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Brooke, S., & Ketchley, N. F. (2018). Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam. AMERICAN POLITICAL
SCIENCE REVIEW, 112(2), 376-394. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055417000636
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Download date: 09. Aug. 2022
Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam
October 5, 2017
Steven Brooke
sbrooke@gmail.com
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
The University of Louisville
Neil Ketchley
neil.ketchley@kcl.ac.uk
Lecturer in Middle East Politics
Department of Middle East Studies
King’s College London
Abstract
Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and
institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to so-
cial and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the
availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a
listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contempora-
neous census data on over 4,000 subdistricts. A multilevel analysis shows that Muslim
Brotherhood branches were more likely in subdistricts connected to the railway and
where literacy was higher. Branches were less likely in districts with large European
populations, and where state administration was more extensive. Qualitative evidence
also points to the railway as key to the movement’s propagation. These findings chal-
lenge the orthodoxy that contact between Muslims and the West spurred the growth of
organized political Islam, and instead highlight the critical role of economic and state
infrastructure in patterning the early contexts of Islamist activism.
Acknowledgements
The authors are listed in alphabetical order; each contributed equally. This research
was supported by the Project on Middle East Political Science. An earlier version of this
paper was presented at the 2016 annual conference of the American Political Science
Association, as well as at seminars and workshops at Harvard University, King’s College
London, the London School of Economics, and the University of Oxford. We thank
Tarek Masoud for sharing data as well as constructive criticism, and Selma Hegab,
Sarah ElMasry, and Khaldoun alMousily for excellent research assistance. Christo-
pher Barrie, Michael Biggs, Jason Brownlee, Ferdinand Eibl, Michael Farquhar, Ali
Kadivar, Charles Kurzman, Dan McCormack, Quinn Mecham, Patrick Pr¨ag, Lamiaa
Shehata, John Sidel, Sidney Tarrow, and Felix Tropf also provided valuable feedback
and comments.
1 Introduction
The first decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of mass movements mobilizing
in the name of Islam. From North Africa to the Indonesian archipelago, Islamist movements
were on the leading edge of national liberation struggles, and would go on to play prominent
roles in post-independence politics: winning national elections, developing sophisticated so-
cial welfare activities, and occasionally waging violent insurgencies. Yet despite the extensive
outpouring of academic and journalistic writing on the rise of organized political Islam, little
is known about the conditions under which these movements emerged and the local ecologies
that facilitated their growth. This is part of a more general shortcoming in the literature
on Islamism: while significant attention has been paid to the biographies and ideologies of
Islamist movements and their leaders, little if any research has systematically evaluated the
social and political contexts of this activism (Masoud 2014 is a notable exception). As Ketch-
ley and Biggs (2017) argue, in rare instances when systematic data on Islamist movements
is available, it is worth the painstaking effort to reconstruct these contexts.
This paper examines the rise of organized political Islam in interwar Egypt.
1
We con-
sider three claims in particular: First, that Islamist movements initially developed in areas
that had undergone social and demographic transformations in the period leading up to the
Second World War (Ayubi 1991, Ayoob 2009, Moaddel 2005, Gershoni and Jankowski 2002);
second, that the first Islamists found support amongst Muslims who had come into contact
with the West and, in particular, amongst those Muslims living in areas where Christian
missionaries were active (Baron 2014, Cleveland 2014, Sharkey 2008, 2013); and third, that
the early sites of Islamist activism were patterned by state presence and the available eco-
nomic infrastructure (Lia 1998, Munson 2001). While all of these explanations are widely
cited in the literature, previous studies have not accounted for variation in where the first
Islamist movements established an organizational presence.
1
We use Islamist activism, Islamist movements, and organized political Islam interchangeably to mean
“organizations and movements that mobilize and agitate activities in the political sphere while deploying
signs and symbols from Islamic traditions” (Ismail 2006, 2).
1
We address this shortcoming by combining a unique cache of historical data with a mixed
methods research design. In 1937, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Arabic-language
newspaper published a nationwide inventory of the organization’s chapters, furnishing micro-
level data on over 200 branches. This provides an unparalleled insight into the early sites
of activism and recruitment by one of the world’s most influential Islamist movements.
We locate branches in their social and economic context by using contemporaneous census
records for over 4,000 subdistricts. The annual reports of British and American missionaries
active in Egypt during this period allow us to test for the effect of Christian proselytization
on the sites of branch formation. Newly digitized workforce statistics on the distribution
of employees in state administration provide a measure of state presence. Finally, maps
and timetables of the country’s rail network account for the role of economic infrastructure
in the organizational development of the Muslim Brotherhood. We bring these materials
together using an ecological approach, inspired by recent research on social movements and
contentious politics in Western contexts (Biggs and Knauss 2012, Kawalerowicz and Biggs
2015), to identify the characteristics of subdistricts and districts that made branch formation
more or less likely. Because our quantitative analysis is ecological, it is inevitably silent
on the processes of Islamist expansion. To further examine how organized political Islam
initially developed, we then expand on the statistical findings through a focused qualitative
examination of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities, as reported in the movement’s Arabic-
language publications.
We find that Muslim Brotherhood branches were more likely to be established in sub-
districts with higher rates of literacy and fewer agricultural workers, supporting claims that
Islamism initially found support amongst the urban middle classes. We can detect no statis-
tically significant effect of Christian missionary activity in patterning branch formation, and
the presence of large European populations in a district significantly reduced the likelihood
that a branch would be established, challenging arguments that attribute the growth of po-
litical Islam to contact between Muslims and the West. Finally, our quantitative results show
2
that Brotherhood branches were more likely in areas where there were fewer state employees,
and in those neighborhoods and hamlets connected to the Egyptian rail network. Qualita-
tive evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood’s publications, including the travel itineraries
of the Brotherhood’s leadership, also points to the rail network as a crucial pathway for the
growth of the movement. A close examination of those sources suggests that the Muslim
Brotherhood deliberately exploited the railway to reach new constituencies and consolidate
newly formed branches. Early Islamist activism, in other words, conforms to the general
pattern seen in the emergence of social movements and mass politics in other contexts: the
rise of organized political Islam was inextricably linked to the availability of economic and
state infrastructure.
The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section we examine the literature on the rise
of organized political Islam to isolate three distinctive groups of theories that purport to
explain the contexts in which Islamist movements initially coalesced. After describing the
data and analysis we present the results. Subsequent sections provide an interpretation and
discussion of our findings, as well as a brief description of robustness checks on the data. A
final qualitative section draws on Arabic-language material from the Muslim Brotherhood’s
publications, as well as biographies of the movement’s membership, to expand upon a key
finding from the quantitative analysis - that Egypt’s rail system was a vital channel for the
movement’s organizational development. We close by suggesting potential areas for future
research.
2 The rise of organized political Islam
By the eve of the Second World War, mass-based Islamist movements had emerged across the
Muslim world. These groups, including the Khilafat movement in India, the Sarekat Islam in
Java, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, commanded memberships in the hundreds of
thousands and provided new outlets for Muslims’ social grievances and political aspirations
(Alavi 1997, Burke 1972, Khalid 1999, Lia 1998, Minault 1982, Noer 1973,
¨
Ozcan 1997,
3
