Introduction

Following the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president Moḥamed Morsi in July 2013, a full-scale crackdown took place on the economic activities and finances of allegedly Islamist-affiliated businesspeople and enterprises in Egypt. This has been revealing of the extent, scope and scale of the Islamist-affiliated economy and finances in the country. For nearly four decades, Islamist revivalism was relatively tolerated under the Sadat and Mubarak liberalised autocracies. It enabled businesspeople and enterprises affiliated with the Islamist movement in its multiple guises to accumulate huge physical and financial assets. They established and ran fairly large enterprises in a variety of sectors, occupying important market niches and operating through extensive networks of financiers, suppliers, distributors, investors, partners and clients (Kandil 2014:78–81; Pradip 2009; Rudnyckyj 2017) .

The crackdown on Islamist-affiliated businesses offered a unique opportunity to get a glimpse—albeit a very imperfect one and from the vantage point of the ruling regime—at the Egyptian Islamists’ economic assets and activities. In 2020, the government announced the confiscation of Egp300 billion worth assets (around $19billion) that were held by entities and individuals allegedly affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood (‘Abdelḥamīd 2020). In 2021, another Egp40 billion worth assets ($2.5 billion) were confiscated. The scope of the crackdown widened considerably to include thousands of NGOs and charities, hundreds of business enterprises, hospitals, clinics, schools and media channels. It extended to around 6000 individuals by 2021, including hundreds of businesspeople and their family members and partners, that were allegedly affiliated with the Islamist movement, not just the Brotherhood (Ismail 2013).

How could affiliates of the Islamist movement in Egypt accumulate so many assets and develop into significant private market actors since the 1970s despite periodic state hostility and in the absence of universal property rights guarantees?

I argue that Islamist entrepreneurs could become successful market actors in Egypt against many odds because they were endowed with an economic habitus by virtue of belonging to the Islamist movement at large (Bourdieu 2005:193). This economic habitus contained dispositions and positions that were conducive for market exchange, competitiveness and capital accumulation. It provided affiliated entrepreneurs with access to relevant forms of social, organisational, financial and cultural capital that allowed success in the market as a field (Greif 1989:879). These positions and dispositions translated into robust networks of producers, distributors, suppliers, financiers, investors and customers creating competitive advantages, especially but not exclusively, in trade and service sectors. Being highly networked also mitigated the persistent threat of expropriation by a hostile state in the absence of reliable property rights.

The Islamist economic habitus was shaped by the ideological mission of the Islamist movement and its long-term interaction with the Egyptian state. The Islamist movement is defined here as a multifarious amalgam of formal and informal organisations including NGOs, charities, business enterprises and individuals and families as well as networks of organisations and individuals that have been active in re-Islamising society, the economy or the state in Egypt in a conscious, coordinated and collective manner since the mid-1970s (Ismail 2007). They have usually operated in the political, socio-religious and economic fields, sometimes simultaneously in all of them, as with the Muslim Brotherhood.

As such, the economic and sociopolitical dimensions of that habitus have created both embeddedness and boundedness for Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs, typifying the solid links between the political and economic fields of power in which they operated. The cross-field habitus of the Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs is not captured in Bourdieu’s conception of economic habitus, which is adapted to more institutionally developed market spheres focusing on competing firms and state agencies (Bourdieu 2005:204). Conversely, in a context like Egypt, market relations have been by far more embedded in informal institutions, organisations and identities (Adly 2020). This rendered the Islamist entrepreneurs’ economic habitus tension-ridden in the essence of its practice, hence rendering it a conflicted habitus, in two principal aspects: one introspective about the actual and perceived (in)compatibility between business activities and the ideological mission of the Islamist movement (Fischer & Jammes 2019:230; Rudnyckyj 2017:171). The other is extrospective having to do with power relations within the market field, namely with hostile state authorities.

As for the first, the Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs were as much Islamists as entrepreneurs. The Islamist movement proved to be an incubator and launcher of entrepreneurialism that was not always or necessarily distinctive in its products or operations from other market actors, or what was once conceptualised as an Islamic economy or moral economy (Asutay 2013; Osella & Rudnyckyj 2017:2–4). Rather, empirical findings from Egypt suggest that the Islamist economic habitus generated successful entries into mainstream businesses in informatics, wholesale and retail trade, food production, clothing and furniture among others without necessarily bearing any mark of the ideological identity of the entrepreneurs (Ismail 2007; Zubaida 1990). This clearly went beyond the rather traditional focus by scholars on the commercialisation of religion through the production and consumption of religious goods and services. It also went beyond the Islamisation of consumption patterns as with Islamic banking, Islamic print houses and media channels, religious tourism and schools (Feillard 2004; Haenni 2005; Strarret 1995). This is a gap the article addresses.

The extrospective aspect of tension within the Islamist economic habitus has been related to the organic link between the political and economic fields of power. Whereas this mode of embeddedness allowed Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs to convert organisational, symbolic and social capital from the socio-religious and cultural fields into the market field, it equally made them extremely vulnerable to disruptions in the political field. In fact, empirical evidence suggests significant tension between the Islamist origins and networks of these entrepreneurs on the one hand and their status as market actors, on the other. This could be theorised as a conflict between two modes of embeddedness: sociopolitical and economic that became increasingly differentiated over time. In fact, many pursued a conscious strategy downplaying their ties to political Islam and particularly any organisational or financial links with the Muslim Brotherhood. Empirical findings indicate that this was mostly the case with former members of the Brotherhood who started their businesses in Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s and managed to accumulate capital and firmly establish market niches in areas like education and healthcare services, usually through family-run enterprises.

By taking Egypt’s Islamists as a case study, I hope to contribute theoretically, empirically and methodologically to a better researched and more systematised query of how religious movements interact with markets. The empirical findings and the novel theorisation should also add to the knowledge about the economic aspects of Islamist movements’ activities in the Middle East and North Africa.

The article proceeds with a section on methodology explaining the sources and the way they are used. The “Restating the economic in Islamist economic habitus” section provides a condensed literature review. The “An Islamist conflicted economic habitus” section develops the argument in detail providing the empirical evidence in its support. The “A look from the inside: Mālek Group’s family, organisation and networks” section depicts an in-depth picture of the microcosm through which the Ḥasan Mālek Group used to operate through a careful and critical reading of the court case papers. The “Conclusion” section concludes.

Methodology

I draw principally on the dynamic reading of the documents of Supreme National Security Court case no.721 of year 2015, popularly known as the Ḥasan Mālek’s case: the leading Brotherhood businessperson in Egypt and the long-time partner of the Brotherhood’s strongman Khayrat al-Shāṭer (Al-Anani 2020). The careful and critical analysis of the case papers links the micro with the macro dynamics, of an Islamist economic habitus, employing rich empirics for the theorisation. In his own words to the public prosecutor, Mālek started his business career in Saudi Arabia in 1983 working in food importation and distribution. In 1985, he returned to Egypt and established a computer company with al-Shāṭer, under the name of “Salsabīl”, which the state seized in 1992. In 1994, Mālek established two trading companies in partnership with al-Shāṭer that were specialised in importing and distributing filaments and ready-made clothes. In 1995, al-Shāṭer was sentenced to 5 years in prison before a military court. Two years after his release, he became deputy supreme guide of the Brotherhood. According to Mālek, this was the point at which he decided to uphold the partnership with al-Shāṭer but to run the joint venture from separate offices in order to shield their business from al-Shāṭer’s organisational activities within the Brotherhood. The strategy proved little success. In 2006, Mālek and al-Shāṭer were arrested and imprisoned in the frame of what came to be known as the “Azhar Militia case”. Their personal assets were also seized. Both would remain in prison until the 2011 revolution after which they received a pardon from the Supreme Military Council that replaced Mubārak on interim basis.

The case file is made up of almost 2500 pages that contain interrogation minutes and reports by the public prosecution and state security. In addition, I depended on a big host of administrative, security and judicial decrees, statements and reports and verdicts on allegedly Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated companies, individuals and non-governmental organisations that were progressively subjected to asset seizure, freezing or confiscation between 2015 and 2021.

This archival combination aimed at providing a macro approach while understanding the micro intricacies of the operation of one of the biggest business groups owned and run by Mālek. Building an empirically rich network analysis of Ḥasan Mālek’s business operations can serve as a case of paradigmatic importance. Mālek is neither an average businessperson nor is he a mere brotherhood member. Rather, he is one of the leading Brotherhood-affiliated businessmen who have played a key economic role since the early 1990s, in partnership with the Brotherhood’s strongman Khayrat al-Shāṭer.

Citing the micro-historian Carlo Ginzburg “the fact that a source is not ‘objective’ does not mean that it is useless. A hostile chronicle can furnish precious testimony” (2013: xvii). Hence, official documents, as biased and non-objective as they may be, provide one of the few windows to the discrete world of economic activities and finances of those allegedly affiliated with the Islamist movement.

It goes without saying that the resort to such documents needs to be done critically and cautiously in order not to fall for the regime’s discourse. Charges of financing terrorism or membership in organisations labelled as terrorist are not treated as part of the objective reality. Conversely, I have strictly focused on factual findings that appeared in official documents including records of physical and monetary assets held by individuals and companies in addition to business relations tying owners and managers of these companies with financiers, investors, suppliers and clients. I carefully read the court papers, including interrogation minutes, security reports and testimonies, in order to reconstruct the relations between those charged or indicted while paying heed to the power context in which they gave their statements and the strategies they consciously adopted in order to deny or to lighten the sentences.

In analysing the content of these documents, I have faced two main challenges. First is the possible unreliability of the charges that would mean that a majority of individuals, enterprises and associations whose assets were frozen or confiscated were never really affiliated with the Islamist movement. This would render any findings simply irrelevant to the research question. Second is the possibility that the state was driven by predation on private property while using combatting terrorism as a mere pretext.

Doubtless, there have been cases of individuals, enterprises and associations that were blacklisted and had their assets frozen or even confiscated due to misinformation and intelligence failure and sometimes out of malicious reporting by former partners or discontented employees. However, there is an overall strong and predominant presence of individuals and entities that have been directly or indirectly affiliated with the Islamist movement. Fieldwork revealed cases of businesspeople and their families that were historically affiliated with the Brotherhood and reportedly ceased being so. Yet, they had their assets frozen in the massive crackdown after 2013. There were also other defendants in the court cases who denied any established long-term ideological or organisational relationship with the Brotherhood. Either way, it would be helpful to consider these as part of the reconstruction of the networks through which Islamist entrepreneurs operated.

As for the second concern, mere predation under the pretext of political repression can be largely ruled out. On the one hand, many of the key enterprises that were frozen or even later on confiscated were not closed down.Footnote 1 They were rather kept running, sometimes by the previous management, but under the supervision of an appointed governmental committee. These were hence far from being instances of mere asset stripping or looting. On the other, it took more than 6 years for a final court verdict confiscating frozen assets to be issued.

In addition, I relied on personal semi-structured interviews with several lawyers and financial analysts in order to understand the practical dimensions of the work of the judicial committee in charge of pursuing the Brotherhood-affiliated assets. I also had the chance to anonymously interview as well as have unstructured conversations with a number of individuals who had the assets of their immediate family members seized or confiscated. The aim of the interviews was to get a micro outlook at the process and contrast the personal experiences with the general and more abstract trends found in the reading and analysis of official documents.

Restating the economic in Islamist economic habitus

There is a thick literature in English, French and Arabic on the various components of the Islamist movement in Egypt. It has been dominated by the “punctuated liberalism” thesis, where Islamists—including the Brotherhood—were tolerated in principle, but kept constantly and systematically in check through legal and security repression (al-Awadi 2013; Ibrahim 1988). Established in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the earliest, and longest living, Islamist organisations in Egypt and the Arab and Muslim worlds. Since its inception, the organisation has sought the conscious re-Islamisation of Egyptian society through preaching—da’wa. By the late 1930s, the Brotherhood became increasingly involved in the country’s politics demanding the Islamisation of public life (Mitchell 1993). Following the 1952 military takeover, the Brotherhood was caught in a mortal combat with the new regime that resulted in its eventual destruction, with its top leaders being imprisoned or executed and many of its members driven into exile.

Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat (1970–1981), launched a series of reforms in the 1970s introducing more political plurality. The one-party system that monopolised political life was brought to an end in 1976. A multi-party system was instilled in its place, with formal opposition parties that were allowed to exist but hardly enjoyed any real influence (Brown et al. 2021). In parallel, the regime tolerated the (re)emergence of multiple Islamist actors through the 1970s, including the reestablishment of the Brotherhood in Egypt. However, the organisation remained legally banned despite being allowed to operate on the ground.

This continued under Mubarak (1981–2011). The Brothers ran successfully for professional syndicate elections and joined the parliament as an informal opposition bloc that became the single biggest in the 1990s. The Brotherhood was kept until control through periodic rounds of repression (Sallam 2022). In parallel, many other actors within the Islamist movement could expand their presence in the public sphere without actively challenging the ruling regime like the Salafi Da’wa in addition to thousands of Islamic charities and NGOs (Abdelrahman, 2004). What applies to the realms of politics, civil society and the public sphere might well extend to that of the economy where the regime’s punctuated pluralism could explain the presence and expansion of Islamist-affiliated businesses until the 2013 takeover (Vannetzel 2017).

I hold the punctuated pluralism argument as a necessary but not sufficient explanation. It does not explain the business impetus that Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs enjoyed in Egypt or how they could convert their social and organisational capital into economic assets and market positions. Whereas punctuated pluralism tells us of the spaces left relatively open for Islamists and others, it does not explain why and how the Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs persistently established and expanded businesses in Egypt despite rounds of regime predatory attacks in 1989, 1992 and 2006 way before the major crackdown of 2013 (Wickham 2002). This is why I think that approaching the Islamist movement as offering an economic habitus is opportune for explaining and analysing Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurship.

Overall, with a few exceptions, the presence of Islamist actors in the economy has remained rather under-theorised, especially from angles of economic sociology (Abaza 2004; Beinin 2005; Ismail 2013). The extant literature on the interaction between Islamism and the Islamist movement on the one hand and the economy on the other can be reduced into three major trends:

The first trend, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, focused on the theoretical, theological and ideological basis of the Islamic economy and its actors (Asutay 2013; Zubaida 1990). This included the rich—yet often ideologically laden—work in Arabic on Islamic finances and Islamic Capital Investment Companies in Egypt and elsewhere (Shuhayb 1989; Al-Tawịla 1988). This trend addressed Islam or Islamism from a systemic perspective: as a system of economic thought inspired by Shari’a law and morality (Fischer & Jammes 2019). Conversely, I focus here on Islamist actors, in the guise of individual entrepreneurs, firms and organisations and networks of all three.

The second trend almost exclusively focused on the economic and financial stances and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, including its international links with the Gulf countries and Europe. Al-Anani (2020) and Carrion (2013) focused on the rising role of businesspeople within the organisation since the 1990s, exemplified by Khayrat al-Shāṭer. There was also focus on the economic ideology of the Brotherhood, especially in the wake of the 2011 revolution and their brief ascent to power. Stress was put on how the rise of the business clique within the organisation pushed it to the right economically and made it more receptive to neoliberalism. Here, scholars echoed the earlier studies on the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, where some version of Islamism contributed to the political and economic rise of an Islamist-leaning class of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Anatolia (Hoşgör 2015; Demir et al. 2004; Tuğal 2002).

The problem with this trend is twofold. First, Islamism as a movement is much broader than political Islam, referring to forces competing for state power. As defined in this study, the Islamist movement is a complex socio-religious universe that includes ideological and theological variants and diverse organisational forms and that can only be defined by the least common denominator of a general commitment towards re-Islamising society. Therefore, the Brotherhood, as important and central as it has always been to the Islamist movement in Egypt, is but one component of Islamist revivalism. Second, much of this literature was rather empirically poor—for justifiable reasons having to do with the authoritarian context and the subsequent discreteness of such financial and economic activities. This made it hard for reconstructing the Islamist-affiliated economy on a macro basis or for delving into how it operates on a micro level.

A third scholarly trend tackled more broadly Islamist revivalism rather than just the forces of political Islam. This included the stress on the ideological transformations that made Islamism more receptive of and even endorsing to market reforms, consumerism, entrepreneurialism and in short, Neoliberalism since the 1980s (Ismail 2007; Rudnyckyj 2009). Haenni’s work on Islam of the market analysed the Islamisation of consumerism in line with globalisation (2005). Ismail’s work goes in a similar direction talking about an Islamic ethic that allowed the rise and consolidation of devout entrepreneurs in early 2000s Cairo (2013). Another related trend focused instead on the commercialisation or commodification of religion and religious practices where the Islamic revival in the social sphere provided the opportunity for the rise of goods and services as well as modes of consumption through which their newly found Islamic identity or public piety in Egypt could find an expression (Starret 1995).

This scholarly tradition has two limitations. First, it downplays “the economic” in Islamist entrepreneurship in favour of the ideological, the religious and the political, and second, it does not provide any explanation for the dense involvement of Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs in sectors and activities that were not explicitly related to the identity expressions of Islamic revivalism in the market (Ismail 2007; Zubaida 1990). This applied to the presence of Islamist businesspeople in mainstream businesses in informatics, wholesale and retail trade, food production, clothing and furniture among others without necessarily bearing any mark of the ideological identity of the entrepreneurs. In this sense, the Islamist movement proved to be an incubator and launcher of entrepreneurialism not distinctive in its products or operations from other market actors, or what was once conceptualised as an Islamic economy or moral economy (Asutay 2013). This is a third gap this article addresses by recognising and restating “the economic” in Islamists’ economic activities.

The rise and expansion of Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurship led some scholars to link the contemporary Islamist movement, with an Islamic ethic of capitalism comparable to the historical Protestant ethic in early modern Europe (Adas 2006; Feillard 2019; See Barker 2007; Kirby 2019 on the Pentecostalist ethic in Africa and Latin America). I disagree with this interpretation. In fact, there is little empirical evidence to suggest that contemporary Islamism has been essentially or primarily neoliberal (Rudnyckyj 2009). It might be true that the main components of the Islamist movement in Egypt and elsewhere embraced free market reforms and private entrepreneurship and even subscribed to the commercialisation of religious and ideological symbols and practices (Fischer & Jammes 2019). However, typical of cross-class religious movements, their stance on the economy has been ambiguous and often incoherent (Tuğal 2002:89).

Many of the Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs already belonged to small business families or had a petty-bourgeois background. For example, Ḥasan Mālek’s father was a member of the Brotherhood—imprisoned in the 1960s—and an owner of a small textile workshop (Case721/2015:448). By the same token, ‘Abdelraḥmān Se‘oudi, another key Brotherhood businessperson, already belonged to a well-established business family that operated in retail trade since the 1930s. Ironically, another branch of the Se‘oudi family (‘Abdelmon’em’s) has operated separately in automotive trade and never developed ties with the Brotherhood. They were hence spared state hostility. Beyond the Brotherhood, Sayyed al-Swirky, the owner of the giant department store, al-Tawhīd wal-Nūr, was originally a merchant before becoming affiliated with the Salafi movement in the 1980s.

Despite the strong elements of embeddedness and boundedness, the Islamist economic habitus was fit for private control and accumulation via market exchange. This assertion should allow us to avoid assumptions of over- and under-socialisation alike (Granovetter 2018). Contrary to the regime rhetoric, Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs were not mere economic operatives of the socio-religious organisations to which they belonged. By the same token, these entrepreneurs were not under-socialised agents either who could instrumentally exploit the Islamic revival and the devotion to the cause in order to accumulate riches for themselves or their religious and political superiors. This cynical view assumes that these economic actors saw the market from above rather than from within the Islamist habitus in which they were embedded and which they embodied all the same.

An Islamist conflicted economic habitus

Taking Bourdieu’s as a point of departure,Footnote 2 I argue that belonging to the Islamist movement at large constituted an economic habitus for affiliated individuals. It endowed them with dispositions and positions that were conducive for becoming successful—that is competitive and profit making—market agents (Bourdieu 2005:204). However, the market as a dynamic field of power relations was not just about competing firms, which could be naturally assumed as the typical market actors in a developed economy like that of France. The case of the Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs in Egypt suggests that the economic field was far from being “a cosmos obeying its own laws” that went through an historical “process of differentiation and autonomisation” (Bourdieu 2005:5). Conversely, the power dynamics in the economic field were heavily influenced if not conditioned by the power dynamics in the political field. Hence, how state authorities managed the Islamist movement, in its different guises, proved critical in defining the formal and informal rules in the economic field. The high level of porosity between both fields (and not just between economy and religion as traditionally underlined) is central to understanding the Islamists’ conflicted economic habitus in Egypt.

The Islamist habitus in Egypt contained dispositions that were conducive to market exchange, private business and entrepreneurialism that proved crucial to generating the clusters of entrepreneurs affiliated with the movement since the 1980s.Footnote 3 The re-admission of the Islamists into Egypt’s public life coincided with the advent of Infitāḥ in 1974, which refers to Sadat’s policies pushing for economic liberalisation and attracting private investment, first foreign and then domestic. Hence, exploring the market opportunities was a reasonable response for many Islamists. As it appears through anecdotal evidence predating the 2013 crackdown, Islamist-affiliated businesses were embedded in the broader movement through multiple connections.

These market-oriented dispositions were also nurtured by strong political, religious and economic ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries following the oil booms of 1973 and 1979. Scholars have already marked how ideational and economic networks were established between Egyptian Islamists and GCC-based economic actors, especially in areas of trade, Islamic finances and the investment of the inflows of remittances of millions of Egyptian expat workers (Amin 2009). These networks would extend later to Turkey, Malaysia and even Europe (Carrion 2013:43–51).

It is noteworthy however that the political opening that allowed the Islamists to claim significant parts of the public sphere in Egypt since the 1970s enabled the emergence and even thriving of Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs and enterprises by the mid-1990s. This was a departure from the earlier trend where the Islamists depended heavily on external linkages through trade and investment (Carrion 2013:20). By 2013, many Islamist-affiliated businesspeople owned and ran huge physical and financial assets inside Egypt despite impending threats of expropriation.

The Islamist economic habitus offered market-oriented dispositions and simultaneously created positions through which social, cultural and organisational capital within the bounds of the Islamist movement could be translated into financial and economic capital. This convertibility of capital materialised into norms, networks and organisational forms that were embedded in the Islamist movement as a socio-religious one. Access to capital was “the medium of communication between Field and Habitus, and of the ‘ontological complicity’ that exists between them” (Grenfell 2009:19). This often translated to intensive forms of interaction between affiliates of the movement with a community-like sense of belonging, solidarity, cooperation and above all mutual trust or what Kandil called a tribe in the case of the Brotherhood (2014:74). These forms of intensive interaction ranged from inter-marriages, networks of Islamist producers, distributers and financiers, consuming health and education services offered by Islamist NGOs and charities, to praying in mosques run by fellow Islamists (Tammām 2010; Zubaida 1990:160).

Being subject to constant threats by state authorities must have also pushed for denser networks among businesspeople and families that shared the same Islamist habitus where it would prove safer to find partners, suppliers, distributors, employees and financiers from among the movement affiliates (Greif 1989). This came unsurprisingly with a general exclusion of these entrepreneurs from public sector patronage, including employment, subsidies and state-owned land, as well as a higher than average risk of predation or at least harassment by the state authorities (Adly 2016). An expressive example appears in Ḥasan Mālek’s interrogation minutes where he responded to the prosecutor’s question about a shop he owned by saying that he rented it many years ago to a Coptic pharmacist (Case721/2015:489). The invocation of the religious affiliation of the renter was enough to dissuade the prosecution from pursuing this thread further. This simple remark reveals a rather shared conviction between Mālek and his interrogators that his business universe is bounded to a great extent by the Islamist movement, if not particularly by the Brotherhood, in a way that is unlikely to include a Christian Copt as an active business associate.

On a macro-level, the sectoral breakdown of the seized assets indicates that the Islamist economic habitus was most “generative” in trade and service sectors than in brick-and-mortar ones (Bourdieu 1978:73). As Fig. 1 reveals, around 70% of the 143 confiscated enterprises, including retail and wholesale trade, trade in electronics and computers as well as tourism and business services. Real-estate and construction stood for almost a fifth, again a service exchange-based activity. There was a disposition towards trade and exchange as well as service delivery, especially in sectors like education, healthcare and Islamic (non-interest based) finances and trade in precious metals like gold. The oft-cited prophetic saying “nine-tenths of God-given income (rizq) is found in trade” corresponded to objective factors like the strong linkages with the oil-rich Gulf countries through trade, investment and remittances. This was often accompanied by the subscription to import-intensive consumption.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Source: Ibrahīm Qāṣim, “Funds of 1589 Terrorist, 118 Company, 1133 NGO and 104 Schools Frozen”, al-youm al-sabe’, Septmber 11, 2018, https://www.youm7.com/story/2018/9/11/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AD%D9%81%D8%B8-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%A3%D9%85%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84-1589-%D8%A5%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D9%88118-%D8%B4%D8%B1%D9%83%D8%A9-%D9%881133-%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A3%D9%87%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9/3945966

Sectoral distribution of allegedly MB-affiliated enterprises confiscated in 2018.

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It also had to do with selecting sectors with low-asset specificity as a reasonable strategy to deal with the imminent threat of expropriation. Investment in trade, tourism and services meant that the physical assets that could be seized were relatively limited compared to the other assets that could be easily monetised and hence either hidden or transferred abroad. It should however be taken into consideration that Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs were excluded from state patronage and crony links that could have afforded them access to more concentrated, capital-intensive and asset-specific forms of investment as in divested or privatised state-owned enterprises or state-owned desert land. It could be asserted in Bourdieu’s tradition that the dispositions and positions of these Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs led them to concentrate their activities in those sectors (Bourdieu 2005:8).

Empirical findings in Egypt suggest an increasing differentiation between the ideological and the economic aspects of Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs. For the first generation, business ventures often stressed the Islamist movement’s broader ideological mission (Osella & Osella 2009:212). This was definitely the case with Islamic Capital Investment Companies in the 1980s, religious tourist agencies, Islamic print houses, Islamic attire and clothing factories and showrooms, especially for women as well as Islamic private schools. In all of these instances, Islamising consumption and commercialising or commodifying Islam drove the missions of these businesses and created to a great extent market niches and clienteles (Starret 1995). This explicit Islamist mission found its continuation in the use of religious symbols for tradenames even if the content of the trade or business activity bore no specific identity reference. Prime examples would be al-Tawḥīd wal-Nūr department store (Oneness of God and light, in Arabic), but also smaller businesses like the currency exchange offices seized after 2013 that bore Koranic names like “al-Nūrān” (Another word for light in Arabic), “al-Tawḥīd” and “al-Rawḍa” (A garden in paradise).

Conversely, the Islamist affiliation would become less explicit for many as of the 1990s where a second generation of Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs would start doing business in identity-neutral sectors like retail trade, informatics, business services and real-estate that was neither specifically related to the Islamist revival nor did it bank explicitly on the Islamist identity reference. Ḥasan Mālek’s business ventures, in partnership with Khayrat al-Shāṭer until 2006, and then separately, were exemplary of this different trend.

The introspective tension between business and identity

The increasing differentiation between the ideological/religious and the economic suggests that Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs have progressively become as much Islamists as entrepreneurs. In other words, more investments and activities became less explicitly related to the mission of the Islamist movement overtime. This may be considered a sign of mainstreaming and diversification of Islamist entrepreneurship but a source of introspective tension about the compatibility of private gain with the extra-economic commitment to Islamic morality, taking over the economy or using gains for the delivery of social and religious services (Fischer & Jammes 2019:230). This critique voiced by an interviewee, who once belonged to the Brotherhood and who blamed its affiliated businesspeople for looking for mere lucrative gain without committing to ulterior goals like economic upgrading, industrialisation, job creation and welfare provisioning. Another former brotherhood wrote in 2012 a critical article titled “supermarket renaissance”, ridiculing the simultaneous launching the so-called renaissance project—mashrou’ al-nahḍa—as part of Morsi’s presidential campaign and al-Shāṭer’s creation of a supermarket chain. For the Brotherhood critic, the real project of the organisation was no more substantive than creating a supermarket chain (Abulgheit 2012).

It is noteworthy that this is different from the theological debate within the community of Islamic financiers that Rudnyckyj mentioned (2017:171) where the contention is about the adherence of financial practices to true Islamic principles. In the Egyptian case, there was little debate on how Islamic trade or services were, as long as they did not involve the obvious taboos like usury. Rather, the issue was the extent to which business choices were subject to the non-economic and hence higher goals of the Islamist movement.

The extrospective tension: businesses in the range of fire

Whereas the Islamist-affiliated businesspersons’ mode of embeddedness allowed them to convert capital from the socio-religious and cultural fields into the market field, it also made them vulnerable to disruptions in the political field, having primarily to do with the actual or perceived threat of Islamism by the Egyptian state. Indeed, Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs would occasionally find themselves subject to state hostile action.

This started with the crackdown on the majorly Islamist capital investment companies in the late 1980s (Beinin 2005:122–123; Springborg 2019:47). Brotherhood-associated businesses were targeted with asset freezing and sequestration in 1992, 2006 and in the aftermath of the 2013 takeover (‘Abdelḥay et al. 2006; Adly 2016). Even a non-politically active and low-profile Islamist businessperson like Sayyed al-Swirky was arrested and sentenced in 2002 on charges of unlawfully marrying a minor. Hence, these entrepreneurs found themselves doubly vulnerable to state harassment: first, as simply politically unconnected businesspeople that lacked protection against extortion and predation in the absence of strongly enforced property rights, and second, as affiliates to the Islamist movement.

The tension between both dimensions of embeddedness could even be spotted within Ḥasan Mālek’s business career. Even though his ties with the Brotherhood are undeniable (even by his own account during the interrogation), he downplayed the extent of this affiliation and emphasised his financial independence of the organisation since the 2013 takeover. It is noteworthy that Mālek Group was seized in July 2014, a full year after Morsi’s ouster. Additionally, unlike almost all senior Brotherhood leaders, Mālek was only arrested in October 2015, more than 2 years after the coup.

The quick rise of the Brotherhood to power after 2011 marked a business break between the two old partners. In 2011, Mālek established separately Mālek Group, which once again was a trading corporation importing and distributing primarily Turkish ready-made clothes and furniture. Mālek Group was a family-owned enterprise, with a Egp20 million paid-up capital. This also marked diverging paths between the two men within the Brotherhood itself. Whereas al-Shāṭer emerged as the undisputed strongman, who tried—albeit unsuccessfully—to run for the Presidential elections of 2012, Mālek shied away from any explicit political role. Conversely, he seemed to have consolidated his economic position within the Brotherhood as a leading businessperson. Mālek was instrumental in the establishment of the EBDA business association (Start in Arabic) in early 2012. Modelled after the MÜSIAD (the Turkish acronym for independent industrialists and businessmen), Mālek’s intent was to bring together small- and medium-sized enterprises in the Egyptian context and to consolidate them as a political-economic bloc (Adly 2016). Mālek became a senior member of Morsi’s economic presidential team. He did not occupy any official position though. I was informed by a former EBDA functionary that Mālek’s ties with al-Shāṭer turned quickly sour during Morsi’s short reign. Apparently, it was not just personal rivalry but also divergent stances on what to do during Egypt’s turbulent transition. It might have been also a conscious attempt by Mālek to shield his family business from the political disruption. Indeed, it is noticeable that after the 2013 takeover, Mālek opened three new branches, pushing ahead with pre-planned expansion (Case721/2015:561). This can be interpreted as an attempt to survive the crackdown on the Brotherhood, which gave Mālek and his corporation 2 extra years after 2013 but ultimately failed in the face of the regime’s radical uprooting of the Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood’s informal and outlawed, albeit tolerated, character of the organisation under Mubārak’s long reign made it very hard to identify the rank-and-file members, not to mention its many sympathisers and clients. This amorphousness was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allowed many Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs to capitalise on their ties within the Islamist movement while consciously and strategically stressing their non-political stance and denying any links with political Islamist forces, namely the Brotherhood. On the other, it was a major liability as it enabled the regime to accuse any of these Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs of being covert supporters of the Brotherhood or any other variant of political Islam. This became a reality once the regime adopted the radical strategy of drying up the financial sources of the Islamist movement at large, being perceived as directly or indirectly linked to the rise of the Brotherhood.

In fact, many pursued a conscious strategy downplaying their ties to political Islam and particularly any organisational or financial links with the Muslim Brotherhood. This was mostly the case with former members of the Brotherhood who started their businesses in Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s and managed to accumulate capital and firmly establish market niches for their enterprises in areas like education and healthcare services, usually through family-run enterprises. A case in point was that of a family of school owners, whose deceased father and business founder was a member of the Brotherhood back in the 1960s. Following the 2013 crackdown, the school was seized and put under the custody of the Ministry of Education, with the personal assets of the owners frozen. They were later added to the terror blacklist. The owners pushed back against these allegations in court by denying any continuous links with the Brotherhood. I was informed that the deceased father had consciously cut ties with the organisation in the 1990s for fear of risking his business and hard-accumulated private capital.

In fact, very few once Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs could break away and convince the state officials that they really did. One can barely think of the heirs of ‘Abdel ‘aẓīm Lokma, the Brotherhood businessperson who made a comeback from Saudi Arabia in the 1970s with the advent of Infitāḥ. Lokma built a business empire in Egypt through mediating GCC-based money flows. His investments were concentrated in heavy industry. Following his death, his heirs seemed to have managed to dis-embed themselves successfully from the Brotherhood networks to the extent of being charged with corruption in 2014, given the close ties that existed between Aḥmed Lokma and Gamāl Mubārak, from which he was acquitted in 2020 (Faraj 2020). Needless to say, the Lokma group did not face the risk of seizure or confiscation after 2013.

This tension within the Islamist economic habitus was amplified in the aftermath of the 2013 takeover and the open war between the state and the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies in the anti-coup coalition, which blurred even further the lines between political Islamist forces and the broader Islamist movement. Thus, many Islamist NGOs and charities and private enterprises came under fire. For instance, al-Tawḥīd wal-Nūr was spared until 2020, when the state alleged that it was part of the financial network of the Brotherhood and hence was seized and its owner arrested.

Even more dramatically, some of these Islamist-affiliated businesspeople went beyond their denial of ties with the Brotherhood into pledging support to the al-Sisi regime as a token of good will after 2013. It was in this context that Karam ‘Abdelwahhāb, the allegedly co-conspirator with Ḥasan Mālek’s scheme to damage the national economy, had donated 10% of his annual profits to Long Live Egypt Fund in 2014. He also claimed to have donated money to the New Suez Canal project (Case721/2015:860). In his interrogation session, al-ḥajj Karam cited these examples and said “I wouldn’t have done so if I were a member of the Brotherhood.” (Case721/2015:861). In the same vein, a business associate of his asserted that Karam was not a member of the Brotherhood. Rather, he and his late brother al-ḥajj Mizār ‘Abdelwahhāb were Salafies (Case721/2015:1961).

The story of Ṣafwān Thābet is another dramatic example of boundedness. Thābet is the owner of “Juhayna”, one of Egypt’s biggest dairy producers since the 1980s. He is also the grandson (from his mother’s side) of a former Brotherhood supreme guide and the cousin of another. Given his special family background, Thābet has consistently tried to dissociate himself from the Brotherhood and to pledge allegiance to the Mubārak regime. For instance, he joined the NDP before the 2011 revolution. In 2015 however, amid a frenzy of freezing the assets associated with the Brotherhood, Thābet’s name appeared on a blacklist of businesspeople accused of financing terrorism. Thābet pursued the same old strategy with the al-Sisi regime. He donated to the Long Live Egypt Fund as a token of support. Yet, in 2020, Thābet and his son were arrested on charges of financing terrorism marking the hardline shift in the regime strategy.

A look from the inside: Mālek Group’s family, organisation and networks

Based on the careful and critical reading of case papers and interrogation minutes, some zoom-in picture of how Mālek Group used to operate could be reconstructed. In the core lay a family-owned corporation under the name of Mālek Group that was owned and managed by Ḥasan Mālek and his sons, especially Ḥamza (who would be arrested and sentenced to life in 2019 with his father). This unmistakably demonstrates the private control side of the Islamist economic habitus. It was essentially of entrepreneurs and their family members playing a role within the movement and/or organisation.

Established in 2011, Mālek Group’s main business was the importation and distribution of ready-made clothes and furniture, mainly from Turkish brands like Sarar and Istikbal. As noted earlier, Mālek ended his long-time partnership with Khayrat al-Shāṭer after they were both released from prison in 2011. This coincided with Mālek himself having direct access to the Brotherhood leadership in his economic capacity as a leading businessperson and a key node of trade and investment networks within and outside of Egypt. Mālek became an advisor and a member of the presidential economic team during the brief tenure of Mohamed Morsi.

With or without the partnership with al-Shāṭer, Mālek’s business was deeply embedded within the Muslim Brotherhood organisation through various channels. In addition to the links to the leadership, Mālek acknowledged his frequent donation to the different charity activities run by the Brotherhood citing examples like feeding the poor during Ramadan and providing medical services for low fees (Case721/2015:485). He was however adamant on stressing that these were personal and voluntary commitments that he himself used to pay out of his pocket in addition to his membership fees and that no other donations were given out of the corporation profits (Case721/2015:486).

Embeddedness within the Brotherhood appeared clearly in the intra- and inter-business transactions undertaken by the Group. To start with, there was a noticeable overrepresentation of Brotherhood members and their kin in Mālek’s enterprise. For instance, one of the employees in the Group was arrested during the dispersal of the Rabi’a sit-in in 2013 (Case721/2015:2092). His brother also happened to work for Mālek Group and was arrested in 2017 on charges related to Ḥasan Mālek’s. Both brothers admitted voting for Morsi in 2012 while denying membership in the Brotherhood (Case721/2015:2090,2099). This can be taken as anecdotal evidence to the communal responsibility of creating jobs for Brotherhood affiliates in businesses run by other members, which is a form of embeddedness that apparently brings in elements of intra-Brotherhood solidarity and loyalty in the daily operations of the enterprise as shown in the triangle in Fig. 2 titled: intra-Brotherhood transactions. It also solves to a great extent the principal-agent problems, adding social sanctioning mechanisms within the community to punish defectors (Greif 1989). However, this does not appear to be exceptional to the Brotherhood per se, which are among the most hierarchical and politically oriented within the Egyptian Islamist movement though. For instance, al-Tawḥīd wal-Nūr has been for long known to extensively hire Salafi workers, which can be seen as a community service directed towards Salafi-oriented fellows, even in the absence of a strict organisational structure like that of the Brotherhood.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Layers of embeddedness—Mālek Group as a model

Full size image

Evidence suggests that intra-Brotherhood embeddedness played a primary role within the enterprise as well as linking its owners to the Brotherhood as a sociopolitical multi-functional organisation and community of members. However, this represents only one dimension of embeddedness that appears to be the least-economic and the most non-market based. Conversely, many other deals on the market seemed to have depended on looser forms of embeddedness allowing a greater market-orientation, beyond the communal and organisational spheres of the Brotherhood. A good example would be the links Ḥasan Mālek managed to establish with the Turkish manufacturers from whom he secured the rights of importing and distributing their products in Egyptian markets. However, this was not purely market-driven as these particular Turkish businesses were themselves deeply embedded in the MÜSIAD network of Islamist entrepreneurs (Osella & Osella 2009). This can be seen as an instance where external trade relations were created by capitalising on the trans-national networks of organisations that bound different Islamists around the world. Mālek’s links to the Brotherhood must have acted as an organisational interface in his foreign trade dealings (see intra-Islamist transactions in Fig. 2). However, Mālek himself as a businessperson seemed to have weighed heavily on these business and non-business ties becoming an important node in this trans-national network through which trade as well as ideological commitments and convictions about organisational forms and economic policies flowed as well. A good example would be Mālek’s conscious efforts to mimic MÜSIAD through his EBDA association, with him becoming its chairperson and having his MÜSIAD counterpart present in the launch event in early 2012, which the author happened to have attended in person (Vannetzel & Yankaya 2019:302).

Similarly, within the Egyptian market, Mālek Group extended strong long-term ties with businesses that did not necessarily belong to other Brotherhood members. The case papers reveal the special ties that linked Mālek Group with a number of foreign exchange bureaus that were crucial for providing the hard currency needed for an importing company like his. Needless to say, the authorities focused on these financial ties as part of pressing the charges of financing terrorism and damaging the national economy through the systematic smuggling of hard currency outside of Egypt. Yet, a careful reader can go beyond the regime discourse into some of the objective findings about business exchange and networks that tied Mālek Group with other Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs. The most prominent associate was al-ḥajj Karam ‘Abdelwahhāb and his wife Fāten Isma’īl who ran together two family-owned exchange bureaus under the names of al-Nūrān and al-Tawḥīd in addition to al-Nūrān company for gold trading. Al-ḥajj Karam (54 years old) started a family business with his late brother al-ḥajj Mizār ‘Abdelwahhāb, which extended into trading in foreign currency and gold importation from Sudan. In 2017, Karam and his wife were arrested on charges of complicity with Mālek in trading in foreign currency on the black market using their registered exchange offices. The link was an accountant at Mālek Group, whose name was Fāris ‘Abdeljawād. It is noteworthy that al-ḥajj Karam did not deny the dealings with Mālek Group. Rather, he denied having ever joined the Brotherhood holding that “my money and companies are too dear to me and I would never have risked losing them” (Case721/2015:867–868). Instead, he admitted wrongdoing in dealing in dollars on the black market in violation of the Central Bank regulations as well as confessing in details to illegally smuggling gold from Sudan into Egypt (Case721/2015:909–910). He rather alleged that his dealings with Mālek Group were strictly on market basis that is driven by profit concerns rather than anything else.

It seems that al-ḥajj Karam’s denial of Muslim Brotherhood membership is rather credible. After all, he has been running two officially registered foreign exchange companies—with four branches in Cairo and other governorates—for years. These have been visible to the Central Bank and to state security since the time of Mubārak. A friendly witness, another owner of an exchange bureau with a history of dealings with Karam, asserted that al-ḥajj Karam, his late brother and his sons were Salafis, with no organisational links to the Brotherhood (Case721/2015:1962). Indeed, the religious names of the two exchange bureaus and gold trading company suggest some Islamist affiliation. He added that the two ‘Abdelwahhāb brothers and himself were arrested for 8 to 9 months in 2002 along 300 others for illegally trading in foreign currency. With a history in smuggling gold and illegal currency exchange, the friendly witness held that al-ḥajj Karam’s deals with Mālek Group were typical of exchange bureaus and importers who are always in need of dollars in order to buy merchandise from abroad (Case721/2015:1963). This was the exact line of defence that Karam and his wife followed in the hope of lightening the charges by admitting to “ordinary” criminal acts rather than being associated with an allegedly terrorist organisation.

The account most probably closest to the truth lies in the middle where Karam’s foreign exchange companies were not within Mālek Group’s intra-Brotherhood sphere of interaction. It was rather a less intense and more market-oriented mode of embeddedness that was based on a long-term informal partnership. This was not a mere transactional relationship though, purely driven by price signals conducted at an arm’s length as Karam claimed in his defence. Such partnership must have been based on high interpersonal trust that tied al-ḥajj Karam with Mālek Group’s accountant Fāris ‘Abdeljawād, who was in charge of securing the needed dollars off the black market amid the harsh foreign currency shortage of 2012–2016. There is little doubt that such illegal, clandestine and high-risk transactions require the presence of rather strong extra market relations, even if profit making remains the central concern. Al-ḥajj Karam must have been aware of the double risk of dealing with Mālek Group, especially after the Group was seized by the authorities in July 2014 but without changing its management which allowed the continuation of business as usual. All this suggests that the ties that bound Mālek Group with Karam’s companies might have been extra-Brotherhood ones, but remained within the more amorphous sphere of Islamist-affiliated businesses.

Regardless of the due process and how impartial and just the trial was against essentially political opponents, the sentences given at the end of the trial in 2019 might be indicative of the form and degree of embeddedness that marked how Mālek Group used to operate. One can fairly consider the harshness of the sentences being proportionate to the perceived closeness to the Brotherhood. Seven received life sentence including Ḥasan Mālek and his son Ḥamza together with five other Brotherhood businesspeople including ‘Abdelraḥmān Se‘oudi (sentenced in absentia). Al-ḥajj Karam and his wife together with Mālek Group’s accountant, Fāris ‘Abdeljawād, received 10 years in jail. The rest, numbering 14, were acquitted of those particular charges of supporting the Brotherhood and damaging the Egyptian economy. This ironically included a few who confessed to trading dollars on the black market. By the same token, others including four minor policemen at the airport were excluded from the Mālek case after having been initially charged and interrogated despite confessing wrongdoing either by smuggling dollars outside of Egypt or receiving bribes. These links were most probably conducted on pure transactional basis and were hence part of criminal networks rather than being affiliated organisationally or ideologically with the Islamist movement and particularly to the Muslim Brotherhood.

This empirically informed reconstruction of Ḥasan Mālek’s business microcosm should serve as a paradigmatic case of Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurship, using Ginzburg terminology. On the one hand, it reveals how the Islamist habitus allowed the conversion of cultural, organisational and social capital into financial and economic capital. Mālek was a businessperson, running a family-owned enterprise but one whose economic career could only be understood in relation to the Brotherhood and the Islamist movement more broadly inside and outside Egypt. On the other, it shows how the habitus translated into layers of social embeddedness of various degrees of intensity.

Conclusion

This article is a theoretical attempt at bringing the Islamist-affiliated economy in Egypt within the perspective of economic sociology. It departs from the established literature that has limited the discussion to the bounds of an Islamic moral economy or studied it as mere extensions of forces of political Islam, namely the Brotherhood. The key argument here is that belonging to the Islamist movement—broadly defined—has constituted an economic habitus that enabled the rise of a class of entrepreneurs who could successfully establish themselves on the market in multiple sectors. Islamist-affiliated entrepreneurs were endowed with market-oriented dispositions and enjoyed positions that allowed the systematic conversion of organisational, cultural and social capital into economic and financial capital.

The empirical evidence has also demonstrated that the Islamist economic habitus is not free of tension and contradictions. In fact, the economic and sociopolitical dimensions of that habitus have created both embeddedness and boundedness if not a sense of entanglement for many of the Islamist-affiliated market agents. Facing these tensions, many adopted rhetoric and organisational strategies that downplayed their association with political Islam while keeping their affiliation to the Islamist movement more generally. In this, the Islamist habitus can only be understood in relation to the broader capitalist transformation in Egypt where market making has been deeply embedded in largely informal social relations and structures. In some sense, the habitus that Islamist entrepreneurs were endowed with was only a variation of social market habitus that one could find among other groups like Christian Copts and Upper-Egyptian migrants. Perhaps, the difference between these groups and the Islamists lies in how the latter were uniquely positioned in the political field as potential or actual rivals of the post-colonial state. This unleashed some unique dynamics that deeply shaped the Islamist habitus, in both aspects of dispositions and positions.