Love Me, Love Us, Love Him: Entangled Emotions, Marriage and Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Emotions are almost entirely overlooked in the literature studying the Muslim Brotherhood. Scholars rather pay attention to specific aspects of the group such as organizational buildup (e.g., Mitchell 1969; al-Anani 2016), internal structures (e.g., Abed-Kotob 1995; Lynch 2007), ideological transformations (e.g., Kandil 2015; Dalacoura 2018), competition with the state or others (e.g., Brown 2012; Pahwa 2023; Brooke 2019; Vannetzel 2020; Fulco and Abdelgawad 2025) or contribution to policy questions (Ehrenfeld 2011; Menshawy and Mabon 2021). Even in works which promise to be all exhaustive in helping us understand the group by examining multiple dimensions at the same time such as political opportunity structures, ideology and structure or organization (Munson 2001), emotions are still missing. The gap continues despite attempts to conceptualize the group as an “identity-maker” (al-Anani 2016, p. 34). Khalil al-Anani drew on New Social Movement theory as developed by Melucci and others. Melucci set three elements for shaping collective identities, i.e., cognition, relations and a “certain degree of emotional investment, which enables individuals to feel like part of a common unity” (Melucci 2013, pp. 44–45). However, al-Anani understudied the third element. For example, although he emphasizes “social networks of friends, kinship, and neighbours” (al-Anani 2016, pp. 68–69)—sites often identified in the literature as key loci for the generation of emotions—this does not lead him to engage analytically with emotions themselves. Instead, these networks are treated as components of the group’s organizational structure and ideological base, or as links between them. There are exceptions, such as Erika Biagini’s excellent analysis of ‘love’ as emotion inside the Brotherhood and Doha Abdel-Gawad’s fresh analysis of the voices of the younger generation inside the group. But Biagini ultimately adopts a cognitively reductive approach, conceptualizes ‘love’ primarily as a form of “power-sharing” (Biagini 2021, p. 559), or a tradeoff of rights and duties as she framed it. Abdelgawad’s fresh analysis treats emotions as part of understanding how young members assess political opportunity structures in the post-2011 Egypt (Abdelgawad 2024). These analyses dilute the specificity or centrality of emotion as analytic category that can sustain attachment and bind subjects (see Alsayegh 2025).

The gap in the literature contrasts with the emphasis placed by the Brotherhood’s founders, who stressed that the group’s creation was a moment of emotional arousal in which “hope” and “love” “captivated our hearts, unsettled our sleep, and brought tears to our eyes” (El-Banna 1990, p. 18). Hassan El-Banna, the group’s founder, conditioned the survival of the movement and its success in mobilizing its “Islamic mission” on a “real awakening in Masha’ir [emotions]” (El-Banna 1990, p. 18), and argued that the first step in reforming a member is “reforming his heart” (Ashour 1978, p. 47). The group thus centralizes emotions as part of its mechanisms of recruitment and indoctrination by stressing stages such as “washing hearts” (see Yakan 1985, p. 63), “love base” (Hawa 2006, p. 308) and “awakening hearts before accessing minds” (Interview, El-Sharnouby 2024).

This article takes emotions as a central analytic lens for describing and explaining the Brotherhood and integrates them as a structurally embedded part of how the group maintains engagement as well as prevent and deter disengagement. More specifically, three types of ‘love’ are constructed, regulated, and mobilized to keep members in as well as prevent and deter them from leaving. The analysis is divided into three sections. The first defines emotion and outlines how to study it through the analytic framework of “emotion regulation strategies”, as developed by Gross (1998, 2001, 2002, 2008). Section 2 examines this approach in practice; the Brotherhood’s emotion regulation strategies as evidenced in a specific social relationship of marriage which generates the emotion of ‘conjugal love’. My work this aligns with growing interest in connecting emotions and relations (Hochschild 1979, p. 554; see also Hochschild 2004). Marriage is not merely the culmination of fleeting ‘romantic’ bonding of emotions in relations such as marriage. It is about interests of individuals and groups. As “an ideal, a duty and a social responsibility” (Gupta 1976, p. 79), endogamous and arranged marriage can serve interests of specific groups of certain classes, castes or religions. The section also shows how conjugal love is produced in arranged and endogamous marriage situations fully controlled by the Brotherhood to serve its mechanisms for members to stay in and not to leave out.

Analysis moves beyond generating conjugal love. As it is produced in marriage, conjugal love (which I also refer to as marital love or love for the spouse) gets entangled with two other ‘loves’, which I refer as ‘love for the group’ as a collective emotion and ‘love for God’ as a transcendent emotion. I define ‘entanglement’ in the specific sense of describing a certain pattern of mutual involvement and inseparability between the three ‘loves’. Analysis below shows how these interwoven emotional elements—marital love, love for the group and love for God—cannot be easily disentangled by individuals leaving the group or abandoning one love (love for the group) rather than the two others. The entanglement is not the same as fusion or collapse. Each type of love can keep its own distinctive features, but the group entangles it with the two others by subordination and anchoring; love for the spouse is subordinated to love for the group, and love for the group is anchored into the love for God.

Love is weaponized by the Brotherhood in the face of those who try to leave the group or those who left it already. In the generation of conjugal love and its entanglement with the two other loves, the group gains enough emotional capital to prevent disengagement by creating a form of emotional monopolization. It structurally blocks any alternative pathways and prevents any emotional autonomy. Individual members are not free to feel emotions in their intimate interactions with their wives and children. Love for the group subordinates marital love through imbuing the latter with meanings of loyalty, sacrifice and trust as constituting love for the group. There is another mechanism to challenge disengagement: Deterrence. In Section 7, I demonstrate how the group increases the emotional cost of exiting the group through threats of divorce, social ostracism and fear of God’s condemnation. The two mechanisms of prevention and deterrence are interrelated. The group prevents disengagement by shaping the very environment and conditions around its individual members through generating conjugal love in endogamous and arranged marriage and through entangling this conjugal love with more dominant loves. Its control over the three loves allows it to deter disengagement by escalating the costs incurred by individual members in case of deciding to exit the group.

The analysis relies on written texts, including works authored by the group’s leaders as part of the literature taught to members within assigned curricula. This source carries the pitfall of fixating what is in reality a dynamic group that has evolved over time since its foundation in 1928. Therefore, I also conducted 35 semi-structured deep interviews with members and leaders conducted over the past nine years (2017–2026) during fieldwork in countries such as Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and the UK, where many members and ex-members now live, particularly following the events of 2012 in Egypt (for full details on interviews and the sampling, see Menshawy 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2024). Combining verbal and written evidence adds credibility and reliability by tracing same emotions at two different fields of analysis. To protect interviewees’ identities, I followed their stated preferences. Some are identified by their real names, particularly those who have publicly positioned themselves as researchers, analysts, or ex-members of the group, while others are referred to by initials or pseudonyms.

2. Emotion Regulation Strategies: Analytic Framework

I adopt Gross’s model of “emotion regulation strategy” as he conceptualizes emotions as mainly arising from situations perceived as relevant to one’s goals and evolve to serve enduring purposes (Gross and Thompson 2007, p. 4; see Lazarus 1991). An individual can be an emotion regulator, especially as emotions are basically “changes in subjective experience, behaviour, or physiology” (Gross 2008, p. 499). This means that emotion regulation strategies encompass “intrinsic” regulation (self-regulation) as emotion relates to internal subjective states such as becoming happy or sad. However, strategies can also entail “extrinsic” regulation (regulation by others) which can impact the intrinsic regulation (such as the power of society to allow or block conditions and structures to express or emphasize specific emotions). The article combines both intrinsic and extrinsic levels as it shows how the Brotherhood exercises extrinsic regulation of emotions in ways that cultivate and normalize intrinsic self-regulation among members.

Gross identifies five families of emotion regulation processes that operate at different stages of emotional generation. I can summarize as follows:

• “Situation selection” refers to shaping members’ exposure to situations, thereby “shap[ing] the emotion trajectory from the earliest possible point” (Gross 2008, p. 501).
• “Situation modification” involves altering physical or social environments to generate emotions such as solidarity (Gross 2008, p. 501).
• “Attentional deployment” refers to redirecting attention within a situation to influence emotional responses (Gross 2008, p. 502). This includes forms of “distraction”, whereby attention is shifted away from undesirable emotions or their sources (Stifter and Moyer 1991), as well as changes in internal focus.
• “Cognitive change” emphasizes the cognitive bases of emotion, including perceptions, memories, and beliefs (Gross 2008, p. 502; see Stein 1989; Erhard 2025).
• “Response modulation” concerns influencing emotional expression or experience, including “expressive suppression” (Gross 2002). This includes reframing positive emotions (e.g., feeling ‘free’) as negative ones (e.g., feeling ‘un-free’) though selecting and modifying situations in marriage as our main example.

Gross’s model is useful for analysis below as it can link emotion with their uses. Emotions are intentions or, Harré succinctly put it, “they are ‘about’ something, in a very general sense” (Harré 1986, p. 8). The model can help understand phenomena at its oppositional level, that is staying in and not leaving out. Scholars have long treated emotions as about what to do and what not to do; that is how actors can motivate, reinforce, and encourage certain behaviours and attitudes on the one hand, and how can they “restrain undesirable attitudes and behaviours” on the other (Armon-Jones 1986, p. 34; also see Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2013).

Gross’s model of emotion regulation strategies is grounded in the generation of emotion and its two central features: evaluation and moralization. Emotions are “appraisals or value judgements” that ascribe importance to things and persons around us (Nussbaum 2001, p. 4; see also Scherer 1984, p. 296; Abdelgawad 2024, p. 42). They take shape within a “local moral order” (Harré 1986, p. 8), where some emotions are approved behavioural displays and others disapproved for violating this order. A group such as the Brotherhood can thus establish its own local moral order, defining “systems of rights, obligations, duties and conventions of evaluation” (Harré 1986, p. 8), and reward or punish members for displaying certain emotions (see Kleinman 1996). Staying in or leaving may follow distinct “feeling rules,” or “social guidelines” governing which emotions to feel and how to express them (Hochschild 1979, p. 563). Moralization therefore draws the line between “right” and “wrong” emotions (Pahwa 2019; see also Jasper and Zhelnina 2023, p. 46).

Three caveats guide my analysis. First, I move beyond definitional debates to treat emotions as regulated processes serving specific purposes. Accordingly, I do not differentiate between terms such as ‘affect’, ‘feeling’, and ‘sentiment’, treating them as semantic equivalents of ‘emotion’—a position long adopted in the literature (e.g., Schott 1979, p. 1319). This avoids overly mechanical and contested categorizations such as Wendy Pearlman’s ‘crowd feelings,’ ‘affective orientations,’ or ‘reflex feelings’ (Pearlman 2013, p. 391). My analysis therefore focuses not on what emotions are in the Brotherhood per se, but on what they are used for (see Hochschild’s “emotion work,” Hochschild 1979, p. 561).

The second caveat is that I focus on a specific emotion and its entangled variants: conjugal love. This means that other emotions may fall outside the scope of analysis. I argue that conjugal love is sufficiently distinct to warrant focused attention. It has a specific point of emergence: it arises through marriage rather than preceding it. As implied in the term itself, conjugal love is tied to the particular relation and moment in which it is generated. Its analytic specificity is reinforced by the fact that it is institutionalized through relations of power and status (Barbalet 2006, pp. 31–55), especially in traditional societies such as those in which Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood operates. In these contexts, marriage is arranged through structured processes of socialization that prioritize family ideals and co-parenthood (Goode 1959, p. 40). Conjugal love is also a religious form of emotion, subordinated to love for the group and anchored in love for God. This aligns with my analysis of a group such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which takes religion as central to its mission and behaviour. Marriage is thus not about the couple, the family or society. It is about God or “the intimate partnership of life and love established by the Creator and governed by His laws” (Catechism of the Catholic Church [1994] 1997).

The third caveat concerns power. As noted, conjugal love helps delineate power relations inside the Brotherhood. Decisions over suitable partners are shaped by collective rules of eligibility, and marriage rituals serve the group’s interests and local moral order. As in many traditional societies, partner selection prioritizes “obedience,” “good character,” and family status (Gupta 1976, p. 78). The analysis below thus focuses on how the Brotherhood as a collective exercises power by monopolizing members’ emotions. This may give the impression that members are always passive and subordinate, accepting the situations and acting by the rules governing them. It also glosses over differences and trends inside the group which can vary in their emotional experiences and inter-generational understandings (Abdelgawad 2024, pp. 89–93; see also Wickham 2014). This article has to be humbly taken as a first step, to be followed by further work examining how such hierarchically imposed power can be challenged, resisted and falsified by individual members.

3. Generating Conjugal Love

In this section, I show how the Brotherhood regulates ‘conjugal love’ to serve its own interests by controlling the processes that generate this emotion. The section details several of Gross’ emotion regulation processes—situation selection, situation modification, and cognitive change—before mobilizing conjugal love by entangling it with love for the group and love for God.

The emotion regulation begins with matchmaking, or what Gupta calls the “mate selection decision make-up” (Gupta 1976, p. 82). The selection of a suitable partner is not an individual decision but, as in traditional arranged marriages, “a group decision involving several persons who are supposedly known to have experience and qualifications to find a better choice as against the free choice of the individuals” (Gupta 1976, p. 82). Mohamed Affan, a former member of the Brotherhood for 14 years, explains that the group acts as sole matchmaker:

It all starts in the weekly meeting of the usra [the smallest organisational unit in the Brotherhood, mostly consisting of fewer than ten members], where there is a slot called tafaqud al-ahwal [inspecting affairs]. The member can tell the prefect in charge of him that he wants to marry, or that he wants to marry a specific woman, usually also belonging to the group. The prefect then contacts the prefect in charge of this woman. They conduct a check that functions as a tawtheeq to trace feedback on her behaviour and performance in the group.

(Interview, Affan 2023)

Suitability is grounded in religious commitment to the group and its ideology. Mustafa Mashhour emphasized that marriage must be based on being “religious” (Mashhour 1986, p. 65), specifically Brotherhood membership. He warned that “if a Muslim brother does not find the Muslim sister with whom he would create the Muslim house, he will have to marry any Muslim girl who might corrupt his life and dissuade him from moving down the road of da‘wa” (Mashhour 1984, p. 66). In another writing, Mashhour urged women to marry only “saheb al-Aqeeda” [the person of faith], defined as “the person who fears God in his relationship with her and who helps her obey God and realise His satisfaction” (Mashhour 1979, p. 122). These expectations have become institutionalized rules. In 2011, Sobhi Saleh warned that marrying non-members would “delay victory” (El-Waziry 2011), referring to the establishment of an Islamic society and state.

Once a partner is identified, marriage becomes a Brotherhood-controlled process. The group assumes authority over situations and arrangements that sideline and marginalize any involvement of biological family members outside its ranks. This relates to the threat of “familial withdrawal”—the “withdrawal of cathexis from larger aggregates to … the confines of the nuclear family” (Slater 1963, p. 343). Members are even permitted to conceal their activities or membership from non-Brotherhood relatives (Interview, Zakariyya 2023), reinforcing this displacement of familial authority. Thus, the Brotherhood is keen to prevent any emotional disinvestment (Coser 1974, p. 1) from the group into biological kinship or ‘blood’ family members who usually have a say in the marriage situations and arrangements in traditional society in a country such as Egypt (see Menshawy 2020, p. 43). Affan recalls his wedding:

My father was confused and even bewildered and unsure what is happening. He was wondering ‘who are they’, as he does not know many of the guests in the hall of my wedding.

(Interview, Affan 2023)

The Brotherhood regulates wedding rituals, including permitted music and ceremonial practices. Heba Zakariyya recalled:

During the wedding, I was a member of an Islamic troupe that ran shows through nasheeds. These nasheeds follow Islamic rules and are therefore different from songs of the outside world.

(Interview, Zakariyya 2023)

Rules extend to no make-up for the bride, separation of sexes (Interview, Yehia 2023), and no handshakes between male and female guests (Interview, Fathi 2023). Regulation also extends to the marital home. Zakariyya explained:

Preparing our sister for the wedding, we stand by her side, including selecting items for her house. We buy plates and pillows and, more importantly, prepare the house for meetings, such as physically separating the lounge between brothers and sisters.

(Interview, Zakariyya 2023)

These arrangements are random acts of social solidarity. They are governed by internal rules. Mashhour, a founding leader of the group, defined the “ideal Muslim house” as “simple … not too small and not too big … separating guests from family members … and preferably containing a place for prayer” (Mashhour 1986, p. 70). He instructed that it must exclude “statues” and “gold or silver cutlery” (Mashhour 1986, p. 71). This reflects prohibitions on extravagance also emphasized by earlier leaders (Ashour 1978, p. 59; Gohary 1978, p. 64). Such practices shape conjugal love in alignment with Brotherhood rules and help situate conjugal love as part of the group’s collective identity as a sect (Menshawy 2024). The sectarianization is emphasized by securing a distinctive “lifestyle” (Interview, Zakariyya 2023) that insulates members through internal exclusionary social ties and isolates them from external influences or rituals.

Marital disputes similarly become collective concerns. Advice and mediation are provided by members rather than biological families (Interview, Affan 2023; Interview, Rami 2023), especially given expectations of secrecy regarding membership (Interview, Zakariyya 2023). The group also offers financial support during hardship (Interview, Salem 2023; Interview, Rami 2023). As Ashkan Yehia noted:

During and after marriage, the couple are fully aware that the prefect or the brother hierarchically above them in the group is their point of reference. This brother or sister is the main source of advice, arbitration and questions for the husband and the wife.

(Interview, Yehia 2023)

This also prevents any emotional investment into other collectives such as biological families. Members are thus taught “that they must get closer to fellow Brotherhood members than to their biological families” (Interview, Ghaniyya 2023), an expectation reinforced through everyday practices before and after marriage.

To summarize this section, such rituals and situations are not merely cultural forms but preventive mechanisms. By controlling whom members marry and how marriage is conducted, the Brotherhood regulates conjugal love at the very moment of its formation, embedding it within organizational structures that reduce the likelihood of disengagement. In doing so, conjugal love is generated not as a private dyadic attachment but as one already oriented beyond the couple itself. Its formation is inseparable from another emotion: Love for the group, to which it becomes progressively entangled by subordination as I explain in the next section.

4. Entangling Conjugal Love: Love for the Group

The conjugal love is further regulated by framing the emotion through entanglement. This subordinates conjugal love to another interpersonal emotion—love for the Brotherhood. Applying Gross’s framework, this subordination takes the form of ‘cognitive change’. The Brotherhood imbues conjugal love with meanings such as loyalty, sacrifice, and trust, thereby monopolizing interpretive authority over what would otherwise be a dyadic connection between husband and wife. In this configuration, the marital relationship loses emotional autonomy. The implicit message is not ‘I love my spouse and children as independent emotional objects,’ but rather: ‘I love my spouse because they are part of my love for the group’. Conjugal love does not disappear into love for the group; rather, it is progressively subordinated to it through these three specific meanings of loyalty, sacrifice, and trust which signify this entanglement.

In general, conjugal love signifies loyalty to the group or any group entity beyond the couple. As Gupta proves in her analysis of endogamous and arranged marriages in India, “continued loyalty of the individual to the family of orientation and kin group is the most cherished ideal” (Gupta 1976, p. 79). Marriage rituals thus emphasize role-oriented obligations rather than personal fulfilment (Gupta 1976, p. 79). The Brotherhood mirrors this pattern. By dominating marital decisions and procedures, it transforms conjugal love into a lifelong responsibility toward the group. Couples marry as Brotherhood members rather than autonomous individuals, interlocking marital and organizational belonging. Remaining married entails remaining a member of the group. Sustaining marriage signals continued loyalty. In functionalist terms, spouses share intersectional roles through marriage and organizational affiliation. The wife of the ‘brother’ consolidates her relation as his ‘sister’ in the Brotherhood, adopting the group’s terminology in reference to a make member as a ‘brother’ and a female member as a ‘sister’ and part of conflating ‘real kinship’ with ‘imagined kinship’ by naming organisational units as ‘usra’, a term which directly and commonly means in Arabic a blood family tie (see Menshawy 2020, p. 34). In line with this terminology, the ‘brother’ marries his own ‘sister.’

Loyalty is reinforced through reproduction. A key goal of marriage is reproducing new members, with instructions to raise children “on the rules of Islam” (Mashhour 1979, p. 125). Children bind families biologically and organizationally to the Brotherhood, further conflating ‘real kinship’ with ‘imagined kinship’ (Menshawy 2020, p. 43; Interview, Salem 2023). Several interviewees reported being born into the movement (Menshawy 2024, p. 9). As Ahmed Abdel-Gawad stated: “I opened my eyes in life to find my parents and my whole family as members of the Brotherhood. I was a member of the group by birth” (Interview, Abdel-Gawad 2017). This structure averts ‘familial withdrawal’ away from the Brotherhood by dedicating emotional energy to networks of “intensive interaction” (Lofland and Stark 1965, p. 873) exercised within the group. Biological relatives outside the group are further sidelined and marginalized in situations generating such interpersonal ‘loves’ (Menshawy 2020, p. 46). Spatial organization further reinforces this loyalty. The Brotherhood’s ‘federated system’ (Munson 2001) fosters dense social relations (Menshawy 2020) and reduces spatial autonomy as many members tend to live together or close to each other geographically. The smallest unit, the ‘usra’ [the family], mirrors the biological family and involves regular, intense interaction in each member’s homes. Homes serve as meeting spaces, thus embedding conjugal life within collective routines such as praying or eating together.

The Brotherhood demands undivided loyalty under principles such as al-takamul wa al-shumoul [comprehensiveness and fullness]. “Members are raised comprehensively—heart, mind, soul, body, morals, and behaviour” (El-Qaradawy 1979, p. 23). Within this totality, divided loyalty between spouse and group is minimized especially if we take the Brotherhood as a ‘greedy’ institution (Coser 1974) that disallows emotional division. Spouses are even given the task of monitoring each other’s adherence to behavioral rules, including dress codes, language, and collective prayers (Interview, Ghaniyya 2023; Menshawy 2020).

Sacrifice deepens this loyalty. The group’s leaders define love as readiness to “sacrifice ourselves” (El-Banna 1977, p. 4). Sacrifice takes different forms. Members must dedicate their “time, money, and effort” (El-Qaradawy 1979, p. 37) to da‘wa. El-Qaradawy wrote:

The Muslim Brotherhood has to make the da‘wa [call for God], his biggest concern, the center of his life, and the very goal of what he seeks after… Calling for God is the road of prophets and their followers, and the most venerated job in life.

(El-Qaradawy 1979, p. 72)

Historical exemplars reinforce this framing. Fatima Abdel-Hady recalled that her husband “spent most of his day working for the Brotherhood” (Abdel-Hady 2011, p. 49). She realized that “da‘wa took precedence over” marriage commitments (Abdel-Hady 2011, p. 49). Marital duties were thus subordinated to the group. Temporal discipline reinforces this hierarchy. Members’ time is structured through detailed schedules of collective obligations (Hawa 2006, p. 84). A member’s life is organized around the movement rather than the household.

Trust further defines conjugal love. Mashhour stated that marriage is “trust” (Mashhour 1979, p. 124), and he also stresses that trust acquires heightened moral value in the movement since it constantly faces the threat of state repression (Mashhour 1986, p. 67). Wives are expected to demonstrate their love by placing trust in the group and accepting the duties through which the group entrusts them. A wife “must preserve her husband in his absence no matter how long this absence lasts” (Mashhour 1979, p. 124). Arrest and exile are reframed as sacrificial devotion. Wives are trained to respond to interrogation and maintain secrecy (Interview, Zakariyya 2023; Interview, Rami 2023; Interview, Yehia 2023; Interview, Fathi 2023). Literature of the group stresses that to marry and experience conjugal love entails Adwar da’wiyya [Da’wa roles], framed as expressions of prioritizing love for the group (Interview, Ghaniyya 2023; Karam 1998; see also Biagini 2021, p. 548).

Although gender is not the primary focus in my analysis, it is worth highlighting that duties attached to conjugal love are gendered. Leaders valorize women’s “sacrifices”, framing endurance and suppression of sensual desire as disciplined virtue (Lewis 1960; Interview, Rami 2023; Abdel-Hady 2011). Rami described a wife refraining from wearing a nightgown in anticipation of raids (Interview, Rami 2023). He also reflected on other manifestations of sacrifice such as parent–children ties:

When I returned home after more than three years of imprisonment, I could not understand my son. He told me, ‘Dad, I am still trying to get to know you after all this time of absence.’”.

(Interview, Rami 2023)

The Brotherhood is keen to institutionalize these meanings with activities such as premarital training courses (Interview, Rami 2023; Interview, Aql 2023). These activities all create “circles of trust” (Interview, Aql 2023) further emphasize the two other meanings of loyalty and sacrifice by repetition and frequency of these courses. In these activities, wives are reminded of their roles in the gender order under which they have to prioritize their duty towards the group by raising children on values of “understanding Islam and making sacrifices for it” (Ali n.d., p. 31). This section thus shows how conjugal love thus acquires collective identification by entanglement with love for the group which members have to abide by expressing loyalty, sacrifice and trust.

The prioritization of love for the group through these meanings is reinforced through an emotional vocabulary typically reserved for intimate attachment and conjugal love. One of the group’s leaders, Abbas El-Sissi, for example, describes his encounter with fellow members in terms that evoke romantic transformation:

… When I met you and sat with you, I began to feel a strange emotion inside me, and I changed after having been like one who was dead. I began to taste the sweetness of loving for God’s sake with many of the young people—I love them and they love me. My relationship with God changed, and I began to feel awe and fear of Him, and my faith and devotion to Him increased. All of this happened when I met you.

(El-Sissi n.d., p. 26)

This narrative mirrors the structure of conjugal awakening: emotional rebirth, sweetness, mutual affection, and heightened devotion. The emotional grammar of couplehood is thus transferred to the collective (See El-Sissi 1984). Love for the group is framed not as ideological agreement but as transformative intimacy, capable of resurrecting the self and intensifying another type of love drawn on one’s relationship with God as I will explain in the next section.

5. Entangling Conjugal Love: Love for God

In this subsection, I show how conjugal love is not only linked to love for the Brotherhood but further elevated and anchored in love for God. Members are expected to marry in order to:

… build the Muslim house, the strong pillar of creating the Islamic state, and give birth to righteous children whom we raise on the pillars and rules of Islam … turning marriage into ebada and gaining the satisfaction of God.

(Mashhour 1985, p. 15)

These meanings were reiterated by other leaders. One reminded members “In your own conscious mind, you are marrying for Islam,” that “you have to also feel that you are united organically by Islam” (Ali n.d., p. 30), and that “you give birth to children and raise them up for Islam” (Interview, Ghaniyya 2023). Marriage is described as a “step forward to get closer to God” (Ali n.d., p. 30). All these messages aim to guarantee “Islamiyat al-zawag” [The Islamisation of marriage] (Yakan 1977, p. 56). Their force derives from repetition across the leadership. Mashhour even included a subheading, “marriage is worship”, urging members to “turn all of our lives into worship to get closer to God” (Mashhour 1979, p. 123). He defined “ideal marital happiness” as emanating from “piety towards God is the giver of happiness” (Mashhour 1979, p. 123). These meanings are shaped in practice. In response to Abdel-Hady’s complaint, her husband told her: ‘“Ya Fatima, we are trading with God—a trade that will never perish”’ as she narrated this response in her autobiography (Abdel-Hady 2011, p. 49). Such statements highlight the shift of conjugal love beyond loyalty, sacrifice, or trust toward the group, into love for God. Members are taught that marrying and loving one’s spouse primarily signify love for God.

This divine orientation of conjugal love is rooted in Rabaniyya. Derived from Rabb (God), Rabaniyya refers to “getting acquainted with God” (El-Banna 1990, p. 125) and striving for His satisfaction. Members are called to structure their lives—including marriage—as a continuous movement toward God. As Yehia stated: “The wedding has one single goal, that is satisfying God, and marriage has a similar one, that is the husband and wife holding their hands in a journey towards paradise” (Interview, Yehia 2023). Marriage thus becomes a vehicle toward divine grace. Everyday phrases such as ana ihebuk fil ellah [I love you for the sake of God] reflect this orientation. In intersectional terms, a spouse is ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ by membership and also ‘truer’ Muslim tied by commitment to God? This entanglement with love for God is instituted through specific iterative rituals controlled by the group such as wird al-rabitah, a daily prayer asking God to “strengthen their bond” and produce “brotherhood in God” (Elsasser 2019, pp. 288–89, 297, cited in Pahwa 2019).

Through this anchoring, the two ‘earthly’ loves become conditional. Love is shared under terms imposed by the group—always ‘under God’ or “so far as a higher love permits” (Lewis 1960, p. 152). The anchoring can take more of a hierarchical relationship; love for God stands first as more of a “divine energy” (Lewis 1960, p. 153) leading other types of love. Members must “marry for God” (Yakan 1977, p. 52), and relations must not come “at the expense of Islam” (Yakan 1977, p. 52).

This religious recoding has organizational consequences. Marriage and generated conjugal love become sacramental—not merely social or organizational, but covenantal. Conjugal love is framed not as reciprocal exchange (see Biagini 2021), but as “purposive commitment” (Taylor 1989, p. 76). Commitment shifts from “What is in it for me?” to “How can I contribute to the larger cause?”. Sacrifices become tax-free investments, rewarded by divine grace rather than material return (El-Banna 1977, p. 38). Meanings under which love for the spouse subordinates to love for group are thus justified and sanctified through entanglement with love for God. For example, El-Banna framed sacrifice in marriage as “forgetting oneself” and “suppressing one’s emotions” for “pure jihad for the sake of God” (El-Banna 1990, p. 61). The group’s control of marital situations is part of connecting with God through “spiritual and emotional homogeneity” (Yakan 1977, p. 55).

Love for God thus restructures power relationship inside the group. It does not begin with individuals loving God, but with God loving them—“not that we loved God but that He loved us” (Lewis 1960, p. 153). Conjugal love thus shifts from reciprocity to duty. Also, grounding conjugal love in Rabaniyya stabilizes it against questioning. Anchoring love in the “Beloved who will never pass away” (Lewis 1960, p. 145) makes reinterpretation difficult. Challenging conjugal love thus requires contesting the religious framework itself. In addition, arranged marriage adds a “plausibility structure” stabilizing meaning (Berger 1984, p. 378) on love as an emotion of vulnerability. As Lewis wrote, “to love at all is to be vulnerable” (Lewis 1960, p. 147). Religious anchoring protects against that vulnerability especially through externalization. Love for God is constructed as an external emotion existing “outside our own consciousness” (Berger 1969, p. 10; see also Menshawy 2022) and gets internalized through role socialization (Berger 1967, p. 4). Marriage becomes less about becoming spouses and more about becoming Muslims getting closer to God. Rabaniyya can thus recode conjugal love in transcendental terms and guard it from emotional drift.

Love for God sanctifies the Brotherhood’s regulation strategies beyond questioning, doubting or criticising. The group stands as the one in charge of representing and maintaining this love for God. It presents itself not as jama‘at min al-muslimin [A group of Muslims] but as jama‘at al-muslimin [A group of the Muslims] (Hawa 2006, p. 26). Slogans such as “God is our goal” reinforce this claim. As Pahwa notes, the group positions itself as “working for God” (Pahwa 2023). The Brotherhood monopolises access to God and to ‘love for God.’ The latter is thus offered to members of the Brotherhood on exclusivity. The group also uses this monopolisation to draw boundaries with the outside world, thus deprived of this ‘love for God’. El-Banna boastfully set the group and its members apart as those who share “a stronger iman” [belief] and those outside the group who share “a weaker iman” (El-Banna 1977, p. 9).

Finally, all meanings of love such as loyalty, sacrifice and trust are reframed by positive evaluation and moralization. For example, members are not coerced into sacrificing spousal love as a price to be paid as part of joining the group or as a matter of coercing members into this emotional commitment. Sacrifice is reframed as a reward of divine satisfaction. As Lewis argued: “We shall draw nearer to God… by accepting [sufferings] and offering them to Him” (Lewis 1960, p. 148). To go back to the example above of Abdel-Hady’s marriage, Hawash’s ‘trade with God’ becomes a “safe investment” (Lewis 1960, p. 146) since it endows him with obtaining this transcendental satisfaction and grace. Absence from home is reframed as sought-after sacrifice. The group’s involvement into rituals such as furnishing and designing houses are reframed less as interference into the marital relationship but a re-orientation towards obtaining this ‘love for God’. Making the house less comfortable is part of avoiding risks of “multiple distractions” from God including a “surrender to the senses” (Lewis 1960, p. 117). As one leader out it, if the house is “too comfortable, it will distract the married couple from carrying out their religious duties” (Mashhour 1986, p. 71).

6. Love Weaponized

The previous section has shown how disengagement is prevented through the institutional embedding of love. By instituting conjugal love within arranged and endogamous marriage and entangling it with love for the group and love for God, the Brotherhood constructs relational and moral structures that engineer love as a preventive mechanism against disengagement. It is sustained through controlled situations, meanings, and rituals that provide no alternative routes or opportunities for disengagement. Yet prevention does not exhaust the Brotherhood’s repertoire. When members attempt to disengage from the group or abandon the love for it, these same entangled emotions are reactivated in a different register—as instruments of deterrence. While prevention embeds attachment within institutional structures, deterrence operates by imposing or threatening sanctions that make disengagement too costly to pursue. The group weaponizes the entanglement, making it costlier to lose love for the group. The cost is risking the loss of the two other loves. This is an emotion work, as the group imbues counter-emotions experienced during exit with “negative” meanings such as shame, embarrassment and guilt.

6.1. ‘Divorce Him’

Exit destabilizes marital love. Marriage functions as the primary situation through which conjugal love is generated and maintained, and that situation is regulated by the group. Disengagement from the group thus threatens not only membership but also the marital bond built within it. Many ex-members, across generations and ranks, reported that the Brotherhood deliberately instrumentalizes the entangled loves to deter them from exiting it. The late Kamal El-Helbawy illustrated this pattern. Interviewed in London in 2017 at age 79, he became emotionally overwhelmed recalling the group’s reaction to his 2012 resignation (Interview, El-Helbawy 2017). His wife, Zainab Mustafa, testified:

When my husband announced his resignation from the Brotherhood during a TV show on air in 2012, many other female members began to ask me to divorce him. ‘Why do you continue living with him?’.

(Cited in Menshawy 2020, p. 35)

Mustafa admitted feeling “sadness and shock” and subtly reminded him of the marriage’s connection to the Brotherhood, which had arranged it. Although they did not divorce, pressures continued. As a female leader in the group, she acknowledged that such pressures extend across ranks and have led to separations. A similar case emerged as I heard similar accounts narrated thousands of miles away from London. In 6th of October City, a suburb of the Egyptian capital Cairo, Azza Afify reported pressure to divorce Sameh ’Eid after his exit. When ’Eid resisted, their marriage entered “a whole year of tension” (Interview, ’Eid 2024; see ’Eid 2013). Afify said these pressures “left me traumatized” and led her to seek therapy (Interview, Afify 2024). When she refused to divorce him, leaders ostracized her: “I was made to feel like an outsider or outcast” (Interview, Afify 2024). This exclusion was “very painful” and aimed at punishing both her husband and her refusal to punish him.

Divorce is not an unintended consequence of leaving the group. It is part of organizational penalties. Brotherhood literature lists al-tahdid wal-wa‘eed [threats and intimidation] and sanctions such as hager wa muqata‘ [estrangement and boycott] (Yakan 1985, p. 96). Though divorce is not explicitly named, hager linguistically denotes marital estrangement in Arabic. El-Banna endorsed such deterrence, noting that dissenters may learn through “depriving them of ties with their house and their brothers” (El-Mat’ny 1979, p. 50). For members long insulated within the group at most of their lives, this deprivation is a heavy price and constitute a “harsh punishment to be felt” (Interview, Zakariyya 2023).

Some would argue that this deterrence has been effective tool. Many members hide or undermine their exit emotions through “expressive suppression,” fearing loss of spouse and family as a response to their departure from the group. Tareq El-Beshbeshy stated: “It was too risky and costly to exit the group as I would lose my wife and my children. Out of this fear. I stayed in for years” (Interview, El-Beshbeshy 2017). This emotion of fear, defined as a “dispiriting emotion” linked to loss of control (Frijda 1986, p. 429), can stop changes in the group membership by maintaining the status quo (Pearlman 2013, p. 392). Members can cognitively appraise disengagement as too costly. Costs can include a goal conflict between leaving the group and preserving their marriage. Fear of incurring such costs is a deterrent in the sense of depriving individuals of “insufficient power” (Kemper 1978, p. 5, cited in Pearlman 2013, p. 393) to take such a decision of exiting the group.

6.2. Shaking Love for God: ‘Less Muslim or Non-Muslim’

The divorce penalty involves not only ‘response modulation’ but also ‘cognitive change’ or calculating costs and risks in case of disengagement. Marriage is cognitively invalidated by undermining its foundational premise: that the couple is united to serve the Brotherhood and gain God’s satisfaction. Exiters are treated as less Muslim or even non-Muslim. Since marriage realizes the Islamic mission, its validity is weakened. Tareq Aboul Sa’d recalled: “My wife … said that I would not be a good Muslim and would not keep my full commitment to Islam or its practices such as prayers (Interview, Aboul-Sa’d 2017).

Leaders reinforce this by equating abandonment of love for the group with abandonment of love for God. Disillusioned members who think of disengagement are urged to “read more Qur’an or pray more” (Menshawy 2020, p. 173). Their anger against the group is labelled as “satanic” emotion (Menshawy 2021a; Menshawy and al-Anani 2021). Leaders cite enough religious texts to establish this reframing such as prophet Muhammad’s sayings such as “He who separates himself a handbreadth from the community has cast off the rope of Islam from his neck.” (Nouh 1987, p. 14), or that “group is mercy and division is suffering” (Nouh 1987, p. 27), or and that “those who want to go to paradise have to commit to the group” (Nouh 1987, p. 24). Fear is intensified by hierarchical power asymmetries (Robin 2004) as is the case in a hierarchically rigid group such as the Brotherhood where rules as presented as orders to be fully and unquestionably obeyed by members. Ultimately, this weaponization reinforces leaders’ power by sustaining control over what members feel and how they interpret those emotions, even during and after disengagement.

Finally, positive exit emotions—such as freedom or independence—are recoded as shameful. Exiters may shift from ‘gaining the I’ and all positive emotions of feeling ‘free’ (Menshawy 2021b to shame and rejection (See Jasper and Zhelnina 2023; Scheff 2003). Such positive emotions are deemed “inappropriate” (Hochschild 1979, p. 567) and un-religious. Aboul-Sa’d described feeling “frightened, threatened, and disconnected” after being told he had forfeited God’s satisfaction (Interview, Aboul-Sa’d 2017). Leaving thus requires defying the three loves and the rules sanctifying them.

7. Conclusions

Emotions are not epiphenomenal to the Brotherhood’s organizational life; they are central to sustaining membership as well as preventing and deterring exit. This article applied Gross’s emotion regulation strategies framework to show how processes such as situation selection and modification, cognitive appraisal, and response modulation are systematically controlled to generate and manage emotions that support engagement and discourage disengagement. Focusing on marriage as a key relational site linking family, social life, and religious commitment, the analysis demonstrates how emotional regulation operates through social arrangements and ideological framing that shape which emotions members feel, how they feel them, and for what purpose.

Conjugal love emerges not as a private dyadic emotion but as a regulatory instrument. It is constructed through arranged marital situations, reframed as loyalty, trust and sacrifice for the group, and religionized as devotion to God’s satisfaction. This produces an entangled structure in which love for the spouse is subordinated to love for the group, and love for the group anchored in love for God—over which the Brotherhood claims privileged interpretive authority. Marriage thus functions as an emotional infrastructure for organizational engagement.

The emotional investments that bind members also raise the cost of leaving. Emotions that might support disengagement and related to feeling relief, freedom autonomy are reframed as shameful or sinful (for similar processes, see Blom 2017, pp. 127, 135). Exit is cast as emotional, social, and religious loss, reinforced through pressures on marital ties and threats of sanction. Regulation therefore continues beyond departure, especially through ‘response modulation’. Disengagement does not end regulation; it redirects it toward punishment.

I hope my research can shed light on the Brotherhood as an institutional emotion regulator shaping not only what members feel but how they interpret those feelings during membership and after exit. Attending to emotions illuminates how power operates not only through rules and ideology but through the structured management of emotional life. This analysis opens avenues for further research on emotions in the Brotherhood and on comparable “emotion-saturated” movements (Gould 2004; Blom 2017). My research is an act of solidarity with other scholars calling for the need to take emotions “seriously in understanding the goals, strategies, and work of Islamist movements” (Pahwa 2019) and politics in the Middle East in general (see Jasper and Volpi 2018; Jasper 1998, 2006, 2011). Furthermore, the article marks an initial step in that direction and invites future research into how exiters resist or neutralize these regulatory strategies rather than simply yield to them.