Answering the Call

In 2012, Egypt held its first democratic presidential elections resulting in a win for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Morsi. Not even a year later, the military ousted the elected president and placed thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members as well as other vocal dissenters in jail. These events are tragically similar to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s repressive tactics of the early 1950’s. As Abdullah al-Arian, the author of Answering the Call, writes, once again the Muslim Brotherhood is faced with the challenge of adapting to the new circumstances they find themselves in. Yet this time, they have their past experience of reconstituting themselves to draw upon (p. 240). It is this first period of recovery that is the topic of al-Arian’s book. More specifically, the author looks at the 1970’s under Anwar Sadat as a ‘dynamic and captivating’ (p. xvi) decade that witnessed the transformation of the Muslim Brotherhood from an almost completely broken organisation to a major political oppositional force by 1981.