Imagining the Perfect Society in Muslim Brotherhood Journals


Book Description

The investigation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood during the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and the early years of Hosni Mubarak is based on the movement’s main journals, al-Da‘wa and Liwā’ al-’Islām, presenting its history during two relevant periods: 1976-1981, 1987-1988. These journals show that, contrary to the focus in modern research (e.a. sharia laws, gender relations, or ideas of democracy), the Brotherhood is a much more broadly oriented, social-political opposition movement, taking Islam as its guideline. The movement’s own versatile discourse discusses all aspects of daily and spiritual life. An important adage of the Brotherhood is Islam as a niẓām kāmil wa-shāmil, ‘a perfect and all-encompassing system’. Faith should play a role in every aspect of daily life, from cooking dinner and housekeeping to education, holidays, enemy images, legislation, and watching television. Islam is everything, and everything is Islam. In its journals the Brotherhood provided its unique reflection of the spirit of the age. The movement presented itself as a highly reactive group that responded to current events and positioned itself as a moral, religious and political opposition to the Egyptian regime.




The Society of the Muslim Brothers


Book Description

Orignally published in 1969, this monograph has become known as a standard source for the history of the revivalist Egyptian movement, the Muslim Brethren, up to the time of Nasser. The work has been reissued for those scholars and students interested in the Muslim revival.




The Muslim Brothers in Society


Book Description

A groundbreaking ethnography of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood The Islamists’ political rise in Arab countries has often been explained by their capacity to provide social services, representing a challenge to the legitimacy of neoliberal states. Few studies, however, have addressed how this social action was provided, and how it engendered popular political support for Islamist organizations. Most of the time the links between social services and Islamist groups have been taken as given, rather than empirically examined, with studies of specific Islamist organizations tending to focus on their internal patterns of sectarian mobilization and the ideological indoctrination of committed members. Taking the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB), this book offers a groundbreaking ethnography of Islamist everyday politics and social action in three districts of Greater Cairo. Based on long-term fieldwork among grassroots networks and on interviews with MB deputies, members, and beneficiaries, it shows how the MB operated on a day-to-day basis in society, through social brokering, constituent relations, and popular outreach. How did ordinary MB members concretely relate to local populations in the neighborhoods where they lived? What kinds of social services did they deliver? How did they experience belonging to the Brotherhood and how this membership fit in with their other social identities? Finally, what political effects did their social action entail, both in terms of popular support and of contestation or cooperation with the state? Nuanced, theoretically eclectic, and empirically rich, The Muslim Brothers in Society reveals the fragile balances on which the Muslim Brotherhood’s political and social action was based and shows how these balances were disrupted after the January 2011 uprising. It provides an alternative way of understanding their historical failure in 2013.




Washington Brotherhood


Book Description

Traditional portrayals of politicians in antebellum Washington, D.C., describe a violent and divisive society, full of angry debates and violent duels, a microcosm of the building animosity throughout the country. Yet, in Washington Brotherhood, Rachel Shelden paints a more nuanced portrait of Washington as a less fractious city with a vibrant social and cultural life. Politicians from different parties and sections of the country interacted in a variety of day-to-day activities outside traditional political spaces and came to know one another on a personal level. Shelden shows that this engagement by figures such as Stephen Douglas, John Crittenden, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Stephens had important consequences for how lawmakers dealt with the sectional disputes that bedeviled the country during the 1840s and 1850s--particularly disputes involving slavery in the territories. Shelden uses primary documents--from housing records to personal diaries--to reveal the ways in which this political sociability influenced how laws were made in the antebellum era. Ultimately, this Washington "bubble" explains why so many of these men were unprepared for secession and war when the winter of 1860-61 arrived.




Revolutionary Brotherhood


Book Description

In the first comprehensive history of the fraternity known to outsiders primarily for its secrecy and rituals, Steven Bullock traces Freemasonry through its first century in America. He follows the order from its origins in Britain and its introduction into North America in the 1730s to its near-destruction by a massive anti-Masonic movement almost a century later and its subsequent reconfiguration into the brotherhood we know today. With a membership that included Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere, and Andrew Jackson, Freemasonry is fascinating in its own right, but Bullock also places the movement at the center of the transformation of American society and culture from the colonial era to the rise of Jacksonian democracy. Using lodge records, members' reminiscences and correspondence, and local and Masonic histories, Bullock links Freemasonry with the changing ideals of early American society. Although the fraternity began among colonial elites, its spread during the Revolution and afterward allowed it to play an important role in shaping the new nation's ideas of liberty and equality. Ironically, however, the more inclusive and universalist Masonic ideas became, the more threatening its members' economic and emotional bonds seemed to outsiders, sparking an explosive attack on the fraternity after 1826. American History




Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood


Book Description

The book offers a processual and discursive perspective on how individuals exit the Muslim Brotherhood. The framework is based on an interaction of ‘micro’ psychological and emotional factors, ‘meso’ organizational factors and ‘macro’ political developments linked to the specific case of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt during the Arab Spring. Based on interviews conducted in Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the United Kingdom, the author traces in-depth narratives of exiters while they return to their private life or resort to political activism of another stripe. This work examines thought-provoking patterns pertaining to elements long under-explored in the scholarship and stands out as it systematically identifies this unexamined subset of Brotherhood members: peaceful leavers.




Organization outside Organizations


Book Description

Describes the organizational aspects of contemporary society, explaining how organization occurs not only inside formal organizations, but also outside and among them.




The Human Society


Book Description

Is the human society fair and fulfilling, as you learn in school, or it is harmful, with corrupt politicians, financial cartels, and major conspiracies spanning the world as you always notice? Both are the case, yet the human society improves gradually, despite of all corruption in the news, only that the media tends to highlight politicians in order to capture the masses, or you never watch the news. Because it is always a show, even in the news, while everybody is happy. But is society actually corrupt and harmful? The human society has always been exploitive, yet people tend to interact in any manner in the world, more or less humane, while it is meaningful to distinguish your own influence, exactly as it is. Would you like to learn the truth about the human society? Then study yourself and those around very well, since society is the direct interconnectivity of all human beings, with you in it. Therefore, you are the one defining society directly, at least in everything regarding you, and this is the case with everyone else. While everybody is relatively good intentioned in society, since we are very similar through our human nature and through all natural, living needs and meanings that we fulfill. Because humanity is never divided into the good and the bad, since everybody is good by having similar natural needs and meanings, only that people can become more exploitive while fulfilling consensual needs, as these make them be whatever their superiors, jurisdictions, and ideologies desire, stepping in this manner outside the actual human nature. And this is bad, since this is exactly how humans become unhuman, with all dreadful consequences manifesting in the world. Because humans fulfill mostly consensual needs, as orders and duties coming from above, but not their own, human needs, as everyone should. While this ends up defining the human society the most, changing it altogether into a social machine meant for profit and exploitation, and it should never be the case in a human world. Because there are two human societies to consider, the natural, intelligent human society that everyone seeks to have and maintain through their own living, natural needs and feelings, and the consensual society actually instated in the world, regardless if you want it or not. Throughout this book, we study how life and living human beings gather naturally to form classes of life and living societies meant to make life better, safer, meaningful, and therefore fulfilling. We also understand the current human society in its consensual structure and characteristics, in all aspects and from all perspectives. Furthermore, we identify and understand the various modes of society that life and the environment may demand, as we recognize what is meaningful among orders, agendas, and conspiracies already implemented or threatening to take place in the world, who the main social actors are, and how determined they remain in everything that they do in the human society. This helps you understand your own meaning in life, in society, and in the world, while understanding how your meaning is enhanced or altered by your own behavior and interconnectivity in life and in the world. If you seek to uncover and understand the human society exactly as it is and as it should be, this book is for you.