More than a decade after the Arab uprisings, the conditions for Islamist movements, parties, and organizations across the Middle East and North Africa region have arguably never seemed bleaker. Indeed, as Islamist actors find themselves navigating renewed repression, political, and social polarization and drastically altered circumstances in their diverse contexts, one may be forgiven to agree with those scholars such as Asef Bayat and Oliver Roy proclaiming the end of Islamism. In this regard, Lucia Ardovini's book brings a fresh and new perspective with which to look at the dynamics affecting Islamists across the region, showing that moments of renewed repression may instead represent opportunities for Islamist movements’ internal renewal. Looking at the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of the 2013 military-led coup that ousted the group from power, Ardovini argues that rather than putting an end to the movement, the renewed crackdown has instigated a gradual process of internal change. As its members are taking stock of past experiences while in exile, they are also questioning those values and ideological traits that for decades have been at core of the Brotherhood's identity as a movement, creating potential for change. While these processes are still very much in flux and therefore it is too soon to determine what the movement's future trajectories will be (p. 3), the two certainties that the reader draws from the book is that the Brotherhood will continue to be an important political actor in the years to come, although it may well emerge from repression as a radically different movement from the one to which scholars have grown accustomed.

In the book, Ardovini traces the internal debates shaping the Brotherhood's evolution in light of the movement's perceived political failure and ongoing repression, a prominent one pertaining to the Brotherhood's identity as both a religious and political actor. Under Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule, the Brotherhood had achieved a delicate balance between its religious and political missions, growing its strength and appeal in society as a result. This balance was deeply shaken by the movement's shift from a party of the opposition into a party of government. After the Freedom and Justice Party's election into power, the Brotherhood's inability to articulate a clear political project showed that in the last three decades its focus on politics had come to the detriment of ideological renewal, reflected in a perceived gap by members between the movement's religious ideology and its actual implementation in practice. The leaders’ appeal to the traditional movement's values, such as loyalty and obedience to the organization and its leaders as a way to maintain legitimacy and create consensus, prevented the Brotherhood from operating as a modern political party guided by principles of participatory democracy, pluralism, and transparency, which significantly contributed to its demise from power. The repression that engulfed the movement since 2013, therefore, instigated a profound process of self-reflection among members, and heightened internal divisions. In searching for new ways to survive repression and exit the crisis, a majority of members is now considering separating the Brotherhood's political from the religious mission, out of the belief that the group's commitment to Islam as a comprehensive ideology encompassing both a religion and a state (shumuliyyat al-Islam) functioned as a catch-all idea that boosted recruitment and support, but also justified the silencing of internal dissent and stalled the evolution of its political ideology. Therefore, while the Brotherhood's internal debate on the separation between da'wa and politics is not new, it has acquired new prominence in the post-2013 context, not least because reformist and dissenting members who would have been expelled from the Brotherhood in the past are now left operating from within the organization by its senior leaders, due to the essential need to maintain unity and strength in numbers after the coup. Therefore, the debate on the separation between da'wa and politics is certainly one to watch in the years to come, as resolving it would significantly impact the movement, requiring changes in “hierarchy, indoctrination and mobilization strategies” (p. 124). As a result, Ardovini successfully shows that while since 2013 the Brotherhood faces several external and internal challenges, the most significant comes from its own ranks.

The book is the result of over seven years of research on the Brotherhood's organization and ideology, and therefore of the author's accumulated expertise and intimate knowledge gained of the movement and its members, distilled into a highly accessible text. In the book, Ardovini takes the readers into the journey of the Brotherhood's evolution as an ideological and identity-based movement since the 2013 coup, foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of those individuals directly involved in the events. The book relies on interviews carried out between 2013 and 2019 with both current and former Brotherhood members in exile in the UK and Turkey. They include not only senior leaders and former Freedom and Justice Party Ministers, but also rank and file members who had limited decision-making power while the Brotherhood was in government in Egypt, but who nonetheless were left bearing the brunt of repression since 2013. As such, the book forefronts the perspectives of members who cut across the Brotherhood's generational and organizational spectrum, and therefore also of those individuals who are seldom included in ethnographic studies of the organization, contributing to the book's richness, diversity, and novelty. In turn, this allows the author to show that the Brotherhood is no longer the cohesive and unitary actor its official leadership wishes to portray, but “an organization composed of increasingly independent individuals” (p. 10). This change requires an urgent shift in the analytical approach that scholars use to study the movement toward one centered on individual members’ responses to repression.

The book comes at an important time when Islamist actors in the region seem to have lost relevance in light of post-Uprisings authoritarian reconfigurations, to alert us that the repression of ideologically and internally structured social movements, such as the Brotherhood, can indeed instigate counterintuitive processes of ideological renewal, resting on the diversity of responses to repression by its individual members (p. 118). Individual responses of Brotherhood members have been addressed in the literature, but have largely focused on those who have departed the movement (see, e.g., Mustafa Mensahwy's and Victor Willi's recent books on the movement). In contrast, Ardovini shows that looking at the perspectives of those who seek to achieve change from within despite being equally critical of the movement is crucial to understand how social movements survive repression and their future trajectories. Indeed, the Brotherhood continues to display a high level of resilience as its members remain committed to the organization's survival. The fact that they advance competing strategies to reunite and rebuild while advancing calls for changing the values and principles over which the movement historically rested provides therefore a strong indication that the Brotherhood may well emerge from the current crackdown as a very different movement.

One of the book's strengths pertains to the author's ability to trace a coherent and lucid account of the Brotherhood's internal ideological debates taking place at a time when the movement remains deeply divided. By foregrounding individuals’ responses to repression the author successfully demonstrates the value of disaggregating social movement's responses to understand their transformation as collective actors. A weakness of the book is the lack of inclusion of responses by members in Egypt; although considering the movement's new dimension of forced exile, the book presents an honest account of the Brotherhood today. Another potential weakness is the lack of focus on gender relations as part of the internal debates taking place in the movement. The female members of the Brotherhood have played an increasingly important role in the resistance of Islamists since 2013, and their growing involvement has led to gender issues becoming a significant site of contestation between the movement and its members, making it therefore important to explore whether the gender ideology of the movement also has become the target of internal renewal. These points, however, do not take away from the importance of the book, which remains a candid and valuable account of the Brotherhood and how the movement is evolving under the new circumstances of repression and forced exile.

This book is certainly a must read for scholars of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, of Islamism and the identity politics of diaspora movements more broadly, due to its focus on exiled members. Because of its clarity in terms of writing, flow, and structure, the book is also easily accessible to students and therefore it lends itself well to be used in graduate and postgraduate courses on political science, sociology, and international relations.