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

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 with political prisoners of other ideological convictions, most notably communists and Zionists. By emphasizing not what state repression restricted the Muslim Brothers from doing, but rather what it allowed them to do, Ghyoot shows how the ideology of the Muslim Brothers was shaped not only by internal debates but also by encounters–good and bad–with leftist intellectuals, religious clerics, and intelligence officers inside Egypt’s prisons.

Ghyoot recounts how, amidst crushing state repression, the Muslim Brothers established an underground prison society that came to serve as a template for the utopia they envisioned for an Islamic Egypt. Brothers Behind Bars offers a new understanding of Islamism in twentieth-century Egypt.