Book review: The Muslim Brotherhood, by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham

The Muslim Brotherhood
by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham
Princeton
3.5 stars
Christopher de Bellaigue

Pity the Middle East: its sorrows come in battalions. The region went into labour with the Arab Spring of 2011, but it would take unusual clairvoyance to predict how the offspring will look. It may be a monster.

American political scientist Carrie Rosefsky Wickham's excellent new history of the Muslim Brotherhood reveals much about the most influential political organisation in the Middle East, shedding light in the process on the Brotherhood's inability to cope with the transition from opposition movement to government for all Egyptians. Generous, pious and efficient, the Brotherhood has also been regarded with unease and distrust almost since its inception in the 1920s - a paradox that partly explains its calamitous recent collapse in public affection.

Ambiguity, Wickham insists, is intrinsic to the Brotherhood. For long periods, the movement and the regime were not so much enemies as reluctant cabin mates. For the benefit of his backers in the West, Hosni Mubarak blamed the Brotherhood for all Middle Eastern terrorism. The group milked what sympathy they could get as a repressed opposition. All the while, between spikes of brutal confrontation, the two sides tolerated each other - within limits.

In or out of power, the main question concerning the Brotherhood is its aptitude for modern democratic politics. Wickham gives no definitive answer because there is plenty of evidence both for and against.

Wickham's research was financed by the Carnegie Corporation, in New York. One wonders how long American institutions will maintain interest in a place from which their government clearly wants to withdraw. The answer may be connected to the readiness of the US and other countries to use expensive processes such as fracking to shift the weight of oil and gas production away from the Middle East. For many Americans, retreat would be a blessed relief.

Guardian News & Media