Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Ideological Evolution, and Challenges Ahead

This paper reviews the most important ideological developments of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood party in the seventy years of its political life. This ideological evolution and transformation has been under the influence and interaction with the local, regional and international environment. To understand the reason and depth of these ideological developments, the researcher examined the historical and intellectual milestones of these developments and found that after founding the party and drawing its main lines of political and religious ideology by Al-Bana, the Brotherhood has experienced two ideological fundamental evolutions: 1. Emergence of Sayyid Qutb in the fifties and spread of radicalism in Islamic thoughts, and 2. Formation of a moderate Islamic and neo-interpretive religious movement in the nineties and its religious dominance on the ideological structure of the party in the first decade of twenty first century, which led to some reformations in the manifesto of the party, reception of political pluralism, and acceptance of democratic values as human rights which are recognized by Islam. Furthermore, due to the nature of the party's ideological-political manifesto, researcher identified and addressed the challenges that the Muslim Brotherhood will encounter in the region as a political party. The answers to these challenges are considered effective in the evolution of political Islam and can be counted as another major milestone in the ideological history of the party.