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![]() | The Muslim Brotherhood: |
The Muslim Brotherhood has achieved a level of influence nearly unimaginable before the Arab Spring. The Brotherhood was the resounding victor in Egypt's 2011-2012 parliamentary elections, and six months later, a leader of the group was elected president. Yet the implications of the Brotherhood's rising power for the future of democratic governance, peace, and stability in the region is open to dispute. Drawing on more than one hundred in-depth interviews as well as Arabic language sources not previously accessed by Western researchers, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham traces the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from its founding in 1928 to the fall of Mubarak and the watershed elections of 2011-2012. Further, she compares the Brotherhood's trajectory with those of mainstream Islamist groups in Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco, revealing a wider pattern of change. Wickham highlights the internal divisions of such groups and explores the shifting balance of power among them. She shows that they are not proceeding along a linear path toward greater moderation. Rather, their course has been marked by profound tensions and contradictions, yielding hybrid agendas in which newly embraced themes of freedom and democracy coexist uneasily with illiberal concepts of Shari'a carried over from the past. Highlighting elements of movement continuity and change, and demonstrating that shifts in Islamist worldviews, goals, and strategies are not the result of a single strand of cause and effect, Wickham provides a systematic, fine-grained account of Islamist group evolution in Egypt and the wider Arab world. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham is associate professor of political science at Emory University. She is the author of Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt. "This timely publication emerges from Emory University political scientist Wickham's (Mobilizing Islam) long-term research into the institutional and ideological nuances of 'movement changes' within the Muslim Brotherhood--the Sunni revivalist organization that was the leading opponent of the Mubarak regime in Egypt before the popular uprising of January 2011. . . . This admirable study (based on hundreds of interviews) is a judicious, well-grounded plea for complexity in the depiction and analysis of Islamist movements."--Publishers Weekly "[F]ascinating and marvelously detailed. . . . The Muslim Brotherhood offers one of the best and most detailed presentations of a robust school of thought among students of Islamism. . . . [I]t is likely to become a standard text and will be received as a major summary statement of decades of research and analysis."--Marc Lynch, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas Endorsement: "A timely and incisive look into the history, politics, and future of the Muslim Brotherhood by the foremost expert on Islamism in Egypt. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham has constructed a detailed account of how the Brotherhood confronts the challenges before it, and why and when it embraces change. Everyone concerned with the future of Egypt should read this book."--Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival and The Dispensable Nation "Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham's The Muslim Brotherhood is the most significant book about the Egyptian brotherhood since the publication in 1969 of Richard P. Mitchell's The Society of the Muslim Brothers. Essential for understanding the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and its aftermath."--James L. Gelvin, author of The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know Preface ix Subject Areas: | |||||||
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