MENA Scholar Spotlight: Steven Brooke

Learn more about a rising scholar of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt, and more

Every Friday, we feature a MENA politics scholar from the POMEPS network and ask some informal questions about what they’re reading, working on, and enjoying these days.

Steven Brooke of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is one of the most exciting and productive rising scholars of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood out there. His 2019 book Winning Hearts and Votes was an instant classic in the field, setting a new standard for rigorous empirical research and sophisticated theorizing about the actual role played by social services in the political project of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. (Here’s an article length version of the core argument for those who prefer articles for their syllabus.). Even before publishing those key works, Brooke helped me conceptualize and pull together a volume in the POMEPS Studies series on Islamist social services (free download). His research on Islamist social services touches more broadly on the question of whether Islamists have systematic advantages in electoral or other forms of politics.

One of Brooke’s most interesting recent projects has been his work with Oxford University’s Neil Ketchley on the historical foundations of Islamism, again with a particular emphasis on the rise of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the interwar period. Their 2018 American Political Science Review piece really showcases their empirical and theoretical creativity. By mapping the precise location of Muslim Brotherhood branches (an innovative and labor intensive process in its own right), they were able to show the importance of proximity to rail networks and education for the rise of Islamism in that critical historical period. They extended that analysis in a 2021 Politics and Religion piece, along with third co-author Brynjar Lia, to determine who exactly supported the early Muslim Brotherhood at a similarly granular level of detail.

Brooke has a wide range of other research projects, mostly on Egypt, which feature his characteristically innovative approach to generating data to answer genuinely interesting questions. “Exclusion and Violence after the Egyptian Coup,” which he wrote with Elizabeth Nugent for a special issue of Middle East Law and Governance I edited with Jillian Schwedler, used district level data to test the relationship between Mohammad el-Morsi’s Presidential vote share and post-coup violence. “Who Votes After a Coup?”, also co-authored with Nugent, does something similar on another intriguing question of broad theoretical interest. There’s a lot more, of course, but you get the idea.

Let me just mention here, because I can, that Brooke is also a great public servant for the discipline: among other things, he’s a member of the POMEPS Steering Committee and he served as Treasurer for the APSA MENA Politics Section for the three years I was its President.

Without further ado, let’s find out more about Steven Brooke!

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Aaron Rock-Singer’s new account of Salafism, In the Shade of the Sunna.  It’s a really valuable attempt to revise Salafism’s conscious self-identification as a timeless, textually-bound religious movement.  By going directly to the contemporaneous textual record produced by notable Salafi scholars themselves, he’s able to identify significant and unexpected changes, discontinuities, and accommodations to modernity.  He also has a great eye for taking superficially quirky ritual practices (praying in shoes, having a beard of certain length, etc…) and interpreting why they matter in the context of modern political, social, and cultural struggles. 

What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written?

I’m quite proud of my book, Winning Hearts and Votes.  On the one hand, it seems very much of its time- a book about Islamist social service provision, elections, and public politics in general just doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the region’s current moment.  On the other, I think it answered a valuable question for those of us who studied the region: how and why does Islamist groups’ social service provision produce political effects?  It was also very challenging to write in that each chapter was grounded in different types of evidence, and I had to think very hard about how they hung together not just narratively, but in terms of an overall research design and argument.

What are you currently working on?

Neil Ketchley and I are working on a book about the growth of the early Muslim Brotherhood, building off of our 2018 APSR article.  We try to frame the book comparatively: if you had gone back to Egypt in the late 1920s or early 1930s, you would have encountered a variety of boisterous movements with similar ideologies, repertoires, membership bases, charismatic leaderships, etc…  Yet most of these relatively quickly faded from the historical record, while the Muslim Brotherhood grew to become one of the world’s most successful social movements.  Our point is that explaining why the Brotherhood succeeded requires explaining why other, superficially similar movements failed.  It’s a fun project that really requires serious engagement with primary sources, and there’s lots of new material we’ve discovered.

What’s your dream research project (and why haven't you done it yet)?

It’s not as cool as Jillian’s gift shops!  But it’s actually something I’ve made some headway on over the past couple years.  Over a decade ago I was fiddling around in the Library of Congress and came across some incomplete but very detailed, essentially building-level maps of interwar Egypt.  They really intrigued me.  I had an idea to collect, digitize, geo-reference, and extract the attributes of each feature on the maps- essentially to geocode every mosque, school, police station, shrine, government building, and so on that existed in Interwar Egypt.  I received funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources’ “Digitizing Hidden Collections” initiative to do so and have spent the last couple years overseeing a team of RAs working on that project.  We’ll have about 300 individual map sheets in total and hundreds of thousands- if not millions- of features ready for public release in perhaps a year and a half or so. 

What’s one resource / opportunity that you wish more MENA politics scholars knew about and took advantage of?

I’d encourage everyone to check out POMEPS’ slate of activities, including small grants and book and article workshops.  It’s an excellent way to get feedback on your work from a variety of perspectives, and it’s all very supportive based on a great community of scholars.  It has helped me tremendously!

What's your current favorite bit of MENA pop culture?

Whenever I get into a rut with my writing I usually put on various playlists of funk from Middle Eastern artists from the 70s and 80s.  This mix is a great start.

What’s the most interesting non-fieldwork related thing you’ve done in the Middle East?

One of my hobbies is golf (right now my handicap is 6.5).  When I lived in Lebanon I played at the Golf Club of Lebanon, in Southern Beirut.  It was great!