Inside the Brotherhood, by Hazem Kandil (Polity, £20)

Hazem Kandil’s study of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is a deeply intimate portrait of an organisation rightly known as “the mother of all Islamist movements.”

The book seeks to understand the nature of the Brotherhood’s religious ideology, how it is maintained and inculcated amongst its own members, and how it determines its political strategy.

This, Kandil maintains, was the ultimate cause of their downfall in June 2013 after just one year in government.

The core of Brotherhood belief is what the author terms “religious determinism,” essentially the belief that worldly success is the result of divine favour, which itself is the product of the level of piety of a community — a clear break with mainstream Islamic theology which maintains that piety determines success in the next world rather than this one.

While other Islamist movements, such as those in Turkey, Jordan and Iran, have all enjoyed a large measure of political power due to their ability to astutely navigate the political process, the Egyptian Brothers, argues Kandil, have largely eschewed the formulation of clear political strategies and policies in favour of cultivating divine favour.

Thus it was precisely their fidelity to this principle that was the ultimate cause of their overthrow and it caused them to neglect the usual political processes of forming alliances and seeking pragmatic means of resolving pressing social problems. Instead, the focus was on developing the godliness of the organisation in the hope of currying divine intervention.

The implicit assumption of this belief is that it is not the political and economic system that needs changing but merely the spiritual calibre of its leading personnel.

It is this tenet that has made the Brotherhood such an important asset for the Egyptian regime over the years in absorbing the discontent and anger of disenfranchised youth and channelling it into a strategy that does not threaten the existing system in any meaningful way.

By the same token, this has also made them an extremely useful asset to Western neocolonialism. Once in power, the Brotherhood’s hostile rhetoric towards globalisation and the West proved no obstacle to their embrace of IMF neoliberal policies to a far greater degree than their predecessors.

Kandil says little of this international dimension of the Muslim Brotherhood — its utility to imperialism.

But that would be another book. This one, focusing on the domestic elements of Brotherhood thought and practice, succeeds in dissecting its strategies extremely well.