Sociology Working Papers
Paper Number 2015-04
The Social Contexts of Islamist Activism:
Elite Students and Religious Education in Egypt*
Neil Ketchley and Michael Biggs
Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
August 2015
Department of Sociology
University of Oxford
Manor Road
Oxford OX1 3UQ
*
This research was supported by a TRE Grant from the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University.
Correspondence to [email protected] or michael.biggs@sociology. ox.ac.uk; both at Department of Sociology, University of
Oxford, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ. We thank Christopher Barrie, Hannah El-Sisi, Michael Farquhar, Diego
Gambetta, Steffen Hertog, Ali Kadivar, Charles Kurzman, John Sidel, and Richard Stewart for their comments.
Abstract
A large body of scholarship asserts that students of engineering and medicine are
overrepresented in Islamist movements. It also claims that political Islam emerges from secular
rather than religious education. This paper uses unique data on 1,379 Islamist students arrested
after President Muhammad Mursi was overthrown in 2013. Matching these activists to the
population of undergraduate students, we analyze how the arrest rate varied across 378 university
faculties. We find that Islamists came disproportionately from al-Azhar University, which
provides a religiously inflected education in diverse subjects. Thus the literature’s emphasis on
secular education does not hold for contemporary Egypt. Most importantly, we find that
Islamists tended to come from university faculties admitting students with higher grades, and
from faculties that recruited from students taking science rather than literature in secondary
school. Controlling for grades, engineering and medicine were not especially prominent. These
findings suggest that Islamist movements conform to a more general pattern: political activism
attracts elite students.
The idea that Muslim students of medicine and engineering are more likely to join Islamist
movements has become common currency in both scholarship and public discourse on the rise of
organized political Islam.1 It is also claimed that Islamists are overwhelmingly drawn from
secular universities and rarely possess formal religious training. Although these generalizations
are widely accepted in the literature, previous analysis has not adequately compared Islamists
with the underlying population from which they are drawn.
In this paper, we investigate the social contexts of Islamist activism in Egypt using
unique data on 1,379 Islamist students arrested during the state’s concerted repression of the
Muslim Brothers after Islamist President Muhammad Mursi was overthrown in 2013. This
constitutes the largest and most complete sample yet available for studying the educational
ecologies of political Islam. Matching these activists to the population of undergraduate students,
we analyze how the arrest rate varied across 378 university faculties in 52 institutions. To enter
university, Egyptian secondary school students take an examination (al-thanawiyya al-ʿamma) in
either science or literature, and this enables us to rank university faculties using the grades of
admitted students, and to classify them according to whether they require science.
We find that Islamists came disproportionately from al-Azhar University, where students
receive a formal religious education irrespective of their degree specialization. Thus the
literature’s claim that Islamist cadres and their leaders emerge from secular universities does not
hold for contemporary Egypt. Analysis also reveals that Islamists tended to come from university
faculties with more demanding entry requirements, and from faculties for which the science
examination was a prerequisite. Controlling for grades, Islamists were no more likely to be
drawn from engineering and medicine than from other faculties that required science. Given that
the science examination is more prestigious, these findings suggest that Islamist activism
1
conforms to a more general pattern seen in mobilization in Western universities: political
activism attracts elite students.
1. Islamism and university education
The first notable research on the social contexts of Islamism was published in the 1980s.2 This
coincided with a shift away from explaining Islamist activism using textual readings of religious
doctrine.3 In a landmark study, the Egyptian political sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim conducted
34 interviews with detained members of two Muslim Brother splinter groups active in Egypt in
the 1970s.4 Ibrahim found that cadres and leaders alike tended to have high educational
attainment: all but five (29 out of 34) were university educated, and over half were current
university students, with the majority studying either engineering or the medical sciences.
Subsequent studies of Egypt’s Muslim Brothers and related Islamist groups reiterated Ibrahim’s
findings. Eric Davis analyzed trials of prominent Muslim Brothers who had been prosecuted in
the 1950s and 1960s, and concluded that the movement drew its support from newly urbanized
university graduates – “especially, in more recent times, engineers.”5 Ziad Munson, studying 179
arrests reported in U.S. diplomatic cables from the 1950s, claimed that the bulk of the Brothers’
membership came from “the most Westernized and modernized segments of the population –
students, engineers, doctors, and government bureaucrats.”6
Separate analyses by Nazih Ayubi,7 Nemat Guenena,8 and Giles Kepel,9 again using trial
and interview data, also found evidence that Egyptian Islamists recruited university students, and
in particular, students taking either engineering or the medical sciences. Most recently, Hazim
Kandil’s study of the Muslim Brothers detected a similar pattern based on informant testimony
and the biographies of the movement’s current leadership.10 Scholars have also charted the
2
ascendency of Islamists to the leaderships of Egypt’s major professional syndicates – especially
doctors, dentists, engineers and pharmacists.11 Islamist science and engineering professors are
also prominent in the faculty lounges of Egyptian universities.12
The association between studying engineering or medicine and becoming an Islamist
travels beyond Egypt. Studies of Islamist mobilization in Tunisia, Turkey, and Iran also claim
that university graduates in medicine and engineering are a key source of recruits.13 In the most
ambitious and systematic investigation, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog compiled a sample
of 404 violent Islamists from several different movements and regions. They concluded that
“among violent Islamists … individuals with an engineering education are three to four times
more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in
Islamic countries.”14 This finding is particularly noteworthy as theirs is the only study that
compares the proportion of Islamist engineers to the baseline of engineers in the population.
Gambetta and Hertog discerned a slightly different pattern for 585 university graduates from
non-violent Islamist groups (including Muslim Brothers in Egypt). Graduates of medicine,
pharmacology, and science were more prominent than graduates of engineering.15
The fact that university students and graduates are overrepresented among Islamist
activists is not surprising, because this is characteristic of most social movements in modern
societies. Why, though, the association between Islamism and particular academic subjects –
engineering and medicine, and perhaps the natural sciences? There are three principle
explanations. One is that students of these subjects, as compared to students of the humanities
and social sciences, possess a technocratic mindset that renders them more receptive to literal
readings of Islamic doctrine. According to Gambetta and Hertog, students in applied scientific
subjects like engineering seek “cognitive ‘closure’ and clear-cut answers as opposed to more
3
open-ended sciences.”16 Students that possess this cognitive disposition, it is argued, see in the
teachings of Islam divinely endowed, ready-made solutions for society’s ills, which they apply in
the same manner as one might apply scientific knowledge to solve profane technical problems.
This suggests a natural affinity between the mode and method of the applied sciences and
literalist hermeneutics.17 A modern technical university education, it follows, can be more of a
boon than a hindrance to Islamic activism.18 A corollary claim, made by Kandil, is that Islamists
recruit doctors and engineers, as opposed to students of the social sciences, because they favor
“obedience over analytical thinking.”19 In his argument, a membership constituted by pliant
engineers and uncritical natural scientists contributed to the Muslim Brothers’ downfall in the
years following the 25 January Revolution that ousted Husni Mubarak.
A second explanation is relative deprivation. Since the 1970s, Middle Eastern universities
have overproduced science and engineering graduates, despite declining employment
opportunities and widespread economic immiseration. In Egypt, for instance, universities
overproduced engineering graduates by a ratio of 2:1 in the 1980s, relative to the number of
employment opportunities.20 In the subsequent period, the annual number of university students
graduating with engineering degrees has quadrupled to 23,153 in 2013 alone.21 Scholars argue
that this “lumpen intelligentsia,”22 faced with “educated unemployment,”23 experience acute
relative deprivation as a result of being denied the social status and economic opportunities
befitting their education.24 Many of these alienated and frustrated graduates, this thesis suggests,
join Islamist movements as a consequence of their economic marginalization.25 The relative
deprivation thesis has also been deployed counterfactually to explain the absence of doctors and
engineers amongst violent Islamists in Saudi Araba, where university graduates enjoy better
employment prospects.26 This does not explain, however, the reportedly large number of science
4
and engineering graduates amongst second-generation Islamists in Western Europe, where
relative deprivation is hardly relevant.27 Moreover, several Middle Eastern countries with the
objective conditions for relative deprivation have not experienced Islamist mobilization.28
A third explanation, which derives its theoretical rationale from the literature on student
activism in the West, is that Islamists are drawn from student elites. Ibrahim anticipated this
thesis when he observed that Egyptian Islamists tended to be admitted into university faculties
that require very high scores on the general examinations taken in the final year of secondary
school.29 Gambetta and Hertog also claimed that graduates with elite degrees are especially
prevalent in non-violent Islamist movements in Egypt and Jordan.30 Ahmed Abdalla, in his
history of the Egyptian student movement, noted that engineering students of various political
stripes – including nationalists, socialists, and liberals – formed the leading edge of antigovernment protestors in the late 1960s.31 One engineering student attributed this tendency to the
Ministry of Education’s decision to place the highest achieving secondary school students in
faculties of engineering, “causing them to be prominent in politics as they were prominent in
science.”32
This accords with findings on student mobilization outside of the Islamic world. After the
upsurge in student protest in the 1960s, Meyer and Rubinson argued that “the most politically
active students are those with high social class backgrounds, high levels of academic ability, …
and a high sense of social and political efficacy.”33 This generalization has been vindicated by a
handful of rigorous multivariate analyses of student mobilization, pertaining to left-wing protest
in the United States since 1960. Those studies found that more selective universities tended to
have higher levels of mobilization.34 Students with higher grades and pursuing academic (rather
than vocational) subjects were also more likely to protest.35 One plausible explanation for this
5
pattern of activism is that elite students possess a greater sense of personal efficacy, feeling that
as individuals they can comprehend and influence the political system. Longitudinal surveys
demonstrate that personal efficacy helps to predict subsequent participation in activist groups.36
The literature on Islamist mobilization also spotlights the tendency for Islamist activists
to come from lay backgrounds, lacking formal religious training.37 “Not only the Islamist
leaders,” notes Charles Kurzman, “but also the rank and file emerge disproportionately from
secular universities.”38 Conventional wisdom dictates that this lack of formal theological training
reflects and reproduces a shift in religious authority away from traditional scholastic structures to
lay Muslim publics. This shift, it is argued, followed the belated adoption of print capitalism
across the Islamic world in the late nineteenth century.39 A crisis of authority in Islam’s clerical
class, widely perceived as ineffective in the face of European colonial encroachment,
compounded this trend.40 After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of mass
Islamic social movements – led by a newly urbanized and literate class of teachers, government
officials, and students – marked an unprecedented rupture with prior traditions of Islamic
associationalism.41 No longer did Muslims need a formal religious education to speak publicly in
the name of Islam. As Gregory Starrett and others have chronicled, the privatization of Islamic
associational activities accelerated in the 1970s, following the rise of new modes of Islamic
revivalism and new forms of socio-religious consumption that stood outside of traditional
structures of Islamic religious authority.42
In Egypt, formal religious instruction is traditionally received at al-Azhar university,
historically one of the most prestigious institutions for Sunni Islamic education. In the 1960s, the
university was brought within the ambit of state control: female students were admitted for the
first time and new faculties opened teaching non-religious subjects, such as medicine,
6
engineering, and business studies.43 Still, all students at al-Azhar, regardless of their chosen
specialization, must pass a religious component as part of their degrees. To be admitted into the
university, students at secondary school sit an examination that tests knowledge of Islam. Most
of these applicants have studied in al-Azhar’s national network of primary and secondary
schools, where they are expected to have memorized the Qurʾan by the age of fifteen. For our
purposes, it is important to note that scholarship on Islamism in Egypt has hitherto assumed that
Islamist activists are to be “found mainly among middle-class urban students of the secular
universities, not among the religiously educated students of al-Azhar’s colleges.”44
This deficit is attributed to the supposed antipathy Islamists hold for the country’s
religious institutions and traditional Islamic scholasticism. This contrasts with the Dar al-ʿUlum,
which is notable in Egypt for being the sole faculty in the public university system that provides
religious instruction, albeit in the context of modern pedagogical training. The Dar al-ʿUlum
counts several prominent Islamists amongst its alumni and former staff and has historically
drawn the support of the Muslim Brothers who endorsed its reform-minded mission of providing
modern teacher training in an Islamic context.45 While the status of the Dar al-ʿUlum has been
significantly diminished in recent years, primarily due to the opening of secular faculties of
education, scholars continue to associate it with Islamist activism.46
2. Sources
In July 2013, a military coup removed Islamist President Muhammad Mursi from office. Since
then, the Muslim Brothers and Mursi’s Islamist allies have been the targets of a wave of
repression that has seen tens of thousands arrested. Egypt’s judiciary has handed down mass
death sentences to supporters of the former president, while journalists and human rights groups
7
report the widespread use of torture against detainees. To investigate the social contexts of
Islamist activism, we exploit original data on 1,719 Islamist undergraduates detained in the
eighteen months following the coup. These data were compiled by the Muslim Brothers for
submission to the International Criminal Court as evidence of human rights abuses.47
Information includes date and place of arrest, and court case number; university, faculty, and
year of study; home address and contact details for next of kin, including telephone numbers and
email addresses. The same source provides similarly detailed data on 196 undergraduates who
were killed, and on 446 who were excluded or suspended from university.
The students in these samples are young Islamists, predominantly Muslim Brothers, who
were involved in street protests and anti-coup activism organized under the umbrella of the proMursi National Alliance to Support Legitimacy.48 The most common places of arrest were on
campus (41%) and at protests outside of university (35%). Students were most likely to be killed
while protesting (88%).49 To establish the reliability of the data, we compared students’ names
with an online database compiled by Egyptian human rights activists of those arrested and killed
since the 2013 coup. We also conducted web searches of students’ names to fill in missing
observations.
The primary limitation of using arrests to measure activism in Egypt is that they
underestimate the participation of women. Women were only a tiny minority of those arrested
(2%) and killed (3%), because the regime tends to spare women from these severe forms of
repression. Thus women form a much higher proportion of students who have been excluded or
suspended from university (39%). There is no reason to think that the data is subject to any other
selection biases.
8
In matching the number of activists to the number of university students, we exclude
private universities, technical institutes, and academies. These accounted for only a small
minority of students arrested (9%) and killed (11%), and for none of the exclusions.
Data on Egypt’s 23 public universities are collated by the Higher Council for Universities.50 The
Council’s office in Cairo University holds a volume for the 2013-2014 academic year, recording
the number of undergraduates by institution, faculty, sex, and year of study. Al-Azhar
University, which is administered separately, has information on the number of students
graduating in the 2012-2013 academic year, the last year for which data is available, by faculty,
institution, and sex.51 To estimate the number of students enrolled at al-Azhar, we multiply the
number of graduates by the duration of their degree.52
The university admissions process requires some further remarks. Most students who
pursue higher education go to a public university or al-Azhar; a minority choose private
universities, technical institutes, or academies. Academic prestige in Egypt, unlike in the United
States or the United Kingdom, attaches primarily to discipline rather than to institution. The
exception to this rule is the prestigious American University of Cairo, but it educates less than
0.01% of Egyptian university students. Public universities do not form a hierarchical system as in
the United States, from the flagship state campus to ‘directional’ universities. Admission into
university in Egypt is based on a student’s grade in the examination taken in the final year of
secondary school.
Two years before taking the exam, students are streamed thematically, after having
chosen to sit either a science or literature-based paper. Traditionally, the science exam is
considered more difficult and thus more prestigious. Less accomplished students often take the
literature exam. Some university faculties only admit students who have taken the science
9
exam.53 Secondary school students seeking admission into al-Azhar are also streamed into
science and literature sections, in addition to being tested on their knowledge of Islam. Entry
requirements are only published after students have applied for a university place and after
students’ grades have been collated (a widely-anticipated event in Egypt, known as al-Tansīq).
These entry requirements provide our measure for the selectiveness and prestige of each
academic discipline. The entry marks are available online and are updated annually.54
3. Method
The combination of institution, faculty, and sex defines the unit of observation. There are 52
institutions: 24 branches of al-Azhar University, and 28 branches of 23 public universities. These
institutions are divided into 378 faculties. Each faculty in turn provides one observation for male
students and one for female. (Some faculties admit only one sex.) We choose to incorporate sex
differences into the analysis rather than to exclude women altogether. The dependent variable is
the number of students arrested. In total, 1557 students in these institutions were arrested; 1379
have sufficient information to be matched with faculty. Because the dependent variable is a
count, it is naturally modeled with negative binomial regression. Thus the number of arrests, ifs
(indexed by i for institution, f for faculty, and s for sex) is estimated by
(
)
m˜ ifs = exp b0 + å bk X kifs Sifsd ifs
The number of students, S, is the exposure variable. With twice as many students, we expect
twice as many arrests. The error term, , is drawn from the Gamma distribution with mean of 1
and variance of . The number of arrests relative to the number of students will be explained by
several independent variables, Xk. Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for all variables (the
correlation matrix is Appendix Table A1).
10
[Table 1 about here]
The minimum admission grade varies by faculty, and by sex within al-Azhar (where men
and women are taught separately).55 The examinations for public universities and for Al-Azhar
are graded on different scales (having a maximum of 410 and 650, respectively). We measure
grades as a percentage relative to the maximum; in both cases, a pass is 50%. These percentages
are commensurable across the two systems because they attract a similar caliber of students.56
Table 2 shows the distribution of grades across subjects, along with the number of students and
the number arrested. Some subjects, like medicine or engineering, require very high grades at
every institution. Likewise some subjects, like social work, are consistently near the bottom.
Other subjects, however, such as education, vary markedly across institutions. In these cases,
grades tended to be lower in peripheral institutions, as measured by distance from Cairo. Overall,
however, grades vary far more by subject than by institution.57
[Table 2 about here]
To define the broad category of scientific and technical subjects, we use the divide
between science and literature that is fundamental to the Egyptian education system. About half
the faculties require students to take science, while the remainder admit students with either
examination. This division is shown in Table 2. Scientific faculties – as we will term them – tend
to have higher grades: the average is 90%, compared to 73% for the remaining faculties. As well
as a binary variable for scientific faculties, we construct binary variables for engineering and for
medical sciences (including dentistry and pharmacology).
11
Just as the literature emphasizes the importance of technical and scientific subjects, so it
emphasizes the significance of secular over religious education. A binary variable is coded for
al-Azhar University.58 Conventionally, this variable would be expected to have a negative effect.
A binary variable is constructed for the one Islamic faculty in public universities, the Dar alʿUlum. Given the Dar al-ʿUlum’s history of producing Islamist activists, we expect this variable
to have a positive effect.
A binary variable for males controls for sex differences. Two control variables are
entered at the institutional level. The number of faculties captures the distinction between a main
campus and satellite branches, some of which comprised a single faculty.59 Geographical
location affects the accessibility of sites of contention and also the degree of repression by the
state. We suspect that students nearer to Cairo could have more opportunity to protest. Likewise,
we suspect that the Egyptian state would concentrate repression at the center rather than the
periphery. After mapping each institution to its district, we measure the distance from the
district’s capital (in hundreds of km) to Cairo, transformed by taking the square root. 60
4. Results
Table 3 presents the results. Coefficients are expressed as incidence-rate ratios (the exponent of
). For binary variables, this ratio represents how much it multiplies the arrest rate. In Model 1,
for example, the arrest rate for men is 54 times the rate for women. Grades are rescaled to the
range 0 to 1 (75% is .75) to increase comparability with the binary variables. Standard errors are
adjusted for clustering by institution, thus increasing the stringency of statistical significance.
The high value of α across all models indicates pronounced overdispersion (compared to a
Poisson distribution, where α = 0).
12
[Table 3 about here]
Model 1 follows the literature in focusing on particular subjects without considering
grades. Students in scientific faculties are arrested at twice the rate of students in other faculties
(excepting the Dar al-ʿUlum). There is no additional effect for engineering, but there is a strong
and statistically significant effect for medical sciences. The rate of arrests for students in medical
sciences is quadruple (1.97  1.64) that for students in non-scientific faculties. The arrest rate is
almost twice as high for students studying in the Dar al-ʿUlum compared to other non-scientific
faculties. Students at al-Azhar University are eight times more likely to be arrested than those at
public universities. Arrests increase markedly with the institution’s size. The arrest rate is eleven
times higher at the largest campus (Cairo University, with 19 faculties) compared to a branch
with one faculty. The institution’s location has no effect.
Model 2 adds the minimum grade in each faculty.61 The effect is statistically significant
and substantively important. Compared to a faculty that required grades of 60%, a faculty that
required 90% is predicted to experience 1.7 times as many arrests (5.50 raised to the power of
0.3). The inclusion of grades reduces the incidence rates (compared to Model 1) for scientific
subjects, engineering, and medicine. In other words, some portion of those effects reflect high
admission standards. The science requirement, however, remains statistically significant and
substantively important. The inclusion of grades does not, by contrast, reduce the effects of the
two religious variables. Figure 1 depicts how the predicted arrest rate varies by grades and by
subject. The baseline is the arrest rate in a non-scientific faculty (excepting the Dar al-ʿUlum)
admitting students with a minimum grade of 85%, which approximates the median minimum
grade across all faculties.62 The relative change in the arrest rate is measured on a logarithmic
scale. The graph shows that the estimated arrest rate for the Dar al-ʿUlum is based on only six
13
observations. Indeed, the difference between that and the estimate for scientific subjects is not
statistically significant (p = .08).
[Figure 1 about here]
Model 2 assumes that grades have the same effect across faculties and institutions.
Variation can be tested by entering an interaction term, though these results must be tentative
given the modest number of observations. There is no evidence that the effect of grades differs
between al-Azhar University and public universities (p = .52 for the null hypothesis that there is
no interaction). This lends support to our assumption that grades are commensurable across the
two systems. There is not sufficient evidence to conclude that the effect of grades differs
between scientific and non-scientific subjects (p = .10 for the null hypothesis that there is no
interaction). As Figure 1 shows, few scientific faculties admitted students with anything but the
highest grades, and so there is sparse information to estimate the effect of low grades in these
faculties.
Models 1 and 2 incorporate only three variables to capture differences among institutions.
Unfortunately there are no data on other relevant characteristics for mobilization, such as the
proportion of students living in dormitories.63 As an alternative, Model 3 includes a separate
intercept for each institution, which absorbs each one’s unique characteristics (and thus shrinks
dispersion, as shown by the reduced coefficient α). Analysis is thereby confined to variation
among the arrest rates across faculties (and sexes) within each institution. This excludes 14
institutions with no arrests or with only a single faculty. Model 3 shows that grades have an even
stronger effect in explaining variation within an institution. Moving from a faculty admitting
students with 60% to one admitting students with 90% doubles the predicted arrest rate.64 The
14
effect for the Dar al-ʿUlum now significantly exceeds the effect for subjects requiring science (p
< .001).
In summary, our analysis identifies three important factors that explain variation in
arrests (aside from sex). First, students in faculties that required the secondary school science
examination were more likely to be arrested, even taking into account admission standards.
There is no evidence, however, that engineering or medical sciences were distinctive. Second, as
the literature on student protest would suggest, students in the most selective faculties –
measured by minimum grades – were more likely to be arrested. Third, students who chose a
religious education – by attending al-Azhar University or by studying in the Dar al-ʿUlum – were
more likely to be arrested. This is remarkable only because the literature on Islamism has
emphasized secular education.
The analysis can be repeated with exclusions and killings as dependent variables. Their
correlation with arrests, divided by the number of students, is low (r = .39 for exclusions and .34
for killings). Because the numbers excluded or killed are much lower than those arrested, these
analyses are less informative. (Appendix Tables A2 and A3 provides detailed results.) There is
insufficient information to ascertain whether exclusion or killing varies with admission grades,
or for scientific subjects.65 Religion, however, is even more important than it is for arrests. In the
equivalent to Model 2, students studying in the Dar al-ʿUlum are excluded at nine times the rate
of other students, and killed at six times the rate; students at al-Azhar University are excluded at
32 times the rate of those in public universities, and killed at over five times the rate. The rate of
killing also diminishes significantly with distance from Cairo.
15
5. Conclusions
Before discussing the implications of these findings, we should acknowledge their limitations.
Our analysis assumes that the distribution of arrested students across university faculties
approximates the distribution of activists in the Muslim Brothers and related Islamist
organizations. Aside from the underrepresentation of women, there is no reason to suspect that
arrests provide a biased sample of Islamists in universities. Our analysis is ecological, of course,
and so cannot illuminate the process of Islamist mobilization.66 We also cannot distinguish the
effects of the university’s social context from the effects of the individual’s family background.
It is almost certain that students from better-off families tended to take the scientific rather than
the literature examination, and to achieve higher grades. Despite these limitations, our analysis
has the great advantage of comparing Islamist activists to the underlying population of university
students from which they are drawn.
Our findings are novel in several respects. Successive studies have identified university
students as a key constituency for Islamist movements, and argued that there is a strong overrepresentation of students of engineering and medicine in Islamists’ ranks. However, previous
analyses have not adequately accounted for the crucial denominator – the number of students
studying these subjects at university. The exception is Gambetta and Hertog, but their analysis
was constrained by the need to combine non-violent Islamists from eight countries to achieve a
substantial sample.
Our results demonstrate that Islamist students in Egypt come from the academic elite:
those who gain higher grades, and who have studied science rather than literature at secondary
school. When we control for grades, Islamists were no more likely to be drawn from engineering
and medicine than from other subjects that required science. As already noted, the science
16
examination for entrance into university is more prestigious. We can relate these findings to the
social movements literature on student mobilization in the U.S. and elsewhere, which has found
that student activists tend to be drawn from self-confident academic elites enrolled at more
selective institutions. Research on the mobilization of students in the West pays little attention to
differences between academic disciplines, because prestige varies far more across institutions.
While it does seem that (left-wing) protesters in the United States and Europe have been
concentrated in the social sciences and humanities, the evidence is surprisingly thin.67 Our results
build on the student activism literature by showing that Islamist activists are concentrated in
more selective disciplines. Viewed in this mode, Islamist activism in post-coup Egypt conforms
to the pattern seen in the mobilization of students in the West: academically accomplished
students were more likely to engage in activism.
There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that non-violent Islamists in Egypt possess
a technocratic mindset. While we do find that the arrest rate increased in faculties that admitted
students taking the science exam, these settings teach a number of non-technical subjects,
including the applied arts (graphic design), physiotherapy and home economics. Conversely, our
findings neither support nor disprove the relative deprivation hypothesis. We do note, however,
that most of the arrested students (62%) were in their first two years at university.68 This
provides some modest evidence against relative deprivation, which would surely predict higher
involvement from students in the final year of their degrees confronting the prospect of finding a
job in the near future.
The literature also claims that political Islam emerges from secular universities. In fact,
our results show that the likelihood of Islamist students being arrested and killed increases
dramatically in academic settings in which students receive a religious education. In particular,
17
al-Azhar University has emerged as an important site of Islamist opposition to the new militarybacked regime.69 In the six months following Mursi’s ousting, there were more anti-coup
protests in al-Azhar than at any other university.70 This leads us to conclude that the high arrest
rate amongst Azhari students simply reflects their prominence in the anti-coup movement, and is
not the result of a biased sample due to government targeting of religiously-educated students.71
We also note that the majority of student deaths occurred outside of term time, and that the
majority of arrests took place outside of university campuses. This raises an important question
for future research: namely, does our sample reflect a change in the social contexts of Islamist
activism, or has the proportion of Islamists studying in venues such as al-Azhar been historically
underestimated? We interviewed several Muslim Brother students while conducting research for
this paper.72 Informants reported that their parents, all of whom were Islamists, had enrolled their
children in al-Azhar’s network of primary and secondary schools to ensure that they received a
religious education. This could suggest a generational change in how Egyptian Islamists perceive
more traditional modes of Islamic scholasticism.
We hope finally that our analysis will encourage scholars of social movements and of
political Islam to exploit opportunities to locate individual activists in their social context.
Conventional politics is easily studied by surveying voters or matching electoral results to
constituencies. The characteristics of protesters, by contrast, are elusive. Event data culled from
newspaper reports and government statistics, the staple of social movements research, are usually
silent on the social backgrounds of participants. Data on movement organizations similarly
provide little specific information on the social context of membership. In rare instances when
hundreds of individuals participating in a movement can be identified (most often due to arrest),
then it is worth the painstaking effort to reconstruct their social context – where they lived,
18
worked, or studied.73 In this, our analysis advances understandings of the social contexts of
Islamist activism and underscores the importance of ecological data for testing assumptions
about the social conditions that produce political Islam.
19
Notes
1
See e.g. Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p.126; Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban
for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.201; Joel
Beinin, “Political Islam and the New Global Economy: The Political Economy of an Egyptian
Social Movement,” CR: The New Centennial Review 5, no.1 (2005): 111-139, at pp.123-124;
Nathan Brown, When Victory is Not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p.89; François Burgat, Face to Face with Political Islam
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p.158; John Calvert, Islamism: A Documentary and Reference
Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), p.4; Gillian Deneoux, “The Forgotten
Swamp: Navigating Political Islam,” in Frederic Volpi, ed. Political Islam: A Critical Reader
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p.60; John P Entelis, “Political Islam in the Maghreb: The
Nonviolent Dimension,” in John P. Entelis, ed. Islam, Democracy and the State in North Africa
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), p.61; John Espositio, Islam and
Politics 4th edition (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), p.256; Mahmud A.
Faksh, The Future of Islam in the Middle East: Fundamentalism in Egypt, Algeria and Saudi
Arabia (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1997), p.37n11; Fawaz A. Gerges, “Introduction: A
Rupture,” in Fawaz A. Gerges, ed. The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.30; Ellis Goldberg, “Smashing
Idols and the State: The Protestant Ethic and Egyptian Sunni Radicalism,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 33, no.1 (1992): 213-241, at p.19; Samuel P. Huntington, The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996),
p.112; Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
20
Press, 2008), p.344; Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt
Against the Modern Age (New York: Harper & Row), p.197; Glenn E Robinson, “Hamas as
Social Movement,” in Quintan Wiktorowicz, ed. Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory
Approach (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004), p.117-118; Olivier Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p.49; Susan
Waltz, “Islamist Appeal in Tunisia,” Middle East Journal 40, no.4 (1986): 651-670, at p.656;
Robbert A F L.Woltering, “The Roots of Islamist Popularity,” Third World Quarterly 23, no.6
(2002): 1133-1143, at p.1135.
2
For an important exception see Richard Mitchell’s classic study of the Egyptian Muslim
Brothers. In that early account of the post-Second World War Brothers, Mitchell observed
that: “Precise information of the socio-economic distribution of the movement is just as
difficult to amass as on its geographical distribution. But some hard, albeit random,
statistical evidence from the numerous legal entanglements of the Society is available to
suggest a membership drawn from most sectors of society.” Richard Mitchell, The Society of
the Muslim Brothers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1969]), p.328.
3
See variously, Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996); Salwa Ismail, Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the
State and Islamism (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006); Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic
Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2002); Reinhard Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World
(London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000); John Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the
Modern World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982).Feryaz Ocakli, “Notable
21
Networks: Elite Recruitments, Organizational Cohesiveness, and Islamist Electoral Success
in Turkey,” Politics & Society, Online First: DOI: 10.1177/0032329215584790, pp.3-4
4
Ibrahim, Saad, “Anatomy of Egypt's Militant Islamic Groups: Methodological Note and
Preliminary Findings,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12, no.4 (1980): 423453.
5
Davis, Eric, “Ideology, Social Class and Islamic Radicalism in Modern Egypt,” in Said Amir
Arjomand, ed. From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984),
p.141.
6
Ziad Munson, “Islamic Mobilization: Social Movement Theory and the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood,” The Sociological Quarterly 42, no.4 (2001): 487-510, at p.492.
7
Ayubi, Nazih N. M., Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (London:
Routledge, 1991), pp.82-84; see also Ayubi, Nazih N. M., “The Political Revival of Islam: The
Case of Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12, no. 4 (1980): 481-499.
8
Nemat Guenena, “The ‘Jihad’: An ‘Islamic Alternative in Egypt,” Cairo Papers in Social
Science 2, no.2 (Summer 1986), pp.94-99.
9
Kepel, Gilles, The Prophet and the Pharaoh: Muslim Extremism in Egypt (London: Saqi
Books, 1985), pp.214-221.
10
Hazim Kandil, Inside the Brotherhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), pp.34-36.
11
Raymond William Baker, Islam Without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Carrie R. Wickham, Mobilizing Islam: Religion,
Activism and Political Change in Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
12
Asef Bayat, 2007, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn
(Stanford: Stanford University Press), p.170.
22
13
See e.g. Elbaki Hermassi, “La société tunisienne au miroir islamiste,” Maghreb- Machrek
103 (January-March, 1984): 39-56, at p.43; Nilü fer Gö le, “Secularism and Islamism in
Turkey: The Making of Elites and Counter-Elites,” Middle East Journal 51, no.1 (1997): 4658, at p.56; Richard Yann, 1991, L'islam chi'ite. Croyances et ideologies (Paris: Fayard),
pp.247-248.
14
Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog “Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic
Radicals?” European Journal of Sociology 50, no.2 (2009): 201-230, at p.201.
15
Ibid, pp.208–9.
16
Ibid, p.221.
17
See Dina Rashwan, The Spectrum of Islamist Movements Vol.1 (Berlin: Verlag Hans
Schiler/al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, 2006), p.90.
18
See R. Hrair Dekmejian, Islam in Revolution: Fundamentalism in the Arab World
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), p.113.
19
Kandil, Inside the Brotherhood, p.36.
20
Clement Henry Moore, Images of Development: Egyptian Engineers in Search of Industry
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980).
21
Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics “Ijmālī Kharīgī Kuliyāt al-
Handasa/al-Handasa wa al-Tiknulūjyyā Wafqān lil-Takhsīs wa al-Nawʿ ʿām 2013,” 2013.
Available at:
http://www.msrintranet.capmas.gov.eg/reports/univ/emo.aspx?parentid=373&id=3453&
free=1 (last accessed 28 Jun. 2015).
22
Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, p.85.
23
Wickham, Mobilizing Islam, ch.2.
23
24
For the classic thesis on the relationship between relative deprivation and mass
mobilization, see Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1970). One application to elites is Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early
Modern World (University of California Press, 1991).
25
As argued by Ayubi, “The Political Revival of Islam”, pp.494-495; Ayubi, Political Islam,
pp.82-83; James Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1984), p.29.
26
Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan Islamism since 1979
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.188.
27
See Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog “Why are there so many Engineers among
Islamic Radicals?”, pp.206-207; Jonathan Laurence, The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims:
The State’s Role in Minority Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011),
p.70.
28
See especially Muhammed Hafez who offers a thoughtful critique of the relative
deprivation thesis as it applies to explaining Islamist violence in the Middle East. As he
argues, relative deprivation would predict sustained Islamist rebellions in Jordan, Tunisia
and Morocco, countries that have hitherto been spared the phenomenon. See Mohammed
M. Hafez, Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (London:
Lynne Rienner, 2003), pp.9-19.
29
Ibrahim, “Anatomy of Egypt’s Militant Islamic Groups”, p.439. Though see Ibrahim’s
follow-up study, where he finds the opposite trend: “The average age of Islamic militants
arrested and charged with acts of violence has dropped from 27 years in the 1970s to 21 in
the 1990s. Of the 30 militants arrested, tried, and convicted for attacks on tourists, three
24
were below the age of 20 (19, 18, and 16). Likewise, there has been a sharp decline in the
formal education of Islamic activists, based on this sampling – in the 1970s, as many as 80
percent were college students or graduates. In the 1990s, that percentage had dropped to
20 percent. Among these, those majoring in elite subjects, such as medicine and
engineering, dropped from 51 to 11 percent.” Saad Ibrahim, “The Changing Face of Egypt’s
Islamic Activism” in Phebe Marr, ed. Egypt at the Crossroads: Domestic Stability and
Regional Role (Washington, DC: National Defence University Press, 1994), p.39. Of note,
these proportions conceal very small numbers of activists, especially if the 30 militants
include non-students.
30
Gambetta and Hertog, “Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?”,
p.208.
31
Ahmed Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt (London: Saqi
Books, 1985), chs.8-10.
32
Cited in Ibid, p.213.
33
John W. Meyer and Richard Rubinson, “Structural Determinants of Student Political
Activity: A Comparative Interpretation,” Sociology of Education 45, no. 1 (1972): 23–46, p.
26. One phrase in the quotation is excised—“well-integrated personalities”—because it has
not aged well.
34
Peter M. Blau and Ellen L. Slaughter, “Institutional Conditions and Student
Demonstrations,” Social Problems 18, no. 4 (1971): 96–110; Sarah A. Soule, “Diffusion of
Protest Tactics: The Student Divestment Movement in the United States,” Social Forces 75,
no. 3 (1997): 855–882; Nella Van Dyke, “Hotbeds of Activism: Locations of Student
Protest,” Social Problems 45, no. 3 (1998): 205–220; Nella Van Dyke, Marc Dixon and Helen
25
Carlon, “Manufacturing Dissent: Labor Revitalization, Union Summer and Student Protest,”
Social Forces 86, no. 1 (2007): 193–214. One study, however, finds no effect for college
quality: Michael Biggs, “Who Joined the Sit-ins and Why: Southern Black Students in the
early 1960s,” Mobilization 11, no. 3 (2006): 241–256.
35
Biggs, “Who Joined”; Ronnelle Paulsen, “Education, Social Class, and Participation in
Collective Action,” Sociology of Education 64, no. 2 (1991): 96–110; Darren E. Sherkat and
T. Jean Blocker, “The Political Development of Sixties’ Activists: Identifying the Influence of
Class, Gender, and Socialization on Protest Participation,” Social Forces 72, no. 3 (1994):
821–842. The last two present similar analyses of the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel
Study (YPSPS).
36
In addition to analyses of the YPSPS, see Steven E. Finkel and Edward N. Muller, “Rational
Choice and the Dynamics of Collective Political Action: Evaluating Alternative Models with
Panel Data,” American Political Science Review, 92, no. 1 (1998): 37–49. A recent review is
Fletcher Winston, “Decisions to Make a Difference: The Role of Efficacy in Moderate
Student Activism,” Social Movement Studies 12, no.4 (2013): 414–28.
37
See e.g. Ayubi, “The Political Revival of Islam”, p.494; Burgat, Face to Face with Political
Islam, p.158; Sami Zubaida, Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East (London:
I.B. Tauris), pp.72-73.
38
Charles Kurzman, “Bin Laden and Other Thoroughly Modern Muslims,” Contexts 13
(Fall/Winter 2002): 13-20, at p.14; see also Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi, “Who Are the
Islamists?” in Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, eds. Rethinking Islamic Studies: From
Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism (Columbia, SC: South Carolina University Press, 2010).
26
39
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1982); Juan R. I. Cole, “Printing and Urban Islam in the
Mediterranean World, 1890-1920,” in Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly, eds. Modernity &
Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press,
2002); Eickleman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics, p.111; Francis Robinson, "Technology and
Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print," Modern Asian Studies 27, no.1 (1993):
229-251.
40
See Charles Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Source Book (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002); Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and
Fundamentalism.
41
For that early history, see e.g. Khalid Adeeb, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform:
Jaddidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1998); Cemil Aydin, The
Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian
Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Brynjar Lia, The Society of the
Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement (Reading: Ithaca Press,
1998); Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization
in India (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982); Deliar Noer, The Modernist
Muslim Movement in Indonesia: 1900-1942 (Singapore: Oxford University Press); Takashi
Shiraish, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1990).
42
Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation
in Egypt (California: University of California Press, 1998). See also, Charles Hirschkind, The
Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia
27
University Press, 2006); Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
43
For that history, see Malika Zaghal, “Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-
Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952-94,” International Journal of Middle East Studies
31, no.3 (1999): 371-399.
44
Ayubi, “The Political Revival of Islam”, p.494; see also Davis, “Islamic Radicalism in
Modern Egypt”, p.143.
45
See Hilary Kalmbach, From Turban to Tarboush: Dār al-ʿUlūm and Social, Linguistic, and
Religious Changein Interwar Egypt, unpublished D.Phil thesis, St Anthony’s College,
University of Oxford. There are branches of the Dar al-ʿUlum at the universities of Cairo,
Fayum and Minya.
46
See e.g. Bayat, Making Islam Democratic, p.170.
47
Personal correspondence Mona al-Qazzaz 17 Oct. 2014.
48
Neil Ketchley, “The Muslim Brothers take to the Streets,” Middle East Report, Issue 269
(Winter 2013): 12-17.
49
Place is known for 1,070 arrests and 155 killings; percentages omit missing cases.
50
Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat
Ain Shams Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth
Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān biIjmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Alexandria Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam
al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ,
2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn biJāmiʿat Aswan Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth
28
Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān biIjmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Asyut Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam alJāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014);
Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat
Banha Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr
al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī
aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Beni Suwif Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿfi al-Jāmiʿi
2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher
Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Cairo
Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr alTaʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī
aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Damanhur Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam alJāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014);
Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat
Damietta Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth
Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān biIjmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Fayum Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam alJāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014);
Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat
Helwan Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr
al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī
aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Kafr al-Shaykh Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿfi alJāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014);
29
Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat
Mansoura Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth
Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān biIjmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Minya Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam alJāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014);
Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat
Monufia Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿfi al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr
al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī
aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Port Said Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿfi al-Jāmiʿi
2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher
Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat al-Sadat
Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr alTaʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī
aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Sohag Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi
2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher
Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Suez
Canal Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr
al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī
aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Suez Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi
2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher
Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Tanta
Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿfi al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm
al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al30
Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat South Valley Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿfi al-Jāmiʿi
2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr al-Taʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014); Higher
Council for Universities, Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb al-Muqayyadīn bi-Jāmiʿat Zaqaziq
Muwazaʿīn ʿala al-Firaq fi al-ʿam al-Jāmiʿi 2013/2014 (Cairo: Markaz Buhūth Tatwīr alTaʿlīm al-Jāmiʿi – Idārat al-Ihsāʾ, 2014).
51
Al-Azhar University, “Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb Kharīgīn bi-Kuliyāt al-Banīn fi al-ʿam
al-Jāmiʿi’ 2012/2013” (Cairo: Idārat al- Mʿalūmāt wa al-Ihsāʾ, 2013); Al-Azhar University,
“Bayān bi-Ijmālī aʿdād al-Tulāb Kharīgīn bi-Kuliyāt al-Bināt fi al-ʿl- al-Jāmiʿi’ 2012/2013”
(Cairo: Idārat al- Mʿalūmāt wa al-Ihsāʾ, 2013).
52
In the Egyptian higher education system, the majority of undergraduate degrees run for
4 years. However, students studying dentistry, engineering, pharmacology and veterinary
medicine complete a 5-year degree, while medical students stay on for a sixth year before
completing an elective in a public hospital.
53
University faculties requiring the science exam are: applied arts (graphic design),
agriculture, agricultural engineering, construction, dentistry, engineering, fisheries science,
computer science, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, physiotherapy, science (physics,
chemistry, and biology), urban planning, and veterinary medicine. See Table 2.
54
Tansik, “al-Hudūd al-Dunyā li-Kuliyāt Shahādat ʿilmi Banīn,” 2013. Available at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150628113752/http://www.tansik.egypt.gov.eg/AApplica
tion/Limits/LimitEB2013.htm (last accessed 28 Jun. 2015); Tansik, “al-Hudūd al-dunyā liKuliyāt Shahādat adabī banīn,” 2013. Available at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150628113340/http:/www.tansik.egypt.gov.eg/AApplicat
ion/Limits/LimitAB2013.htm (last accessed 28 Jun. 2015).Tansik, “al-Hudūd al-dunyā li31
Kuliyāt Shahādat ʿilmi bināt,” 2013. Available at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150628113553/http://www.tansik.egypt.gov.eg/AApplica
tion/Limits/LimitEG2013.htm (last accessed 28 Jun. 2015).Tansik, “al-Hudūd al-dunyā liKuliyāt Shahādat adabī bināt,” available at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150628113452/http://www.tansik.egypt.gov.eg/AApplica
tion/Limits/LimitAG2013.htm (last accessed 28 Jun. 2015). Tansik, “Bayān bil-had al-adnā
lil-qubūl bi-Kuliyāt wa Maʿāhid al-Majmūʿa al-ʿalimiyya nithām hadīth li-ʿām 2014,” 2013.
Available at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150628114033/http://www.tansik.egypt.gov.eg/applicati
on/LimitE2014.htm (last accessed 28 Jun. 2015).Tansik, “Bayān bil-had al-adnā lil-qubūl
bi-Kuliyāt wa Maʿāhid al-Majmūʿa al-adabīyya nithām hadīth li-ʿām 2014,” 2013. Available
at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150628113921/http://www.tansik.egypt.gov.eg/applicati
on/LimitA2014.htm (last accessed 28 Jun. 2015).
55
Where men and women studied in the same faculty, entry grades were very similar; the
correlation is .98 across al-Azhar’s 14 faculties that admit both sexes.
56
Within faculties, Al-Azhar requires slightly higher grades than public universities: the
difference is only 2.6 percentage points (p = .04), from regression with separate intercepts
for each faculty, controlling for sex, number of faculties, and distance from Cairo.
57
Institutions explain just 7% of the variance in grades, while subjects explain 77%.
58
Within al-Azhar, specifically religious subjects do not have a higher arrest rate than
others.
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59
An alternative would be the total number of students in the institution (logged), but this
is not statistically significant at the .05 level.
60
The “great circle” distance, as the crow flies, is calculated using the Stata program
geodist, written by Robert Picard. Alternative transformations to the square root provide
no improvement.
61
Including a quadratic term provides no significant improvement.
62
The median is 89%, or 83% weighted by the number of students.
63
As emphasized by Dingxin Zhao, “Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization
during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing,” American Journal of Sociology, 103,
no. 6 (1998): 1493–1529.
64
This range is not unrealistic: a few institutions included faculties that spanned the range
from 50% to 98% or 99%.
65
The 95% confidence interval for the effect of grades on the exclusion rate (in Model 5,
equivalent to Model 2) ranges from 0.39 to 1310. For the rate of killing (in Model 8), the
interval ranges from 0.047 to 4.4.
66
See here, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow,
Contentious Politics 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
67
M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi, Generations and Politics: A Panel Study of Young
Adults and Their Parents (Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 336; Roger M. Kahn and
William J. Bowers, “The Social Context of the Rank-and-File Student Activist: A Test of Four
Hypotheses,” Sociology of Education 43, no. 1 (1970): 38–55. Neither analysis is properly
multivariate.
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68
This is calculated from 1102 students whose year of study is known.
69
See Ketchley, “The Muslim Brothers Take to the Streets,” p.16.
70
Neil Ketchley and Michael Biggs, “When is Protest Repressed? Islamist Mobilization in
Egypt after the 2013 Coup,” unpublished manuscript.
71
We are grateful to Charles Kurzman and Michael Farquhar for encouraging us to stress
this point.
72
Interview with Esso and Hoda 6 December 2014; interview with Ehab 9 December 2014;
interview with Hend, 17 December 2014.
73
An important study matching individuals to their university context is Doug McAdam and
Ronnelle Paulsen, “Specifying the Relationship between Social Ties and Activism,” American
Journal of Sociology 99 (1993): 640–67. Individuals are matched to their residence by Juta
Kawalerowicz and Michael Biggs, “Anarchy in the UK: Economic Deprivation, Social
Disorganization, and Political Grievances in the London Riot of 2011,” Social Forces (2015),
Online First: doi: 10.1093/sf/sov052; Michael Biggs and Steven Knauss, “Explaining
Membership in the British National Party: A Multilevel Analysis of Contact and Threat,”
European Sociological Review 28, no.5 (2012): 633-646.
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