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The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan, 1945-1993, by Marion Boulby. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1999. xix + 160 pages. Index to p. 169. $44.95.
The Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world has received a great deal of attention in recent years due to the West's obsession with fundamentalism and the prospect of terrorism. In the Foreword, John Voll points out that there have been few single-country books or articles on this subject (p. x). This book is a sound attempt to fill this scholarly void and to challenge conventional notions that all Islamist movements are violent by nature and that their ultimate goal is to capture the state and impose the Shari'a. In fact, Boulby tries to show, relying on sound evidence, that the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan is moderate, has cooperated with the Hashemite regime, and has never sought to capture the state.
Boulby lays the ground work in the first chapter by discussing in some detail the development of the State of Jordan. Drawing upon secondary sources for much of this discussion, he illustrates the difficulty that Jordan, at its inception, faced in shaping a national identity. Arab nationalist/secular parties-especially the National Socialist Party led by Sulayman al-Nabulsi (who won the 1957 free elections and sought to align Jordan with Egypt and the Soviet Bloc), along with the Islamists, Arab Nationalists, and Ba'thists-were competing identity communities that challenged the formation of a Jordanian identity per se. King Husayn sought to deal with these identity challenges by conducting a short-lived experiment with democratic politics. In the 1950s, given the political and existential challenge to Jordan posed by Egyptian President Jamal `Abd al-Nasir's nationalist politics, the King instituted martial law and abolished the electoral process, thus strengthening his hold on power (p. 21). The author provides a very good discussion of the subsequent political events that led to the second free elections in Jordanian...