Ömer Şipal

The book tries to frame the current predicament the Muslim Brotherhood is experiencing within the internal conflict between two schools of thought: “an energetic Islamist intelligentsia around Umar al-Tilmisani” and “a group of hardliners of the first cohort” (p. 389). Although these internal disputes between the middle generation and the old guards have been addressed in the relevant literature, understanding the current chaos in light of this tension between the two schools of thought is quite enlightening. And because of this, the book, in my humble opinion, can be accepted as a contribution to the literature concerning the Muslim Brotherhood. Future scholars of the Brotherhood will benefit from it to understand what happened to the organization after the bloody coup.

It is the historical roots of the clash between the Islamists and the nationalists in Egypt, that culminated in the bloody coup in Egypt in 2013 and whose influences have been felt around the Middle East for more than a half century, that Fawaz A. Gerges attempts to trace in his new book, titled Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East.