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This chapter examines the development of Islamic constitutionalism, which is based in the Muslim Brotherhood. It begins by studying the re-emergence of the Brotherhood since 1970 and the political pressures that have pushed it toward a moderate conception of Islamic governance. It then analyzes the writings of four contemporary thinkers who play a critical role in defining the Brotherhood's view of constitutional order: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Muhammad Salim al-'Awwa, Kamal Abu al-Majd, and Tariq al-Bishri. The analysis focuses on their positions regarding the same four aspects of constitutionalism discussed in the previous chapter: the rule of law; constraints on state power; protection of civil and political rights; and public participation in politics.

This chapter begins with a concise summary of the statist conception of political order that underlies Egypt's current autocratic regime. It then documents the economic contradictions that brought this order to the point of crisis in the early 1990s. In response to this crisis, the regime adopted reforms that enabled liberal constitutionalism and Islamic constitutionalism to broaden their influence and support. The analysis examines the growth of these two alternative views of constitutionalism through the actions of their most determined advocates: the de facto professional association for judges (the Judges' Club—Nadi al-Quda) and the Muslim Brotherhood. The analysis finds that political competition under Egypt's repressive regime has pushed advocates of liberal constitutionalism and Islamic constitutionalism toward common ground. Their political agendas converge in several areas, particularly with regard to key elements of liberalism such as constraints on state power, strengthening the rule of law, and protection of civil and political rights.

This chapter provides background and a general context for examining Hamas' specific role as social actor. The Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas was born with the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, in December 1987. The birth of this organization represented the Palestinian embodiment of political Islam in the Middle East. Although Hamas itself is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is rooted in a decades-old history of Islamic activism that began with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza City in 1945. Hamas' evolution and influence were primarily due to the nature of Hamas' participation in that Intifada: the operations of its military wing, the work of its political leadership, and its social activities.

The chapter examines the role of apocalyptic in Islam. It begins with the mutation in Muslim apocalyptic literature at the approach of the year 2000, then goes back to Islamic origins as an apocalyptic movement in which Muhammad announced the imminent Last Judgment, and developed military jihad AU: MW and CMS both say lower case, and since you use lc elsewhere, I'm going to standardize to that. as a response to the humiliating disappointment of its non-arrival. After outlining the basic components of Islamic apocalyptic thinking, the chapter traces how Western modernity and, especially, Israel, revived apocalyptic Islam, in the form of global jihad, from 1979 (ah 1400) to the year 2000, from the Iranian (Shiite) revolution to Bin Laden, Hizbullah, and Hamas. Global jihad, in the terms of this book, represents an active, cataclysmic apocalyptic movement aiming at an imperial millennium—the most destructive force in human history.

Founded in Egypt by Hasan al–Banna in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood could trace its activism in Palestine back to 1936, the year of Yasin's birth and the year in which a major revolt had broken out against the Jews and the British. It laid the foundation for all future uprisings, including the intifada. Some forty years after its conclusion, Yasin would choose to name the military wing of Hamas after 'Izz as–Din al–Qassam, a Syrian Arab who had preached fiery jihad and organized bands of guerrillas in the Haifa hills. In 1980, thousands of Muslim brothers took to the streets of Gaza ransacking and burning “leftist” institutions, including the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. The intifada erupted in 1987. Yasin and the Brothers abandoned their former gradualism and entered the fray under the name “the Islamic Resistance Movement” or “Hamas”.

This chapter explains that it is not entirely wrong to partially attribute the coup, the massacre, and the certainty of those who backed these actions to the notion that revolutionary politics left no alternative to violence, which manifested in the Rabʻa Massacre. But it is entirely wrong to neglect the long-standing discursive apparatus of excommunicating the Muslim Brotherhood from the national community that was operational during the period of revolutionary liminality and before it. Resorting to such concepts as imitation and crisis in no way obviates the need to delve into the production, meaning, and circulation of this discourse. If anything, the need to document and interpret the means of excommunication are heightened by one's attention to the form of crisis: the creation or occurrence of a threshold in the present; a plunge into liminality, and then a reckoning. The revolution created a series of thresholds, not just the initial threshold of the plunge into the void when the label “revolution” was applied to events on January 25, 2011. The Maspero Massacre was a threshold; the Battle of Muhammad Mahmud Street was too, and so were a number of other crisis events, including the Tamarrud demonstration against Muhammad Morsy in 2013 and the coup that followed shortly thereafter.

This chapter revisits the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood to understand why an organization that started out as a nonviolent religious movement came to be associated with violence. Many blame this on the harsh repression under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, the analysis shows that the drift toward violence started much earlier. Reconstructing the sequence of events between 1936 and 1948, the chapter reveals that what initially politicized the Brotherhood was the presence of British troops in Egypt and Palestine. The formation of an armed wing led to competition over authority within the group, which incentivized violent escalation. The chapter then focuses on the period between 1954 and 1970 and shows that repression had a dual effect. On the one hand, it inspired new jihadi interpretations, which were particularly appealing to younger members. On the other hand, the prisons were also the backdrop against which the Brotherhood became convinced that violence was futile.

Examining the critical issues around which the Muslim Brotherhood organized its activism in the second half of the 1970s, Chapter 6 isolates the organization’s chief publication for a discussion on cultural framing. The monthly periodical al-Da‘wa was a focal point of the group’s activities, bridging the generational divide by publishing commentaries by senior group leaders and articles by student reporters. It featured the active construction of the Muslim Brotherhood’s message for the next generation, detailing not only the group’s grand vision for an Egypt that fulfilled the tenets of Islam, but also its reaction to current events and a thorough appraisal of government policies.

This chapter explores the evolution and role of Islamist social institutions in Gaza, beginning with the reformist work and philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood and continuing through the first Intifada and the Oslo period. Emphasis is given to the primary role of the social sector (e.g., the Islamist institutions' contribution to community development, order, stability, and civic engagement); the political role and meaning of Islamist social work; and the impact of institutional work on grassroots development, community cohesion, and civism. There is no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood has long used social institutions to spread its ideas and increase its influence. The Muslim Brotherhood's success was tied in large part to the fact that, until the first Intifada in 1987, the Brethren largely refrained from violent resistance against the occupation.

How European networks of the Muslim Brotherhood have played a leading role in organising Muslims in Ireland is demonstrated in this chapter. The major Sunni mosque organisation, the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland (ICCI), established 1996, is funded by the Maktoum Foundation whose patron is the deputy ruler of Dubai. The ICCI is based in a large South Dublin mosque complex and heads a network of different mosques in Dublin and other cities of the country and convenes the Irish Council of Imams, a body comprising representatives of imams from around the country. It also hosts the secretariat of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, an influential institution developed by the Qatar-based Egyptian scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (b. 1926) to develop Islamic jurisprudence catering for the specific needs of Muslim minorities in Europe (fiqh al-aqalliyyat).

This chapter analyses the history of the Brotherhood in Spain, which is mainly limited to the Syrian branch, whose members fled the regime of Hafez al-Assad in the 1960s. It shows how the liberalisation of the law for the recognition of Muslims and non-Catholics allowed the Brothers in Spain to organise themselves in cultural organisations and publish their ideas and spread Islam. It also traces their gradual decline as a distinct organisation in the 1990s.

This chapter details the early discussions about reconstituting the Muslim Brotherhood following a change in the ruling regime and with it a change in policy toward the political opposition. The veteran leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood emerged from Nasser’s prisons to an increasingly crowded field of Islamic activism that featured groups offering alternative programs, while Sadat also appropriated religious rhetoric in the development of his governing ideology. Efforts to reconstitute the Muslim Brotherhood were hampered by internal divisions, a change in leadership with the emergence of a new general guide in Umar al-Tilmisani, and the years of alienation from the broader Egyptian society.

Chapter 5 details the process by which the internal divisions within al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya were resolved. Coinciding with the Muslim Brotherhood’s reconstitution, or perhaps because of it, the dividing ideological lines within the student movement were more clearly drawn, with the majority of its leadership, especially at the senior level, deciding to join the Muslim Brotherhood as members. For its part, the Muslim Brotherhood proved extremely adept at recruiting the next generation of Islamic activists to join its ranks. The organizational structure was rebuilt following closer coordination between youth and veteran activists; by the end of the decade, the Muslim Brotherhood had once again become a thorn in the side of the ruling regime.

This chapter assesses the most important period in the revolution, namely the last three months of 2011. By that time the revolutionary forces—those that stayed mobilized or that remobilized periodically throughout the year—had articulated a series of demands that went far beyond the ubiquitous but vague “bread, freedom, and social justice” slogan. They included the cleansing of institutions from Mubarakist elements, greater autonomy and political freedom within universities and al-Azhar, independent labor unions, the cessation of military trials for civilians, unambiguous civilian rule, and redress for those killed or injured by the security forces. None of this had anything to do with an institutionally nurtured “democratic transition” that occupied the attention of political scientists; none of it was acknowledged by institutions or powerful public figures, who never deviated from the line that the revolution was incoherent, and merely the product of a few feckless youths. Hence, chants at demonstrations of “down with military rule” were heard by March, but it was a series of massacres and street battles beginning in October and lasting until early February of 2012 that brought anti-SCAF (Supreme Council for the Armed Forces) sentiment much more openly into the mainstream than anyone could have dreamed, given the deeply institutionalized reverence for the military in Egyptian public culture. At that point, the military had little choice but to push ahead with elections that it knew would result in a transfer of power to the Muslim Brotherhood.

This chapter continues tracing the development of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. It focuses on the period of expansion of the Brotherhood after the fall of Arab Nationalism from the 1970s through the 1990s, with a view to how Ikhwan movements used their ties with governments and their social appeal to earn more popular support. It presents case studies of Brotherhood activities within Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE during this period to show that the forms adopted by Brotherhood movements in the super-rentiers, similar to Ikhwan elsewhere in the region, were dictated by the political opportunities available to them. Opportunities became increasingly available to Ikhwan branches in the Gulf with the fall of Arab nationalism, which had been the Brotherhood’s primary ideological rival. Contrary to the predictions of rentier state theory, Brotherhood groups managed to establish themselves even as super-rentier governments were expanding welfare packages to citizens throughout the 1970s.

Ghannouchi grows up in a Tunisian traditional Islamic yet politically charged milieu of anticolonialist Arab Nationalism.

The journey of his life passes through stations, the first is his country's capital, Tunis, where he studies at the supposedly Islamic institution, Az‐Zaytouna, only to come out of it more confused and almost completely severed from his Islamic roots.

He escapes to Cairo and then to Damascus where he studies philosophy, divorces Nassirism, encounters Islamic groups, such as the Salafis, Hizb‐ut‐Tahrir, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and nationalists groups, such as the Ba’th Party and the Arab Socialist Union, and “reembraces” Islam.

A tour of Europe and then a one‐year study in Paris serve only to consolidate his conversion, attract him to Tablighi Jama’at, and terminate his exile.

On his way back home, he meets what hence becomes his main source of inspiration, Algerian thinker Malik Bennabi.

This chapter demonstrates how the creation of a transnational institution such as the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) are not the outcome of local efforts from European Muslims at the grassroots level. Instead, the ECFR is the result of a top-down approach intended to project an image of European Islam, which is consistent with the objectives of political Islam. In addition, this chapter explores the role of political Islam on the construction of the image of European Islam and on the notion of Muslim representation in Europe, with particular reference to the historical development of Ireland’s Muslim community.

This chapter inverts the usual question of the Islamist position on the Coptic question, to ask what are Coptic perceptions of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist project. It examines the positions of key lay and Church figures from within the Coptic community, since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood. It then looks at the establishment of Islamist parties post-January 25, as well as at the Copts who joined these parties—their motivations, their prospects for assimilation, and the parties’ agendas.