The Rise and Fall of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

In his new book Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days (Georgetown University Press), Eric Trager draws on extensive local research and interviews with Mohamed Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders to dissect the traits that helped the group win power -- in many cases the very same traits that contributed to its rapid demise. To mark the book's release and discuss the Brotherhood's near-term prospects, the Institute hosted a policy forum on October 18th, 2016 with the author and two other speakers, Nancy Youssef and Michele Dunne. Eric Trager, the Institute's Esther K. Wagner Fellow, was in Egypt during the 2011 revolt and has conducted research there frequently in the years since. A former Fulbright Fellow, he holds a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and has been published widely in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Atlantic, New Republic, and other media. Nancy Youssef is a distinguished Egyptian American journalist who currently works as senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast. During her long career with McClatchy, Knight Ridder, and other media outlets, she held top positions and played key investigative roles at news bureaus in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Washington, and other locales, covering multiple wars and garnering several awards for her work. Michele Dunne directs the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously, she was the founding director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, a visiting professor of Arab studies at Georgetown University, and editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin. As a Middle East specialist at the State Department from 1986 to 2003, she served at the U.S. embassy in Cairo and on the secretary's Policy Planning Staff, among other roles.