Anticolonial Terrorism: Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood to 1954

Abstract

This chapter looks at the rise of anticolonial terrorism in Egypt, and especially at the role played by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It argues that assassination became established among anticolonial nationalists in Egypt before the Brotherhood was founded and was then briefly practiced by the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, however, generally preferred other varieties of violence, which it understood as jihad. Some of these were more obviously acts of political violence than others. The use of violence was never part of the Brotherhood’s main strategy, however, and in the end it proved disastrous for them. They definitively abandoned terrorism in about 1968.