The Muslim Brotherhood's Convoluted Relationship with the West

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2018

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Martyn Frampton (@FramptonM) of Queen Mary University, is one of the most talented historians of his generation. He recently sat down with Ryan in Washington to speak about his new book, The Muslim Brotherhood and the West: A History of Enmity and Engagement. Since its founding in Egypt in the 1920s, the Muslim Brotherhood has been animated by hatred for the West, but has also vigorously engaged with Western nations -- especially Britain and America -- in pursuit of its goals. Martyn walks us through this alternatively harrowing and fascinating story. In his telling, the Muslim Brotherhood is the perfect example of a movement that is intensely ideological yet deeply pragmatic and flexible. And the United States and Britain have a habit of getting led into the same cul-de-sacs with the Brotherhood over and over again, hoping -- in Martyn's words -- that they could achieve certain things by engaging with the Brotherhood, only to be left disappointed. This tale does not just have major implications for foreign relations, but also for integrating Muslim communities at home in the West. For you aspiring historians out there, he also discusses the process of writing the book, including learning a new language and conducting archival research on three continents.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs.
0:14.0	My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the editor-in-chief of War in the Rocks.
0:17.0	This is a great episode of the War in the Rocks podcast I'm very excited about.
0:21.0	My good friend Martin Frampton from Queen Mary University where he's a reader in history is here and we're going to talk about a bunch of different things but the main thing that brings us together is his latest book the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. A history of
0:34.1	enmity and engagement just came out this year at Harvard University Press. Why this
0:39.7	book? Why another book about the Muslim Brotherhood? Why should we care
0:42.0	about any of this stuff?
0:43.4	Well, thanks Ryan. Thanks for hosting me. It's great to be here on a podcast that I've listened to a lot of.
0:49.7	I mean, you're right, there are a lot of books on the Muslim Brotherhood but I think what I've tried to
0:55.2	to scope out here is a subject that I think is important, important historically, academically,
1:00.3	that is neglected I think in the literature this kind of a specific issue of the
1:05.0	relationship with the West what has the historical relationship between the
1:09.4	Brotherhood and the West being as I lay out in the introduction to the book this is a subject about which has been huge kind of myth-making
1:16.7	conspiracy so I think that in itself makes it a worthy subject of historical academic inquiry to kind of try and pull away some of those
1:25.1	some of those myths and Thirdly I mean just in a broader sense you know for all that it's
1:30.8	had travails in the last few years I think the Brotherhood remains the most
1:34.0	important Islamist movement in the world and therefore the question of its relationship
1:40.7	with the West will still be of relevance and importance and
1:43.7	therefore it's worth looking at. I'm fascinated by how you came to the subject because
1:49.1	you're a historian who's not trained in in Middle East studies in the Middle, so you started looking at Europe and Northern Ireland
1:56.6	and terrorism.
1:57.6	So how did you go from that to this? And also I should add to do so as already a senior academic.
	...

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