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Brothers Behind Bars

A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt's Prisons

Mathias Ghyoot (Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Studies, Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University)

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Hardback

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English
Oxford University Press Inc
22 September 2025
Brothers Behind Bars tells the harrowing, yet fascinating, story of the imprisonment of the Muslim Brotherhood--the largest Islamist movement in Middle Eastern history--in Egypt stretching from the Palestine war in 1948 to the consolidation of President Anwar al-Sadat's rule in 1975. Drawing on more than three hundred prison memoirs written by Muslim Brothers and Sisters, Mathias Ghyoot takes the reader on a rare journey behind the prison walls to show how radicals and moderates, ministers and intelligence officers, clerics and jailers were embroiled in an epic battle to define Islam in modern Egypt.

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.
By:  
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication:   United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions:   Height: 240mm,  Width: 163mm,  Spine: 35mm
Weight:   835g
ISBN:   9780197662731
ISBN 10:   0197662730
Pages:   496
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Mathias Ghyoot is a Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He studies the social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and South Asia with a particular interest in the history of Islamism.

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

A superb piece of scholarship. Based on an impressive array of hitherto unknown or unexplored primary sources, Ghyoot offers an entirely new reading of a formative phase of Islamist thought and practice. His work on the Egyptian Muslim Brothers' prison years is one of the most exciting contributions to the study of Islamism in the modern Arab Middle East-and beyond-to appear in many years. * Gudrun Krämer, author of Hasan al-Banna * Between 1948 and 1975, the Muslim Brothers underwent three waves of long term incarceration in Egypt. Brothers Behind Bars is a definitive account of their experiences. Based on an extensive body of sources, mostly in Arabic, the book provides a richly detailed account of the varied conditions to which the Brothers were exposed in prison, the wide range of their responses, and the fragmentation of their movement that ensued. Today, the Brothers are undergoing a fourth wave of imprisonment in Egypt, giving the book a sharp contemporary resonance. * Michael Cook, Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University *


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