Voice of the Muslim Brotherhood

Da'wa, Discourse, and Political Communication

Noha Mellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138078642
• eBook ISBN: 9781351628044
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the wake of the 25 January revolution and the coup that followed in 2013, Egyptian bookstores recorded a significant increase in demand for books by and about the Muslim Brotherhood. However, despite the burgeoning literature on the Brotherhood, knowledge about the movement is still rather limited, particularly with regard to its most strategic tool – media and communications.

This book offers a fresh and close look into the communication strategy of the group, focusing on published periodicals, biographies, and websites that represent the voice of the Brotherhood. The book analyses the core mission of the Brotherhood, namely its da?wa (call, invitation to faith) – how it is articulated and how it is defined by the movement as an ideology and a process. Have the media represented a coherent voice of the Brotherhood over the past decades? What can they communicate regarding the Brothers' perception of the needs of their audiences? How have the media served to sustain, preserve, and distinguish the movement for nine decades? The book argues that the Brotherhood media speak with an intermittent voice and deliver an incoherent message whose tone is changeable and fluctuating and cannot be claimed to truly represent the heterogeneity of the group.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates Media Studies and Social Movement Theory, the book provides a fresh analysis of the Brotherhood movement as an interpretive community and will be a valuable resource for anyone studying Egypt or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Part I

1

Unpacking the Brotherhood brand

This chapter identifies a set of discursive strategies used by the movement in positioning itself and its daᶜwa mission. The Muslim Brotherhood, as a movement, does not draw a dividing line between political and religious activities, as previously explained, and so “there is no way of cutting through the tangled web of human activities and allocating certain things to religion, others to politics, some to the state and some to a specifically religious authority” (Lewis, cited in Kepel, 1984, 11). The Brotherhood, as a religious group, called for an understanding of Islam as a comprehensive system that governs both public and private spheres (Paison, 2009); this, in my view, is why its media should be seen as a tool of both religious and political communication. According to the movement’s founder, Hasan al-Banna, any attempt to separate Islam from politics should not be tolerated, as he called on Muslim Egyptians and indeed other Muslims elsewhere to embrace Islamic teachings and to apply them in all aspects of their lives, be it political, economic, or social. It is known from his epistles, for example, that he advocated a strategy of gradualism, which clearly indicates that the group was moving slowly but steadily towards its overarching political goal of transforming the whole of society and not only like-minded followers.

The Brotherhood embarked on building schools, clinics, and other charitable services not only to demonstrate how Islam penetrates “the structures of everyday life” (Paison, 2009, 2) but more importantly, to combat the established structure, which, according to the Brotherhood founder, were serving the missionaries’ purposes. The movement has based its mission on daᶜwa as a route to implementing Sharia, or a comprehensive and encompassing system of rules and norms, and in doing so, the Brotherhood has shown deep commitment to the role of religion in rectifying and preserving the social order. The Brotherhood can be classified as an activist group, in this sense, that endeavoured to change the social order by aligning it more closely to “an Islamic order” (Elsässer, 2007, 376–377). The Brotherhood’s publications and the founder’s epistles include numerous examples of the call to all Muslims to embrace daᶜwa as part of their religious duty and should strive to spread the true meaning of Islam in all areas of life. It is here that the concept of tarbiya (cultivation) emerges as a powerful tool in “turning the ordinary Muslim into a committed activist believer” (Elsässer, 2007, 380). Daᶜwa served an intra-ummaic (rather than extra-ummaic) purpose for Brotherhood media, or addressing the Muslim world rather than preaching Islam to non-believers outside the Muslim world. Daᶜwa does not only mean the call to Islam in terms of performing Islamic rituals, such as prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage, in this respect, but, more importantly, the surrender to daily practices, including political and social customs relating to Islamic rules. The movement nonetheless has not specified a clear manifesto as to how this application of Sharia can be practically implemented, particularly in the political sphere.

Religion, it is argued, should create a sense of moral obligation to follow rules set by the collective or society. The Brotherhood uses the religion of Islam to create a sphere that unites both the sacred and the profane, in Durkheim’s terms; for instance, the Brotherhood members used religion to bestow meanings on certain rituals and to give them a sacred significance – a symbol of an unbreakable bond amongst members – as evident in the act of ordaining members of the so-called secret apparatus. During al-Banna’s time, former veteran members of the secret apparatus, such as Mahmud al-Sabbagh (1986), recounted the process of being called into a dark room and seated in front of another Brotherhood member, completely covered in a sheet in order to conceal his identity (although many agreed that they could identify him by his voice as Saleh Ashmawy). The dark room would have a table in the middle with a copy of the Qur’an and a gun placed upon it, and the new member would be asked to swear by the Qur’an to perform jihad, whatever the sacrifice he may have to make. Here, the material act is enmeshed with the sacred, and it is rather difficult, if not impossible, to perform the former without invoking the latter. Another example of this intricate blend of the sacred with the material were the parades of the jawwala (“rover” groups) marching while shouting “Allahu Akbar wa lillah al-hamd” (“Allah is great and praise to Allah”), intending to demonstrate the physical prowess and organizational skills of the group. Such marches aimed to ordain an aura of sacredness on a mundane ritual, which in turn helped reaffirm the group’s bond; and in 1940, when al-Banna decided to withdraw his candidacy for a parliamentary position (at the request of the then prime minister), the Brotherhood members were utterly disappointed, but al-Banna consoled them by drawing a parallel between his decision to withdraw and the Prophet’s decision to enter the peace Treaty of Hudaybiyyah with the Quraysh tribe in Mecca, during the early formation of Islam (Khaled, 1993, 274).

The discussion here continues with how the Brotherhood has managed to emerge and sustain its position as a strong social movement, working across the religious, political, and social fields. I argue that the narrative has been one of the main strategies in sustaining this movement for several decades, communicated not only through the Brotherhood magazines but, more importantly, through interpersonal communication, drawing on the narrative of a collective identity. The recent approaches to Islamic activism have emphasized the need to deconstruct the discourse of such movements and “the resulting ideational packages”, aiming to detach the movement from despotic powers as well as competing Islamic movements (Wiktorowicz, 2004, 13). Al-Qaeda, for instance, blamed its dispute with the Saudi state partially on the complacence of Saudi ulama (scholars), calling the latter “palace lackeys” who were unable to confront corrupt rulers; in so doing, al-Qaeda framed itself as the “sole mediator between the sacred texts and religious practice” (Wiktorowicz, 2004, 13). In a similar vein, the Brotherhood aimed to frame itself as the sole religious and spiritual power, which managed to combine political goals with religious piety. The Brotherhood movement, in order to support such discourse, resorted to the act of branding itself as a religious and political authority that could withstand the pressure of domestic oppression, fast-paced political and financial environments, as well as global changes.

The Brotherhood interpretive community has its own shared logo, memories and memoirs, icons and narratives, which altogether contribute to distinguishing the Brotherhood from rival movements and also to identifying it as a counter-hegemonic force, both regionally and globally. These shared symbols and narratives constitute a form of faith branding (Einstein, 2008, 12), which rests on the creation of myths and stories commodified and consumed like mundane products. The result is that subscribers to a certain brand do not need to think about the rationale for using that brand, for all they need to do is to see the brand’s visual identifier or listen to related stories and myths, in order to trigger the brand’s attributes; thus, branding is about making meaning and meeting a need (Einstein, 2008, 70). The argument here is that such a shared narrative has been built around one main conceptual schema, namely the notion of the threat of “Western incursion” whether military, political, or cultural, which feeds into the idea that Islam is threatened by erosion in Muslim societies, in the name of modernization and progress. The reason that this is coined as a conceptual schema rather than as a theme or idea is that it serves as a blueprint for the whole movement, in that it includes a road map of various relationships among different actors and the rules governing these relationships. It is a form of metanarrative that defines the causal mechanisms of power and hegemony not only within Egypt but in the whole world. This conceptual schema draws on previous embodied experiences and interactions, particularly between Muslims and non-Muslims. The significance of this schema is that it has become so naturalized in the Egyptian political discourse that it has been used by other rival movements, such as the Salafists, and even by mainstream political and media institutions. This schema represents the success of Islamist movements such as the Brotherhood to naturalize this metanarrative as an integral part of public discourse, based on antagonistic relationships with the West as an existential threat to the Islamic world; for this metanarrative to take root, it was supplemented by a series of discursive tactics, including commemoration, nominalization, personalization, and delegitimization, which will be discussed in more detail in the last section of this chapter. The first task here is to define the Brotherhood as a social movement.

The Brotherhood movement

A social movement is a form of collective action “with some degree of organization and continuity outside of institutional or organizational channels for the purpose of challenging or defending extant authority” (Snow, Soule and Kriesi, 2004a, 11). A social movement, in contrast to crowd or mob action, is characterized by its internal organization, sustainability, and aim to spur radical social changes. The Brotherhood society provides a stark example of such a movement with its complex organizational structure, its existence for ninety years, and its mission, albeit ambiguous, in transforming society. Literature on social movements used to focus on secular rather than religious movements, however, thereby enforcing a separation between the secular versus religious forms of mobilization (Sutton and Vertigans, 2006). An explanation for this neglect was provided by Oberschall (2004, cited in Sutton and Vertigans, 2006, 102) as follows: “Many Western academics are fixated on a poverty-social injustice-exploitation interpretation of discontent and grievance in the third world and [on] secular ideologies and justifications for action. They are confused and bewildered by religious crusaders who dedicate their lives to realizing God’s will on earth, by violence if necessary”.

One important study about the Brotherhood as a social movement is reported in Munson (2001) who argues that the movement was a response to the missionaries’ activities. However, it is difficult to reduce al-Banna’s mission to being a direct response to his grievance about the missionaries; doing so would lead to overlooking an important question, namely, why that issue in particular triggered such a protest by al-Banna and his followers. The missionaries’ projects, such as building schools and hospitals for disadvantaged Egyptians, had clearly benefited a large sector of the population, and thus the missionaries had a sizable group of beneficiaries on the ground. How then could al-Banna manage to turn the same groups against the missionaries? The answer could be in the Brotherhood’s rhetoric and their dependence on emotionally charged morality politics: instead of facilitating an open debate about the implementation of new policies to improve social life, morality politics “is emotionally charged”, calling for an immediate righting of a wrong not by offering new policy ideas but by demonstrating the moral position of speakers “in the face of much allegedly wrongheaded opposition” (Wagenaar and Altink, 2012, 284). This may explain why the Brotherhood’s periodicals, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun and al-Nadhir, circulated emotionally charged stories about the missionaries, depending on the personalization or naming of the victims so as to make the stories more appealing to the readers, who were urged to identify with the victims, rather than providing concrete facts about the number of such victims. Expressing moral views is part of morality politics, which can be owned by any social group or individuals because expressing a view on a moral issue is not a prerequisite for a certain technical expertise (Wagenaar and Altink, 2012, 283).

If it is assumed, on the other hand, that al-Banna’s grievance was the poverty suffered by a large segment of the population, it is still not known why his Brotherhood movement would succeed in what the socialists and communists failed to do. Comparing the Brotherhood’s success with the communists’ lapse, Munson (2001, 500–501) concludes that the former society allowed members with varying degrees of commitment to join the movement, while communist groups were rather more selective, or perhaps cautious, in accepting new recruits; in fact, the nomination process to join a communist group could last as long as two years to ensure that only the most committed were accepted (pp. 500–501). Ironically, however, the Brotherhood reverted to the communists’ selection process, particularly since the 1990s, prolonging it up to eight years, as evidenced in the recent memoirs released by young disassociated Brotherhood members. There is no evidence that this prolonged test period of new recruits’ commitments reduced the appeal of the Brotherhood or the number of its supporters during the 1990s and 2000s.

Munson (2001, 492) also argues that the Brotherhood membership during the 1940s and early 1950s came from “the most Westernized and modernized segments of the population – students, engineers, doctors, and government bureaucrats”. The data extracted by Munson shows that, of those arrested in 1954, sixty-one were students, thirty were civil servants, eighteen were teachers, and ten were professionals. There is no compelling evidence here, however, that such groups included so many “engineers and doctors”. There was no indication, furthermore, that the university students arrested, then, were by any means “the most Westernized and modernized segments of the population”; in fact, many veteran Brotherhood members who were university students at that time testified in their memoirs to the humble background from which they came (see e.g. Abdel Halim, 1994, in which he mentions other members such as Abdel Hakim Abdeen). These members belonged to the group of new effendiyya, whose Westernization “on the whole was more superficial than the previous generation” (Gershoni and Jankowski, 2002, 18). It is important, moreover, to recall that the education sector had expanded rapidly during the early part of the twentieth century, providing opportunities for disadvantaged groups. The British control of the education system diminished by 1922, when the responsibility of education was relegated to the Egyptian government, who dramatically expanded it between 1922 and 1952, and government spending on education also rose considerably from 3 percent of the state budget in 1923 to 11 percent in 1953. The number of students more than quadrupled in the course of fifteen years, and many Muslim Brothers, including al-Banna himself, served as school teachers and were often transferred from urban to rural areas to meet the increasing demand for teachers (Langohr, 2005).

Social actors mobilize around one goal, usually share similar grievances, and benefit from external resources, as well as emerging political opportunities that facilitate their mobilization. Recent studies critiqued this narrow focus on grievances and resources, which diverted attention from cultural dynamics, including social actors’ views and sense of identity (see Jasper, 2010, for a full discussion). It is agreed, however, that grievances alone are not enough to spark an organized movement; resource mobilization is also required to sustain a movement, including the ability to recruit and mobilize (Rootes, 1990). The Egyptian al-Jamaᶜa al-Islamiyya, for instance, had the control of 150 mosques in the 1980s, which were used to organize and make contact with the public, for “without organizational capacity, individuals remain isolated from one another and unable to effectively launch collective endeavors” (Wiktorowicz, 2004, 13). An accommodating environment should also be available for the movement to flourish, and such opportunities could open up if there were internal divisions among power holders or a failure of state institutions that allowed movements to mushroom and mobilize against the state. Inasmuch as a movement is contingent on its mobilization activities, resources, and surroundings and these factors are likely to change over time, it is important to consider any movement in its historical context in order to appreciate the strategies and tactics it uses to create its own unique narrative.

A movement then has several characteristics: it has a specific agenda shared by its membership base, mobilized in formal or informal organizations that are in pursuit of the movement’s goals, using an array of tools and tactics, and engaging with internal and external tar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Conclusion
• References
• Index