Martyn Frampton

On his book The Muslim Brotherhood and the West: A History of Enmity and Engagement

Cover Interview of May 13, 2018

A close-up

The book ended up longer than I anticipated—in part because the evidence that I accumulated in Cairo, London, and Washington, proved to be so rich and the story so compelling (and because I had a very tolerant and sympathetic editor at HUP!). Partly because of this, I took care to make sure that the introduction and conclusion, if read together, provided succinct but thorough overviews of the key themes that run throughout the book. I thought back to my days as an undergraduate, when often, it was the only part of a book I had time to digest, and I wanted to make sure that someone with limited time, or perhaps just browsing, could glean the essentials from those critical chapters.

Beyond that, I think readers will be guided in their approach by those areas of greatest interest to them. Chapter 8, for example, which covers the period from 1989 down to 2010, is of the greatest immediate chronological relevance to those considering contemporary policy challenges. Conversely, those wanting to understand in greater depth, the way that the Brotherhood thinks about “the West” will want to read Chapter 1, which deals with this issue during the formative era of the group. (One of the insights of the book is the remarkable degree of ideological continuity that the Brotherhood demonstrates on this issue.)

Personally, Chapter 2 was perhaps the section of the book I enjoyed writing the most. This covers the period 1940 to 1944, and examines the debates taking place among British officials—both political and military, in Egypt and in London—over the Brotherhood, and the best way of dealing with them. Particularly interesting to me was tracing the genesis of a strand of thinking within officialdom that later became far more widespread. This favored engagement with, and perhaps even patronage of, groups like the Brotherhood—on the assumption that they might thereby be tamed, and perhaps even brought to “moderate” or “liberalize” their behavior. In the 1940s, that viewpoint does not prevail, but it is fascinating, I think, to hear it being debated at that time. So, I would perhaps recommend this chapter as a good snapshot of the book’s substantive content.

history / united states / islam / egypt / united kingdom / middle east / arab spring / foreign policy / muslim brotherhood /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009