Foreword: Looking Back to This Study

This author stopped studying the Brotherhood by the end of 2013, for many reasons, some personal, and others related to the Egyptian situation and to work ethics—Muslim Brothers are jailed and they cannot defend their cause. This author's dislike for their ideology and their way of doing things does not prevent him from being respectful to the men, their commitment to their cause and their sacrifices.

Studying the Brotherhood tests the limits of “neutral axiology.” Studying this movement raises hard questions, regarding religion, the nation state, ethics, politics, polity, security, lies and truth in politics, democracy, revolution, the relation between religion and law, the relation between religion and ideology, the relation between religion and polity, the relation with the “other,” and how you study this “other.” Do we have a universal political science's idiom enabling us to use the same concepts for describing widely different worlds? To claim being neutral toward these issues is lying. Defining the right distance between the movement and the researcher is impossible; managing the actual distance between them is delicate.

Our “sources” are widely different: interviews with top, middle-ranking, and modest militants; doctrinal books written by top and middle-ranking Muslim Brothers; testimonies of former members, of dissidents, and/or of militants who disapprove of the “official line”; testimonies of their Egyptian foes who had to work with them: these foes can be secular actors, security officials, or simple people; testimonies of their “public”; and anthropological, sociological, and historical studies.

It should be clear that this is a clandestine organization, with a solid and deep-rooted “culture of clandestinity.” This does not mean that it has never tried “openness”; it means that it is not organized for a “natural” relation with the “other.” This culture precedes Egypt's authoritarian turn: al Banna, the great founder, the “imam,” praised secrecy. He had a grand design (the caliphate and the conquest of the world), and thought that evil forces (Crusaders, international Jewry, free masonry) would do their utmost to counter it: so it had to adopt the organizational structure and way of doing things of masonry, as he imagined it. The Brotherhood would be a masonry “for the good.”