Violence and counter-violence between the state and Islamic movements: the case of the Muslim Brotherhood

Summary

This study does not aim to identify the course of historical and political events in Egypt in a detailed way, rather it does aim to monitor the ideas and visions that controlled the course of violence and its manifestations in the dialectic of religion and the state. Therefore, the paper focused on studying the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, being the first Islamic movement that emerged in modern Islamic history. Given the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood have showed its hatred of national states from the group’s very beginning, the Islamic movement was accused of practice of violence against the state since its inception to its rise to power.

The paper defines the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the state at various periods of rule in the Egyptian state. In terms of data, the paper relied on: first, the Muslim Brotherhood sources, especially the writings of Hassan al-Banna and Sayed Qutb; second, the critical studies that handled the literature of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The main objective of the paper was to get to the truth of the tense relationship between the Egyptian state and the Muslim Brotherhood.