The Fourth Ordeal A History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, 1968–2018

"The Fourth Ordeal is a history of the Muslim Brotherhood from the late 1960s to 2018. It provides an inside account of the Brotherhood's internal organizational evolution since its 'second founding' in the seventies, tracing the story to the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and the Brotherhood's short-lived experience with power, and on to its gradual fragmentation in the post-2013 period. Tracing the personal life stories of key Brotherhood leaders, the story puts the spotlight on the group's growing internal conflicts over authority and leadership, which it argues were rooted in different cultures and value systems, and which ultimately heralded the demise of the Brotherhood in the post-2013 period. Based on over 140 Oral History interviews with current and former Brotherhood members, a wide reading of original written sources, as well as the eyewitness accounts of the author who conducted his fieldwork in Egypt in 2012 and 2013, the book provides a new understanding to the question of why the Brotherhood's experiment with power had failed"--