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  • A Struggle for Power: Islamism and Democracy
  • Nathan J. Brown (bio)
Inside the Brotherhood, by Hazem Kandil. London: Polity, 2014. 240pages. $25.
Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, by Shadi Hamid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 269pages. $27.95.
Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt, by Abdallah Al-Arian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 320pages. $55.

For much of the past decade, scholarly study of Islamism, democracy, and the Muslim Brotherhood — three discrete subjects and ones that are international in nature — often heavily overlapped and frequently centered on Egypt. No more. Egypt has plunged into autocracy, repression, and Islamist insurgency. The Brotherhood may no longer be the center of gravity for Islamism and no longer spins its wheels in electoral politics in any case; democracy seems to be an unlikely prospect for Egypt and much of the Arab world; and the most dynamic Islamist movements no longer seem to be those that focus on electoral participation.

Has any useful knowledge been left behind after Egypt’s bloody summer of 2013? Scholarly interest in Islamist movements was anchored by the political experience of the Egyptian Brotherhood. Of course, many scholarly writings focused on other movements, other countries, and on fields other than politics. But it is the rise of Egypt’s Brotherhood and its fate in the political realm that garnered the most attention and often set the context for scholarly efforts that used it as a measuring stick for other experiences.

Different accounts emphasized different things, but a fairly coherent story has emerged: of a loosening political environment in Egypt from the 1970s on; a rising surge of religiosity within society; and a resurgent Muslim Brotherhood movement that became increasingly (though never exclusively) interested in politics and successful in making its presence felt to the extent that it became the leading political face of the rising tide of Islamism.

And, it should be added, it is not simply scholars who have kept a steady eye on the Brotherhood in politics — political activists, regimes, diplomats, and many Islamists themselves came to base their political calculations in part by their understanding of, or reaction to, the Brotherhood. To be sure, the Brotherhood’s political fortunes have increasingly been seen not so much as drivers of the political process; scholars have shifted gradually to view it more commonly as a reaction to it: the Brotherhood’s politics have been seen as effect as much as cause.

This scholarly work has been carried out under circumstances that were unusually favorable: the boundary between Western scholars and those based in the Arab world has frayed in fruitful ways. Even secretive and closed movements have been pried open for those who take the trouble to seek out leaders and dissidents, closely probe statements, and follow discussions online.

Thus, when the Arab uprisings of 2011 propelled the movements to the center of the political stage — and led to the surprising result of a freely elected president of Egypt hailing from the Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi in 2012 — there was considerable scholarly [End Page 463] expertise to deploy to understand the political dynamics at hand (though hardly predict them — events moved too quickly and too chaotically for most observers to say much beyond narrating them). The two years following the 2011 uprising were likely some of the most fateful for Islamist movements in Egypt and perhaps far more broadly, but the overthrow of Morsi in 2013 seems to have also brought the Brotherhood’s political project, as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, to a full stop. It is now appropriate to step back and ask two questions: What have we learned, and how relevant is what we have learned likely to prove in the era after 2013?

Of the books under review, two center on the Brotherhood itself and give an inside view of the movement. We learn a lot about the movement as a result, despite its bashfulness with outsiders concerning its internal operations. In one sense, these books buck the broader scholarly trend to see the Brotherhood’s behavior as reactive to context rather than as impelled by its organization and ideology.

Hazem Kandil’s...

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