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The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: the rise of an Islamic mass movement 1928-1942
BRYNJAR LIA, 1998
Reading, Ithaca
272 pp., hb, L30.00, ISBN 0 86372 220 2
Scholarship on Islamic fundamentalism habitually dates back to the foundation of the Egyptian Society of the Muslim Brothers in 1928, and the English-speaking world is referred to Richard Mitchell's 1969 The Society of the Muslim Brothers for further details. This book purports to supersede Mitchell's rather brief coverage of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (hereafter MB) in the 1930s. There are three reasons why it succeeds in doing this: firstly, it draws on a host of sources not available to Mitchell, namely the memoirs and documents that have flooded the Egyptian bookmarket since the release of the Brothers in 1970. Secondly, it distances itself from earlier treatments of the MB-including Mitchell's-which saw the MB as traditionalist, reactionary and exclusivist. Thirdly, it asks the right question and pursues it clearly and thoughtfully.
The right question is the question of growth. Of all the various Islamic societies flourishing in the 1930s, why was it precisely the MB which grew so dramatically that, by 1941, it had more than 500 branches in Egypt alone and several hundred thousand supporters? How did a small provincial charity become a force to be reckoned with on a national political level? Lia answers this question by pointing to the MB's organizational skills, its daring campaigns on popular issues such as Christian missionary activity, and its conscious drive to represent an important but neglected constituency, namely the urban middle class. In presenting this explanation, he argues against a number of earlier answers which he finds one-dimensional and in need of qualification. These include political patronage, the MB's adroit exploitation of Egyptian sympathy for the Palestinian uprising, Hasan al-Banna's charisma and the MB's anti-Western ideology.
In general, Lia complains that, so far, the ideological angle has been much overstressed in the study of the MB, which has mainly been based on the writings of its founder Hasan al-Banna. The early history of...