Arthur Néron-Bancel
Understanding the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as an Islamic socio-political actor
Awarded the Kuwait Program Student Paper Award, Sciences-Po (Spring 2013)
Following the 2011 popular uprisings in Egypt that brought down the existing regime and precipitated a sudden opening up of the national political landscape, Islamic groups freed from the state’s heavy-handed repression have imposed themselves as very prominent actors in national social and political transition and reform processes. Among these groups, the Muslim Brotherhood has proven particularly successful in early electoral cycles and has thereby gained unprecedented access into the spheres of state power.
At present it seems a recent history of mutually politicized fear and distrust between two essentialized entities, ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’, continues to shape the way a number of actors on each side of the equation view the other. The following paper seeks to move beyond superficial perceptions of Islamic movements and instead to develop a nuanced and contextualized understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood as an Islamic socio-political actor operating in, and shaped by, a very specific historical material context.
To do this, we first develop a basic theoretical framework that draws on the work of prominent sociologists (primarily Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu) to address issues of reciprocal causality between social actors’ religious views, beliefs and practices (symbolic systems and imaginative structures) and the social and political structures in which they operate. Rather than uni-dimensional ‘Islamic actors’, we want to understand the Brotherhood as “signifying agents engaged in the social construction of meaning (...) to elicit collective action." To do this we focus particularly on the Muslim Brotherhood’s contemporary economic policies and program in order to show that, in their unconditional adoption of capitalism and free-markets, the Muslim Brotherhood’s current Islamic ideology is profoundly different from that adopted by other more radical and revolutionary Islamic movements in recent history. We will suggest that the Brotherhood’s form of Islamic economic policies may be seen as fulfilling specific social and political functions, and therefore best understood in light of the movement’s position in Egypt’s social structure: as a rising ‘pious bourgeoisie’, long excluded and marginalized by the previous regime but nonetheless seeking to claim its stake by working within the framework of the existing socio-political order.
We conclude by suggesting that the strategies suitable to a rising bourgeoisie trying to accrue power may not be the most suited in a country facing such urgent demands for profound socio-economic change from its vast lower classes, especially given a contested religious field where no group monopolizes the production and manipulation of ‘religious capital’.
Professor: Stephane Lacroix
Date: April 2013
Words: 7, 055
In early 2011, massive popular uprisings across Egypt precipitated the fall of long-time ruler Husni Mubarak’s regime, after more than 30 years of semi-authoritarian rule.
However, more than two years later, the prospects of achieving sustainable and inclusive economic development in Egypt are very low. In fact, the country’s current short- to medium-term
economic outlook is in many ways far worse than it was before.
Over the recent years, Egyptian authorities have failed to react to rapidly rising costs from the convergence of a deep social and political crisis and a legacy of severe structural weaknesses from decades of political and economic mismanagement. Powerful political factors prevented the decisive and rapid adoption of the reforms that might have allowed the adjustments needed to avoid today’s impending crisis. Today it seems the country has no easy or cost-free way out, though one might hope that gradual reforms might still be able to avoid complete collapse or mitigate the depth and length of the crisis. The Central Bank of Egypt has begun to gradually devaluate its currency since early 2013 – a necessary move welcomed as a first step in the right direction. Similarly, negotiations with international lenders could hopefully lead to gradual and progressive structural reforms (incremental tax increases or subsidy cuts, with mechanisms designed to target the more wealthy and support the poorer classes).
However, similar structural reform packages in the past have had a very dismal track-record in terms of avoiding the tremendous social costs that are to be expected, and this makes the prospect of improved living conditions for the Egyptian population in the short- to medium-term (in terms of inclusive economic development and socio-political stability) very unlikely.
Professor: Anne-Laure Delatte
Date: April 2013
Words: 2,800
This essay studies the role that exogenous structural forces – political and economic, international and domestic – have played in driving Cairo’s urban growth, as well as it’s spatial and landscape development. The contention is that Cairo’s urbanization was significantly impacted by economic factors and an evolving relationship between foreign economic interests and a shifting domestic political system.
From a theoretical perspective, the framework employed relies on drawing concepts and parallels from materialist urban theory. While we adopt an approach similar to that used to explain urban development in certain 19th and 20th century European cities, we also find that differing patterns of political and economic development in each case engendered a different dialectic between industrialization and urbanization.
Professor: Patrick Le Galès
Date: November 2012
Words: 5,500