This paper aims to explore a set of historical lessons and religious ideological trends that have influenced Hamas. The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement is most often portrayed as a monolithic whole. Hamas is however the product of a complex set intellectuals tendencies. These derive from its mother organization, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the different schools of thought therein, as well as from the debates and developments among Islamic movements more broadly in different countries across the Middle East. I aim to guide this discussion including references to specific Hamas ideologues by taking a close look at their writing. In the process I would like to identify various ideological forces that coexist within the movement, ranging from those that take social justice as their baseline to the ones that lean more towards Salafi and Jihadist movements.

In his address to the Fifth Conference of the Society of Muslim Brothers, held in Cairo in 1939, Hasan al-Banna declared: “We openly say that the Brotherhood is a political group and that its mission is a political one”. With this ended what one dissident called “the golden decade”. From 1939 onwards, the Brotherhood started a process whereby it gradually transformed itself from a religious revivalist movement to an organisation with decisively political objectives. This paper looks at the organizational history of the Muslim Brotherhood since 1973, and the reasons for its failure in the summer of 2013. Building on the literature of organisation and management studies, as well as pervious work in social movement theory, political sociology, political sciences and anthropology, the paper will analyse structural developments in the Brotherhood’s internal political organization in order to understand its rise and fall. Based on two years of fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013, and over 50 oral history interviews with Brotherhood leaders, rank-and-file members and dissidents, the goal is to provide a novel understanding of the Society’s history in the face of successive periods of rebuilding and reaction to the opening and closing down by the regime. In explaining the Brotherhood’s rise and fall, the paper will use the conceptual apparatus of the literature on organizational behaviour in order to creatively illuminate internal politics, decision-making, coalition building, as well as the indoctrination and mobilization of the rank-and-file apparatus. In particular, it will focus on the conflict between the so-called “Qutbists” (a label not used by the “Qutbists” themselves), who were in power during the period of governance from mid-2012 to mid-2013, and the “reformists”, who were pushed out of the organization during the Guidance Office elections of 2010. These camps did not distinguish themselves primarily in terms of religious doctrine, but rather in terms of their views on internal organisation, management and decision-making, with representatives of either side justifying strategic goals and priorities by shaping the Brotherhood’s ideology in a way that suited their specific political interests. The representatives of these coalitions were pitted against each other in personal and oftentimes acrimonious conflicts over the control over resources and key administrative positions. It will be argued that it is ultimately this internal clash of personalities that decisively weakened the Brotherhood on the eve of the revolution of 2011, thus being at the root of the Brotherhood’s failure in 2013.

The paper examines how the internal fragmentation of Egypt’s largest Salafi group, the Salafi Call (al-Da‘wa al-Salafiyya) and its external competition with the Muslim Brotherhood, have shaped its identity through its 40-year existence. It argues that ultimately the combination of internal divisions and tense external rivalry has led to the gradual fragmentation of the group’s authority following the 2013 Raba‘a al-Adawiya massacre. The paper is based on extensive fieldwork in Egypt between 2012 and 2015. Starting with the Da‘wa Salafiyya’s emergence at the University of Alexandria in the 1970s, the paper traces how a group of Alexandrians, primarily made up of medical doctors, became widely recognized and respected as a legitimate voice of Islam. Following this historical contextualization, it addresses the group’s sudden entry into Egyptian political life following the fall of Mubarak through its newly created al-Nour party. In the Egyptian parliamentary elections of 2011-2012, al-Nour captured 27% of the vote by mobilizing the broad and loyal following of the Da’wa Salafiya’s shaykhs and came to be regarded as the second most influential players in the Egyptian political arena, alongside the well-known Muslim Brotherhood. I argue that two main trends have shaped the group’s identity and aims, which led to its fragmentation. The first trend has been the constant tension between influential shaykhs and Salafi politicians. The former group believes that da‘wa (proselytization) should take precedence over the game of party politics, while the latter argues that the current situation calls for an intense involvement in politics. This dispute has manifested itself in the gradual division between the group’s figures of authority and even the rejection of the Da‘wa Salafiyya’s religious authority by some of its core constituencies. The second key trend pertains to the Da‘wa Salafiyya’s relation to the Muslim Brotherhood, which over the past 40 years has vacillated between amicable competition and cruel rivalry. I demonstrate that until 2013, the Da’wa Salafiyya had built considerable authority by aggressively trying to differentiate itself from its main Islamist competitor, namely by offering a model of affiliation that is non-hierarchical and fluid. However, the Da‘wa Salafiyya’s harsh attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood and its recent support of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has also led to the delegitimization of some pre-eminent shaykhs and caused some Salafis to reject democratic politics.

Tunisia’s largest Islamist movement, Ennahdha, is careful to frame its own historical narrative to emphasise a seamless, progressive evolution from its preaching origins to political activism. This, it says, has culminated in the form of a modern, national, conservative but pragmatic party that accepts the democratic political process and seeks to build consensus. A tendency by scholars to focus on the elite-level politics of transition in the capital Tunis has served to reinforce this narrative. However, at the local level there is an acute debate among Ennahdha members about what their movement stands for, how best to achieve their goal of Islamising society, and how much political compromise has jeopardised the movement’s historic proselytizing mission. This paper draws on 14 months of fieldwork among Ennahdha activists in one Tunisian city, Sousse, including interviews, observation, and analysis of newspapers as well as internal party documents and written histories. I argue that at the local level the movement remains heavily shaped by its social and religious activities and the moral code that underpins them. The daily, lived practice of religious belief and of correct ethical comportment remained key to sustaining the many individual Ennahdha members who remained inside Tunisia during the repression of the 1990s and 2000s, and continues to shape their convictions today. In the years after the fall of the Ben Ali regime, the movement has fragmented internally as it struggles to regain the youthful vitality and cohesion it enjoyed in the 1980s. Ennahdha’s efforts to recruit a new generation of supporters have proved harder than expected because of the perceived ambiguity of its message. Its early electoral success has ironically disappointed many of its grassroots members, who sense a loss of religious legitimacy and the dilution of their historic, proselytizing origins. The debate about whether to divide Ennahdha into a separate political party and a religious movement has become increasingly urgent, but many fear such division may weaken the organisation. There are still unresolved debates about what it means to adopt religious values as a political reference within a civil, not Islamic, state. The result is that local movement leaders are trying to manage an array of internal debates and self-criticisms that belie the elite-level assertion of pragmatic, political coherence.