Jihad has occupied a prominent position in the worldview, political strategy and foreign policy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which enjoyed a brief taste of power in Egypt from 2012-13. Muhammad Mursi and the Brotherhood had many enemies and detractors at home and abroad. For some, the Brotherhood was an irredeemably radical Islamist group that used elections to seize control of the state, but which would use this power to enforce its ideological vision on Egyptian society and declare a jihad against Israel and the West. Others saw the Brotherhood as having sold out to a US-Israeli agenda in the Middle East and having 'abandoned' jihad. Each of these interpretations misrepresents the way the Muslim Brotherhood has conceptualized jihad throughout its history. In this paper I argue that the Muslim Brotherhood's understanding of jihad has remained relatively consistent over time. Where it has engaged with jihad discourse, it has done so to serve its overall purpose of establishing and consolidating a mass movement in Egypt oriented towards the gradual Islamic reform of state and society. I also argue that, contrary to common perceptions, the discourse of jihad offers a means for Islamist social and political actors to support, rather than overturn, the domestic status quo. This broader perspective evolves from a general examination of the Brotherhood's approach to jihad in the decades prior to the election of Muhammad Mursi before focusing more closely on the Mursi and immediate post-Mursi periods. The paper shows that the Muslim Brotherhood has approached jihad as a mechanism for domestic reform, and as military action conducted under the authority of the state. This conception has related to the Brotherhood's historical desire to build a mass movement for Islamic reform without provoking state repression and has thus also functioned to absorb more radical opposition to the Egyptian regime. In many ways the Brotherhood continued to behave like an opposition movement despite having won both parliamentary and presidential elections. The engagement of the Brotherhood, as well as that of Salafi preachers, with the issue of jihad, reflects this structural continuity. To illustrate the argument the paper scrutinizes Islamist approaches to jihad in political discourse in relation to three key issues: first, Egypt's policy towards Israel; second, the civil strife in Syria and third, the military coup directed against Mursi in July 2013.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Ḥassan al-Banna in Ismailyya, Egypt, arose in the midst of the Nahda (enlightenment) movement that flowered in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Arab/Muslim Nahda intellectuals, staring down the end of the Ottoman empire and the encroachment European colonizing missions, sought to protect the Arab-Islamic homeland through a deep investigation and analysis of ascendant liberal values in Europe. Nahda scholars -- including Islamic-state inclined scholars -- wrote that European values were both similar to Islamic ethics and the foundations of Islamic Jurisprudence (fiqh) e.g. (Rafaʼa Al-Tahtāwī, 1868, 1873); and essentially different (and better) (e.g. Rashīd Rida, 1930). Scholars have asked whether the Muslim Brotherhood movement can be considered a part of the Nahda movement, and by extension, a natural outgrowth of modernity. The answer seems to be “yes” when the question is asked in this way. After all, they participated fully in debates about how to respond to colonial rule, the anxiety at the heart of the Nahda movement. At the same time, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood can be read as a reaction to the liberalization of Egyptian society, which made was a condition for the possibility for, according to Hassan al-Banna, Christian missionary activity in Egypt under the auspices of organizations such as the YMCA. (Richard P. Mitchell, 1969). This paper argues that the “alternate modernity” debate fruitfully explains the Muslim Brotherhood’s firm place in the Arab and Muslim story of modernity, but it questions whether the lens of “modernity” is the most useful one to apply to the historiography of the Muslim Brotherhood. This paper suggests an alternative lens, called the “sunnaic paradigm” to ask how al-Banna understood himself fulfilling the Prophet Muhammad’s example (sunnah), how Sayyed Qutb, one of the movement’s most important intellectuals, understood himself in relation to al-Bannah and the Prophet’s sunnah, and how contemporary Muslim Brotherhood polemicists such as Khyarat al-Shāter (b. 1950) or Moḥammad Morsi (b. 1951), now facing unprecedented oppression in Egypt, understand themselves in relationship to their forefathers and the Prophetic sunna. This dialectical approach provides an alternative historiography that might be closer to some of Brothers’ own.

In Sayyid Qutb's "Social Justice in Islam," the Islamist project was articulated as a profound critique of Western values, and it called for radical and collective social change. But over the last thirty or so years, Islamism has become more than just a call to political action. A whole Islamist mediascape has sprung up, particularly in Egypt, in which Islam becomes a way to articulate and define individual values in an un-critiqued neo-liberal world order. One of the most interesting actors in this new Islamist mediascape is Amr Khaled, a kind of Islamic self-help guru, whose immensely popular youtube series "A Smile of Hope" has received little sustained academic attention. My research addresses this gap in the academic literature, and analyzes Amr Khaled's Islamic self-help mediascape in light of the larger Islamist project as articulated by Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Banna, and Abu Ala Maududi. I examine over thirty episodes of Amr Khaled's youtube series, as well as his writings in Egyptian newspapers and his long-form interviews on Al-Jazeera in order to excavate Khaled's instrumentalization of the Qur'an as a self-help manual. I argue that Khaled's attempt to market Islam and the Qur'an as a guide to material wealth and personal happiness is at once a natural extension of the Islamist project--particularly that of Hassan al-Banna, for whom the Qur'an is an activated manual for everyday life--but also pushes the boundaries of the Islamist idea. Can there be an Islamism without a critique of the existing economic, political, and social order? Amr Khaled certainly hopes so, and his smiling attempts to reconcile Egyptian youth to God, capitalism, and the state order force us to complicate our understanding of Islamism as a whole.

With dilapidated public hospitals, poor-quality public healthcare, widespread corruption, unaffordable private care, and inadequate healthcare coverage, the status of healthcare in Egypt gradually became a major source of social and political discontent among Egyptians. However, the most prominent voices in the fight for better health in Egypt have rarely been ordinary citizens, patients or patient advocacy groups, political parties or pressure groups, but, rather consistently, physician groups. The Egyptian uprising in January 2011, with its aspirations for "human dignity and social justice,” only lent momentum to these doctors' fight to reform the health system and enshrine the right of all Egyptians to quality healthcare. Relying on interviews with doctors and a variety of other sources, the paper focuses on the mobilization of several groups of Egyptian doctors and their efforts to reform the health system in Egypt. Some of the groups examined include the board of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, “Doctors Without Rights,” The Committee on the Right to Health, as well as public campaigns such as “What is More Important than Egyptians’ Health?,” NGOs such as “Tahrir Doctors” and The Association for Health and Environmental Development, and charitable organizations such as “Mercy Doctors.” The paper proposes the notion of the “organic doctor,” along the lines of Gramsci’s “organic intellectual,” to examine and understand these doctors’ mobilization, not as impartial caregivers, but very often as citizens with grievances themselves who see in their fight for the interests of “the people,” a fulfillment of their socio-professional vocation and a realization of their personal and professional value systems. Relying on a historicized analysis of the role assigned to "experts" by the Egyptian state and public sphere (Mitchell, 2002), the paper highlights the paradox and limitations of the role of the “activist-expert.” Since doctors became the face of the crumbling and predatory healthcare system in Egypt, their calls for reforming it have often been met with suspicion and skepticism from their patients, and with hostility from the State which blames them for the deterioration of the healthcare system. Nonetheless, doctors’ expert and insider status often acts to legitimize their claims about the healthcare system and their appeals to reform it. The paper proposes an exploration of the moral, political and socioeconomic realities of "activist" doctors in Egypt and how they construe their mission in the face of skeptical patients and successive regimes that chose to remain deaf to their appeals.