This paper presents the main findings from my current research project: a book length study of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s prison ordeals that is under contract with Oxford University Press. Entitled "Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, 1948-1975", my book builds on a collection of more than two-hundred prison memoirs written by Muslim Brothers and Sisters to tell the story of the Brotherhood’s long period of incarceration in Egypt. Although the significance of the Brotherhood’s prison ordeals has been widely recognized in current scholarship, no scholar has yet fully explored this eclipsed period in the history of the Brotherhood. My book endeavors to close this significant scholarly gap by – for the first time ever in a combined fashion – tell the history of the Brotherhood’s imprisonment from the Palestine War to the rise of Anwar al-Sadat. My main argument is that the prison experience was crucial for the social and intellectual formation of the Brotherhood. By acknowledging the institution of the prison as a crucial site for the formation of ideology, I claim that Egypt's state institutions played a significant role in shaping the competing ideologies within the Brotherhood. Yet, while the institution of the prison severely encroached on the freedom of the Brothers, prison also offered them time to reflect on their situation – not merely in conversation with each other, but in conversation with political prisoners of other ideological convictions as well, most notably Communists. Thus, by emphasizing not what state repression restricted the Brothers from doing, but rather what it allowed them to do, I wish to demonstrate how the ideology of the Brotherhood was shaped between 1948-75 not merely by debates internal to the Brotherhood, but by encounters with leftist intellectuals, professional clerics, and government agencies inside the prisons of Egypt. In this paper, I first want to give a brief overview of the book before I explore a critical methodological question that lays at the heart of this project: namely, how can we as historians get access to, let alone, claim to speak historically about events in one of the most restricted institutions in the Middle East – that is, the prison in modern autocratic Egypt?