Mathias Ghyoot will discuss his Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book tells the harrowing, yet fascinating story of the imprisonment of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt stretching from the Palestine War in 1948 to the consolidation of President Anwar al-Sadat's rule in 1975. Drawing on a wide range of untapped sources—including prison memoirs written by Muslim Brothers and Sisters—the book takes readers behind the prison walls to reveal how moderates and radicals, jailor and intelligence officers, clerics and communists were embroiled in a struggle to define Islam in twentieth-century Egypt. Building on the research in Brothers Behind Bars, Mathias Ghyoot’s talk challenges dominant narratives about the prison experiences of the Muslim Brotherhood and, more broadly, about the development of Islamism in and beyond Egypt. He foregrounds the role of memory in shaping collective experience and argues for the construction of an alternative archive beyond both the Egyptian National Archives and the records of the Muslim Brotherhood. The talk thus addresses a critical methodological question for historians of the modern Middle East: how to write the history of the carceral state that was, and remains, modern Egypt.

Mathias has an MA in Islamic Studies from Copenhagen University and is currently a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, specializing in the social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and South Asia. His dissertation offers a global history of the rise of Islamism, tracing the development of organized Islamic activism from the late Ottoman Empire through the interwar Muslim world. Mathias is also working on an edition and translation of the lost travelogue of Sayyid Qutb, tentatively titled The America I Saw: The Travel Writings of an Islamist in the Making (forthcoming with Syracuse University Press).