Emotions in the Muslim Brotherhood have been largely overlooked in the literature. This article examines how the movement strategically regulates specific emotions—and the processes that generate them—to keep members in as well as to prevent and deter them from leaving. It focuses on conjugal love as it is produced through endogamous arranged marriage practices. Drawing on frame analysis of Brotherhood literature and fieldwork conducted in Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and the UK, the study shows that the group tightly structures marital formation, including matchmaking, wedding rituals, and the organization of the couple’s household. Conjugal love produced in this marriage is entangled with two additional forms of attachment: love for the group and love for God. This entangled emotional structure transforms marriage and the three loves attached to it into a mechanism of organizational engagement that can prevent and deter members from leaving. For example, the group makes the cost of exit emotionally high through threats of divorce, social ostracism and God’s condemnation.
Mustafa Menshawy (Wed,) studied this question.