The Center for Global Peace & Conflict Studies presents

"Unlocking the World of Muslim Brothers"
with Hazem Kandil, Cambridge University

Thursday, April 3, 2014
3:30-5:30 p.m.
Social and Behavioral Science Gateway, Room 1517

About the talk:
The Muslim Brotherhood’s slow rise and rapid fall from power in Egypt was determined by institutional politics. But ideology shaped the movement’s performance in this power game. Islamism’s central organizing principle - referred to here as ‘religious determinism’ - both enabled and restricted its subjects through a matrix of discursive and non-discursive practices. The result was a united, yet politically inept organization. Drawing on years of participant observation, extensive interviews, focus groups, previously inaccessible organizational documents, and dozens of memoirs and writings, this is the first ever in-depth study of the relationship between the Brotherhood and its members. Whereas past accounts considered how Brothers infiltrated civil society, engaged in politics, and promoted their message, this work examines the three-sided process that goes into the heart of any attempt to understand the Brotherhood: how members are recruited and socialized; how their social networks are constructed and sustained; and how Islamism structures their lives. The aim is to employ a sociological understanding of ideology, as a social process that produces new subjectivities, to reorient the study of Islamism from what Islamists said and did, to who they really were.

For further information, please contact Sylvia Lotito, slotito@uci.edu.