Mathias Ghyoot (Princeton University) discusses his new book 'Brothers Behind Bars'. Chaired by Professor Raihan Ismail (St Antony’s College).
Over the course of three decades, between 1948 and 1975, more than 60,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood were imprisoned in Egypt. What did these prison experiences mean for the social, intellectual, and organizational development of the Brotherhood? What role has the prison, more broadly, played in the history of Islamism? And how have interactions between the state and political prisoners of diverse ideological commitments shaped the debate over the role of religion and politics in twentieth-century Egypt? Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons (Oxford University Press, 2025) tells the harrowing yet fascinating history of the Muslim Brotherhood’s imprisonment, from the Palestine War through the consolidation of President Anwar al-Sadat’s rule. Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources—including prison memoirs written by Muslim Brothers and Sisters—Mathias Ghyoot will in this in this talk go behind prison walls to show how moderates and radicals, jailers and intelligence officers, clerics and communists were drawn into a prolonged struggle over the meaning of Islam in twentieth-century Egypt. Challenging dominant narratives about the prison experiences of the Muslim Brothers, and about the development of Islamism more broadly, the talk will foreground the role of memory in shaping collective experience and argue for the need to construct an alternative archive beyond both the Egyptian National Archives and the records of the Muslim Brotherhood. In doing so, the talk ultimately addresses a critical methodological question for historians of the modern Middle East: how to write the history of the carceral state that was—and remains—modern Egypt.
Published by Oxford University Press in 2025: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/brothers-behind-bars-9780197662731?cc=gb&lang=en&
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Mathias Ghyoot is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, specializing in the social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and South Asia. His dissertation offers a global history of the rise of Islamism, tracing the development of organized Islamic activism from the late Ottoman Empire through the interwar Muslim world. Mathias is also working on an edition and translation of the lost travelogue of Sayyid Qutb, tentatively titled The America I Saw: The Travel Writings of an Islamist in the Making (forthcoming with Syracuse University Press).
