Abstract
This chapter analyses the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to show that, despite superficial resemblances to emancipatory movements, the Brotherhood never warranted the kind of optimistic investments placed in it by some Marxist or Marx-inspired scholars. As an apparently oppositional bloc with deep cultural roots in Egyptian society, the Brotherhood’s emergence as a leading political force in the wake of the 2011 uprisings led some to interpret it in Marxist terms as a Gramscian bloc fighting a war of position, building on what appeared to be a counterhegemonic legacy. In fact, as Mirshak’s analysis shows, the Brotherhood’s version was never anything more than a Zombie-Gramscianism and its political success was merely ‘passive-revolutionary’ in character.
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Notes
- 1.
An earlier version of this chapter has been published as Mirshak N (2021) The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: A Gramscian reexamination.Current Sociology, Epub Ahead of Print 17 September 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921211039273.
- 2.
The term ‘Islamism’ refers to different forms of organisations and movements that advocate that public and political life should be guided by Islamic principles (Poljarevic 2015). These groups can utilise a variety of tactics to achieve this aim ranging from violence (e.g. Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Jama ‘ah al-Islamiyah) to more gradual and reformist approaches such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the main focus of this chapter. In other words, Islamism is far from monolithic. Its political impact ‘has been reactionary, conservative, democratic, revolutionary, conspirational—depending on the specific and changing national and international contexts in which Islamism has developed over a period of several generations’ (Buck-Morss 2006, p. 3).
- 3.
This decree ‘fired the prosecutor general, made the president immune from judicial oversight, and immunised the Shura Council and the Constituent Assembly from dissolution by court order’ (Lesch 2017, p. 142).
- 4.
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony can be traced back to Marx’s preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy which Gramsci himself had translated (Boothman 2008).
- 5.
A war of manoeuvre (war of movement) refers to the possibility of overthrowing ruling elites and the subsequent takeover of the state through conducting a violent revolution or a ‘frontal attack’.
- 6.
Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) was an Egyptian educator, thinker and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Qutb is considered to be a major influence on the development of Radical Islamism.
- 7.
Jahiliyya—as God describes it and His Qur’an defines it—is the rule of humans by humans because it involves making some humans servants of others, rebelling against service to God, rejecting God’s divinity (uluhiyya) and, in view of this rejection, ascribing divinity to some humans and serving them apart from God (Qutb cited in Shepard 2003, p. 524).
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Mirshak, N. (2022). Marxism and Islamism in Egypt: A Re-Examination of the Muslim Brotherhood—Introduction and Overview of the Muslim Brotherhood. In: Kirkpatrick, G., McMylor, P., Fadaee, S. (eds) Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91642-8_10
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