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Carrie Rosefsky Wickham , The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press , 2013). Pp. 384. $29.95 cloth.
Oppositional Thought and Movements for Justice
A leading authority on Islamist politics, Carrie Wickham brings years of thoughtful research, experience in the field, and careful reflection to her new book on the Muslim Brotherhood. The book, which is meticulously detailed and superbly sourced, is a pleasure to read and advances robust theoretical and empirical claims.
Wickham begins with the expectation that competing tendencies of ideational continuity and change exist in any large political-missionary organization. Rather than boil the group down to a voiceless monolith or speculate about the Brotherhood's essential intentions, Wickham shows how and why scholars can account for the strategic changes not only in the group's rhetoric and behavior but also in its values and beliefs. The central argument is that Islamist ideational development is dependent on "differences in the social environments within which [Islamist groups] are embedded" (p. 287). Thus, a big-tent organization like the Muslim Brotherhood is not a free-ranging actor with ideological coherence. She charts ideational change by matching the ideational development of individuals with their specific political histories. This leads her to analyze three groupings within the Brotherhood: reformers, pragmatists, and conservatives. In doing so, she eschews the participation-causes-moderation argument in favor of a more fine-grained analysis of cause and effect. Wickham takes her expansive knowledge and background and applies it mainly to the case of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood but also to Brotherhood...