As the Arab uprisings of 2011 propelled Islamist movements to the forefront of politics, most political scientists tended to view these actors as adaptable and strategic, approaching electoral politics with a pragmatic outlook. This approach was in sharp contrast with the perception of many youth activists, who saw Islamists as inflexible and religiously dogmatic. Sumita Pahwa’s new book, Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, sheds new light on this discrepancy by detailing the ways in which religion took center stage in Islamist messages regarding political participation. For anyone seeking to better understand how the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) conceives of political activism to be compatible with daʿwa, or preaching, this book will serve as an invaluable resource. Ambitious in its scope and rigorous in its analysis of MB documents, Politics as Worship traces the evolution of debates about the potential tension between daʿwa and political work from the founding tracts of Hassan al-Banna to the internal debates after the military coup of 2013. The author, notably, shows that the MB’s discourse and political understanding has shifted over time, but what has not changed is its underlying commitment to “righteous action” (p. 3). To the extent that movement leaders started embracing political participation more wholeheartedly over time, they portrayed political activism as a way of performing and cultivating piety. As this book’s title suggests, politics was always framed by MB leaders as a form of worship, and a way to build a righteous Islamic society.

Pahwa adopts a constructivist approach, examining how religious discourse is constructed and how frames and norms change over time. The resulting analysis places this discourse in historical context, and presents it against the background of so-called political opportunity structures. The focus throughout, however, remains on speech acts. Drawing on a wide variety of publications, internal documents, speeches, and interviews, she shows how different generations of MB leaders framed what it means to “work for God” (p. 13), and how the discourse shifted regarding the religious value of political activism. Rather than putting forward a new theory of Islamist activism, Pahwa complements and builds on existing work by offering one of the most detailed discussions to date of how the MB has understood the compatibility of daʿwa and politics. Her careful engagement with the existing scholarship on the MB offers an excellent reference guide for those interested in Islamist ideological debates. The analysis offered here stands out through the rich details obtained by the author from internal training documents, and the consistent juxtaposition of messages to internal audiences and messages aimed at an external audience. Since critics of the MB often accuse the movement of presenting itself as moderate to outsiders and conservative to its members, this detailed comparison of internal and external messaging is particularly valuable. Pahwa shows that these messages tended to be fairly consistent, and she argues that, after 2011, “rooting political work in the language and logic of religious virtue” led to a focus on individual spirituality over “generating substantive new policy proposals,” and it “reduced opportunities for pragmatic compromise” in the political realm (p. 152).

The five empirical chapters that comprise Politics as Worship progress in chronological order, before the Conclusion draws parallels to other Islamist movements, such as the Tunisian Ennahda movement, the Moroccan Movement for Unity and Reform, and the al-ʿAdl wa-l-Ihsan (Justice and Charity) movement. Chapter 1 starts with the founding ideas of Hassan al-Banna and their evolution under Sayyid Qutb and Hasan al-Hudaiby. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the 1980s, tracing the movement’s gradual embrace of political participation as a form of daʿwa and an opportunity to draw support by modeling righteous action, and state institutions as tools for applying God’s law. Whereas political success and state control were not short- or medium-term goals, at first, and the mission was to cultivate good Muslims who would support an Islamic polity, over time leaders came to see state power as being essential for establishing Islamic justice and instilling Islamic values. Chapter 4 covers the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, which other scholars see as the period when the MB “moderated” its ideology in response to political participation and generational changes within the movement. Pahwa, critically, shows that the MB’s commitments to political pluralism and freedoms were more than simply strategic adaptations to the political context, and both the reformist voices that eventually broke away from the MB and the conservative “organization men” (p. 114) that came to dominate the movement by the mid-2000s understood politics as a form of Islamic work. The conservative leadership, however, being focused on organizational hierarchy, wanted to keep “any MB-run political party under its control” (p. 152). This attempt at political control continued after the formation of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Perhaps the most significant contribution to the existing scholarship on the MB comes from Chapter 5, where Pahwa covers the internal debates following the 2011 uprisings. Here, the analysis combines an examination of texts and speeches with insights obtained from numerous interviews and field notes. Pahwa shows how the MB’s discourse became more populist and majoritarian, and how different factions diverged on whether to separate the political work from the socioreligious mission. Internal divisions became even more acute after the military coup, as activists took away different lessons about the relationship between religious and political work. Some thought the MB’s political strategy “failed to adequately follow and promote religious values” (p. 191). Others argued that it was premature to focus so heavily on political participation and governance, and that the political failures of the MB ultimately hurt the daʿwa. A third camp blamed the MB for not focusing enough on politics, and believed that it should have “invested more in political outreach and learning” (p. 191).

As Abdel Fattah el-Sisi consolidated his rule and expanded his repression, disagreements within the MB degenerated into organizational splits. While the discussion in Chapter 5 covers some of the organizational divisions, the focus of the analysis remains on internal ideological debates inside Egypt. The reader, accordingly, does not get a full sense of the extent of defections and organizational fractures that have occurred in the MB since 2015, or some of the divisions occurring in exile. Pahwa, nonetheless, offers a valuable discussion of “Vision 28,” an internal document that was the culmination of an extensive self-assessment by one of the leadership factions. One of the conclusions of this document was that the movement had not embraced politics fully enough, and that it was essential to have a party that was independent from the daʿwa structure, since “political success required political specialization” and “politics could not be a mere extension of daʿwa” (p. 199). This emphasis on the separation of daʿwa and politics was a significant departure from the MB’s previous stance that “insisted on the convertibility of preaching and political outreach skills” (p. 201). The document proposed developing party leaders and cadres, and abandoning the “historical suspicion of parties as forces of division” (p. 200) that the movement had inherited from al-Banna. What this discussion shows is that even when the MB is severely fragmented and weakened by repression, its understanding of politics can continue shifting.

One of the most interesting insights that emerges from this discussion, and that is supported by the comparisons with other Islamist movements in the Conclusion, is that “it is difficult to predict how an Islamist movement will adapt to electoral politics as a function of its theological principles of action, or the political opportunities it faces” (p. 214). As Pahwa points out, the religious framing sets the bounds for changing operational priorities over time, but it can be used to justify various political strategies.

Throughout Politics as Worship, it is never entirely clear whether some of the changes in the MB’s operational priorities were motivated by cognitive shifts and a process of ideological learning, or whether the adaptation was, at first, merely pragmatic, but presented in internal documents in a language that remained consistent with existing religious frames. Pahwa takes a clear stance not to infer motivations from behavior, but rather to let the actors speak for themselves, and show how they make sense internally of these changes. This places the book in a somewhat unique position within the literature on the MB. It is neither an insider’s account of the movement, nor is it an attempt to interpret the group’s behavior through the rationalist and behavioralist biases prevalent in Western political science. Instead, the book offers one of the richest discussions of the MB’s internal discourse, helping readers understand how Islamists interpret their actions. The author’s close textual analysis makes it a valuable resource to both readers unfamiliar with the MB, and to scholars who are close observers of the movement.