The Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West is the first comprehensive history of the relationship between the world’s largest Islamist movement and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East for the past century: Britain and the United States. In the decades since the Brotherhood emerged in Egypt in the 1920s, the movement’s notion of “the West” has remained central to its worldview and a key driver of its behavior. From its founding, the Brotherhood stood opposed to the British Empire and Western cultural influence more broadly. As British power gave way to American, the Brotherhood’s leaders, committed to a vision of more authentic Islamic societies, oscillated between anxiety or paranoia about the West and the need to engage with it. Western officials, for their part, struggled to understand the Brotherhood, unsure whether to shun the movement as one of dangerous “fanatics” or to embrace it as a moderate and inevitable part of the region’s political scene. Too often, diplomats failed to view the movement on its own terms, preferring to impose their own external agendas and obsessions. Martyn Frampton reveals the history of this complex and charged relationship down to the eve of the Arab Spring. Drawing on extensive archival research in London and Washington and the Brotherhood’s writings in Arabic and English, he provides the most authoritative assessment to date of a relationship that is both vital in itself and crucial to navigating one of the world’s most turbulent regions.

Following the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood achieved a level of influence previously unimaginable. Yet the implications of the Brotherhood's rise and dramatic fall for the future of democratic governance, peace, and stability in the region are disputed and remain open to debate. Drawing on more than one hundred in-depth interviews as well as Arabic-language sources never before accessed by Western researchers, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham traces the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from its founding in 1928 to the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the watershed elections of 2011-2012. Highlighting elements of movement continuity and change, Wickham demonstrates that shifts in Islamist worldviews, goals, and strategies are not the result of a single strand of cause and effect, and provides a systematic, fine-grained account of Islamist group evolution in Egypt and the wider Arab world. In a new afterword, Wickham discusses what has happened in Egypt since Muhammad Morsi was ousted and the Muslim Brotherhood fell from power.

The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the oldest and most influential Islamist movements. As the party ascends to power in Egypt, it is poised to adopt a new system of governance and state–society relations, the effects of which are likely to extend well beyond Egypt’s national borders. This book examines the Brotherhood’s visions and practices, from its inception in 1928, up to its response to the 2011 uprising, as it moves to redefine democracy along Islamic lines. The book analyses the Muslim Brotherhood’s position on key issues such as gender, religious minorities, and political plurality, and critically analyses whether claims that the Brotherhood has abandoned extremism and should be engaged with as a moderate political force can be substantiated. It also considers the wider political context of the region, and assesses the extent to which the Brotherhood has the potential to transform politics in the Middle East.

In the wake of the 25 January revolution and the coup that followed in 2013, Egyptian bookstores recorded a significant increase in demand for books by and about the Muslim Brotherhood. However, despite the burgeoning literature on the Brotherhood, knowledge about the movement is still rather limited, particularly with regard to its most strategic tool – media and communications. This book offers a fresh and close look into the communication strategy of the group, focusing on published periodicals, biographies, and websites that represent the voice of the Brotherhood. The book analyses the core mission of the Brotherhood, namely its dacwa (call, invitation to faith) – how it is articulated and how it is defined by the movement as an ideology and a process. Have the media represented a coherent voice of the Brotherhood over the past decades? What can they communicate regarding the Brothers’ perception of the needs of their audiences? How have the media served to sustain, preserve, and distinguish the movement for nine decades? The book argues that the Brotherhood media speak with an intermittent voice and deliver an incoherent message whose tone is changeable and fluctuating and cannot be claimed to truly represent the heterogeneity of the group. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates Media Studies and Social Movement Theory, the book provides a fresh analysis of the Brotherhood movement as an interpretive community and will be a valuable resource for anyone studying Egypt or the Muslim Brotherhood.

The book offers a processual and discursive perspective on how individuals exit the Muslim Brotherhood. The framework is based on an interaction of ‘micro’ psychological and emotional factors, ‘meso’ organizational factors and ‘macro’ political developments linked to the specific case of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt during the Arab Spring. Based on interviews conducted in Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the United Kingdom, the author traces in-depth narratives of exiters while they return to their private life or resort to political activism of another stripe. This work examines thought-provoking patterns pertaining to elements long under-explored in the scholarship and stands out as it systematically identifies this unexamined subset of Brotherhood members: peaceful leavers.

In Europe and North America, networks tracing their origins back to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements have rapidly evolved into multifunctional and richly funded organizations competing to become the major representatives of Western Muslim communities and government interlocutors. Some analysts and policy makers see these organizations as positive forces encouraging integration. Others cast them as modern-day Trojan horses, feigning moderation while radicalizing Western Muslims. Lorenzo Vidino brokers a third, more informed view. Drawing on more than a decade of research on political Islam in the West, he keenly analyzes a controversial movement that still remains relatively unknown. Conducting in-depth interviews on four continents and sourcing documents in ten languages, Vidino shares the history, methods, attitudes, and goals of the Western Brothers, as well as their phenomenal growth. He then flips the perspective, examining the response to these groups by Western governments, specifically those of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Highly informed and thoughtfully presented, Vidino's research sheds light on a critical juncture in Muslim-Western relations.

A wide-ranging account of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and its ideological and behavioural development since its founding in 1945.

Orignally published in 1969, this monograph has become known as a standard source for the history of the revivalist Egyptian movement, the Muslim Brethren, up to the time of Nasser. The work has been reissued for those scholars and students interested in the Muslim revival.