Steven Brooke: “Mosques and Islamist Activism: Spatial Evidence from Interwar Cairo”

Why do Islamists mobilize in some mosques, but not others? We answer this question by matching a list of mosque-based lectures, sermons, and collections carried out by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in interwar Cairo with a geo-referenced 1:5,000 scale map series from the same time period. Our results suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood was more likely to operate in mosques where they enjoyed prior relationships and that were located in close proximity to transport networks.