من وحي الخاطر

Introduction The movement of the Muslim Brotherhood has become, ever since its reputation crossed the Egyptian borders in the early 1950s, the subject of increasing number of studies in the West. In this literature three main features dominate: first, a general tendency to stress (often to exaggerate) the transnational or global character of the movement; second, an emphasis on the predilection toward militancy and violence as central features of the movement; third, an understanding that these two features are closely juxtaposed and intertwined. In general, from this literature emerges a monolithic view, one that is always assumed but never examined, of the movement and its discourse as exclusively Islamic in content, global in scope, militant in outlook and historically unchanging. Of these aspects, it is the last two that are clearly problematic and it is these two that are the focus of this paper. It should be noted that not all of these conclusions are mistaken. There is...