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Who Supported the Early Muslim Brotherhood?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2021

Neil Ketchley Open the ORCID record for Neil Ketchley [Opens in a new window] ,
Steven Brooke  and
Brynjar Lia
Neil Ketchley*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Steven Brooke
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin - Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Brynjar Lia
Affiliation:
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Neil Ketchley, Department of Politics and International Relations and St Antony's College, University of Oxford. E-mail: neil.ketchley@politics.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

Scholarship on political Islam suggests that support for early Islamist movements came from literate merchants, government officials, and professionals who lacked political representation. We test these claims with a unique tranche of microlevel data drawn from a Muslim Brotherhood petition campaign in interwar Egypt. Matching the occupations of over 2,500 Brotherhood supporters to contemporaneous census data, we show that Egyptians employed in commerce, public administration, and the professions were more likely to sign the movement's petitions. The movement's supporters were also overwhelmingly literate. Contrary to expectations, the early Brotherhood also attracted support from Egyptians employed in agriculture, albeit less than we would expect given the prevalence of agrarian workers in the population. A case study tracing Muslim Brotherhood branch formation and petition activism in a Nile Delta village illustrates how literate, socially mobile agrarian families were key to the propagation of the movement in rural areas.

Keywords

Political IslamMuslim BrotherhoodEgypt
Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 388 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

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