emergence of new religious intellectuals in interwar Egypt, because it highlights how early new religious intellectuals straddled the boundary separating the ‘ulama’ from the efendiyya to establish themselves as religious leaders for the self-consciously modern efendiyya. While early new religious intellectuals drew on hybrid educational backgrounds, their vocation and discourse were fairly closely matched to the efendiyya. Instead, it was in the area of aesthetics that the most blurring occurred, with leaders performing elements of both ‘ulama’ and efendiyya aesthetics to establish legitimacy as both social leaders and religious authorities within the efendiyya.

Political Islam: An African Perspective

Political Islam continues to gain adherents across the African continent. In an attempt to understand why this is the case, this article explores the historical evolution of political Islam or Islamism. Three case studies are then provided to examine the implementation of this ideology—the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Sudan’s National Islamic Front and Al Shabab in Somalia. In conclusion, we examine the future of political Islam from the perspective of secularism.

Praxeology of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood during the Reign (Recognition of the Fall of Muslim Brotherhood After One Year in Office)

Praxeology of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood during the Reign (Recognition of the Fall of Muslim Brotherhood After One Year in Office)

SIŁA IDEI. WPŁYW HASSANA AL-BANNA I SAYYIDA QUTB NA BRACTWO MUZUŁMAŃSKIE

This article analyzes the ideological influences of Egyptian leaders Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb on the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna and Qutb are considered by many scholars as prominent thinkers in the Muslim world of the twentieth century. They have had a major impact on Islamic extremism in modern times, and have dealt with a number of religious and social issues, which exist in Islamic discourse until today. On the one hand, many of their writings were written metaphorically, while on the other hand, their writings are interpreted by many as explicit orders to exercise violence. This article examines whether Qutb and al-Banna’s ideas still have actual impact on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The aim is to make a case for assuming a new standpoint, which will add to the wider research knowledge.

The Mainspring and Recruiting Mechanism of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood under Authoritarian Regimes

To understand the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's mobilization phenomenon, the readers should look at different angles. Those angles are divided into two categories: the first category is based on macro-analysis, while the second is based on micro-analysis. The Macro-analysis is defined by the historical explanations based on the political or sociological explanations. The microanalysis in this paper presents the different mechanisms pursued by the experienced members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. those stages are well studied and evaluated by the Organization

The Setback of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood: A Study from the Post-Islamism

The Setback of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood: A Study from the Post-Islamism

Affection, désaffection et défection chez deux jeunes Frères musulmans en Égypte

The young Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood bloggers who began to raise their voice in 2006 represent an interesting case to analyze the affective dimension of disengagement process. Despite their adoption of a dissident stance – clearly related to their ideological defection as well as to their insertion into new activist networks – they did not immediately leave the Brotherhood. They continued to be dependent upon this organization which is known for its all-encompassing character. Comparing two trajectories which mix loyalty and disengagement allows one to draw connections between (rather than separate) the processes whereby one remains with or leaves the group. I argue that the paradoxical loyalty of dissidents is to be explained by the Brotherhood’s capacity as an organization to produce powerful emotional attachment – ukhuwa (fraternity). But the various ways in which the dissidents experience these intense affective states determine whether they pursue their commitment or withdraw. Indeed, ukhuwa is a double-edged feeling: while it is at the basis of the Brotherhood’s appeal, and while it is the core of the members’ loyalty, it can also be a source of exclusion and make relations turn violent. The article shows how this ambivalence characterizes the internal relations which structure the group. &#9632

The Arab Summer and Its Discontents

The paper looks at the roots of the Arab Spring, the subsequently contentious political landscape, which emerged in post-revolutionary Middle East, and the series of conflicts and dizzying challenges, which have gripped much of the region. Principally, it examines, historically, the distinct combination of (structural, agential, and triggering) factors, which led to the Arab uprisings as well as the role of moderate, mass-based Islamist movements, principally the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (mb) and its offshoots, which managed to rise to power, in certain countries, after the downfall of Arab strongmen across the region. But, shortly after, to be followed by the unceremonious demise of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (mb), and the ensuing region-wide backlash against its offshoots in 2013. The paper argues, after a careful examination of the structural roots of the 2010–11 Arab uprisings, that one of the principal pitfalls of the ruling Islamist parties was their inability to establish a credible mode of governance, which could decisively mark a break with the old order. They failed to provide an alternative economic agenda to address the structural maladies of the crony capitalism, which emerged on the heels of accelerating market-oriented reforms in the 1990s. The influence of Arab Sheikhdoms on Arab Transition Countries (atcs), and their support for ultra-conservative Salafi groups, further diluted the process of democratic transition, leading to, among other things, the breakdown of the political process in Egypt.

Do Modern Radicals Believe in Their Mythologies? A Comparison between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Legion of the Archangel Michael in the Light of Four Political Mythologies

This study seeks to employ the concept of political mythology in order to test the applicability of a comparative grid applied to two discursive orders produced by one salient expression of modern Islamic fundamentalism/radicalism and by the interwar European extreme right. Narrowing the perspective, the study intends to compare the fundamental texts of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael (Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail) by resorting to four political mythologies coined by the French historian Raoul Girardet: the Conspiracy, the Savior, the Golden Age and Unity. My hypothesis can be summarized as follows: as imaginative acts of world creation/destruction, political mythologies are structures of meaning which allow a comparative approach that preserves intact the tension between similarity and difference. Therefore, Wittgenstein's epistemological edge of the theory of ‘family resemblance’ could be amplified by the employment of political mythologies. Consequently the broad ranging cross-boundary comparisons gain systematic value without falling into the trap of rigid taxonomies. Consequently I seek to demonstrate that despite a basic structure of similarities, the fundamentalism of the Islamic Brotherhood and the radicalism of the Romanian extreme right appear in the light of political mythologies as bearing features that differ markedly from the Islamofascist paradigm.

Why Did the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Year-Long Rule Fall?

Why Did the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Year-Long Rule Fall?

Revisiting the Co-optation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood by the H.usnī Mubārak Regime

Revisiting the Co-optation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood by the H.usnī Mubārak Regime