In Egypt’s first democratic election after the uprisings, Islamist parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafist al-Nour party, dominated the polls. Though much has been written about the organizational efforts of the Islamist groups, one intriguing factor has been overlooked: the formative role of migration to Saudi Arabia for many Egyptians.

In our new study, co-authored with Talha Köse and Mesut Özcan, we reveal some illuminating insights about the real relationship between migration and the rise of the Salafist movement in Egypt.

Shortly after the final round of the parliamentary elections in early 2012, we conducted a survey with around 1,100 Egyptians. Employing stratified random sampling, we divided each governorate into urban and rural areas, including cities, towns and villages from each — though excluding villages in distant rural areas because of accessibility and cost. Afterward, using random sampling, we chose households and individuals to interview. Of the respondents, some 20 percent were part of a migrant family — that is, they or their family members had worked abroad for at least six months. Of these migrant families, 31 percent — 6 percent of the sample total — had a family member who had lived in Saudi Arabia.

The scale of the migrant experience among Egyptians should not be surprising. The newly established Gulf sheikdoms recruited Egyptians and other Arab migrants from non-Gulf Arab countries for newly created institutions. Then migration to Saudi Arabia gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s and accelerated with the 1974 oil spike, as Egyptians took positions ranging from high-ranking bureaucrats to unskilled laborers for development projects. While most Egyptians started to migrate for political and economic reasons, the causes of such migration differed across time. While politics also played a major role, especially in the 1950s and 1960s economic opportunities in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries increased the magnitude of migration. In particular, the oppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and other small Islamist groups by the nationalist/socialist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser pushed their supporters to neighboring newly emerging states in the Gulf and other oil-rich countries in 1950s and 1960s.

Troubled by the rise of Arab nationalism, these new Gulf regimes, especially Saudi Arabia, welcomed the Islamist leaders, professionals and workers, provided that they did not interfere in domestic politics and were loyal to the regime. Migration scholars, like J.S. Birks, C.A. Sinclair and Andrzej Kapiszewski, provide empirical data to contextualize Arab migration in the Gulf countries. The biggest economy of the region, Saudi Arabia, prioritized Arab migration to such a degree that, at its peak in the 1970s, about 90 percent of all migrant workers in the country were Arabs.