ABSTRACT
Marwan Bishara analyzes the relationship between democracy and “the most influential Islamist movement in the Arab world—the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.” Founded more than eighty years ago, soon after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the Brotherhood has spawned any number of Islamist movements in countries across the Middle East. Its leaders have been persecuted, imprisoned, and executed by the Egyptian government over the decades, though Bishara contends that the Brotherhood has evolved into a primarily “social and charitable movement” that has shied away from involvement in politics. The more radical members of the group, who embraced tenets of radical Islam, including violent jihad, have generally splintered off from the Brotherhood. And another divergence of views divides the Brotherhood between conservative traditionalists, who advocate religious charity work to further the proselytizing of Islam, and those liberals who urge greater participation in the political processes of the country. As a result, the Brotherhood is distrusted by both ends of the political spectrum—by the government, which considers it an Islamist terrorist organization, and by the jihadists, including al-Qaeda, who consider the Brotherhood’s participation in the political life of the nation to constitute a backsliding acknowledgment of the legitimacy of secular ruling institutions. The Brotherhood displayed no evident leadership in the protest movements that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. But once the ruling administrations of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt were swept aside, the Brotherhood’s strong grassroots networks and community organizations enabled it to step quickly into the resulting power vacuums. The very success of the chiefly secular uprisings against those long-entrenched regimes demonstrated the weakened influence of militant jihadist organizations in the region. In contrast, according to Bishara, the Brotherhood, whatever its religious origins and tendencies, is less interested in imposing strict Islamist principles upon the populace than in working “shoulder to shoulder with liberal, leftist, and nationalist groups.”
