The Muslim Brotherhood

The Arab Spring and its future face

Beverley Milton-Edwards

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415660013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317333647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Demokratie

The Muslim Brotherhood is the most significant and enduring Sunni Islamist organization of the contemporary era. Its roots lie in the Middle East but it has grown into both a local and global movement, with its well-placed branches reacting effectively to take the opportunities for power and electoral competition offered by the Arab Spring.

Regarded by some as a force of moderation among Islamists, and by others as a façade hiding a terrorist fundamentalist threat, the potential influence of the Muslim Brotherhood on Middle Eastern politics remains ambiguous. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Arab Spring and its Future Face provides an essential insight into the organisation, with chapters devoted to specific cases where the Brotherhood has important impacts on society, the state and politics. Key themes associated with the Brotherhood, such as democracy, equality, pan-Islamism, radicalism, reform, the Palestine issue and gender, are assessed to reveal an evolutionary trend within the movement since its founding in Egypt in 1928 to its manifestation as the largest Sunni Islamist movement in the Middle East in the 21st century. The book addresses the possible future of the Muslim Brotherhood; whether it can surprise sceptics and effectively accommodate democracy and secular trends, and how its ascension to power through the ballot box might influence Western policy debates on their engagement with this manifestation of political Islam.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book presents a comprehensive study of a newly resurgent movement and is a valuable resource for students, scholars and policy makers focused on Middle Eastern Politics.

1 Roots and Ideas

DOI: 10.4324/9781315659305-2

No one but God knows how many nights we spent reviewing the state of the nation … analysing the sickness, and thinking of the possible remedies. So disturbed were we that we reached the point of tears.

Hassan al-Banna ¹

Introduction

The old man sat outside a crudely whitewashed breeze-block dwelling. It was too hot to sit inside the cramped, stuffy one-room shack he called home. Instead, he sat in an alleyway where sewage water ran in open gullies of the refugee camp. His name was Mohammed, and he was the son of Mohammed and father to his own son named Mohammed. In the slowing of the day amidst the blanket of heat, he was reminiscing about an earlier time when his life was shaped and made relevant through his pious commitment to faith and his political attachment to a movement which offered him hope. Mohammed was a refugee. He and his family had fled their Palestinian village in 1948, and more than forty years later he remained stateless while Israel's Jewish citizens had built a new life in his home. As a young teenager, he had been introduced to the ideas and goals of a new movement which, he claimed, offered him hope that one day he would live again in his home, back in his village, and enjoy the security of a passport. That movement was the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, otherwise known in English as the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘These men were simple and pious believers who offered me an education and a dream of Palestine restored,’ said Abu Mohammed. ² Joining this movement in the Gaza Strip in the 1950s, he was educated in the principles of Islam as applied by the Muslim Brotherhood. In the ensuing years, the Egyptian authorities that administered Gaza imprisoned him for his affiliation with the movement. ‘But even in this time,’ he said, ‘I kept faith. I kept faith with the pious men who showed me that the path of Islam would bring me freedom.’ ³

The story of the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood is about faith and the impact, individually and collectively, of a pious attachment and its outworking. It commences with the Brotherhood's establishment in Egypt, in 1928 by a twenty-two year old man named Hassan al-Banna. Born in the small village of Mahmoudiya on the Nile Delta in 1906, this ‘preacher's son’ would be influenced by his faith and his attachments to it to become recognized as a principal inspiration for modern-day Islamism. He grew up in an age of revolution, anti-imperialism, and rising nationalism in Egypt. Al-Banna himself claimed that as a young village boy in 1919 he had joined his compatriots in demonstrations to support the revolutionary movement that swept the country as its nationalist leaders demanded independence from the British. ⁴

In this chapter a historical account of the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood along with identification of leading thinkers within the movement, such as Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, will be presented. The Muslim Brotherhood was initially established, as this chapter will highlight, as a religious movement for social affairs and preaching (dawa). Yet within the context of colonial Egypt and the rest of the Middle East where native power was subjugated to European political control, the emergent ideas of Islamist intellectuals embodied by the Brotherhood soon developed a politically responsive hue. This political hue addressed itself to the dilemmas of living in Muslim states in the modern age and the challenges of Muslim solidarity over emergent transnational issues such as Palestine. Almost from its inception, the Muslim Brotherhood became a growing force of opposition with a message that garnered appeal across the Middle East. This chapter accounts for and analyses the roots of the movement and the dominant ideas that its major thinkers conceptualized.

Al-Banna and the rise of a reformist Islamist movement

Al-Banna's early life bore much in common with the majority of Egyptians at the turn of the twentieth century. During this period most Egyptians lived in the rural lands of the Nile Delta in villages and hamlets where livelihoods were derived from centuries-old economic and social relations. ⁵ Historian Albert Hourani called this period one of ‘changing ways and thought’ where life in the countryside polarized; populations and cities grew; travel, education, and new media opened new intellectual horizons; and Islam both in its elite and mass form would emerge changed.⁶ Al-Banna's father, Sheikh Ahmad Abd al-Rahman al-Banna al-Sa'ati, was the village imam (preacher) and its religious scholar. Historians credit al-Banna's father for introducing his son to a life of religious piety, as well as training in religious scholarship and thought.⁷ In his early life al-Banna's fortunes were also inextricably tied to that of his father, and hence in 1923 the family departed from the certainties, traditions, and stability of village life in Mahmoudiya and moved to Egypt's bustling, dynamic, and explosively modern capital city Cairo.

Anyone who visits Cairo for the first time cannot help but be overwhelmed and overawed by this grand and noisily frenzied city. Cairo in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan and exciting place but one that had been reshaped and modernized since 1882 by British rulers. The gains of Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali (1769–1849) in terms of winning dimensions of self-rule from the Ottoman powers of Istanbul were rolled back under the British colonial project. And although only a year previously Egyptian nationalists had succeeded in winning a pledge from London that it would pull out of Egypt and grant the country independence, there were few who truly believed that the British would relinquish rule so easily.⁸ Such qualms were not misplaced, and it became apparent that behind the throne of Egypt's King Fuad the British would continue to dictate. In 1923 there can be little doubt that the teenage al-Banna's first experiences of the city were staggering, overwhelming, and powerful as he and his family were exposed to heady societal and political upheavals. Al-Banna's father soon ensured that his son was enrolled in a religious teacher–training school that was considered modernist in its pedagogic approach. This exposed al-Banna to the intellectual discourse of a new generation of Islamic scholars often described as reformist or modernist.⁹ Such scholars advocated new approaches to Islam to allow for processes of interpretation (ijtihad) that would permit the faith to be relevant to a modern context. This distinguished them from traditional Muslim scholars who sought to maintain the status quo. Scholars such as John Esposito contend that the reformists in ‘attributing the weakness of Muslim society to its stagnation and tendency to blindly follow and cling to past authority’ also had ‘one ultimate political purpose’ as well.¹⁰ The modern Muslim reform-ists included emergent and leading intellectuals of the time such as Mohammad Abduh, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and Rashid Rida. Al-Afghani, for example, was a highly influential reformist Muslim scholar whose ideas and approaches to the role and place of Islam in modern society were considered to also be in opposition to European colonial and imperial projects across the Middle East and Asia.¹¹ His approach created opportunities for Muslim nationalists and pan-Islamists to increasingly articulate their demands for freedom and independence from foreign usurpation and domination. Al-Afghani articulated a set of ideas that resonated particularly strongly in British colonial Cairo and were disseminated by his acolyte Mohammad Abduh and Abduh's own protégé, Rashid Rida.

Al-Banna's inquiry brought him into the same circles of Rashid Rida and other Cairo-based Muslim modernist ideologues of the time. Rida was a leading light who not only articulated his ideas within the confines of the mosque or particular study groups. Rida's approach was emphasized when he also began to publish a magazine called Al-Manar (The Lighthouse), which covered a gamut of issues and concerns that animated the Islamist modernist reformist movement at the time. In Al-Manar (which would later be edited by Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood) its many readers could access the nuances of debate shaped by Abduh and Rida's ideas on how Muslims should interpret their condition of social, political, and economic subjugation, as well as more mundane concerns about modern Muslim life. As a ‘mouthpiece of Islamic reform’, the ideas and articles contained in the magazine sought to validate to a public audience this new approach to making Islam relevant for purposes of adherence and practice, as well as the contemporary social, economic, and political conditions of the time.¹²

When his studies were complete, al-Banna moved to the city of Ismailia on the Suez Canal and took up a teaching post in a primary school. The city was a product of the building of the canal. Although Khedive Ismail the Magnificent founded the city during the construction of the Suez Canal in 1863, the British established a base there following the Battle of Kafr-el-Dawwar in 1882. Hence, the fabricated city must have appeared as inauthentic to this religious young man as the nature of the city's European-inspired architecture. Al-Banna was struck by the contrasts between foreign wealth and Egyptian poverty in Ismailia. He too was concerned that the Egyptian nationalist movement, spearheaded by the nationalist Wafd party, neglected Islam in favour of a secularist approach.¹³ Al-Banna established his new society, called the Muslim Brotherhood, as his response. Allied with some six workers who had raised grievances about their status and the yoke of British control over their lives, al-Banna vowed to act, though it was a crowded stage on which the Muslim Brotherhood would be established. Muslim and Islamic societies in Egypt flourished, but this was also an indication of the capacity that existed in Egypt at the time for the kind of message that al-Banna sought to spread. The Muslim Brotherhood quickly gained supporters and members, and al-Banna was able to establish branches across Egypt within a decade (and shortly after, beyond) attracting thousands to his new credo. The message was simple: improving piety and promoting the call of Islam and its manifestation in Egyptian society.

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood was part of a more general movement of nationalism and modernism that was influencing the Muslim imagination. The Middle East was no longer unified in Islam but increasingly fragmented under postwar and foreign-inspired forms of power and governance. In Turkey the caliphate had been demolished and attempts to revive it in 1926 failed in the face of the nationalist republic being shaped by Kemal Attaturk. European influence appeared to have an impact on Muslim culture across the region and was apparent in powerful measure in the Cairo and Ismailia of al-Banna's age. This impact was tellingly conveyed to an important audience in 1930 by Rashid Rida, who described the Middle East as engulfed in a time This was al-Banna and Rida's rejection of liberal secular ideas which appeared to prevail in the discourse of thinkers such as Taha Hussein and in the Egyptian nationalist movement for independence. Even the redoubt of Muslim tradition, the venerable Islamic university of al-Azhar in Cairo, appeared to give rise to scholars at the time who were reflecting a discourse of ideas which appeared to allow for a separation between politics and faith. This was perhaps best epitomized by the publication of Ali Abd al-Raziq's book titled Islam and the Foundations of Governance (al-Islam wa usul al-hukm).¹⁵ For al-Banna, state and faith were considered inseparable. Hence, the ideas of anti-imperialism, the promise of an authentic Islamic project, and the challenges of nationalism animated the discourse of the Brotherhood.

afflicted by ideological, intellectual, political, Communist and Bolshevik upheavals; in a time that is strained by religious, literary and social chaos; in a time that is threatened by women's revolution, the violation of marital vows, the disintegration of the family and the bonds of kinship … [where] nothing remains stable to raise our youths and teach them respect.¹⁴

When al-Banna formed the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, he reflected some of these developments in modern Egyptian political thought, allowing the new movement to attract members from across the social and class strata. This approach appealed to the new intelligentsia, resonating with their desire to engage in a form of identity politics that accommodated Islam. Al-Banna's chief appeal, however, lay with other classes in Egyptian society reaching out as he did to ordinary workers, as well as the merchant and artisan classes of the city. By 1932 he had relocated back to Egypt's capital and set up a modest headquarters in Cairo. Al-Banna had hoped to create an organization that was religiously rather than purely politically inspired. The task of the Muslim Brotherhood that he envisioned and strove to realize was to recreate a truly Islamic society that publicly reflected the fundamental tenets of the faith. Yet al-Banna would engage in this task by employing techniques that took advantage of the changes that modernization had wrought on Egyptian society. Under his leadership the Brotherhood quickly established itself as a grass-roots, populist, and media-savvy organization that harnessed the public and political openings in Egypt at the time. In securing the Brotherhood structures into society and scaffolding the new organization onto traditional and existing social and religious institutions such as the mosque and through Muslim welfare activities, al-Banna could mix the old with the new and accommodate the growing sense of dislocation that so many Egyptians were experiencing. The scaffolding of Islam by the Muslim Brotherhood presented the movement and its leader with the means by which to address a variety of contemporary issues.

Although not intended to be established as a political party, the Muslim Brotherhood increasingly found itself compelled by its supporters and opponents to address the political realm. To be or not to be in politics was the question that dogged the Islamic reformist movement as a whole, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, not to mention a question that remains salient even today among many political Islamist groups. There had been many debates among Muslim modernists and reformers at the time with respect to what their political role or function, if any, should be.¹⁶ Some abjured from politics and urged their fellow thinkers and supporters to instead concentrate on more fundamental preoccupations such as inclining local populations back to the faith system itself. In this realm the Brotherhood found itself in distinction not only to secularist nationalist and socialist opponents but also to the elites of institutional Islam. The religious revivalism of al-Banna and his followers was a challenge to traditionalist Muslim scholars and preachers who sought to preserve the status quo. But the status quo was a problem for al-Banna and his supporters, as it presented the Egyptian people with an image of Islam in decline and increasingly eclipsed from public life by the kinds of secular and licentiou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Roots and ideas
• 2 Egypt – Phoenix
• 3 Palestine – Hamas and the link in the chain
• 4 Jordan – Hashemites and the brethren
• 5 Tunisia – Renaissance
• 6 Yemen – The Muslim Brotherhood and the ties of tribe
• 7 Transnational Brotherhood
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index