In Pursuit of Legitimacy The Muslim Brothers and Mubarak 1982-2000 by Hesham Al Awadi (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2004. 262 pages.)

Abstract

In his book In Pursuit of Legitimacy, Hesham Al Awadi sets out to explain
Egyptian president Mubarak’s dramatic shift in his treatment of the Muslim
Brothers (Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin), from toleration of the outlawed group to
severe repression, over the first two decades of his regime. Standard explanations
for this shift, as Awadi points out, have a state-centric bias in which the state is the primary actor responding to the threat posed by the Muslim
Brothers to the regime, either by providing social services when the state’s
capacity to do so was hampered, or by challenging the legitimacy of an
authoritarian regime. The author acknowledges these factors, but then offers
a substantially different narrative in which he skillfully traces the political
dance of power between the outlawed group and the regime. The move to
repression, in Awadi’s rendering, can be better explained by the responsive
relationship between the Muslim Brothers and Mubarak than by understanding
either power or legitimacy solely in terms of the state.
Awadi argues that the driving force behind Mubarak’s crackdown in
the mid-1990s was a cyclical competition between the president and the
Muslim Brothers for political legitimacy, which began with his regime’s
accession following Sadat’s assassination in 1980. In his analysis, the
author states that this conflict’s brutal 1995 climax, during which a number
of Muslim Brothers were convicted at a military trial, was by no means
a foregone conclusion. Rather, it was the result of a highly responsive relationship
between the regime and the increasingly powerful opposition
organization. Moreover, it could have evolved differently had the Muslim
Brothers made different choices about how to best pursue their program ...