Brothers Behind Bars : A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt's Prisons

Brothers Behind Bars tells the harrowing, yet fascinating, story of the imprisonment of the Muslim Brotherhood--the largest Islamist movement in Middle Eastern history--in Egypt stretching from the Palestine war in 1948 to the consolidation of President Anwar al-Sadat's rule in 1975.Drawing on more than three hundred prison memoirs written by Muslim Brothers and Sisters, Mathias Ghyoot takes the reader on a rare journey behind the prison walls to show how radicals and moderates, ministers and intelligence officers, clerics and jailers were embroiled in an epic battle to define Islam in modern Egypt. Ghyoot argues that Egypt's state institutions played a crucial role in shaping ideologies within the Muslim Brotherhood, demonstrating how the institution of the prison became a critical site for the formation of political resistance in modern Egypt.Although prison severely encroached on the freedom of the Muslim Brothers, it also spurred reflection and conversations among them as well as w