y political party in the Bolshevik image, with all that that entails in terms of resilience, organizational strength, patterns of leadership, methods of operation, and ability to thrive on repression.
Considerably less complimentary of the origin of the Muslim Brotherhood is the assessment of Roy:
The enclosure of Islamist thought within its own premises goes hand in hand with the weakening of Islamist specificity in relation to the strictly fundamentalist movement. . . . (T)he puritanical and formalist inspiration that was always present among the founders, such as Hasan al-Banna . . . was a moment, a fragile synthesis between Islam and political modernity, which ultimately never took root.
It is at once obvious that Western observers do not have a solid grasp of Muslim world, which is perhaps a vestige of medieval Christianity's ill-fated attempts to rout the Muslims from the Holy Land. The enmity Roy displays is countered by Pittaway who sees in the emerging Brotherhood, "the clarity of its objectives, the strength of its organization, and the high degree of motivation of its members (which) in the thirties and forties embodied the resistance to British colonial rule." Since the sixties, as Bianchi puts it,
Western views on the resilience of Islam have come full circle, but there has been remarkable continuity with regard to the notion that, sooner or later, Muslims must choose between their faith and their freedom. (T)he perceived alternatives (are) the secular Turkish path of rationalism, Westernization and liberty versus the fanatical Iranian path of dogmatism, isolation and repression.
Pittaway's observations are at least corroborated in the fact that al-Banna was assassinated by agents of the government of King Farouk in 1949; the (communist/socialist) regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and his secret police, led "a secular and nationalist revolution that crushed the Muslim Brotherhood and its hop...