Reading List: Western Scholarship on the Muslim Brotherhood (and Supplemental Primary Sources)
Eleven books for those wishing to better understand the Muslim Brotherhood.
From time to time here I’m going to offer reading lists on key topics as a way of going beyond the news of the moment. This is the first list.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949). The Brotherhood soon attracted a massive following within Egypt. It also spread quickly to other countries, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, and had a global influence as well. Typically in the opposition, the Brotherhood and Brotherhood-related parties have nevertheless sometimes been in power, for example in Egypt (2012-2013), Sudan (1989-1999), and Gaza (2006-2023).
The Brotherhood has been an object of fascination for Western scholars and especially political scientists - actually, probing why that’s the case would make for a worthy dissertation topic. But the reasons are at least partly obvious: the Brotherhood is intrinsically interesting, plus it’s often been the most prominent opposition movement/party, and so the Brotherhood’s relationships with various authoritarians tells us a lot about both sides of those equations. In any case, this list is my effort to (a) help you understand the Brotherhood, (b) orient yourself within the voluminous Western academic literature on the topic, and (c) get an interesting lens on the political history of the Middle East and beyond.
The list is organized in the recommended reading order which also loosely maps, for entries 1-5, onto the history of the Brotherhood in Egypt. Entries 6-11 are organized geographically and provide views of the Brotherhood beyond Egypt. At the end I give a few key primary sources in English translation for those who want to hear the Brotherhood is in its own voice(s). You’ll notice that the list concentrates on the Middle East and includes effectively nothing west of Egypt - this is partly to try for at least some brevity, but also partly because once one gets to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, it’s not so easy to classify local Islamist parties as Brotherhood “branches” per se. Perhaps that’s a topic for a future post.
Anyways, here’s the list:
Richard Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford, 1969). Mitchell’s account is not only a detailed history and exposition of the Brotherhood’s structure and worldview, it’s also widely considered the classic account of the Brotherhood - so reading it gives you an anchor in the secondary literature. Read the 1993 edition with John Voll’s Foreword. Voll describes how Mitchell’s particular vantage point - seeing Arab nationalism at its high point, witnessing the repression of the Brotherhood, and viewing the Brotherhood through the prism of the modernization theory dominant in the 1960s - led Mitchell to underestimate the Brotherhood’s staying power. Voll praises the book, though, for giving readers the tools to understand why the Brotherhood later resurged, even though Mitchell’s history ends when the Brotherhood was at its nadir. If you want another history of the Egyptian Brotherhood as a whole, before moving on down this list, then I’d recommend Carrie Wickham’s The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton, 2015), which goes up through the time of Mohamed Morsi (1951-2019, president of Egypt 2012-2013).
Barbara Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology (Routledge, 2009). Zollner’s book makes a strong sequel to Mitchell’s because her account goes a little past his, chronologically, and also approaches the question of ideology differently. The two central characters here are (1) the title’s al-Hudaybi (1891-1973), who served as the second General Guide of the Brotherhood (1951-1973) after al-Banna’s assassination in 1949; and (2) Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the thinker who is now often associated in Western accounts with radicalism but whose life and thought have also been subject to various reassessments (see here for one example). Zollner reconstructs the different worldviews of al-Hudaybi and Qutb, sets them into historical context, and argues compellingly that al-Hudaybi’s views won out within the Brotherhood. If one wanted to pause here and go further with studying Qutb, a key recent title is Fawaz Gerges’ Making the Arab World (Princeton, 2018), which juxtaposes the biographies of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970, president from 1954-1970) and Qutb. If you want to go even deeper on Qutb, see the biographies by James Toth and John Calvert.
Aaron Rock-Singer, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and Islamic Revival (Cambridge, 2019). Rock-Singer’s book has three advantages for the reader of this list. First, it gives you more of the historical thread begun with the previous two books; one central character in Rock-Singer’s account is Umar al-Tilmisani (1904-1986), the third General Guide of the Brotherhood. Second, the book places the Brotherhood into the wider context of the “Islamic Revival” of the 1970s. Rock-Singer pays attention to the reformist/charitable organization Jam‘iyya Shar‘iyya (Islamic Law Society, or perhaps the Law-Based Society, depending on how one wishes to translate the name) and the Salafi organization Ansar al-Sunna (Supporters of the Prophetic Model). This multi-movement focus lets the reader see how the Brotherhood was adapting not just through interactions with the state in a period of somewhat greater tolerance under President Anwar al-Sadat (1918-1981, in power 1970-1981), but also through interactions with other activist Muslims. Third, Rock-Singer gives you a window into Brotherhood and other activist media of the period. If you want more insight into the Brotherhood under Sadat, Practicing Islam in Egypt pairs well with Abdullah al-Arian’s Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (Oxford, 2014).
Steven Brooke, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage (Cornell, 2019). Now that you’ve explored the early Brotherhood, the movement’s internal ideological debates during its reconstruction, and the Brotherhood’s re-emergence during the 1970s and after, it’s worth digging more into the Brotherhood as an organization. Brooke focuses on the Brotherhood’s social services and especially its medical clinics under the umbrella of the Islamic Medical Association. Brooke found that the Brotherhood’s clinics largely served paying, middle-class customers, and he ties this into a theory about how offering high-quality services to the middle class can translate into votes at election time.
Shadi Hamid, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World (St. Martin’s press, 2016). Hamid conducted hundreds of interviews with Brotherhood members before and after the Arab Uprisings of 2010-2011. The value of those interviews shows through in Islamic Exceptionalism, which is most interesting for the glimpses it offers into how Brotherhood members and other Islamists responded to the dizzying ups and downs of the 2011-2013 period. Hamid really delves into the soul-searching that followed, the fierce debates over strategy, and the difficulty the Brotherhood had in finding a way forward after the overthrow of Morsi.
David Warren, Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis (Routledge, 2021). This book offers three things to the student of the Brotherhood: (a) it serves as a robust introduction to the thought and activism of Yusuf al-Qaradawi (1926-2022), the most famous cleric associated with the Brotherhood; (b) it pairs well with Hamid’s book in terms of analyzing the Arab uprisings, their aftermath, and how that affected the Brotherhood, and (c) it gives serious insight into the thinking of the Brotherhood’s opponents in the Gulf, particularly the counterrevolutionary project emanating from the United Arab Emirates. For those who want more on al-Qaradawi, I recommend Global Mufti: The Phenomenon of Yūsuf Al-Qaraḍāwī (Columbia, 2009), a collection edited by Bettina Gräf and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen.
Stéphane Lacroix, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Harvard, 2011). This is, flat out, one of the best books on politics in the Middle East. It is also, for the purposes of this list, highly relevant in terms of examining the Brotherhood’s career in Saudi Arabia, first as fleeing Egyptian dissidents were welcomed into the Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s, and then as the Brotherhood-inspired Sahwa (Awakening) movement became a political threat to the monarchy in the 1980s and especially during and after the Gulf War. Lacroix thus helps you understand even more fully some of the dynamics that come up in Warren’s account. The book’s themes branch out in a number of directions, and it may feature on other lists I post here.
Jillian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge, 2006). Schwedler’s book is crucial not merely for looking at two of the region’s most important Brotherhood-affiliated parties beyond Egypt (Jordan’s Islamic Action Front and Yemen’s al-Islah, or Reform), but also because the book is one of the most sophisticated treatments of the “inclusion-moderation hypothesis,” or the idea that allowing groups (in this case Islamists) to participate in formal politics will result in their moderation. For more on the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, see Joas Wagemakers’s book by that title (Cambridge, 2020); unfortunately I am not aware of a similar, and similarly recent, book-length treatment of al-Islah (readers may know!).
Raphaël Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford, 2013). Although brutally suppressed (including in the 1982 massacre in the city of Hama, hence the book’s title), the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was one of the movement’s most important branches. Lefèvre gives the movement’s history, its internal debates and complex responses to the various eras of Syrian politics after independence, and the diverse trajectories of Brotherhood activists, jihadists, and others following the crushing of the 1976-1982 uprising. The book pairs well with Thomas Pierret’s Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge, 2013), which examines the post-1982 role of Sunni Muslim clerics inside Syria and includes a chapter (#5) on clerics’ relationships with Islamists.
Willow Berridge, Hasan al-Turabi: Islamist Politics and Democracy in Sudan (Cambridge, 2017). For all that has been written about the Brotherhood in Egypt, the Brotherhood-inspired National Islamic Front had a longer time in power (1989-1999, as well as considerable political influence in the late 1970s and early 1980s) than the Egyptian Brotherhood ever did. Here Berridge analyzes the life of Sudan’s most important Islamist, Hasan al-Turabi (1932-2016), retracing Turabi’s biography in depth and then turning, in even greater depth, to his intellectual influences, output, and his overall legacy. This book pairs well with Noah Salomon’s For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan's Islamic State (Princeton, 2016), which does not focus on the Brotherhood per se but rather on what it was like to live under this experiment in Islamist governance. Salomon makes the creative argument that the state produced “Islamic grammars” that came to fill daily life (for example, in Islamic praise songs played on the radio). Different segments of society then leveraged their own expressions of Islam to contest that same state’s authority.
Jeroen Gunning, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (Oxford, 2007). When asked about Hamas I usually recommend Tareq Baconi’s Hamas Contained (Stanford, 2018) as the best book to read for understanding the present juncture, but the questions Gunning asks - in sum, how does Hamas approach politics? - are more relevant for the purposes of this list. In any case you should look at both books: both Gunning and Baconi talk about the Brotherhood, as an inspiration for Hamas and as an interlocutor Hamas in the present. I have not seen, but would very much like to see, a book focusing on Hamas’ relationship with the Brotherhood.
Primary Sources
Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden, edited by Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton, 2009). I’m a fairly conservative user of the term “Islamism” myself, preferring to apply it to the Brotherhood and things like the Brotherhood, rather than to a wider spectrum of figures. Perhaps I’ll write about that here soon. But in any case, this anthology includes translated excerpts from several people mentioned above - al-Banna, Qutb, al-Turabi, al-Qaradawi, etc. - and a host of others.
Al-Turabi, Women in Islam and Muslim Society. The Brotherhood is, quite simply, much more than the caricatures of it. Reading Turabi offers many surprises to those expecting a two-dimensional “fundamentalist” - but reading Turabi also occasions reflection about why this clearly very intelligent man had so many failures (and outright tragedies) as a policymaker, even when judged by his own standards.
The Brookings Institution’s “Islamists on Islamism Today” series. In 2017, Hamid and Will McCants interviewed various leading Brotherhood figures from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, as well as members of Islamist and Muslim democratic parties in other countries such as Tunisia. I have not seen an English-language anthology of contemporary Brotherhood perspectives and writings; this is the closest thing to such an anthology that I’m aware of.
The legal writings of Brotherhood shaykhs. Al-Qaradawi and Sayyid Sabiq (1915-2000) produced some of the most popular Islamic legal writing of the twentieth century, including al-Qaradawi’s al-Halal wa-l-Haram fi ‘l-Islam (The Permitted and the Forbidden in Islam) and Sabiq’s Fiqh al-Sunna (perhaps, Jurisprudence Based in the Prophetic Model). While not about the Brotherhood per se, these texts give insight into how major Brotherhood figures thought about Islam itself, not just as an ideology but as a legal system. Both have been translated, as have many other works by al-Qaradawi.