Past Read: Egypt, Islam, and Democracy: Critical Essays

Ibrahim, Saad. Egypt, Islam, and Democracy: Critical Essays. (American University in Cairo Press, 2002)
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Sociologist and activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s (born 1938) Egypt, Islam, Democracy (2001) is a compilation of critical essays written over the course of twenty years, from 1976-1995. Ibrahim divides Egypt into three main sections. Part one, “Islamic Activism,” covers Islamic militancy, the Muslim Brotherhood and its relationship to Sadat, Islamist political activism throughout the 1980s, and, in the aftermath of Huntington’s infamous book, “Islamic Activism and the Western Search for a New Enemy.” Part two, “Society, Economy, and Polity,” includes a chapter on Cairo urban studies, an analysis of Egypt’s landed bourgeoisie, and some early discussions of the economic liberalization policies that came in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviets, “Governance and Structural Adjustment: the Egyptian Case.” Finally, part three, “Management and Mismanagement of Diversity: The Case of Ethnic Conflict and State-Building in the Arab World” moves into issues of ethnic conflict and state-building, a retrospective (and “vindication”) of Sadat, analyses of grassroots movements in Egypt, and discussions of civil society and democratization. What is striking about these essays, reproduced chronologically from the date of their publication, is what they show about how little was known about Islamist groups in the early 1980s; many of Ibrahim’s observations, including his detailed commentaries on the nature of political Islam, are now common knowledge. Additionally, his section on the 1990s, particularly his discussion of structural adjustment in Cairo, is useful for my own research.