Title: An Islamic Alternative in Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood and Sadat
Abstract: The rising interest in Islamic militant movements in the West may be fully justified on grounds of national interest. H owever there is a creeping danger of neo-Orientalism in the garb of Western social science. One possible outcome is the mystification of Islamic militancy by Western writers. Concepts of the revival, resurgence, and return of Islam may be quite misleading. The tendency to lump together all Islamic movements in all countries of the so-called crescent of crisis glosses over the historical specificities and the socioeconomic particulars of these countries. Premature generalization must also be guarded against. Five years ago, in cooperation with an Egyptian research team, I began a study of the Islamic movement in Egypt. The major events in Iran had not yet unfolded.1 What motivated our research was the spreading appeal of the movement among Egyptians in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Violent confrontations between Islamic groups and the regime of President Sadat had been increasing in number and scale after 1972. This study reports on our analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood alternatives to the major policy orientations of the Sadat regime. The choice of the Muslim Brotherhood of all Islamic groups in Egypt was motivated by several considerations. First, as a movement the MB is not new on the Egyptian political landscape.2 It was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Jamal alDin al-Afghani, Muhammad Abdu, and Rashid Reda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were its ideological antecedents. This historical
Publication Year: 1982
Publication Date: 1982-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 29
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