It is a common feature of many academic and journalistic narratives to blame the Muslim World’s ills on Saudi Arabia’s exporting of Wahhabi Islam. As Bano and Sakurai (2015) have noted, while this narrative may have some merit, it can be overly reductive. In the decades prior to the founding of the Islamic University of Medina in 1961, which signaled the commencement of Saudi Arabia’s exporting of its version of Wahhabi Islam (Farquhar 2017), al-Azhar was establishing an international network of missions to export its own Azhari Islam. This paper uses the relationship between the Azhar missions, and the Wahhabi ulama of the Eastern Arabian Peninsula in the early / mid-twentieth century to engage the debate around Islam in modern Qatar. As Baskan and Wright (2011) articulated, Qatar presents a conundrum inasmuch as it is nominally a Wahhabi state like Saudi Arabia, yet it pursues very different policies, most obviously toward the Muslim Brotherhood. To date, academics who study Qatar have emphasized the impact of an influx of Muslim Brotherhood emigres from countries such as Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s (Roberts 2017, Kamrava 2013, Ulrichsen 2014, Freer 2018), and this paper complicates this narrative in two main ways. First, I use the example of Muhammad b. Mani‘ and his students to argue that in the early twentieth century there was an established Wahhabi elite on the Qatari peninsula, complete with its own scholarly families such as the Al Mahmuds. These families usually hailed from the neighboring Najd highlands and several of them played a key role in establishing the early religious education systems in both Saudi Arabia and Qatar. While Baskan and Wright (2011) acknowledge the existence of these families the key question, then, is what happened to them? Second, I show that the influx of emigres to Qatar, of whom the most famous is Yusuf al-Qaradawi (2002), did not view themselves as coming to spread the Brotherhood ideology. Rather, they came as Azhari missionaries and developed Qatar’s religious education system along the same lines as they envisioned for al-Azhar. Consequently, I argue that Qatar is an example of the successful export of Azhari Islam, which continues to shape Qatari policy to this day. Moreover, and following Lauziere (2016), the paper further calls into question the utility of using categories such as Wahhabi, Salafi, Azhari, or Brother/Ikhwani to categorize the Sunni ulama, especially in the early / mid-twentieth century.

In recent years, several scholars have analyzed the causes and aftermath of the 2013 coup in Egypt. Some employ analytic frames that focus on the interaction between authoritarian state structures and revolutionary movements (Cook, 2017; El-Gobashy, 2013; Masoud, 2014). Others examine interactions with the state “from below,” for example, how youth and youth movements such as the 6 April Movement negotiate authoritarian state oppression (Sonay, 2018; Schielke, 2015). A third group of studies examines Islamist, specifically Muslim Brotherhood, interactions with the state (Hamid, 2014; Trager, 2016). This paper contributes to this body of scholarship by examining the political theology of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from the analytic lens of religious studies, taking a bottom-up approach. Through an examination of the Muslim Brotherhood’s particular blend of the theological and the political, we learn how the Brotherhood has created a particular version of Islam. This paper takes it as a starting point that there are multiple expressions of Islam in Egypt, including traditional sufi orders, the traditionalist -- and, starting in the twentieth century -- state-influenced version championed by Al-Azhar, the output of popular preachers such as Dr. Amr Khaled, expressions of Islam that are influenced by salafi trends, and syncretic manifestations of some or all of the above. This paper situates the Muslim Brotherhood in this social-religious landscape. This paper therefore asks, “How does an understanding of the political theology of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt help us make sense of their rapid rise and fall from power in Egyptian society?” Here this paper focuses not so much on state oppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the rise and fall of social acceptance of the group. This presentation analyzes three main points to this end: 1. How the populist nature of the group by necessity simplified certain theological questions, such as determinism versus free will (qa??’ vs. qadar); 2. The ways in which the establishment of strict political hierarchies, (for example, the process by which one can move up in rank within the organization) influences approaches to theology, such as discouragement of obscurantist thinking in favor of clearer, actionable directives; and 3. How political repression in Egypt may have led to an emphasis on the social, or outward manifestations of faith (hijab, public prayer), and the effect this emphasis has on Egyptian society (and politics).

Despite the vast scholarship on the conflict between the Egyptian President Jamal Abdil-Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood, very few scholars discussed in detail the role official religious state institutions played in this conflict. My paper explores the relationship between, religion, politics and state institutions in Egypt by focusing on Nasser’s al-Azhar and its role in mobilizing the masses against the Muslim Brotherhood. I reconstruct Nasser’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, arguing that they should not be seen in black-and-white terms but as two faces of the same coin. I argue that they both blurred the lines between politics and religion using Islam and its institutions to confront each other and to compete over people’s imagination. The first part of the paper discusses the transformation in the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Azhar before and after 1952, arguing that they shared a friendly relationship that changed when Nasser came to power. The second part of the paper discusses how Nasser co-opted al-Azhar and used it to combat the Muslim Brotherhood and undermine their religious base. I use articles and caricatures published in al-Azhar’s official magazines, Majllat al-Azhar and Minbar al-Islam, to show how Nasser was presented as the “New Saladin” and a representative of a moderate Islam whereas the Muslim Brothers were deviant Muslims who threatened Islam and the Egyptian society at large. I analyze how Azharis evoked traditional Islamic terms, like Kharijites, to serve modern secular purposes and to shape the Egyptians’ perception of the Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, I analyze how the Egyptian state used the religious past in order to meet the challenges of modernity. The third part of this paper discusses how historians of the modern Middle East regularly overlook the important role played by the United States and Saudi Arabia in this conflict. I use documents produced by the Eisenhower administration to illustrate how the U.S and Saudi Arabia supported the Muslim Brothers as an Islamic ideological force against Nasser and his official Islam presented by al-Azhar. Finally, unlike earlier scholarship that argues reconciliation between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian state started during the presidency of Sadat, I argue that this rapprochement took place during the later years of Nasser’s presidency by sending Azharis to indoctrinate Brotherhood members while still in prison.