The cool refreshing breezes of the wind are “I love you’s” from God. A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. It is his desire that everyone would accept His love. A third point is about the generational gap and youth recruitment from the “Islamist potential pool” compared to Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria. The advances of ISIS in Libya and the breakdown of Brotherhood electoral activism in neighboring Egypt, however, present an ideological and recruitment challenge to Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi factions. Other Salafi factions have accused the LMB of compromising its principles to gain influence in the political sphere. The LMB escalated its anti-Islamic State rhetoric after the Islamic State in Libya targeted Misrata, which is controlled by the Tripoli side, in May 2015. The statement issued by the LMB on June 1, 2015, called for “eradicating the ISIS threat in Libya.” The relationships between the LMB and jihadists and other Salafi factions was never easy even before Khalifa Hefter’s second coup attempt in May 2014. In 2013, Salafists in Tripoli publicly burned copies of the works of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and the Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

Politically and logistically, the LMB supports the Libya Dawn Coalition and General Abdul Salam Jadallah al-Obeidi, the General Chief of Staff of engagement with Islamic State forces in Sirte and other towns, who is loyal to Tripoli. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. The Tunisian “model” and Ennahda’s behavior within it seemed to be less attractive and less practicable in Libya, as LMB leaders understand the different nature of Libya’s political polarization and the particularities of the Libyan crisis. It elevates already high levels of social and political polarization and undermines fragile transition processes. Indeed, it is precisely at the nexus of these domestic, regional, and international levels that this collection is poised to make the best contribution. What the papers as a whole also help to make clear, however, is that we should not focus too narrowly on these factors solely in their domestic context, as area specialists most often do. As a Middle East expert, I often focus on what is going on in that region. This opens up new options for those of us who work on countries often treated as “outliers”-cases located both geographically and conceptually at the periphery of our collective analysis of the Middle East as a region.

One of the outcomes of reading the various papers for me personally was the realization that we need to look at Islamist networks as global actors, rather than as actors confined to one particular country or one particular region (i.e. the Middle East). More specifically, as I outline below, reading others’ work has encouraged me to better attend to the interaction between regional and local dynamics, to more aggressively resist using Egypt as an analytic benchmark, and to think more explicitly about how to balance case specificity and analytic generality in my approach to Islamism. The brutal fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt led to the belief among many LMB figures that hard power is necessary. The second point is the impact of the brutal fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the electoral fall of Ennahda in Tunisia on the LMB. Some reference to Egypt seems justified, of course, insofar as it was in Egypt that the first Brotherhood was established, and from Egypt that its intellectual influence spread. Yemen, of course, is one of these cases, where the Islah party is either mistakenly identified as “the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood” or dismissed as something exceptional, owing to its diverse composition of tribal, Salafi, and “Brotherhood” leaders.

After the country’s uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s multi-factional Islamist party Islah enjoyed new opportunities for institutional power, joining a coalition government in December 2011. But, while the Muslim Brotherhood faction within Islah initially seemed ascendant, it has since found itself targeted by the Houthi movement, weakened in relation to other factions within the party, and increasingly dependent on external actors to retain its political relevance. The Muslim Brotherhood/LMB’s traditionally preferred spheres of institutional politics (elections, constitutional assemblies, and parliamentary party politics) and social services are not the most attractive recruitment tools for a revolutionary younger generation in the middle of a civil war (especially given the outcomes in Egypt and Tunisia). But because it was driven by a set of questions and subsequent hypotheses about politics rather than about Islamists, Egypt and the Egyptian experience was somewhat naturally decentered. In terms of social services, the LMB did not have similar opportunities to connect with the masses like the Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia.