Islamism, the Military, and the Egyptian State: A Discussion with Ahmed Abdrabou and Ashraf El Sherif

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh:

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), in collaboration with university partners, is pleased to hold a series of events highlighting the work of scholars from the MENA region. For more information about the MESA Global Academy, please visit the website.

In the inaugural event, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University is hosting Ahmed Abdrabou, an Egyptian political scientist from the University of Denver, and Ashraf El Sherif, an lecturer in political science at the American University in Cairo. The scholars will come together on a panel to discuss their work on Islamist politics and the military in the context of the Egyptian state. Please register here.

Ahmed Abdrabou works on civil-military/civil-security relations in the Middle East, connecting these relations to good governance indicators in the region with a focus on Egypt and Turkey. His 2020 book, Good Governance and Civil-Security Relations: A Comparative Study of Egypt and Turkey, was published in the Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Democratization and Government series. Ahmed’s current research addresses the shortcomings in the literature on the relationship between democratization and civilian control in the region, expanding the number of case studies beyond Egypt and Turkey to include civil-military relations and good governance in Tunisia, Sudan, and Algeria.

Ashraf El Sherif works on Islamist movements, contemporary Muslim/Arab thought and cultural studies, state-religion relations, state-society relations, democratization studies, Arab Spring politics, and ideological religious politics. He has analyzed post-2011 institutional and ideological transformations of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist movements and is finishing a book entitled Islamists and State in Modern Egypt: From Banality to Revolution, which examines the 2011-2013 and post-2013 Egyptian Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists, and a third movement he identifies as the revolutionary Islamists. Ashraf’s next project seeks to understand the question of “revolution” in the Middle East in the modern age, exploring a number of revolts’ structures and repertoires of grievances and contextualizing them within the broader study of modern revolutions.