Before the Arab Spring, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was, at least for Western scholars, one of the less-researched branches of the prominent Islamist movement. Whereas Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Jordan and the Maghreb countries furnished useful insights into Islamist political activism—stretching from social movement mobilization to electoral politics to violence— the Syrian case was mostly unexamined, despite clear relevance to these questions. Dara Conduit’s The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria tells the story of this movement, from its founding in the 1940s up through the Syrian civil war, in the process furnishing valuable information that helps integrate this branch’s experience into the broader study of political Islam.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria consists of eight substantive chapters divided into two broad sections. The first five chapters review the history of the movement up to the 2011 uprising, with thematic chapters on its founding ideas, political involvement, relationship to violence, and existence in exile. The second part uses this rich historical legacy to understand the Brotherhood’s actions during the Syrian uprising, in particular the juxtaposition between the group’s relative strength in the elite-level politics of the formal, external opposition to the al-Assad regime and its relative weakness inside the county.

The structure of the book reflects the logic of the argument. Given the Muslim Brotherhood’s status as the best organized and most prominent Syrian opposition group, Conduit asks this question: Why did it not play a more prominent role in the peaceful uprising against the Assad regime and the subsequent civil war? Her answer at least partially lies in the Brotherhood’s decades-long history: “the experience of Ba’th authoritarianism had a profound impact on the group’s political character, creating physical and cognitive changes that impeded its ability to operate, and which colored every political decision” (p. 89). In particular, Conduit argues that the Brotherhood never fully reckoned with the causes and consequences of its violent clash with Hafez al-Assad’s regime, culminating in the massacre of thousands of Brotherhood members and civilians alike at Hama in 1982. Absent self-criticism about the incident, the Brotherhood’s identity and commitment to nonviolence remained unclear to both analysts and potential allies of the movement (and perhaps inside the organization itself). Thus by the 2011 uprising, other opposition figures—as well as elements of the international community—viewed the Brotherhood with suspicion. Its own timidity and calculated ambiguity about some of these questions lessened its ability to transform its considerable resources into influence.

On the one hand, the book’s motivating question is somewhat overstated: on the eve of the uprising, the Brotherhood was largely irrelevant on the ground. Given its weakness inside the country, it would have been more surprising if it had been in a position to dictate events: Conduit later calls the Brotherhood the “strongest political group in theory, but less so in practice” (p. 39). But on the other hand, the Brothers were able to assume such an outsized role in opposition elite politics for the same reasons they were weak on the ground. Conduit shows how the Brothers’ expulsion from Syria, starting decades before the 2011 uprising, injected them into an international milieu where they would go on to form a web of connections with regimes and opposition figures that would later allow them to play the role of “kingmaker” in the various formal opposition bodies and coalitions that emerged during the early days of the uprising (p. 3). This made the opposition’s task doubly difficult: the most prominent face of exile politics had little to no influence on the ground, whereas those at the grassroots and in the local organizing committees had to struggle to make their voices heard in the various international forums on Syria. As the opposition foundered and the uprising turned into a civil war, extremist groups and deep-pocketed foreign governments—and not Syrians themselves—emerged as the real centers of power.

The book’s value lies in historicizing and contextualizing the group’s conduct during the uprising by reference to a variety of qualitative evidence, including memoirs, contemporary periodicals, and interviews. In so doing, Conduit’s work puts another spade of soil on the idea that the Brotherhood can be analyzed as a purely or even primarily an ideological actor: “the Brotherhood’s organizational history, personnel, political experiences and operating context give a better view into the group than any carefully planned Islamist ideological programme” (pp. 11–12). At the same time, The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria raises more questions about the extent to which the Brotherhood’s self-described identity as an Islamist organization imposed stricter constraints on its ability to navigate the political arena. As Conduit argues, the Brotherhood’s ability and indeed “willingness to constantly morph alongside the political mood ha[ve] led to a hollowing of its core purpose” (p. 14). But do other organizations that make similar compromises pay a similar price? Or is the price steeper for Islamists? In some cases, the Brotherhood’s compromises were justified by a logic of organizational survival (like when it sought the support of Saddam Hussein against Hafez al-Assad, even while Hussein was repressing its Iraqi colleagues). But other compromises were more cynical, as in 2006 when the Muslim Brothers defected from the broad-based anti-Assad “Damascus Declaration” to form a “National Salvation Front” with one of al-Assad’s dissident vice presidents. This episode, in particular, raised significant skepticism and suspicion about the group from other opposition actors and would color the group’s dealings with the opposition post-2011.

The book’s thematic chapters span a wide array of issues from political participation to violence to exile. This thickens the empirical record and offers a variety of intriguing comparisons with better-studied Islamist cognates in Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia (as well as non-Islamist organizations). For example, it is interesting to consider old questions of violence, exile, and coalitional politics in light of the new details about the Syrian case. In Tunisia, for example, the Brotherhood was also repressed and forced into exile (although without the extreme brutality of Hama), but seems to have avoided much of the suspicion and factionalism that the Syrian compatriots had to navigate. The Egyptian Brotherhood, too, experienced repression and exile under Abdel Nasser, yet managed more or less to make the organization’s position on violence clear within a few decades and, at least at the outset of the Arab Spring, could rely on a broad coalition of opposition allies.

Why was the Syrian branch of the movement different? Is it because it lacked a public figure with the gravitas of Rached El-Ghannouchi? Why did the Syrian Brotherhood fail to produce something equivalent to the Egyptian Brotherhood’s public renunciation of violence in Preachers, Not Judges? A second question relates to the prevalence and influence of regional identities inside the movement. In many respects, the Syrian Brotherhood was a typical example of the type: it was an educated, middle-class, and predominantly urban movement. Yet Conduit’s work suggests that, in contrast to other national chapters, regional identities—Damascene, Aleppan, and Hamawi (from Hama)—have not only persisted inside the Syrian Brotherhood, but also influenced outcomes, including its engagement in antiregime violence. The persistence of regional identities inside an ideological movement is thus consequential and puzzling, especially compared with the relative lack of such coherent subnational identities in Brotherhood organizations in other countries. Further study of these internal cultures would likely uncover—as Conduit’s work suggests—the importance of underlying socioeconomic structures that would help better identify the relationship between Islamist movements and their local contexts.

Neither cunning generals nor restive protest movements are key to understanding the arc of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood during that country’s uprising. Instead, Conduit tells us, it is the movement’s own history: an inability to publicly and realistically reassess past mistakes has bred suspicion among potential allies and rendered a unified opposition to al-Assad difficult. Now, as the regime consolidates control, the Brotherhood seems destined for continued exile, wherein the trauma of Hama has been magnified exponentially.