This is a solid work of scholarship, and serves a nice supplement to Mitchell's more expanded work. However, given that the new information handled by B. Lia offers merely a refinement of our understanding of the Brotherhood rather than a radical revision, one is recommended to rather begin with Mitchell-whose book is available in paperback, is more established, and is a fraction of the cost. Contrary to D. Pipes' and others' reviews, Mitchell's work does not portray the Muslim Brotherhood as reactionary. This rhetorical device of point, counter-point does considerable injustice to Mitchell's work.

Standing on its own, this work is well written and easy to follow. Lia is able to delve into the mechanics of the organization on a social and political level in order to reveal just how it reached the amount heights of success that it did. The result is a picture that explains well why it was a model so extensively copied and exported throughout the Muslim world. If there is any comparison to be made to Mitchell's work, this would certainly be the proper feature to focus on. Overall, Lia gives a much more lucid, detailed account of the Muslim Brother as a social organization and makes a convincing case for the organization being the first grass-roots political movement in Egypt with its origins and leadership from the poorer classes [unlike the Wafd]. What is lost, however, is comprehensive picture of the whole-and this due partly to the limited time frame of the study-wherein the Brotherhood's other distinguishing features [e.g., its religiosity, transformation during political persecution, etc.] are obfuscated.

The best known study of Egypt's foremost fundamentalist Islamic movement, Richard Mitchell's Society of the Muslim Brothers (1969), portrayed the organization as a reactionary response to Westernization mounted by those left in its wake. And, indeed, this was the general interpretation of fundamentalist Islam by most writers on the subject before 1990 or so. Now, however, a thoroughly different (and much improved) interpretation rules, one that sees the Muslim Brothers and like movements as a facet of modernization. Their personnel are urbanites dealing with the cutting edge of modern problems; their ideas, methods, and goals all incorporate modern ways; and they show far more willingness to learn from the West than was hitherto realized.

In a very impressive research effort into the early years of the Muslim Brothers, Lia (a Norwegian scholar) relies on new sources and deep knowledge of his subject to show convincingly just how well that movement does fit the new interpretation. He establishes that it organized in ways novel for Egypt and mobilized elements of the population hitherto neglected. But its greatest importance lay in developing an answer to the rampant European ideologies of the 1930s: in this, the Muslim Brothers began "a lasting process of renewal . . . in which religion was related to the modern age and all aspects of modern life." With justification, Lia concludes that the Muslim Brothers' "reinterpretation of Islam will remain the most far-reaching Islamic renewal this century."

Middle East Quarterly, June 1999