Dr Neil Ketchley from the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies (School of Politics & Economics, King’s College London), along with his colleague Dr Steven Brooke from the University of Louisville, has published a new article on the social and institutional origins of political Islam in the prestigious journal American Political Science Review.

Focusing on the case study of the early Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from the 1930s, the article considers the social and economic contexts within which the first Islamist movements emerged. It investigates the popular notions that Islamist mobilization was facilitated by social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, or the availability of new kinds of state and economic infrastructures. It tests these hypotheses by matching a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with newly digitized census data spanning over 4,000 subdistricts, as well as maps, railway timetables, and other contemporaneous sources that account for the country’s economic and state infrastructure.

The article finds that Muslim Brotherhood branches were much more likely to be founded in subdistricts connected to the railway and where literacy was higher. Branches were much less likely to appear in districts with large European populations and where state administration was more extensive. Qualitative evidence from the Brotherhood’s various publications provides further support for the view that the railway was key to the movement’s propagation.

In conclusion, the article highlights the critical role of economic and state infrastructure in bringing about the rise of Islamist activism. In doing so, it challenges the widely held belief that organised political Islam initially grew in areas where there was greater contact between Muslims and the West.

This research was generously funded by the Project on Middle East Political Science – and is part of a new book project that revisits the rise of political Islam in the interwar period.