The Muslim Brotherhood: the Arab Spring its Future Face

The Muslim Brotherhood is the most significant and enduring Sunni Islamist organization of the contemporary era. Its roots lie in the Middle East but it has grown into both a local and global movement, with its well-placed branches reacting effectively to take the opportunities for power and electoral competition offered by the Arab Spring.

Regarded by some as a force of moderation among Islamists, and by others as a façade hiding a terrorist fundamentalist threat, the potential influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on Middle Eastern politics remains ambiguous.The Muslim Brotherhood: The Arab Spring and its Future Face provides an essential insight into the organisation, with chapters devoted to specific cases where the Brotherhood has important impacts on society, the state and politics. Key themes associated with the Brotherhood, such as democracy, equality, pan-Islamism, radicalism, reform, the Palestine issue and gender, are assessed to reveal an evolutionary trend within the movement since its founding in Egypt in 1928 to its manifestation as the largest Sunni Islamist movement in the Middle East in the 21st century. The book addresses the possible future of the Muslim Brotherhood; whether it can surprise sceptics and effectively accommodate democracy and secular trends, and how its ascension to power through the ballot box might influence Western policy debates on their engagement with this manifestation of political Islam.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book presents a comprehensive study of a newly resurgent movement and is a valuable resource for students, scholars and policy makers focused on Middle Eastern Politics.

Foreign Policy Essay: Hamas's Islamist Foes

Editor’s Note: The United States rightly regards the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Palestinian organization Hamas as a terrorist group, but Hamas is also the de facto government of the Gaza Strip. There it juggles the responsibilities of governing Gaza and the associated need to mollify Israel with its self-image as an Islamic “resistance” movement. Making this difficult act even harder, Hamas faces a terrorism problem of its own. Gaza is home to a range of groups that see Hamas as too accommodating toward Israel and too lenient when it comes to imposing Islamic law at home. Beverley Milton-Edwards, a professor at Queen’s University Belfast and renowned expert on Hamas, assesses these Islamist rivals and the risks for Hamas of being too confrontational or too passive in dealing with them.

The 1996 ‘Muslim holiday’ affair. Religious competition and state mediation in contemporary Mozambique

Political commentators often cast religious con? ict as the result of the numerical growth and political rise of a single faith. When Islam is involved, arguments about religious fundamentalism are quick to surface and often stand as an explanation in their own right. Yet, as useful as this type of explanation may be, it usually fails to address properly, if at all, two sets of important issues. It avoids, Ž rst, the question of the rise of other religions and their contribution to tensions and con? icts. Second, it reduces the role of the State to a reactive one. The State becomes an object of contest or conquest, or it is simply ignored. Adopting a different approach, this article investigates a controversy that took place in Mozambique in 1996 around the ‘ofŽ cialisation’ of two Islamic holidays. It looks at the role played by religious competition and state mediation. The article shows that the State’s abandonment of religious regulation – the establishment of a free ‘religious market’ – fostered religious competition that created tensions between faiths. It suggests that strife ensued because deregulation was almost absolute: the State did not take a clear stand in religious matters and faith organisations started to believe that the State was becoming, or could become, confessional. The conclusion discusses theoretical implications for the understanding of religious strife as well as Church and State relations. It also draws some implications for the case of Mozambique more speciŽ cally, implications which should have relevance for countries such as Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe where problems of a similar nature have arisen.

The Bonds of Brotherhood: New Evidence of Sino-North Korean Exchanges, 1950-1954

Drawing on recently declassified documents from the archive of the Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), this article looks at China’s relationship with North Korea during and immediately after the Korean War. Although previous scholarship has touched on PRC–North Korean military ties during the war, this article is the first in-depth analysis of issues that are less well understood, notably China’s efforts to cope with a huge influx of refugees from North Korea, the PRC’s economic assistance during the war and in the early postwar reconstruction, and Chinese educational and ideological support for North Korean professionals and party cadres. The article shows that the extensive military coordination between Beijing and Pyongyang was only one way in which the war brought North Korea and the PRC into a closer relationship

Peacebuilding at the Local Level: Refugee Return to Prijedor'

During the 1992-95 war, Prijedor was synonymous with mass killing, ethnic cleansing and detention camps. A decade after the end of the war, international agencies consider this town to be an example of successful foreign intervention. Thousands of Muslim displaced persons (DPs) returned to their pre-war homes, mosques have been rebuilt, and hard-line Serb nationalists have lost much influence. How could Prijedor turn from a hopeless case of ethnic violence to an example of successful intervention? This essay argues that Prijedor's (relative) success is due more to the determination of Muslim DPs than to the international peacebuilding strategy. The initial post-Dayton international intervention exacerbated the problem of internal displacement, raised ethnic tensions and left Prijedor in the hands of the same indicted war criminals responsible for the war. Against the advice of international agencies, which feared a backlash among the Bosnian Serbs, in 1998 Muslim DPs began returning home. Eventually, large-scale return improved ethnic relations and helped marginalize Bosnian Serb extremists. The essay concludes by highlighting the lessons from Prijedor, and identifies the domestic and international contribution to Prijedor's post-settlement success.

Right to War in the Islamic Tradition:Jihad and its Compatibility with Modern International Law (will be submitted to the publisher in April 2014)

In the last century, Islam drew the world’s attention though such phenomena as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the fierce Muslim resistance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat by a radical Islamic group. But it was when Osama Bin Laden and his organization Al Qaeda were established to have been behind the 11 September attacks in the US, the age-old images of Islam, the fanatical and belligerent religion threatening what the Western world stands for, were revitalized. The impact of 9/11 attacks was so great that even balanced portrayals of Islam were eclipsed by stereotypical images of a fundamental, anti-Western and warmongering religion that bore the hallmarks of medieval prejudices and rhetoric. The popular image tailored for the Western audience reflected Islam as monolithic, intrinsically aggressive, and determined to engage in religious wars against the interests and values of the Western civilisation.
This book intends to help reduce, at least to a reasonable degree, the impact of sweeping, and at times tendentious, generalisations about Islamic laws of warfare. The main purpose of this book is to place the legal, cultural and historical practices of Islamic wars in their broader socio-political contexts, thereby establishing that there has been no undisputed understanding of what defensive or aggressive warfare entails in Islam, whether in doctrine or in practice.

Behavioural consequences of imagining intergroup contact with stigmatized outgroups

We investigated whether imagining contact with an outgroup member would change intergroup behaviour. Participants who had imagined a positive interaction with an outgroup member or an unspecified stranger were told that they were about to take part in a discussion task with an outgroup member. They were taken to a room and asked to set out two chairs ready for the discussion while the experimenter left, ostensibly to find the other participant. The distance between the two chairs was then measured. Undergraduate students who imagined talking to an obese individual (Experiment 1) or a Muslim individual (Experiment 2) placed the chairs significantly closer than those in the control condition. They also reported more positive feelings and beliefs regarding Muslims. These findings highlight an important practical application of imagined contact: preparing people for successful face-to-face contact.