Islam or Islamism? There are many occasions when people confuse the two concepts, even considering them synonymous, despite the fact that the former refers to a major monotheistic religion and the latter to a political ideology, which nevertheless uses religion as a frame of reference. Furthermore, another major issue concerns the silence regarding the historical development of Islamism during the 20th century and its almost inevitable association with the violence and extremism experienced today in the broader Arab-Islamic world.

The purpose of this work, therefore, is to narrate the early history of Islamism as the story of an idea, some people, and a world that engaged with the challenges of modernity. By following the transition of the founding members of the Muslim Brotherhood from childhood to adulthood, we simultaneously reconstruct the picture of a world that was by no means static; on the contrary, it was changing and destined to become the world of Islamism’s childhood and adolescence.

What followed was the arrival of a new generation, born amid the Great Depression of 1929, the successes, dilemmas, and deadlocks, up to the violent interruption of the path towards adulthood. At the same time, that old world continued to change relentlessly, under the weight of the emancipation of local urban classes, decolonization, social radicalism, and military revolutions.

Through our journey across space and time, we will try to understand how the Muslim Brothers appeared and why the period of Islamism’s first youth came to an end, because only in this way will we more easily decode its subsequent ideological shifts, the conditions of its political failure, or its future reappearance.