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2 the muSlim Brotherhood Building a State within a State in Egypt The Brotherhood is the people. We are struggling. We help the poor. We help the jobless. Where do we get our money? out of our own pockets. We reach in our pockets to help one another. —Essam El Eryan, deputy vice president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party The most prominent Islamist movement in the Muslim world today and the “mother organization of all Islamist movements”1 is the Society of Muslim Brothers.2 Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood today has branches in some seventy countries. As Middle East area specialist Barry Rubin observes, “while other Islamist groups have made more dramatic appearances, launched huge terrorist attacks, and fought civil wars, the Muslim Brotherhoods have shown more staying power and better organizational skills.”3 The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is unique among the four movements we chronicle in two respects. While all of the movements encountered resistance, the Brotherhood is the only movement to have faced severe government repression. In the more than eighty years since its founding, the Brotherhood has survived two dissolutions by the Egyptian government, the assassination of its founder, the execution of one of its leading theoreticians, the jailing of thousands of leaders and members, and efforts by the government—at least until the fall of President hosni Mubarak in 2011—to cripple its institutions and impede its goal of creating an Islamic order in Egypt. The Brotherhood is also the only movement of the four in which a segment of it, in the movement’s early decades, used violence, including assassinations of two high government officials. yet from the start, the Brotherhood’s primary strategy was a gradual, reformist one of building religious, cultural, and economic institutions as an alternative to the Egyptian state. These institutions allowed the movement to thrive despite government repression and eventually to win the largest number of seats in by far the first post-Mubarak elections for the Egyptian parliament.4 That this all has happened in Egypt—the largest and most influential Arab nation and a key U.S. ally in the region—makes the Egyptian case a “bellwether of what might lie ahead”5 for other Muslim-majority nations and of great interest to the world’s policy makers. the muSlim Brotherhood 33 how has the Muslim Brotherhood survived and succeeded in many of its goals despite heavy government repression throughout much of its history? Like all the movements whose stories we tell here, the Brotherhood was based on a strongly communitarian vision that saw Muslims as mutually responsible for each other and for their community. This communitarianism, together with the founder’s conception of Islam as applicable to all realms of life, gave the Brotherhood the ambitious goal of Islamizing Egyptian society from below, beginning with the individual and moving outward in concentric circles to the believer’s family, community, society, and state. Branches of the Brotherhood began by building a local mosque and gradually adding to it other services such as a clinic, boys’ club, unemployment agency, and so on. Eventually, businesses serving the community were added. one institution at a time, the Brotherhood established a dense network of alternative institutions that extended to all corners of the nation. That this “state within a state” was spread across the country allowed the Brotherhood to survive two dissolutions by the government. Decentralization also allowed members to address elements of the Brotherhood’s absolutist beliefs to the needs and sensibilities of local communities. Across the country, potential recruits to the movement were able to experience, through the mosques, schools, social services, and businesses established by the Brotherhood, what life might be like if the movement’s goal of Islamizing society were achieved. The Brotherhood’s provision of much-needed services also served as a tacit indictment of the Egyptian government’s efforts to meet its citizens’ needs. The Brotherhood’s near-capture of Egyptian civil society gave the movement a society-wide base of support from which to enter the arena of electoral politics—a base that propelled them, despite the government’s rigging of elections, to become the largest opposition bloc in the Egyptian People’s Assembly during President hosni Mubarak’s regime, and the largest party in the Assembly after the first postMubarak elections of 2011–2012. iSlamiC orthodoxy, CommunitarianiSm, and ComPrehenSiveneSS Founded in Egypt in 1928 by hasan al-Banna, a twenty-two-year-old elementary school...

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