Inside the Brotherhood

by Hazem Kandil

This is the first in-depth study of the relationship between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its own members. Drawing on years of participant observation, extensive interviews, previously inaccessible organizational documents, and dozens of memoirs and writings, the book provides an intimate portrayal of the recruitment and socialization of Brothers, the evolution of their intricate social networks, and the construction of the peculiar ideology that shapes their everyday practices. Drawing on his original research, Kandil reinterprets the Brotherhood’s slow rise and rapid downfall from power in Egypt, and compares it to the Islamist subsidiaries it created and the varieties it inspired around the world. This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of the Middle East and to anyone who wants to understand the dramatic events unfolding in Egypt and elsewhere in the wake of the Arab uprisings.

Genres: Politics, Egypt, Middle East, History, Islamism, Islam, Religion

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2014

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

It reads like the academic work that it is. Author Hazem Kandil studies “how organizations employ their ideals in macro-level power struggles.” In this work he focuses on how the Muslim Brotherhood attained power over 8 decades of patient building and dramatically lost power in a little over a year.

Kandil’s study includes research into published and unpublished sources (inclusive of 17 memoirs) print and AV indoctrination materials, interviews with 77 people (p. 183) with various relationships with the Brotherhood, 6 years attendance at a Brotherhood mosque in California and more. The result for the reader is a look inside the Brotherhood, including the secret parts, delivered through dense and heavily footnoted prose.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 with the goal of creating an ideal Muslim society. It was personal and not political. The “ideology” was simple: once all follow Islam as the Brothers define it, God will see that a good life will follow. Recruitment is careful, most are selected from friends and family of members.

In weekly meetings a “cultivation curriculum” (which the author was able to see and cite) is delivered which focuses on obeying/trusting leaders and not criticizing Islam (because that weakens it). The suffering of Brothers is idealized so that recruits understand that to betray the group betrays those who suffered. Recruits are evaluated on worship, ethics, sociability and commitment. As one becomes a brother, he (there are a few female groups) cocoons into a family, work/ business and social life revolving around the Brotherhood. Outside reading, media, relationships are discredited, discouraged and often banned. There are many examples of the indoctrination process.

The author’s premise is that a group like this, with no academic heft behind it and no experience in negotiating daily life outside the closed loop of its community would fail. He shows how, after being late to the Egyptian protests the Brotherhood was able to leverage its nationwide footprint into an electoral victory and how members and leaders were surprised that Egyptians wanted a government to provide security and services, not religious guidance.

Kandil concludes with a survey of the Brotherhood and the groups it has spawned around the Middle East and a provocative chapter called “The End of Islam?”.

If you are a general reader you want to know about the Brotherhood and you don’t mind a dry academic slog, this book is for you.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute must-read for anyone who writes or thinks about religion. The phrase "Muslim Brotherhood" is thrown around like a hot potato in the United States -- the right equates it with terrorism, while for the left it sounds like a dog whistle, but I have literally never seen an article explain what the Brotherhood is. In fact the Brotherhood has two unusual qualities which everyone needs to be familiar with.

The first is that while they advocate for Islamic government, they have no concrete explanation of what that means. They do not even know whether their Islam is Sunni or if it includes Shia as well; conflicting ideas about this have been published on their website. In college I read Sayyid Qutb's Milestones and, assuming that Muslims would have an implicit understanding of what was meant by Islamic government, his plan sounded pretty solid at the time. It turns out that Qutb had no idea what he was talking about and the entire Brotherhood is just as clueless as Qutb, and when they actually came to power in Egypt in 2011 they had no plan for governance and were sincerely confused by their inability to attract coalition partners. The author suggests that the general public in Egypt had a positive impression of the Brotherhood because of their extensive charity work, and were just as surprised as the Brotherhood themselves that their community organizing prowess did not translate into political stability.

The second thing that everyone needs to know about the Brotherhood is that they actively discourage reading, even books about Islamic law and history. That's right! Brothers and Sisters are given immediate social welfare, pious friendships, and other benefits as soon as they join the group, but they are held from real membership for up to a decade and are constantly being tested, and reading too many books or asking difficult questions can get them completely expelled and cut off from their entire social circle. Only those who have passed the stringent anti-intellectualism tests become full-fledged Brothers, which explains their political incoherence.

Basically the Muslim Brotherhood is like a stupid version of Chabad. It is a group of illiterate engineers who are devoted to doing good works and bringing God into their communities, and do not support terrorism, but do not trust intellectuals (which is a major problem considering how real terrorists might mimic their social structure, but that's a topic for another book). It seems too weird to be true, but this is the group that exported Salafism to Saudi Arabia and was elected to power in Egypt in 2011 -- which explains why their government collapsed and they were massacred and imprisoned, rather than turning Egypt into a model of Islamic governance.

[Frumenty · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a view to reviewing this book, I’ve just gone back over my Goodreads reading list to see when I first began self-consciously reading to improve my understanding of the place of Islam in Western and other societies. There were books about Indonesia, a long-time interest since I lived there for 3 years, and some others ; but the two titles that mark the beginning of my interest in Islam per se are Robert S. Leiken’s “Europe’s angry Muslims” and Jonathan Laurence’s “The emancipation of Europe’s Muslims”, both of which I read in late 2015, and have reviewed.

After reading Hazem Kandil’s “Inside the Brotherhood”, I have to ask myself whether it is of itself the most useful book I have yet read, or whether I have profited so much from it because of the (moderately) extensive reading that has preceded it, and that I just can’t answer. I’m going to give it 5 stars because that’s what it’s worth to me, but how other readers react to it may depend upon what reading has preceded it.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, and is generally credited with having given rise to Islamism, often called “political Islam” or more accurately (I think) “Islamic activism” (one struggles with terminology in getting to grips with the protean variety of Islams). Since the publication of Kandil’s book, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a number of its allies have cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar, citing for cause (among other things) Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and affiliated organisations, which are deemed by the Saudis to be terrorist organisations. Given Saudi Arabia’s history of Wahhabi proselytism, the hypocrisy of their position could hardly be more blatant, but that’s politics.

The Brotherhood’s history in Egypt is not unmarked by acts of violence, but it also has a most extraordinary record of patient and passive suffering in the cause of its particular vision of Islam : piety, humility, charity, education, sports, hospitals, traditional Islamic values, support for the poor and the weak. The Brotherhood’s strength has been its grassroots activism ; it was the natural beneficiary of the revolution that ousted the dictator Hosni Mubarak, but in office its cultural and intellectual deficiencies became too obvious for citizens to ignore.

The culture of the Brotherhood is strongly anti-intellectual, vigorously suppressing debate and dissent for the sake of unity. While a great source of strength in adversity, in government it left them bereft of ideas with which to address the real-world needs of Egyptians, and what little they offered was indistinguishable from the prescriptions of secular parties, for the simple reason that it was mostly borrowed from secular sources.

Kandil’s book explains the concept of “religious determinism”, an analogue of the “historical determinism” which had its vogue among communists in the 1930s ; they share the belief that by creating certain correct conditions a desired result (the socialist revolution, global Islamic government) will inevitably follow. The Brotherhood’s idea is that Allah will reward his followers with temporal power when enough of them are sufficiently virtuous to deserve it ; hence, when the Morsi government was thrust into office in Egypt, its representatives addressed themselves not to the material needs of the citizenry but to making them better Muslims, and to stacking government posts with people more remarkable for piety, and for loyalty to the Brotherhood, than energy or competence. Usually so adept at presenting the secular public with a religious but reasonable persona, the threat of political annihilation after a year in government outed many Brotherhood members as wacky believers in a panoply of bizarre millennial prophecies of which the public had formerly had only a suspicion. Harmless enough, even quite constructive, in opposition, the Brotherhood proved itself inert and ridiculous in government.

Kandil’s book looks first at “cultivation”, a notion closer to the French word “formation”, I think, than the English word “education” ; Brothers are formed for piety, humility, engagement, and obedience to the leadership. It then looks at the Brotherhood’s ideology, which is in some particulars quite heterodox vis-à-vis the mainstream currents of Sunni Islam ; it is revivalist, and has something, I think, of the ethos of Christian “prosperity theology”, with its emphasis on temporal rewards for virtue and personal sacrifice. Kandil then examines the vicissitudes of the Brotherhood’s institutional existence in Egypt, from inception and suppression, to power and downfall ; and after that gives an account of its many offshoots outside of Egypt, not excluding the “Shi’a Islamism” of Ruhollah Khomeini that led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. At last he touches lightly on the question of whether Islamism has any future, but doesn’t commit himself.

This is a wise and excellent book, not about Islam itself but about an important and idiosyncratic manifestation of Islam. It is an unflattering portrait of a movement and an organization characterized by intellectual and moral mediocrity such that it is hard to take seriously the dire predictions that Islamism will one day take over the world, if it is not stopped ; Islamism may aspire to global Islamic government, but in truth it just doesn’t have the right stuff for such an enterprise.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hazem Kandil wastes no time in lecturing us about how we have gotten Islamism wrong, as many ‘critical’ scholars are wont to do (sometimes condescendingly). He lays out the puzzle straightforwardly: what is the Muslim Brotherhood? He maps the movement out, teases out its ideological beliefs, and lets us draw our own conclusions. I, for one, appreciate how he saw no need to care about what the alarmists and apologists think.

For Kandil, the Brotherhood is an intriguing movement because it combines elements from all sorts of social movements (e.g., cults, evangelical movements, vanguard party, and millenarian orders), as can be seen in the passage here:

“For while this process might strike the casual observer as simple indoctrination with a religious flavor, it is actually an elaborate activity that borrows from at least four different schools: it instills a transformative worldview in the minds of members, as communists do; it claims that converting into this worldview is contingent upon a spiritual conversion, as in mystic orders; it presents this worldview as simple, uncorrupted religion, as in puritan movements; and it insists that this worldview cannot be readily communicated to society because it is not yet ready to handle the truth of the human condition, as in Masonic lodges (p. 6).”

The paradox within the Brotherhood is manifold. It is political but denounces, at least in principle, realpolitik. It envisions a change that is no less than revolutionary but, barring some strays, renounces violence to achieve it. It sees social change as rooted fundamentally in individual change but will seize and use state power mercilessly if the opportunity arises. The Brotherhood believes Islam is for everyone trenchantly but also that not everyone is ready for the Islam they preach; hence the secrecy and appetite for censorship and authoritarianism.

There is no shortage of books about the Egyptian Brotherhood, from Carrie Rosefsky Wickham’s Mobilising Islam (2002) and The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (2015) to Khalil Al-Anani’s Inside the Muslim Brotherhood: Religion, Identity, and Politics(2016) and to Joas Wagemaker’s The Muslim Brotherhood: Ideology, History, Descendants (2022). I have not read these books in-depth so I won’t be making any comparisons here.

The distinctive contribution Kandil makes is in his interpretation of the Brotherhood’s ideology as one of religious determinism. Here’s how he explains it,

“…Islamism is, at bottom, an ideology that attributes worldly success to religious devotion (p. 175).

The movement is defined by a circular logic whereby those closest to God are closest to success. Their point of success begins the moment a Muslim starts behaving like how a ‘perfect’ Muslim would (one embodied by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rigorous code of conduct, no less), not when they have won votes or controlled governments. This is because Brotherhood sees itself as the perfect society, which fuels their distrust of society (hence their penchant for secrecy) even as they claim to want to transform it.

Put differently, the Brotherhood is part of society but also above society. It’s why they conspire internally more than they seek to convince externally.

Kandil argues that this circularity in thinking explains the Brotherhood’s anti-intellectualism (overthinking has no place when the work lies in ‘acting out’ Islam); tenacity in failure (failure is nothing when success is predestined for Islam); and its baffling lack of a programmatic governing vision (policy is nothing because the Brotherhood is the end and not the means).

Kandil’s argument is not new, as the Brotherhood’s failure due to its many paradoxes is a conclusion made by scholars like Olivier Roy decades back. Thus, this book’s most penetrating insights lies in (1) its supply of insiders’ view and documentation; (2) The Brotherhood’s actual dealing with its failure after the 2013 downfall; (3) less-known facts about key figures, like how Qutb was an extremist in nature, and had ‘penned provocative articles advocating things as shocking as nude beaches’ (p. 126) and (4) the shedding of light on how The Brotherhood exploited the post-War on Terror ambiguity whereby global sentiments towards Islamists swung from sympathy to alarmism and back with one pole trying to compensate (often justifiably) for the other.

On no. 4, he writes,

"They would also use the Banna–Qutb divide to convey a sense of division to outsiders. This served two purposes: first, in urging rulers, activists, and foreigners to concede to the doves, lest the hawks take over; and second, in dismissing any militant ideas or practices leaked to the press as the work of rogue Qutbists (p. 131)."

By returning the agency to the Brotherhood, Kandil provides outsiders who want a clean ‘victim’ or ‘victimiser’ view of the Brotherhood with an uncomfortable picture. And here’s the quandary:

If the Islamists knew what they were doing, then they are hiding an uncompromising grand plan that would take the moral puritanism, social exclusivism (non-orthodox Muslims and non-Muslims are by definition second class in their worldview), and intellectual impoverishment we have seen thus far much further if they get into power. That means the Islamists cannot be trusted inherently.

On the other hand, if the Islamists do not know what they are doing, how can we trust them?

That is not to say there aren’t some shortcomings in the book. First, even if one can’t pine for the Brotherhood’s success given their anti-pluralist ideology, the book seems to have taken the hard authoritarian environment the movement has to operate in as a given rather than as an exceptional condition that will breed the kind of conspiratorial thinking and victimhood mentality the Brotherhood is known for. Whereas cases in Malaysia, Turkey, and Indonesia may show that just because Islamists enjoy freedom doesn’t mean they enjoy keeping it, I reckon the fact that the Brotherhood is a product of authoritarianism should not be understated.

Second, the book’s constant portrayal of the Brotherhood as a somewhat detached, even if internally coherent, movement does not help explain its social and political appeal. Even if they do not enjoy outright majorities, the Brotherhood and their heirs in the Middle East have constantly won sizeable votes to upwards of 40pc of the total votes. Despite authoritarian conditions, they often became the largest party in parliaments after elections (see Egypt in 2011; Turkey 2002; Kuwait 2022). This kind of popularity demands an explanation the book does not seem to have supplied.

Perhaps the case of Malaysia, which I am most familiar with, can provide some answers here. Whereas the nation’s flagship Islamist party, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) is not, strictly speaking, an heir of the Brotherhood and is, in some ways, at odds with another party that claims a stronger lineage to the Brotherhood, the Parti Amanah Negara (PAN), the triumph of Islamism is hard to understate. The distinguished qualities of the Brotherhood is seen in the country’s many Islamist parties and movements, such as having a well-oiled, well- organised social infrastructure; remarkable ideological coherence internally; profound disinterest in good governance other than moral policing; extraordinary persistence despite (previous) adversarial conditions; and an alleged grand design that can sustain endless stalling and innovation without changing any of its core ideals and beliefs.

But I think the greatest success the Malaysian Islamists can claim is that while not many people want to be an Islamist (because of its taxing and somewhat ascetic lifestyle), they have managed to get the people to think like them, with dire consequences to a plural society like Malaysia’s.

Even if they ‘believed that the world conspired against them’ (p.56), the Islamists probably shouldn’t cry wolf at this point. In Malaysia as in many other places, it is precisely this feeling that the world is conspiring against Islam—a sentiment the Islamists cultivated fervently, no less—that made them the biggest beneficiaries of democratisation thus far.

[Ala Eden von Rabbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two methodological problems in this outstanding work: sampling, and narrative teleology.

1. Sampling is always an obstacle when dealing with clandestine and quasi-clandestine organizations with concrete ideology such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Current members are unlikely to provide propaganda-free accounts, ex-members and dissidents are unlikely to provide non-opinionated objective accounts, and cross-referencing salvages so little information that is open to interpretation by nature. The researcher will always end up in a sea of self-selection bias. Kandil's reliance on snowball sampling (as stated in page 184) would only exacerbate the problem.

To make things more confusing, the most treasured source, i.e. the 42 interviews which Kandil uses, are presented with no information save the place and date of the interview.

2. Narrative teleology is what I call the practice of exhuming a metanarrative that is likely to possess an explanatory power over the entire ontology of the phenomenon in question, and then re-presenting the phenomenon in a narrative that builds up towards achieving this one particular metanarrative. It's a regular practice in postmodern and post-structural analyses, and surely introduces some coherence to ambivalent, multifaceted phenomena, but at the dire cost of forcing the phenomenon itself to fit into the new re-presentation mold. In other words, it's another bias: the book is manufactured specifically to make the audience arrive to the conclusion that religious determinism is the core concept of MB and Islamism.

Though, Kandil provides a sound theoretical, phenomenology-like framework for this methodology, theoretical soundness does not make up for the compound bias that threatens a very worrying deformation of the phenomenon, and hence a component with error potentiality for any future decision making or scholarly pursuit, which is not exactly reliable.

Having said that, the book is a great material and provides fascinating insight, that is if the indeterminacy due to bias is settled, or its core claim is proven at some point in the future.

[Noha Sallam · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I rad about the MB from the inside.....

[Ilana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has interesting information, as based on insider knowledge. However, this can also work against the accuracy of the content.

[Stephen Lockett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The aspect of the book I found most interesting was the point, eloquently made by the author, where pure faith meets modern politics something has to give, blind faith by it’s very nature is intolerant, whereas a modern political party needs to encompass consensus building amongst disparate ideologies. Kandil points out that The Brotherhood evolved in the 1920s influenced by the international communist movements emanating from the USSR and both seemed to have this unrelenting ideological faith immoveable in the face of reality. Perhaps unwittingly this book gives an insight into human nature some people need to cling to ideologies and faiths, and can only live out their lives perfectly intolerant to any other outlook. The last chapter is a graphic and chilling timeline describing how radical elements developed in the Egyptian Brotherhood in the seventies that led directly to Al-Qa’da and their series of international atrocities and onto to the new Caliphate that was briefly formed in Syria and Iraq. Another branch in turn led to Hamas.

[Adil Hussain · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is proving to be a difficult read. I've made it to the end of the first chapter and I'm really going to have to push myself to continue on with it.

The book has thus far been a one-way critique of the Muslim Brotherhood based on interviews with anonymous nobodies. It is devoid of objectivity and balance, and full of sarcasm and straw man arguments.

If you're looking for unchallenged arguments to confirm negative opinions that you already hold about the Muslim Brotherhood, this book is for you. For me though, there's just too much political spin here. Everything the Brotherhood stands for and does is shed in a negative light and it's hard to take a book seriously that presents a caricature of its subject material.

[Omar · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books if you are interested in learning more about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and political Islam in general.

Kandil dives deeply into the ideological foundations of the organization, the structure of its leadership and rank‑and‑file, the organization's history, and the group’s eventual failure as a result of internal tensions and self-sabotage. He also examines how the Brotherhood’s project extends beyond Egypt’s borders, looking at how its ideas and organizational model have been adapted in other Arab and Middle Eastern contexts, and how it interacts with states, rival movements, and international actors.

[Eslam Morsy]

اريد لن احصل على نسخة الكترونية ... واتسائل ايضا هل ترجم؟

[Anas Taleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to understand the brotherhood read this book. I can confirm that’s the presentation made by Kandil is accurate because I was exposed during my youth to the Islamist propaganda and the book helped me to understand the origin of such ideas and how they were propagated