P1: WQS Trim: 138mm × 216mm Top: 43.5pt Gutter: 48pt IBBK097-01 Humanities Demy 216 × 138 December 3, 2014 13:36 10 Jihad Discourse in Egypt under Muhammad Mursi Ewan Stein Jihad has occupied a prominent position in the worldview, political strat- egy and foreign policy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which enjoyed a brief taste of power from 2012–13. Muhammad Mursi was Egypt's first freely elected, and first Islamist, president. He was removed from power on 3 July 2013 by a military coup backed by large sections of Egyptian society. Mursi and the Brotherhood had many enemies and detractors at home and abroad. For some, the Brotherhood was an irredeemably radical Islamist group that used elections to seize control of the state, but which would use this power to enforce its ideological vision on Egyptian society and declare a jihad against Israel and the West. 1 Others saw the Brotherhood as having sold out to a US–Israeli agenda in the Middle East. Al-Qa'ida, for example, accused Mursi of having 'abandoned' jihad. 2 Each of these interpretations fundamentally misrepresents the way the Muslim Brotherhood has conceptualised jihad throughout its his- tory. Jihad, as Rudolph Peters has observed, 'is a concept with a wide semantic spectrum, and its actual meaning differs from organization to organization'. 3 Often translated in the Western media as 'holy war', jihad has connotations inclusive of, but broader than, violence. In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, this chapter aims to show that the organi- sation's understanding of jihad has remained relatively consistent over time; where it has engaged with jihad discourse, it has done so to serve 176