Min Al-Ekhwan ila Midan Al-Tahrir (From the Brotherhood to Tahrir Square), Osama Dorra; Cairo: Al-Masri Publishing House, 2011 So many books on the 25 January Revolution have come out that it took a title with the words "Muslim Brotherhood" in it to grab my attention. Osama Dorra is not a name that was known to me, but the 27-year-old renegade Muslim Brother -- who spent 10 years in the oldest organisation of political Islam in Egypt -- seemed to be onto something. The book opens with a sincere- sounding dedication to Egypt in which Dorra says he only learned to love his homeland in Tahrir Square -- witness to the most inspirational moment he ever experienced. It is as a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) insider that Dorra speaks about Tahrir; he does not speak for the MB but he offers invaluable insights into its engagement with the recent, transformative events, particularly where it comes to conflict between younger members of the MB and its leadership. Dorra's book is divided into three neat sections: "From the Muslim Brotherhood" (expounding on the generational gap within the Brotherhood and explaining his reasons for leaving after so many years of dedicated engagement); "To Tahrir Square" (expressing the moment of the revolution and being in the thrall of Tahrir Square at that moment); and "Revolution Log" (a day-to-day journal of events witnessed). Dorra opens the first section of the book with a remark made by the political science professor Heba Raouf: "The Brotherhood is a huge body blocking the doorway: neither is it able to get through nor does it let us try. We have to teach the elephant how to dance, as the English saying goes." The elephant in the room is a problem indeed. The work of the scholar James Belasco, to whom I was able to trace that saying, shows just how relevant this metaphor of the elephant can be to social transformation. In some sense it is all about an inconvenient truth. And that, according to Dorra, is how society should see the MB: a group with its own beliefs and battles but also its own conflicts; an inescapable if possibly obstructive side of political reality. He sees their pledge not to present a candidate for the presidency as a wise move, for example, since it betrays awareness of society's fear of them. It was following a problematic interview he gave Al-Dustor newspaper in June 2010 that Dorra left the group and decided, as it were, "to talk", to be his own activist. His first book, Inside the Brotherhood, I Talk, was introduced by the well-known satirist and political commentator Bilal Fadl. Dorra concedes that he might rejoin the MB; he still does not disagree with the MB in essence. But it is the tyranny of the older leaders, and the way everyone is expected to follow their decisions and policies without question, that made him unhappy and unwanted. In the present book Dorra expresses admiration for the younger Brothers as "all light, purity and restless enthusiasm: if they were in an open regime they would've filled the world with beauty". In a chapter entitled "Obsessions of Freedom" he goes on to see how such qualities were seen as "less wise and less capable" and "unready for change, fragile, lightweight, gullible". Yet the leaders' only justification for this is the young Brothers' failure to obey them. Freedom inside the MB is an ambiguous concept; Dorra says he cannot decide whether there is any freedom or not. One decisive moment came when it turned out that the powers that be within the MB were against participating in the 25 January Revolution. Young Brothers were capable of transforming reality and interacting with the people, however: they went against orders and they made a difference. Gradually older and younger Brothers stopped trusting each other; many young Brothers, for example, refused to join the MB's first ever legally recognised party, the Justice and Freedom Party, believing that the political organisation should be a separate entity. Scions of the MB lack the flexibility and faith of the young rank and file; and here too a form of patricide proved necessary. Dorra's doubts are reflected in the chapter "Revolution Inside the Brotherhood", which raises questions such as why the MB have the greatest following among the provincial poor, why they have no newspaper in which to share and debate ideas and views, why they deploy religion in the electoral campaign when their opponents are no less committed to Islam, how their suppression by the regime might have led to them attempting to monopolise religion, how they actively employ religion as a political magic wand with the poor and the uneducated, capitalising opportunistically on people's faith. This, Dorra poignantly connects with his own conflicting feelings as a Muslim Brother -- a theme he develops fantastically and somewhat narcissistically in an imagined Wikileaks entry on Osama Dorra and what the US Ambassador has to say about him to the Secretary of State. Self-aggrandisement of this kind is ironically a feature of the MB in particular and the protagonists of the political Islam epic in general; considering his honesty one can forgive Dorra those 20 minutes of fame. In the second section of the book, "To Tahrir Square", the author analyses and resolves his personal experience in Tahrir Square during the 18 days of the revolution, dwelling on the details of events and Tahrir as a space in which classes and differences dissolved in a sort of utopia of ethics and equality that rings true enough. Here Dorra is no longer a member of the MB as such, but a typical Tahrir protester recounting how "the Battle of the Camel", for example, promoted unity and determination. He spends a whole chapter on Mubarak, wondering what he might have been doing while all this happened in Tahrir. Dorra's own reductive religiosity comes through when he expresses the idea that it was divine intervention that resulted in success, not the efforts of the revolutionaries. Yet he gives a glowing account of the spiritual energy that infused Tahrir during those 18 days in the process, how it turned into a safe and righteous place. By the time Mubarak stepped down on 11 February, the young Brothers had demonstrated their aptitude enough to transform the MB -- as Dorra predicts. The third section of the book has nothing new or interesting or creative to offer, and it becomes clear by the time you turn the last page that the value of this book resides in its being a personal, insider's critique of the MB. Interesting to note that Dorra is unable to give up his own religious rhetoric whatever his position on the MB. Reviewed by Soha Hesham
