ABSTRACT
Before analysing the book Du<at la Qudat in regard to its content, some remarks about its contextuality and, further, its composition have to be made. In investigating the questions how and why the text was composed and disseminated, a connection should be made between the historical situation, as set out particularly in the previous chapters, and the textual interpretation of Du<at la Qudat in the present chapter. The remarks are a fi rst effort to illustrate the discourse among the imprisoned Muslim Brothers and give a genealogy of the communicative network. With this approach, one needs to go beyond hermeneutics, which seeks to link a specifi c text to its historical context. Hence, it is not the purpose of the following interpretation to isolate the book, to look into its composition solely from the perspective of its obvious content and its place in history, but rather to adopt as a leading query its interdependence with surrounding disputes and circumstances.
