Descriptions and analyses of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings constitute a veritable cottage industry for journalists, academics, and think-tank consultants. The three books under review here join an ever-expanding library that documents and interprets those crucial events in December 2010 and January 2011, that so passionately raised our hopes only to later so bitterly crush them.

What is incredible about these three books is how vehemently their authors judge and reject what most Egyptians approve of – Islamism – and then justify their favoritism by citing political theories that camouflage their biases with supposedly “objective” analysis. The word “democracy” becomes stripped of its most important ingredient, “demos” – “the people” – who, in democracies, are supposed to be sovereign, but these authors do not allow Egyptians this respect.

The 2011-12 national elections for Egypt's parliament took place in three stages from late November to early January, and they are regarded as the freest and fairest elections in Egypt's history. Two thirds of the 498 seats up for election (332 positions in 46 districts) went to party slates and one third of the seats (166 positions in 83 districts) went to independent candidates. The 10 seats exclusively appointed by the military brought the total to 508. The results were overwhelming. Islamists won an astonishing 72% of the combined party and independent seats. The bloc dominated by the Islamist Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) won 235 seats (47%) and the Salafist bloc won 123 seats (25%). The outcome for the secular parties was catastrophic. The Wafd and the Egyptian Bloc (the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, the Free Egyptian Party, and the National Progressive Unionist Party, the Tagammu) won just 38 and 35 seats apiece, roughly 7% each. The next two largest categories (6 offshoots of the National Democratic Party [NDP] and 21 independents) that represented remnants from the Mubarak regime, won a combined 17 seats. The remaining 29 seats were scattered across 19 separate small parties.

The first elimination round for the presidency, on May 23 and 24, 2012, narrowed the field down to two contenders: Muhammad Mursi and Ahmad Shafiq. Mursi was the “spare tire” in the race, a last-minute replacement for the disqualified Muslim Brother Khairat al-Shatir. Shafiq had been the last prime minister under Mubarak, before that, a civil aviation minister, and a military man, like Mubarak, Sadat, and ‘Abd al-Nasir. The final contest was less a match between these two and their policies and programs, and more a symbolic battle for what people wanted for Egypt's future. The second stage of balloting took place on June 16 and 17. Mursi won with 13 million votes (51.7%) and Shafiq lost with 12 million votes (48.3%).

A year later, on April 8, 2013, as the media bombarded the Egyptian public about President Mursi's unproven and undeserved “perfidy,” Ahram Online published a research survey conducted by the Egyptian Centre for Public Opinion Research (Baseera) that headlined “Poll: Morsi approval hits record low” showing that the chief executive's “waning” approval rate had “declined significantly” from 78 percent to just below 50 percent to reach a level of 47 percent, an “outrage” which it went on to claim indicated just how unpopular and marginal Mursi had become [Figure 1].

Ahram Online, Monday, April 8, 2013. http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/68729/Egypt/Politics-/Poll-Morsi-approval-hits-record-low.aspx (accessed 8 April 2022).

Fig. 1.“[Who] Would [you] vote for if Elections [were] repeated tomorrow.” Survey conducted by Baseera: The Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research.

In actuality, however, the survey shows just the opposite. After all, Mursi's 47 percent is not bad, around “normal” for recent American presidents. But what the graph also indicates is just how little anyone else really mattered and how little importance they commanded. It also testifies to how keenly respondents distrusted their media, with the portion for “not sure” as much a “winner” as the Mursi supporters. Thus, despite constant indoctrination, people still expressed their support, perhaps even their loyalty, for a president who had only three months left in office before he was arrested.

Shortly thereafter, June 30th was designated the day for street protests, for millions of people to occupy Tahrir Square and surround the presidential palace to demonstrate their dissatisfaction. On that Sunday, Esam al-Amin noted that “within hours, every media outlet claimed that the numbers [of demonstrators] were in the tens of millions.”Footnote ¹ Toward the late afternoon, the military finally published its own assessment: 14 million protesters. This inexplicably rose to 17 million and then later as high as 33 million. On the basis of what it considered to be a huge, overwhelming demonstration of popular discontent, the army overthrew Mursi on July 3rd, ostensibly “in the name of the people.”

However, Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian did not accept the military's version but instead published his own estimates.Footnote ² He determined that the crowds were no bigger than 500,000 in Cairo and 100,000 in Alexandria. It is hard to believe that there were larger crowds elsewhere. Even if Kingsley's numbers are doubled to include other cities, or even tripled, the numbers reach 1.2 or 1.8 million, 2 million at most. These totals are a far cry from the military's numbers, with such a huge discrepancy that it makes the inflated figures look suspicious, perhaps even contrived.Footnote ³

Lower estimates seriously alter the perception that Egypt's military overthrew Mursi because of “overwhelming popular will.” A fiction was forged to bolster the army's own actions three days later that were instead deliberate and willful, not simply in service to the masses. Esam al-Amin dolefully noted that “the will of the Egyptian electorate was sacrificed when one or two million people protested for a day or two.”Footnote ⁴

The three books under review, then, exhibit a marked contempt for the religious trend that was popular with so many Egyptian voters. What is appealing about the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis is seldom, if ever, explored. Instead, these writers focus on what is “wrong” about Islamism.

David Ottaway, a former Washington Post journalist, compares the unfolding development of both the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings to discover what was present or absent that made one an agonizing defeat and the other a lukewarm success. He is the only one to focus on just the 10 years in and around both uprisings; the other two just cover Egyptian history since the mid-20th century.

The author starts out by reviewing a half-century of revolutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa before narrowing his focus to the two despotic dictatorships that existed before uprisings erupted throughout the region. At the turn of the 21st century, urban labor strikes and rural uprisings began fomenting unrest in both countries that finally led to the “sparks” – the actions of Muhammad al-Bu ‘Azizi in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, and Khalid Sa‘id in Alexandria, Egypt – that ignited further outrage. Within a very short period of time – a grim gauge of regime fragility – this anger boiled up to oust the reigning autocrat.

Ottaway employs the structural-functionalist theories developed by Crane Brinton (The Anatomy of Revolution, first published in 1938) who proposed five stages derived from the French revolution – incubation, dual sovereignty, reign of terror, Thermidorian reaction, and regime restoration – to analyze other revolutions. Unfortunately, the author appears unfamiliar with theory by adhering too literally to the French paradigm. Perhaps a reliance on more recent theories – Barrington Moore (who isn't exactly a youngster) and Theda Skocpol (Moore's student) – would offer less biased and self-equilibrating approaches. Moore (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966) examines the balance of power between agrarian landlords, peasants, and urban capitalists. Skocpol (States and Social Revolutions, 1979) augments her mentor by adding the urban working class. Updating this socio-political topography maps participants into two blocs: conservative (rural, agrarian, post-agrarian migrants) vs. liberal (urban, industrial, white-collar). This arrangement is more objective and avoids calling the conservative side “terrorist” as Ottaway does (following Brinton) which, in a Middle East context, introduces a whole new set of problems. The more neutral categories of “conservative” and “liberal” avoid the pitfalls of assuming Islamists to be fanatics, and provide more analytical flexibility.

For example, Ottaway asserts that “Ennahda and the even more fundamentalist Salafis were destined to replace Tunisia's socialists and communists as Brinton's extremists in the unfolding revolution, at least according to the secular narrative” (78) which apparently Ottaway accepts unquestioned. And yet four pages later, the author writes that “Ennahda accepted all the basic principles spelled out in the ‘Republican Pact’ the High Authority had approved in June 2011, mainly to assuage the fears of secularist Tunisians” (82) and still further down: “militant secularists [in 2013] took to the streets to attack, burn, and sack Ennahda offices across the country” (103). How then is Ennahda – the Renaissance Party, Tunisia's version of the Muslim Brotherhood – extremist?

This characterization of Ennahda is paralleled by the author's description of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. “Tahrir Square became a permanent encampment of protesters, the scene of daily bloody confrontations with police, party-paid thugs, and Mubarak partisans,” a description that presents both sides as equally bloody when it was the police who initiated the violence. “Each stage became bloodier as a growing number of young Muslim Brotherhood youth and ‘ultras,’ the infamous thuggish soccer fans, joined in the battles against police and Central Security Forces” (128). The ultras did not appear until the fall of 2011, thus leaving the onus of blame for bloodshed on the Brotherhood, which was not the case.

Ottaway frequently reflects on the tensions between revolutionary and constitutional legitimacy (3, 105-08, 133, 171-73, and 177-80), but he confuses which one should prevail. Much depends on the timing. At the start of the uprisings, the eruption of opposition to the autocrat – especially in light of repeated corrupt and fraudulent elections – represents “revolutionary legitimacy.” But after free-and-fair elections take place, authority becomes based, instead, on constitutional or electoral legitimacy. To oppose the Islamists at this point, when they had agreed to comply with the rules of democracy, and were doing so properly, is not so much a return to revolutionary legitimacy as it is a slide into un-democracy or even counter-revolution. Yet Ottaway continues to depict these two “legitimacies” as equivalents, so that in examining the June 30th protests that led to overthrowing Mursi, choosing a leader by crowd size – which, as we have seen, was highly questionable – becomes as much or even more acceptable than official, organized ballot boxes.

Ottaway observes that both the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings have much in common. Neoliberalism, a world-wide emanation of market fundamentalism, afflicted both countries whereby the poor were left dangling without the subsidies won under their country's earlier corporatist regimes (Bourguiba, ‘Abd al Nasir) but where cronies of Zain al-‘Abidin Bin ‘Ali and Husni Mubarak raked in enormous wealth. Both countries had commemorated neoliberalism's onset with massive bread riots – Egypt in 1977, Tunisia in 1984. Both experienced crippling but unresolved labor strikes in outlying industrial towns – in Gafsa, Tunisia, and al-Mahalla al-Kubra, Egypt, with both occurring in the same year, 2008 – that forewarned of urgent economic and political problems. These “sparks” were mentioned earlier; the tinder they lit included an anxious middle class increasingly impoverished by government policies and malfeasance. Both countries experienced thwarted upward mobility due to a “cramp” – Brinton's term for a sudden setback or reversal in an economy that is otherwise considered expanding – because of capital strikes after 2008.

Both uprisings quickly exposed a power vacuum in which a moderate Muslim Brotherhood emerged, seeking not just electoral legitimacy – both had shrewdly sidestepped earlier proscription by running for Parliament as independents – but more importantly, parliamentarian and presidential power as well. Besides the Brothers, other Islamist groups included a heretofore quietist Salafi movement and a handful of progressive Islamists increasingly more in tune with Western thinking. Ottaway does not seriously distinguish between Salafis and Brothers other than to point out that the former are more conservative. There were also radical Islamists who did not participate in democratic elections, except in one Egyptian case, the Building and Development Party, which was a non-violent offshoot of the militant Islamic Group.

The differences between these two uprisings are equally instructive. The new administration in Tunisia benefited from an absence of overt army interference and a fragmentation of the political field. The liberals in Tunisia, more numerous than their counterparts in Egypt, came to govern in an uneasy power-sharing arrangement with Ennahda. That party's Islamist leader, Rached Gannouchi, prudently compromised, even offering to resign after August 2013 in order to avoid an Egyptian-style bloodbath. However, the recent civilian coup d’état of 2021 underscores the fragility of Tunisia's new democracy. By contrast, the new elected government in Egypt was crushed by a united anti-Islamist opposition and the brutal armored vehicles of al-Sisi's military. The smaller numbers of liberals in Egypt, having sided wholeheartedly with the army against the Brotherhood, afterward remained essentially sidelined and ineffective, having chosen to vilify Mursi who had stubbornly refused to back down and concede to their demands. Thus, Egypt witnessed a “Thermidorian reaction” under al-Sisi whereas Tunisia did not.

Another potent force in Tunisia that was absent in Egypt was the participation of a truly muscular trade union movement, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), that consistently took the side of workers, such as those at the Gafsa Phosphate Company, against the government. In Egypt, a strong and independent labor syndicate movement did not exist. The Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) is state-controlled and packed with indifferent government bureaucrats. The 2008 action at the Mahalla textile factories was a wildcat strike organized by the workers themselves.

Thus, while Egypt had a powerful military and feeble syndicates, Tunisia had the opposite, an absentee military and robust trade unions. Tunisia's more secular and Gallicized liberals outweighed its Islamists, with many of the more extremist Islamists ending up joining foreign militant organizations. In Egypt, the secular liberals were anemic and effectively drowned out by a vigorous Islamist movement. Here, the few militant Islamists joined the fighters in northeastern Sinai already combating Mubarak's despotism. Today, Egypt's military holds sway over a public deadly afraid to display any Islamist tendencies; Tunisia claims a more pluralist society shorn of its autocracy, but still remains uneasy about the bumpy democratic road ahead.

Overall, Ottaway's use of theory and political economy is weak. But the comparative approach is quite commendable, for it brings out the uprisings’ strengths and weaknesses that are not found in the other two books.

Gillian Kennedy's book is not really about the January 25th uprising in Egypt. Rather, it is a prolegomenon to these events, stopping short (for some reason) of discussing how her study is relevant to this upheaval. She applies concepts devised by Antonio Gramsci to analyze Egyptian history since the Free Officers 1952 revolt with the intention of focusing on the Islamic movement, its various branches, and their relationship to the governments of (1) ‘Abd al-Nasir (one chapter), (2) Anwar al-Sadat (a second chapter), and (3) Mubarak (one chapter about containing the Islamic movement and another chapter about confronting this trend). She parses the Islamic movement into three categories: the radicals (militants, primarily, but also including the Salafis who, however, are not typically combative), the conservatives (reformers like the Muslim Brotherhood that I call moderate), and the progressives (who are progressively more secular). The author then intertwines sections that concentrate on Egypt's recent republican history, the government's economic and political policies, and the appeal and legitimacy of various Islamist organizations and thinkers.

However, her explanation of the purposes and doctrines of Islamism, of its appeal to a large number of Egyptians, and the hostilities between Islamists, liberals, and the state all leaves much to be desired. There are better books for this pre-uprising period, including Richard Mitchell's classic, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (1969), Abdullah Al-Arian, Answering the Call (2014), and Hesham al-Awadi, In Pursuit of Legitimacy (2004) – that should have informed her analysis. Kennedy's book suffers from poor writing, poor editing, weak scholarship, and a highly intolerant view of Egypt, Egyptians, and their enthusiasm for Islamism. Her application of theory, whether it be Gramsci or Sayyid Qutb, is highly mechanistic.

The author's explanation for understanding Islamism centers around three basic, but by no means exhaustive, concepts – hakimiyya, jahiliyya, and jihad – and examines their meanings as they differ among her three branches of the Islamist trend. Yet despite the attention the author expends on these, she shows little understanding of what they actually mean, or of the larger set of Islamist doctrines and programs, or the many Islamists who conceived them. In the end, she becomes fixated on just one of the three concepts – hakimiyya – which she examines in four separate, but essentially rehashed sections, that leaves the other two with but token scrutiny. Then instead of clarifying, she ends up criticizing, and here, by focusing on the radical doctrines of Sayyid Qutb even though she readily admits (43, 81) he is not a mainstream thinker but rather an uncharacteristic firebrand. She castigates Qutb for not appealing to Egyptians when it is the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood that proved to be popular and that attracted support.

Perhaps the greatest problem in the book is the author's unjustifiable bias against Islamists in general (except for the progressives), and against the moderate Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Much of her criticism focuses on Islamists not adhering to notions of Western liberality, but also for exhibiting an indifference to gender equality and minority rights for Christians. Yet it is just for these concerns that the Brotherhood established the separate FJP, in order to allow the offshoot to adopt more modern doctrines and platforms that the mother organization did not want to accept. However, the author fails to satisfactorily distinguish between the two, criticizing one for the supposed faults of the other.

Another major error is the author's repeated claim, without any supporting evidence and, in fact, with much evidence to the contrary, that the Muslim Brotherhood lacked legitimacy and support. But moderate and conservative Islamists were, in fact, very popular, which is why they won Egypt's first free-and-fair elections and which is why the government became so frightened when challenged by their success. There would be no need to outlaw, imprison, and torture Brothers if they did not acquire an appeal that threatened the government's status quo.

The author applies Gramsci's concepts in order to give her analysis a theoretical foundation. This takes two directions: one is to compare Egypt with Italy and the other is to choose certain key concepts – hegemony, subalternity, and passive revolution, and she includes the Aristotelian idea of “the common good” as well – and apply them to the “contest for power” between the Egyptian state and the various branches of Islamism.

However, the first path proves ineffective because Italy and Egypt are sufficiently different and because the author lacks an overarching theoretical structure that might allow her to reveal what the two countries share in common or how they differ historically and culturally. Instead, the reader is left with a number of disjointed vignettes that make the analysis of Italy irrelevant to the analysis of Egypt. Whereas the choice of Gramscian concepts might well have provided a comprehensive structure on which to construct such a comparison, this effort, too, falls flat because the concepts she chooses are too granular and too static. The author fails to competently apply Gramsci's concepts to clarify the Islamist movement because she either uses them incompletely (hegemony), incorrectly (passive revolution, common good), or else in a mechanical, cookie-cutter fashion (subaltern classes).

Kennedy's book is very technically flawed and the editing is appalling. Parts of the bibliography are out of alphabetical sequence (238, 239, 241). The final 12 endnotes to chapter 3 are missing entirely (211). A table referring to “Higher Education Budget and Student Entrants” switches the data in two of its columns (56). The author cites a review of a book instead of the book itself (143 and 219), fails to include references in her bibliography (198), mis-titles references (48 and 200), and cites incorrect information (18 and 194, 79 and 206, 118 and 213). The author uses the wrong name for persons and organizations (79 and 141, 134 and 217, 169 and 164-65, 176).

Moreover, the author repeatedly miscopies quotes; the most flagrant include “jahiliyya is based on religion against God's sovereignty” when it should be “jahiliyya is based on rebellion against God's sovereignty” (47); Qutb “viewed the additional problems of injustice, immortality, materialism and atheism as entirely unacceptable” when it should be “immorality” (45); “charity cannot be a panacea for severe income inequalities, high illiteracy, unemployment and low mortality rates” when it should be “high” mortality rates (161); and “Qaradawi concluded that all political parties. . . must not allow religious or atheist parties that contradict Islam to contest elections” when it should be non-religious parties (85).

Much of the author's scrambled charts, incorrect citations, missing endnotes, irregular organization, exaggerated vocabulary, tangled logic, errors in Egyptian history, and incorrect grasp of Islamism and Gramscian theory comes from her inadequate attempts to be “objective” in the tradition of Western social science yet all the while harboring a deep-seated animosity, almost a revulsion, for Islamism. It is amazing that despite all these flaws, the book was still published.

The book by Jack Shenker, a Cairo-based reporter for The Guardian, is an incredible study of republican Egypt. Employing a left-libertarian assessment of Egypt's history since the 1952 revolution, the author examines the inequalities, injustices, and corruption of the corporatist state and crony capitalism under the rule of Mubarak and al-Sisi. He chronicles numerous radical clashes and showdowns by brash, young rebels and revolutionaries (“Resistance and Revolution Country”) against Egypt's heavy-handed, and often cold-blooded, government (“Mubarak Country,” but also referring to the ‘Abd al-Nasir, Sadat and al-Sisi years). It is a “must read” for scholars, researchers, and analysts of republican Egypt.

The author is at his best when he analyzes the political economy of Egypt's neoliberal state and denounces its fraud, venality, and cronyism, although he places relatively less emphasis on economic disparities. His analysis follows the insights of other well-known political economists such as John Waterbury, Alan Richards, Yahya Sadowski, and Robert Springborg. The details of his research and interviews are impressive. These are all highlighted in chapters 1, 2, 4, and 9. He is at his worst, however, when he makes imperious, ethnocentric attacks on the Egyptian family – gender, marriage, parenting – while praising western-derived patterns. These biased accounts can be found in chapters 3, 11, and 12.

In between are those sections where he champions radical activists (chapters 5 and 10) – the book should be subtitled: A Left-Libertarian History – and modestly recounts his own personal experiences on January 25th and 28th, sensibly refraining from recounting what other, well-known accounts have done better (chapters 6 and 7). He seems more swept up in the maelstrom of January 25th than he is an impartial journalist.

But the author is downright contemptuous and narrow-minded when he vilifies and denounces Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood in chapters 8 and 9, pretending to be “populist” even while dismissing and denigrating the people's democratic choice. Subsequently, he scorns elections as simply “sundooqrateya,” or procedural, ballot-box suffrage and instead suggests protest demonstrations, such as those on June 30th, are a better way to assess people's preferences.

Shenker astutely analyzes Mubarak's market-oriented economy. He chronicles the plight of the industrial labor force in al-Mahalla, Kafr al-Dawwar, and even the modest Cleopatra Ceramics Company near Suez. He recounts the agony of enforcing the agrarian un-reform Law 96 of 1992 which, however, was not new, but merely the end of a long string of Sadat's rollbacks of ‘Abd al-Nasir's rural restructuring. He examines the desert cities (following Tim Mitchell and Petra Kupinger) and the government policy of prioritizing luxury housing that involves confiscating property given over to informal housing. Yet despite the popular resistance that he praises, these expropriations have continued unabated under al-Sisi. And the author misunderstands shantytowns and Islamist largesse when he dismisses the state's hostility to these religious philanthropies – he calls it “much hyped” (93) – and fails to see why informal housing might lead to “extremist radicalization.” The author fails to appreciate the distributive effects of Islamic charities, how they made Islamists wildly popular, and why the state would brand them “terrorist” (166).

When Shenker leaves behind political economy and enters the realm of cultural issues, he wades into matters where he is less familiar and even less objective. He promotes art, music, and literature that are distinctly Western and ignores traditional tastes, often equating “traditional” with backwardness and Islamism (355, 363). The author wants Egyptians to “break an old world and form a new one” (456) but the “new one” is decidedly Western in tone. And because Egyptian kinship exhibits the paternalism and patriarchy that he condemns so strongly, the author goes on to belittle family, gender, youth, and marriage norms. He ends up sanctioning parental disobedience, decontextualizing Egyptian sexuality, abolishing conventional ideas of masculinity and femininity, and the inappropriate loosening of (or even abolishing) of marriage customs. On the positive side, the author strongly censures the sexual assaults and harassment that Egyptian women experience, and he is particularly harsh on the government's inattention to this violence (156).

Shenker wants to establish a libertarian state, one of “reimagining of how power functions. . . a rejection of rigid hierarchies, ideological blueprints, charismatic leaders, and the obedience they crave” (252). But because its participants act as scattered activists, unwilling to suppress their own individual ambitions for the sake of collective solidarity, all the sporadic, spontaneous acts of revolutionary disruption that Shenker champions remain uncoordinated because this involves the very authority that left-libertarians reject.

The 2011 uprising was plainly a contest between Moore and Skocpol's secular liberals and religious Islamists – what Shenker calls reformists and counter-revolutionaries (3, 12-13, 248-59, 272, 303) – a conflict that had been taking place well before 2011. Instead of accepting this and taking an evenhanded approach, the author displays an unwarranted malice toward the Muslim Brotherhood and the FJP but altogether neglects to analyze the other side. Instead, he becomes a partisan, and the book suffers from him venting his anti-Islamist prejudices that contradicts both an objective analysis (166) and the people's choice.

Thus Shenker's argument against sundooqrateya, or “ballot-box” democracy, is that it takes place among multiple sets of elites, none of which are truly revolutionary, but merely reformist. But then he writes (132) that “the state's. . . architecture has been annealed, ensuring that no one, male or female, is ever afforded the status of political citizen, someone with the power to make democratic choices of their own.” Yet when Egyptians do make genuine democratic choices of their own – by voting – he criticizes this ballot-box democracy and belittles and demeans their choices (94).

The author criticizes the Islamists as counter-revolutionary. Thus on pages 256 and 257, the author focuses on the role the Brotherhood played in the violent clashes that erupted on November 19, 2011, on Muhammad Mahmud street. This was a crucial event that turned many revolutionaries against the Muslim Brotherhood.

The demonstrators were protesting military trials, although these ordeals had already been taking place for several months. However, the November clashes erupted on the eve of the national elections that the FJP was poised to win. Had there been any substantial violence, the army would have cancelled the elections. In fact, it could be argued that the actions on Muhammad Mahmud street were intentionally initiated in order to delay the elections, which many liberals wanted, demanding, instead a new constitution first. But a referendum held the previous March had overwhelmingly prioritized elections over drafting a constitution. Thus, the confrontation on Muhammad Mahmud was merely an attempt by those who lost the March referendum to change the popular choice to match their own sectarian views (267).

Another issue Shenker uses to criticize the Brotherhood is its supposed alliance with the military (258, 288, 294, 297). However, there were two attempts at a military coup d’état in the first half of Mursi's presidency that the author does not discuss but which invalidate this claim. One involved the shooting of 16 soldiers in August 2012 by Islamist militants in the Sinai. Mursi avoided an assassination attempt by intentionally not attending the soldiers’ funeral. Shenker, instead, calls the resulting military dismissals simply an “entrenchment of the status quo” (259).Footnote ⁵ A second attempt came amidst the violence that erupted after Mursi issued his November 2012 declaration that his constitutional edicts were above the law. During the fighting, intelligence officers intended to assassinate Mursi; it was aborted only when Brotherhood members arrived to guard the president (140)Footnote ⁶.

Shenker's book, then, is a cri de coeur for a libertarian revolution that transcends hierarchies and reformism. But it is also a rant that rejects Islamism as the popular voice of the people. This paradox creates a very strange dynamic of promoting populism while at the same time repudiating it. Readers can benefit from his passion but must also be wary of his prejudices.