Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-09T03:55:10.859Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Struggle for Leadership (2001–2011)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2021

Victor J. Willi
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

This chapter looks at the Brotherhood’s evolution in the decade after 9/11, and how debates about principles gradually morphed into an identity crisis concerning the organization as a whole. Against the setting of an unstable global security environment, marked first by a US-led ‘global war on terror’ and then by US-sponsored projects for the ‘democratization’ of the Middle East, the chapter highlights the debates between the followers of the Tilmisani school on the one hand, and the vanguardist faction on the other. The chapter also introduces the youth members of the Muslim Brotherhood who, in the context of an increasingly potent social protest movement, found themselves increasingly at odds with their leadership. The chapter ends with the contentious Guidance Office elections of the winter of 2009, when the vanguard leaders asserted total control of the Brotherhood’s executive office. Based on Oral History interviews with key Brotherhood members from across all organizational ranks, memoires and available online material, original texts published by the Brotherhood, an analysis of the Brotherhood-related diplomatic correspondence of the US Embassy in Cairo as published by Wikileaks, and a reading of the available scholarly literature, the chapter recounts how the Muslim Brotherhood, while meandering through an unstable global security environment, became further entrenched within its own internal bickering and squabbles to yield a weakened organization unready to meet the challenges of the Egyptian uprising of 2011.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Fourth Ordeal
A History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, 1968–2018
, pp. 179 - 229
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×