Richard P. Mitchell

Richard P. Mitchell wrote The Society of the Muslim Brothers, which remains the standard scholarly history of the Muslim Brotherhood's first three decades. He was an American historian of the modern Middle East who worked at the University of Michigan, and his book grew out of doctoral research conducted in Egypt in the late 1950s and early 1960s - which is to say while the organisation he was studying was being suppressed by Nasser, its leaders imprisoned or executed, and its members unwilling to talk to a foreigner asking questions. He obtained interviews with surviving Brothers and access to their publications anyway. The book, published in 1969, traces the movement from Hassan al-Banna's founding of it in Ismailia in 1928 among workers of the Suez Canal Company, through its growth into a mass organisation with a paramilitary wing, its role in the 1948 Palestine war, the assassination of the prime minister and al-Banna's own killing by the political police in 1949, to the confrontation with the Free Officers. Its value is that it describes the Brotherhood as an organisation with committees, finances and internal arguments rather than as an ideology. It was reissued in 1993 with an introduction by John Voll and has never been superseded for the period. He died in 1983 at fifty-eight, before the Brotherhood's re-emergence as a mass political force in the 1980s and long before 2011, so the book stops where it stops. That has not stopped it being the first thing recommended to anyone starting on the subject. Its account of al-Banna's organisational method - cells, oaths, welfare provision and schools - is the part later scholarship has built on most.

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