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 offshoots in Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco.
This is not to say that the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in a given country are only the helpless products of regime design. Wickham presents a pattern by which varying degrees of regime manipulation and repression lead to fierce intra-group debates about political integration and group preservation. In every case, the conservative and pragmatic forces in the group surround the reformers, or those pushing for more liberal change. Invariably, the reformers are expelled or leave the group while the Brotherhood doubles-down on opaque and autocratic operations that serve the conservative trend.
Wickham explains this process well. She makes the argument that part of the ideational change that some experience is a result of their work outside the Muslim Brotherhood. By running for parliament, working with non-Brotherhood politicians, meeting voters, or serving in professional syndicates, Brothers meet people from different backgrounds. They learn to cooperate and become less wedded to the Brotherhood's rigid ideas. They also cease to care about only appealing to the Brotherhood's base. Reformists’ outside interactions transform their behavior, rhetoric, and worldviews. This, in turn, feeds back into the Brotherhood movement and produces discursive change over time. Yet, neither the conservatives nor the pragmatists gain these experiences.
The problem lies with the conservative faction as well as what she terms the “pragmatic” members of the group, almost all of whom break toward the conservatives when the political stakes are raised. According to Wickham, this seems to have lots to do with the practical practices of group politics. The reason that the conservative leadership always holds the trump card, however, has nothing to do with its ideas. They outflank the reformist trend because leadership positions are habitually stacked with those more concerned with the group's internal operations as opposed to those who focus their political efforts outside the Brotherhood. While the Brotherhood reformists have more liberal ideas as a result of their experiences working outside the organization, those who operate the levers of control within the organization maintain a structural advantage for preserving the group's internal hierarchy. Thus, the so-called reformers always lose because they lack the ability to distribute resources to members, as well as the power to appoint, structure internal elections, or oversee internal rewards and discipline. This also explains why the so-called pragmatists break towards the conservatives. They do not do it for the ideas. Rather, they do it for their careers. Supplementing this dynamic, and as Wickham convincingly shows, repression and political closures reinforce the conservatives’ hold as opposed to tilting the balance towards the reformists.
Path-breaking and innovative, The Muslim Brotherhood nonetheless has dimensions that merit further attention and research. There are two main shortcomings that emerge over the course of this still outstanding book. First, Wickham spends too much time with the reformists. While checking the sources, one sees that she has spoken with people that represent all the different ideational currents. Yet, the so-called conservatives and pragmatists feel absent in the text compared to the reformists, who she relies on extensively. While she explains this discrepancy by saying that the conservative leaders are difficult to access and engage, and I know this first hand to be the case, the reader is still left wanting to hear more from the other side.
The second shortcoming is one of balance. Wickham has one theoretical chapter. Of the eight remaining chapters in the book, seven detail dynamics around the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The remaining chapter covers Islamist movements in Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco. While Wickham's thesis is robust and strong on Egypt's Brothers, more time on the other cases could have strengthened and extended her theoretical claims. Wickham's book remains one about the experience of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
These criticisms aside, Wickham's book is a masterful telling of the trajectory of the contemporary Egyptian Muslim Brothers. She moves past the conventional debates that most political scientists reference when studying Islamists: a variation of either “political exclusion may or may not cause violence” or “electoral participation may or may not cause ideational moderation.” Instead, Wickham makes a case for measuring complexity. While some may argue that this sacrifices parsimony, Wickham delivers with lots of interviews, careful analysis of texts, public events, and electoral campaigns, as well as an encyclopedic sourcing of the secondary literature. The book provides scholars and researchers with much to think about in terms of ideational development, change, and growth. This is even more pressing now that events in Egypt and the Arab world demand that Islamist and secular groups rebuild politically after the aggressive reassertion of military regimes in the region.
