Answering the Call

Reviews / Votes

[An] intricate and empirically rich examination... Answering the Call provides an important corrective to our current literature on mobilization and contestation in Sadat's Egypt * Religion and Society: Advances in Research * Amidst the diatribes against the Brothers, how fortunate it is to have this dispassionate, scholarly explanation of the organizations important contributions and remarkable durability. The Brotherhood invented peaceful ways to act for Islam. This scrupulously researched book analyses how the Brothers call to Islam and social welfare activism were renewed by absorption of talented Islamic student leaders of the 1970s whose presence helped make possible successful participation in Egypts brief moment of democratic politics. * Raymond William Baker, author of Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists * Many of the roots of Islamist resurgence in recent decades can be traced back to activities and ideas developed in Egyptoften on college campuses or among recently released prisonersfour decades ago. This is a story that we know in hazy terms, in part because we view it retrospectively, interested primarily in what it tells us about the roots of groups active today. Al-Arian not only improves on past accounts, giving us the most careful, judicial, and comprehensive history of the re-emergence of Islamic activism in Egypt. He also does so with a prospective eye rather than a retrospective one; he focuses more on da`wa (as many of the activists themselves came to do) rather than on jihad and in the process reconstructs the movements and ideas as they were understood by participants at the time. * Nathan Brown, George Washington University * Based on a wide range of sources Answering the Call offers a comprehensive and convincing account of Islamic activism in Egypt during the presidency of Anwar al-Sadat, including previously unstudied student organizations as well as the Muslim Brothers. Emphasizing the wide range of orientations within the Islamic movement and the internal struggles within the Muslim Brotherhood in the course of its reorganization, its analysis is far more sophisticated and nuanced than earlier ill-conceived accounts focused on "Islamic extremism." * Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan, Stanford University *