This book has been an attempt to discern how much Islam “counts” in explaining the steady victories of Islamist parties in Egypt over the past 50 years. The conventional wisdom has held that Egypt's politics have long been marked by an existential struggle between a great majority that desires the application of God's law, and a small minority, empowered and armed by the West, that has sought to deny that majority its fondest ambition. This book, in reanalyzing the last several decades of Egyptian political history, and by exploring variation in Islamist performance over time and across space, offers an alternative account. It argues that the persistence of Islamists in electoral politics of the authoritarian era, and their dominance in the elections that took place after the end of that era, were born not of a grand passion for Islam, but of structural factors that are on the one hand more quotidian, but on the other just as profound in their effects.

As we have seen, the Brotherhood won elections under authoritarianism by appealing to affluent voters who could afford to cast their ballots as paper stones against an authoritarian regime. The poor, contrary to the expectations of the great body of theorizing, voted not for Islamists, but for those close to the regime who could promise to deliver to them the material benefits they so desperately needed. When the democratic floodgates were thrown open, the Brotherhood and its Islamist allies were able to capture these voters as well, benefiting from the superior opportunities for linkage offered by the country's dense religious networks, and for which parties of the left had no analogue.