Scholars have long debated the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. Some claim the organization supports terrorism, while others believe it is a positive force for democratization. Though the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe has attracted less attention, many feel they understand the group just as well. They assume it is closely tied to its Middle Eastern counterpart, with detractors regarding it to be a suspicious, secretive, and centrally-led organization increasing the alienation of Europe's Muslims. Sympathizers, on the other hand, see it as a moderate, westernized, and fully-integrated force for good. This volume complicates both these views, with experts providing richer and more impartial perspectives on the critical issues relating to Europe's Muslim Brotherhood. It follows the growth and operation of these organizations within different European contexts and captures their highly specific relationship with non-Muslim media and authority figures.

This volume provides an overview on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ways its heritage is appropriated by its European members today. They define themselves as the “community of the middle way”, in the centre of Islamic orthodoxy, proposing an ethos and an ideology. However their heritage is composed of many different intellectual strata and these inputs are in tension. The current movement is both powerful and fragile as certain fundamental principles remain respected while many other themes are currently being cautiously questioned. By analysing private interviews and public discourse, this book fills in an important gap in scholarly research. No other in-depth study exists about this little known and reserved but important reference for European Muslims.

In Europe and North America, networks tracing their origins back to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements have rapidly evolved into multifunctional and richly funded organizations competing to become the major representatives of Western Muslim communities and government interlocutors. Some analysts and policy makers see these organizations as positive forces encouraging integration. Others cast them as modern-day Trojan horses, feigning moderation while radicalizing Western Muslims. Lorenzo Vidino brokers a third, more informed view. Drawing on more than a decade of research on political Islam in the West, he keenly analyzes a controversial movement that still remains relatively unknown. Conducting in-depth interviews on four continents and sourcing documents in ten languages, Vidino shares the history, methods, attitudes, and goals of the Western Brothers, as well as their phenomenal growth. He then flips the perspective, examining the response to these groups by Western governments, specifically those of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Highly informed and thoughtfully presented, Vidino's research sheds light on a critical juncture in Muslim-Western relations.

In the wake of the news that the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Europe, journalist Ian Johnson wondered how such a radical group could sink roots into Western soil. Most accounts reached back twenty years, to U.S. support of Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. But Johnson dug deeper, to the start of the Cold War, uncovering the untold story of a group of ex-Soviet Muslims who had defected to Germany during World War II. There, they had been fashioned into a well-oiled anti-Soviet propaganda machine. As that war ended and the Cold War began, West German and U.S. intelligence agents vied for control of this influential group, and at the center of the covert tug of war was a quiet mosque in Munich—radical Islam’s first beachhead in the West. Culled from an array of sources, including newly declassified documents, A Mosque in Munich interweaves the stories of several key players: a Nazi scholar turned postwar spymaster; key Muslim leaders across the globe, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood; and naïve CIA men eager to fight communism with a new weapon, Islam. A rare ground-level look at Cold War spying and a revelatory account of the West’s first, disastrous encounter with radical Islam, A Mosque in Munich is as captivating as it is crucial to our understanding the mistakes we are still making in our relationship with Islamists today

The Muslim Brotherhood in the West remains a mysterious entity. In The Closed Circle, Lorenzo Vidino offers an unprecedented inside view into how one of the world’s most influential Islamist groups operates. He marshals unique interviews with prominent former members and associates from Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America, shedding light on why and how people join and leave Western outfits of the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing on these striking personal accounts, Vidino weaves together the experiences of individuals who participated in and later renounced Brotherhood groups. Their perspectives provide a wealth of new information about the Brotherhood’s secretive inner workings and the networks that connecting the small yet highly organized cluster of Brotherhood-influenced groups. The Closed Circle examines the tactics the Brotherhood uses to recruit and retain participants as well as how and why individuals make the difficult decision to leave. Through the stories of diverse former members, Vidino paints a portrait of a highly structured, tight-knit movement. His unprecedented access and understanding of the group’s activities and motivations has significant policy implications concerning Western Brotherhood organizations and also illuminates the underlying mechanisms found in a range of extremist groups.

How the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power in Egypt, and what it means for the Islamic world Following the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood achieved a level of influence previously unimaginable. Yet the implications of the Brotherhood's rise and dramatic fall for the future of democratic governance, peace, and stability in the region are disputed and remain open to debate. Drawing on more than one hundred in-depth interviews as well as Arabic-language sources never before accessed by Western researchers, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham traces the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from its founding in 1928 to the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the watershed elections of 2011-2012. Highlighting elements of movement continuity and change, Wickham demonstrates that shifts in Islamist worldviews, goals, and strategies are not the result of a single strand of cause and effect, and provides a systematic, fine-grained account of Islamist group evolution in Egypt and the wider Arab world. In a new afterword, Wickham discusses what has happened in Egypt since Muhammad Morsi was ousted and the Muslim Brotherhood fell from power.

This book analyzes the place of the new Muslim minorities in society within the European Union. The authors explore the root causes of rising tensions and conflict between the new immigrant population and native Europeans over issues of Muslim identity, Islamist doctrines, and Islamophobia. They also provide integration models for the various EU countries and discuss the short- and long-range problems caused by socioeconomic discrimination against Muslims. Contributors include Imane Karich (International Crisis Group, Brussels), Isabelle Rigoni (Paris VIII University), Sara Silvestri (Cambridge University and City University, London), Valeria Amiraux (European University Institute, Florence), Chris Allen (University of Birmingham, UK), Tufyal Choudhury (Durham University, UK), and Bernard Godard (Ministry of Interior, Paris).

Based on interviews and discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood members, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the ways in which their historical heritage is appropriated and continued beyond the movement's internal tensions and pretension to represent the Islamic orthodoxy.

A new, fully updated edition of this critically acclaimed title featuring a new chapter covering the 'Arab Spring' and the Egyptian parliamentary and presidential elections. This is an authoritative analysis, in which Alison Pargeter follows the twists and turns of the Muslim Brotherhood as it battled through the years of oppression under authoritarian regimes to finally become a key and legitimate political actor. From Egypt and Syria to Tunisia and Libya, the Brotherhood and its affiliates are now faced with the complex task of transforming themselves from semi-clandestine opposition movements into legitimate political actors and, in some cases, into ruling powers. 'Authoritative, sober, perceptive ... A must read' Jason Burke. 'A tour de force' Alan George, University of Oxford. 'A highly lucid and approachable analysis of the Brotherhood' Richard Phelps, Perspectives on Terrorism. 'Highly recommended' New Statesman.

As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.