ABSTRACT
The comparative failure of secular opposition political parties can be explained at both the abstract level of Egypt's political culture and at the prosaic level of the cut and thrust of contemporary politics. The deterministic, cultural explanation, which is proffered by Islamicists, is that since secularism is a foreign implant into Egypt's quintessential Islamic society, it is bound to provide insufficient stimulus for political mobilization. Professional syndicates, which group an overwhelming majority of Egypt's doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists, agronomists, actors, journalists, teachers, and other professionals into their separate organizations, provide through their elections a good indication of the balance of power between government and the secular and religious oppositions. The Moslem Brotherhood, on the other hand, is pointed to by most Islamicists as the only broadly based, durable political movement in twentieth-century Egypt that has demonstrated an autonomous mobilizational potential that crosses many of the class, regional, and other cleavages that impede the expansion of secular organizations.
