The Muslim Brotherhood and the West

by Professor Martyn Frampton (Author)

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West is the first comprehensive history of the relationship between the world’s largest Islamist movement and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East for the past century: Britain and the United States.

In the decades since the Brotherhood emerged in Egypt in the 1920s, the movement’s notion of “the West” has remained central to its worldview and a key driver of its behavior. From its founding, the Brotherhood stood opposed to the British Empire and Western cultural influence more broadly. As British power gave way to American, the Brotherhood’s leaders, committed to a vision of more authentic Islamic societies, oscillated between anxiety or paranoia about the West and the need to engage with it. Western officials, for their part, struggled to understand the Brotherhood, unsure whether to shun the movement as one of dangerous “fanatics” or to embrace it as a moderate and inevitable part of the region’s political scene. Too often, diplomats failed to view the movement on its own terms, preferring to impose their own external agendas and obsessions.

Martyn Frampton reveals the history of this complex and charged relationship down to the eve of the Arab Spring. Drawing on extensive archival research in London and Washington and the Brotherhood’s writings in Arabic and English, he provides the most authoritative assessment to date of a relationship that is both vital in itself and crucial to navigating one of the world’s most turbulent regions.

Review
Rigorously examined and thought-provoking. A pioneering study with a wealth of solid historical evidence. (Hazem Kandil, University of Cambridge)

Timely, comprehensive, detailed, and skilled, Frampton’s work will stand as the classic history of the Brotherhood's relationship with the West. (Beth Baron, Director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, City University of New York)

To grasp fully the significance of what is happening in the Arab world today you need to understand political Islamism within the context of the region’s broader history. This elegant, rigorous, and timely account of Western engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood over the last 80 years is an essential aid to building understanding and dispelling confusion. Anyone who makes policy on the region should read it. (Sir John Jenkins, former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia)

Rigorous yet absorbing…[Frampton’s] book fills a crucial gap in the literature and will be essential reading not just for scholars, but for anyone seeking to understand the ever-problematic relationship between religion and politics in today’s Middle East. (Malise Ruthven Financial Times 2018-02-07)

About the Author
Martyn Frampton is Reader in Modern History at Queen Mary University of London.