The 1920s, the decade during which the Muslim Brotherhood was founded, saw the beginnings of communist groups in Egypt and Lebanon. But one of the many and massive differences between the two parties is that the communists were expressing the birth of a modern sector, representing industry and its working class, as a result of new colonial relations. By contrast, the Brotherhood was expressing the shock resulting from the contact with the West, which they tried to rebut categorically. It was not without significance that the Brotherhood chose as its slogan "the Quran is our constitution," or that the city where the group was founded, Ismailia, hosted at the same time the headquarters of the British forces and the Christian missionaries in Egypt. Twenty years later, the inception of the Arab Socialist Baath Party was linked to the expansion of the military institutions and branches, following independence, in Syria first and then in Iraq. This link to some form of modernism remained a strange concept to the Brotherhood, whose clash with the military establishment and vice versa became one of the main phenomena characterizing political life in the modern Arab Orient. In truth, if we are to examine how easy it was for the military regimes, in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, to get rid of pro-Brotherhood elements that had managed to infiltrate the armies, we would be astounded by what is indeed absolute repulsion between the two. True, the terrorist ‘Special Apparatus' founded by the Brotherhood in the early 1940s, and the radical literature produced by Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s, assigned to the pupils of Hassan al-Banna a modern-like functional and instrumental role. However, this was not at all sufficient to transform that broad popular block into one that endorses modernism, whatever the definition of this term or the position on it may be. On the whole, the Brotherhood's sense of victimization, which became most entrenched under Nasser, strengthened its tendency to withdraw and retreat from the new jahiliyya – the ungodly age as per Islamist literature – brought about by foreign and local ‘devils.' And regarding the exodus of Brotherhood cadres from Egypt and then Syria to the Arab Gulf, the financial revenues they amassed there still did not translate into a strong social intermediary, despite their extensive investments in Islamic advocacy. This could be better illustrated by a comparison between the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood. To be sure, the rise of the latter took place in parallel with the emergence of new social changes and structures, such as the Anatolian bourgeoisie or the television boom made possible under Turgut Ozal (1989 - 1993). The Turkish Brotherhood, through this experience that sought to blend between Islamism and liberalism, learned many things about politics, the market, and public opinion trends. The same cannot be said about the Egyptian Brotherhood, however. We say this in order to highlight the astronomical distance that the Brotherhood must traverse in order to become an influential force in the modern world, the only world that exists in actual reality. The fact that the Brotherhood did not go in that direction yet has been a disaster, not only to itself, but also to the societies in which the Brotherhood thrives. The Syrian revolution, in one of its aspects, shed a lot of light on the banality of modernist non-Brotherhood factions, and the superficiality of their modernism per se. But in the same sense, we can say that the recent Egyptian coup, taking advantage of Mohamed Morsi's dismal year in the presidency, highlighted the dilemma of the Muslim Brotherhood's disconnection from our inescapably modern world. With a Brotherhood like this, there is no hope. But without a reformed Brotherhood, given its broad popularity, there is no hope either.
