In The Politics of Islam, Birol Baskan sets out on the ambitious task of explaining the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the governments of five Gulf states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He traces what began as a symbiotic relationship between these states and the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s before chronicling a divergence of attitudes among the Gulf’s ruling elites toward the Muslim Brotherhood today, marking key events like the Iranian Revolution, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the 9/11 attacks, and the Arab Spring uprisings in the 2010s as critical junctures in this change. This comparative and chronological approach is useful, although Saudi Arabia, as Baskan highlights, emerges as an outlier. Baskan explains the unique continued relevance of Saudi religious actors by the fact that their influence predated the construction of institutions of the modern nation-state.
Baskan also finds that “...
