In his forthcoming book, The Closed Circle: Joining and Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Columbia University Press, 2020), Program on Extremism Director Lorenzo Vidino provides critical new perspectives on Muslim Brotherhood networks in the West gathered from extensive interviews with former members of the group in Europe and North America.
The individuals profiled occupied various ranks within the organization. They operated in different countries and at different times. While some spent many of their years in the Brotherhood living outside of the West, all of them spent a substantial amount of time active in Western Brotherhood networks.
The author conducted the interviews over several months and in various countries. Each individual was interviewed at length, and in some cases over multiple days. These interviews were supplemented by additional research and interviews with related individuals in order to both verify and contextualize the information provided by the interviewees.
Each chapter follows a similar three-part structure based on three cycles of militancy: Becoming, Being, and Leaving. The first part of each chapter focuses on how each individual joined the Brotherhood. Attention is devoted to both the recruitment processes employed by the organization and the psychological processes that drove the individual to join. The second part describes the life of each individual inside the organization: the role he/she covered, the activities he/she engaged in, the organizations and the people he/she interacted with. More so than the other two, this part provides deep insights into how the Brotherhood in the West works. The third part covers disengagement: the reasons that lead each individual to leave the organization, how he/she did so, and what the aftermath was.
In this excerpted chapter, Dr. Vidino tells the story of Kamal Helbawy, a legendary figure in Islamist circles for more than 60 years and one of the most senior members of the Brotherhood to have ever operated in the West. Helbawy discusses how he joined the Brotherhood in the 1950s and his international work for the group, including his time as head of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and as Brotherhood envoy to Afghanistan. Helbawy, who played a key role in establishing core clusters of the Brotherhood in the West, then describes the history and inner workings of Brotherhoodlinked organizations in Europe and North America such as Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). He finally recounts how and why he left the organization in 2012.