Britain, the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood: Where "east" meets "west"

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The fellowship project will examine the historical relationship between the UK, the US and the Muslim Brotherhood between 1928 (the birth of the Brotherhood) and the turn of the twenty-first century. It will also investigate the character and evolution of the Brotherhood's ideology. This project has the potential to transform current academic understandings of the Muslim Brotherhood. A key contention is that encounters with Britain and the United States, the hegemonic imperial and "neo-imperial" powers in the broader Middle East region, proved crucial to the formation and development of the Brotherhood, especially ideologically.The project will thus offer a fresh perspective on the movement, seeing it as a product of politico-cultural "in-betweenness", which emerged precisely at the points of intersection between "west" and "east". Too often, the question of ideology has been underplayed in the existing literature on the Brotherhood; the worldview of the Brotherhood has usually been described in essentialised fashion, lacking in nuance (as an endogenous outgrowth of the Islamic religion). In recognition of this, this project will seek to provide a vastly more comprehensive understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood - and in particular, its relationship with what it has understood as "the west". Equally, the project will seek to understand how British and American foreign-policy makers have understood the Brotherhood and the broader phenomenon of political Islam/Islamism. Analysis of this often-neglected relationship can significantly enhance our view of Anglo-American engagement with the Middle East; it also serves as a crucial backdrop to recent developments. In this way, the fellowship will serve as a platform for engagement with a broader, non-academic audience, injecting a historic perspective into modern debates about both the character of the Brotherhood and the question of how western states should respond to its post-"Arab Spring" rise to power. Commentators and practitioners alike have been faced with the challenge of how to construct an appropriate relationship between "the west" and non-violent Islamism. Yet, there has been little consideration of the historical context and experience; this project will seek to historicise precisely that debate.To these ends, I will utilise a range of research methods during the fellowship. This will include traditional empirical archive-based research, conducted in a comparative, transnational setting, across US, UK, Israeli and Egyptian collections and scholarly networks. At the same time, I will use oral history techniques to interview a range of figures, both from within the Brotherhood and from within the foreign-policy making world. Through such an approach, the fellowship will be used to produce a major new set of works that will have a significant impact in both the academic and non-academic world alike.