Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East Paperback – August 27, 2019

Fawaz Gerges has produced another masterful study, this time on the conflicted relationship between the Nasserist regimes and the Muslim Brotherhood. Based on numerous interviews and original sources, Gerges weaves together a contest between two powerful political entities that has been won, at least temporarily, by Egypt’s latest Nasserist, President al-Sisi. Gerges carefully elaborates on the reasons why, including the Brotherhood’s failure to move out of the shadow of its leading theoretician Said Qutb. Gerges has written a fine book that should be essential reading for those who want a comprehensive understanding of Egyptian politics.

This about the struggle between Nationalism and Islamism in Egypt during the 1950s. It’s minimally informative on relations to events in the ME after the Arab Spring revolts or how the rebirth of jihadism culminated in the 9/11 attacks and the war on terrorism. It’s a detailed history of Egypt in the 1950s, featuring the conflict between Gamil Abdul Nasser and Sayyid Qutb, executed and currently revered as a martyr by the Muslim Brotherhood, and invoked as justification for the current spate of Islamic violence. The detail on a plethora of unfamiliar players interspersed with those from the 1920s and 2011 makes sections of the book all but unreadable. There is little on the role of the more moderate, once popular, Wafd party. Likewise on the Copts countering the Ikhwan prior to the slow death of liberalism in Egypt.The book is limited to Egypt, the most populous Arab country, but now a shadow of its former self, not dominant in the near-east, where Saudi Arabia and Iran contend for the balance of power. It starts with the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952, last member of the Dynasty of Mohammad Ali, by Nasser, who’s goal was pan-Arabism under Egyptian leadership. As Egyptians became disillusioned with Nasser’s brand of national socialism, he was able to substitute anti Zionism after the 1956 Suez crisis until his death in 1970.With an interlude of Ikhwan dominance in the 1980s and 90s, Gerges narrates the continuance under Sadat, who swore loyalty to Banna, followed by Mbarek and the brief interlude of Ikhwan rule under Mohammad Morsi, who failed to improve economic conditions. Currently we have General Abdel el-Sisi, who suppresses the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) with another militaristic regime, somewhat reflective of Nasser.Gerges believes the current dominance of the military regime under Sisi is not the last word. His goal of dismantling the social infrastructure will fail because the Muslim Brotherhood is embedded in Egyptian culture. The Ikhwan is likely to recover from its many mistakes, primarily a belief in its own military power over that of the state.

Good book

Making the Arab World by Fawaz Gerges charts the rise of the two men who spawned the two most important movements that have shaped the Arab World down to present day: The Arab Nationalist General Abdul Nasser and Sayyid Qutb who founded the Muslim Brotherhood and serves as the intellectual foundations of several other branches of radical political Islam. The reader is shown where the two men were surprisingly alike and where they differed. We then learn about the two movements how they started, developed, diverged from each other, and most prominently fueled each other.Arab Nationalism in the personal form of Nasser displaced a corrupt king supported by colonial Great Britain. When the goals were shared, the Muslim Brotherhood and Nationalists could co-exist within Egypt, but when things started going south and either side needed a crutch the failings of the other side where exploited. Political Islam became a boogeyman for Nasser, Sadat, and other Arab leaders or they sought to drape themselves in it depending on the political calculus of the moment. While Islamists either cooperated or exploited nationalisms failures.It's an uneasy balancing act, but Genges does a beautiful job of diagraming the key fault line of the Arab World in a way that both explains history and the events of present day in coherent manner.

The book covers the struggle between secularism and religion largely in the modern period and largely in Egypt. The title is somewhat misleading unless you are of the standard opinion that as Egyptian Islam goes so goes the Arab world. Other than that it is a detailed study of the modern conflict between secular/nationalism and religious ideological struggles for power in modern Egypt based on bios of Sayyid Qutb and Gamel Nasser - in that it is an enlightening piece of work depicting the fractured nature of both the Free Officer's movement that Nasser headed and the Ikwan or Muslim Brotherhood. If you want a wider study of the struggles of Arab/Asian Muslim peoples, both secular and religious, against the tides of Western secular capitalism you should read Crusade and Jihad by Polk or From the Ruins of Empire by Mishra.