Voice of the Muslim Brotherhood: Da‘wa, Discourse, and Political Communication by Noha Mellor (review)

The overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood–led government in Egypt in 2013 is dramatic evidence of the ebb and flow of the Brotherhood’s influence over the years. As one of the most influential Muslim organizations in the contemporary world, its changing fortunes are of importance for policy-makers and scholars as well as the political public. In recent years many studies have been written about the Brotherhood and the sources of its power. However, insufficient attention has been given, in Noha Mellor’s view, to the Brotherhood’s “most strategic tool — media and communication” (p. 1). In this book, Mellor works to fill this gap, examining the communication strategies of the group as a way “to understand the trajectory of the Brothers’ shifting ideologies . . . from inception in 1928 to date” (p. 1). Her study, as her title indicates, is an analysis of the Voice of the Muslim Brotherhood as the group articulated its aims and goals in the public sphere.

Mellor begins with a careful presentation of the approach of the study, which “integrates Media Studies and Social Movement Theory and . . . analysis of the Brotherhood movement as an interpretive community” (p. 5). Mellor examines how the Brotherhood developed its “brand,” positioning the Brotherhood media “at the intersection of political and religious communication” (pp. 6–7), and shaping both religious and political public discourse.

Following this introduction, the four chapters of Part 1 provide a conceptual framework for the content analyses of Brotherhood media in Parts 2 and 3. The first chapter presents the key concepts in Mellor’s understanding of the Brotherhood’s “discursive strategies aimed at creating and sustaining the movement as an enmeshed faith and political brand” (p. 31). The evolution of “the brand” is a key theme for the rest of the book. Chapter 2 argues that the respect for the personality and ideas of Hasan al-Banna, the founder, made him “the most important element in the MB brand” (p. 35). Banna’s lack of a detailed ideology or program gave the Brotherhood brand, in Mellor’s view, an important flexibility (pp. 48–49). The major achievement of the Brotherhood was not imposing an ideological program but rather, as Mellor argues in Chapters 3 and 4, was that it changed the character of political and religious discourse: “the Islamic discourse has become so integrated into the overall national fabric . . . that it becomes difficult to separate ‘public’ and ‘counter-public’ as two distinct categories of analysis” (p. 64). Chapter 4 provides an analysis of the variety of media utilized by the Brotherhood in its educational mission, showing how it succeeded in altering public political and religious discourse.

The voice of the Brotherhood developed over time, and Mellor examines this evolution chronologically. The Brotherhood’s voice during its first decade, as discussed in Chapter 5, was primarily that of Banna in his public lectures and newspaper essays. Mellor presents relatively detailed content analysis of specific essays in the newspaper al-Fath and then in the Muslim Brotherhood’s own publications. During the second decade, as presented in Chapter 6, a broader range of writers and new Brotherhood magazines reflected the expansion of the organization and its growing political influence. The complex history of the Brotherhood, described by Mellor in Chapter 7 as the fragmentation stage (1949–71), following the murder of Banna and its active suppression by Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser’s regime, involved a re-branding. “This stage of MB media marked the meta-narrative of ‘Islam for humanity’, and the focus here was on proving the superiority of Islam as a system and ideology” (p. 141), as opposed to communism and other radical ideologies of the time. A key voice in this stage was Sayyid Qutb.

The Brotherhood’s publications, especially al-Da‘wa and Liwa’ al-Islam, as discussed in Chapter 8, were central during the regimes of Anwar al-Sadat and Husni Mubarak in “resuscitating the group...