The most electorally successful parties of the Middle East in recent years have tended to be those that espoused some version of “political Islam,” and foremost among them has been the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. During the 30-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood was by all accounts the country’s principal opposition party, and in 2005 captured 20% of the seats in the country’s legislature. Although some feared that the Brotherhood would work to usher in an Islamic theocracy, others contended that political inclusion would “moderate” the group, causing it to abandon the more objectionable parts of its agenda in order to continue getting elected. It was a debate that generated a great deal of high-quality scholarship, including Jillian Schwedler’s Faith in Moderation (2006) and Nathan Brown’s When Victory Was Not an Option (2012). It was also a debate that was front and center to anyone watching Egypt in the early days of 2011, when citizens rose up to overthrow Mubarak, and then later lined up to vote the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties to a supermajority in the legislature and to the country’s presidency.

In her deeply learned new book The Muslim Brotherhood, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham comes to settle this argument and provoke new ones. Analyzing the discourse and behavior of Brotherhood officials and leading members over the course of the movement’s entire existence, she finds that the Muslim Brothers—and, by extension, Islamist parties—are complicated. She argues that they “cannot be described as ‘for’ or ‘against’ democracy any more than they can be characterized as ‘moderate’ or ‘extremist’” (p. 2). Instead, she tells us that the effort to determine whether inclusion breeds moderation was flawed from the start, built on the overly simplistic premise that movements were unitary actors driven principally by the electoral calculus identified by Anthony Downs’s median voter theorem. She argues convincingly that the Muslim Brotherhood, like any human collectivity, contained multitudes, and that these multitudes responded to their environments in varied ways. Some of them did change, modifying their views on several key issues that she identifies as most important elements of the catchall concept of “moderation”—including the legitimacy of violence, the diversity of acceptable interpretations of Islam, toleration of alternative worldviews, respect for individual rights and freedoms, and the principle of equal citizenship for non-Muslims and women (p. 6). Others, however, redoubled their commitments to the old orthodoxies, and did their best to hold the line against so-called reformists.

What explains why some “moderated” while others did not? Wickham argues that it would be wrong to intuit that those who moderated were simply responding to electoral incentives. Instead, she finds evidence in more than 120 interviews with Islamists (and others) conducted over the course of 15 years that many Brotherhood politicians—particularly those of what she calls the “middle generation” who got their start in student politics in the Sadat era—underwent “self-conscious shifts” in their political commitments (p. 12). As a result of exposure to media outlets, “foreign researchers, party and NGO activists, and even, in some instances, officials of foreign governments,” many of these Islamists internalized “the global discourse on democracy and human rights as well as … local arguments in favor of comprehensive democratic reform” (p. 13). In contrast, older-generation members who were brought up in the bosom of the movement and focused more on proselytizing during good times and circling the wagons during bad ones experienced much more limited ideological journeys.

Ultimately, Wickham tells us, it was these conservatives who ended up exerting the most influence over the movement’s behavior, because “while Brotherhood reformists developed friendly ties with a wide range of Egyptian civil and political leaders and were actively courted by Arab and Western journalists and researchers, they never developed an institutional platform from which to mobilize support for their agenda among members of the group’s base” (p. 139). Thus, in 2007, the Brotherhood produced a highly conservative party “platform” that articulated cramped visions for the role of women and Christians in Egyptian society; and in 2009 and 2010, reformist members were gradually squeezed out of positions of leadership within the movement amid highly contested internal elections (pp. 120–53). And ultimately—although this is not covered in the book, which ends after Muhammad Morsi’s election to the presidency—the movement was widely accused of failing to govern inclusively, abandoning (according to some) its promises to act in concert with liberals, leftists, seculars, and nationalists.

Wickham’s account of the dynamics and scope of the Brotherhood’s changes is of undeniable importance, and it is why this book is as much a contribution to the literature on political parties as it is to the literature on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt, or political Islam. What the author has done here is to articulate a mechanism for party change that takes ideology and human agency seriously. In her telling, political leaders undergo real processes of value change that are independent of the necessities of winning elections or maintaining the support of party militants. Moreover, the choices of these leaders matter: According to Wickham, whether a hard-line or reformist faction seizes control is not simply a function of what garners the party the most votes but of what politicians do to sway their copartisans. For its challenges to much of the literature on parties and party change, this work should, and will, be read with profit by comparativists of a diversity of methodological stripes and regional focuses.

Although Wickham’s account of the processes of ideological change experienced by Muslim Brotherhood members is highly detailed and utterly convincing, future scholars will no doubt work to build upon, and flesh out, her account of the reason that the reformists in the movement failed to carry the day against the more conservative faction. As we have seen, the author locates the causes of this outcome primarily in the decision of reformists to build bridges to non-Islamists, rather than to focus their efforts internally, but there are alternative mechanisms that might have been at play. One of these mechanisms, advanced by several scholars and observers of the movement, is that the Muslim Brotherhood’s highly selective recruitment methods and regimented organizational practices (documented by Wickham in her agenda-setting 2003 book Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt) generated cadres who were rigid in their adherence to party orthodoxy and unlikely to be hospitable to the minority of reformists who brought back from their encounters with non-Islamists and Westerners new ideas about where the movement should be going.

Yet another alternative mechanism is advanced by Wickham herself, in her excellent comparative chapter on Brotherhood-related movements in Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco (pp. 196–246). According to the author, Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development (PJD) took a path almost the opposite of that taken by the Brotherhood. She tells us that the party “has gone the furthest to downplay its call for shariʿa rule and has been the most restrained in pursuit of its conservative social and moral agenda” (p. 231). This, she tells us, “reflects the relative strength of pragmatic and ideologically flexible figures within the group’s leadership ranks” (p. 231). However, she tells us that it also reflects “the presence of secular parties and civil society organizations with sufficient resources and mass support to serve as an effective counterweight to—and constraint upon—the PJD’s power” (p. 231). Those two things are presented as independent causes of the PJD’s pragmatism, but it seems at least possible that one is endogenous to the other. In other words, the ascent of pragmatists in the PJD could have been a function of the fact that the party faced genuine secular challengers who could make it pay a cost at the ballot box for veering too far in the direction of religious purity.

Further support for this alternative hypothesis emerges in the author’s nuanced discussion of postrevolutionary Egypt. Wickham describes a political landscape that was relatively supine before Islamists, as secular parties managed to capture only a handful of seats in the country’s legislature. Instead, she tells us that the Brothers found their main competitors to be even more conservative Salafist parties, whose commitment to Islamic orthodoxy was second to none. According to Wickham, this “placed the Brotherhood in an awkward position. On the one hand, the Brotherhood and the Salafis were part of the same broad ideological current, and any stand taken by the Brotherhood against the Salafis would open it to the charge of having abandoned the Islamic cause. On the other hand, identifying too closely with the Salafi movement would undermine the credibility of the Brotherhood’s democratic commitments” (pp. 194–95). Given this challenging ideological pickle, it seems unlikely that the Brotherhood’s reformists would have succeeded had they followed Wickham’s prescription and tried to bring the movement’s base around to their more enlightened way of thinking. Too much reform would have been a recipe for electoral defeat. Thus, while Wickham is almost certainly correct that individual ideological change is more than just a straightforward function of “considerations of strategic advantage” (p. 9), it may be that such considerations are indeed sufficient to explain the behavior of parties as a whole.

This is not a debate that will be settled easily, however, and Wickham is to be lauded for putting it on the table. In so doing, she has once again set the agenda for future scholarship on the phenomenon of political Islam.