Hasan al-Banna

Gudrun Krämer

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780742120
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie islamique

Hasan al-Banna (1906 – 1949) was an Egyptian political reformer, best known for establishing the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organisation which today has millions of members and spans the Arab world. Through his ardent struggle to revitalise Islamic values amid increasing Westernisation, al-Banna promoted Islamic charity and personal piety throughout Egypt, becoming a powerful political force until his mysterious assassination. In this well written and impartial biography, Krämer gives a detailed account of al-Banna's life and work.

FAMILY BACKGROUND, EDUCATION AND EARLY CAREER

RURAL PIETY

From an early age, Hasan al-Banna was influenced by (Arab) reform Islam of the Salafi type, popular Sufism of the “sober” kind, and Egyptian patriotism, as understood and lived in the socio-cultural milieu he was raised in. It is with this milieu, or, to be more precise, with his family that the story must begin. Hasan al-Banna’s father, Ahmad b.‘Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad, was in fact a remarkable man who would deserve a study of his own, to explore more deeply the lives and concerns of educated people in the Egyptian countryside at the turn of the twentieth century.

Hasan al-Banna’s father was born in 1300/1882 into a family of small landowners in the village of Shimshira on the westernmost branch of the Nile, not far from where it flows into the Mediterranean at Rosetta. Administratively, Simshira was located in the district of Fuwwa, which was then part of al-Gharbiyya province. His mother came from a family of “knowledge and religion”; her brother was a faqih, a Qur’an reciter, in the neighbouring village of Sindiyun. Hasan al-Banna’s younger brother Jamal relates that when his grandmother was pregnant with her second child, she had a dream that her son would be called Ahmad and would learn the Qur’an by heart. The dream came true: Ahmad entered a kuttab or Qur’anic school – the only type of school then available in a small Egyptian village – at the age of four and acquired a lifelong love of learning.

Ahmad was born the year the British occupied Egypt. This was the beginning of the era of Lord Cromer (Sir Evelyn Baring), who as British agent and consul-general effectively governed the country from 1883 to 1907. Like many members of the English ruling class, Cromer did not believe in advanced public education, least of all for the peasant population. In his view, rural men and women, if they were to have any education at all, should be given a practical training designed to make them, as a British official in neighbouring Palestine was later to put it, “useful and content.” This applied to Britain as much as to the colonies, but especially to the latter. Government schools of the European type were liable to manufacture nationalist “demagogues” and “malcontents,” who would not be satisfied with their station in life.¹ Many members of the Egyptian upper class shared his views. Schools also cost money. For these reasons, government investment in rural education was limited, and literacy rates remained very low. Take Shimshira: in 1907, the Egyptian census registered 192 inhabited houses in Shimshira with a total 1,226 residents, of whom a mere thirteen, all of them men, were able to read and write – a notoriously vague category which could mean anything from being able to scribble one’s name to easy fluency in literary Arabic. (One should also bear in mind that some people were able to read without being able to write.)

Ahmad al-Banna did not wish to join his elder brother in cultivating their land as this would not leave him sufficient time to pursue knowledge. Instead, he resolved to learn the craft of repairing watches, an unusual choice for a village boy of his time and age. Supported by his parents, who both held religious learning in high esteem, Ahmad went to Alexandria to train as an apprentice with a well-known master of the craft. At the same time he continued his religious education at the Ibrahim Pasha Mosque, one of the largest mosque colleges, or madrasas, in the country. While al-Azhar was certainly the most widely known institution of higher religious learning in nineteenth-century Egypt, it was not the only one. Muhammad Ali (r. 1805–48) had weakened their position by confiscating their endowments (awqaf), yet there still remained several mosque colleges that also trained religious scholars, ‘ulama’, and whose graduates could also serve in various official or semi-official functions, such as faqih (legal expert, but in contemporary rural Egypt usually a Qur’an reciter and kuttab teacher), imam (prayer leader), khatib (Friday preacher) or ma’dhun (notary for marriages and divorces). The largest and most prestigious was the madrasa attached to the al-Ahmadi Mosque in Tanta, which in around 1900 had sixty-eight scholars–teachers or “professors” and 4,173 students, followed by Ibrahim Pasha with forty-three professors and 773 students. For comparison, al-Azhar numbered 250 professors and 10,403 students.² It was only at the turn of the century that the provincial madrasas were integrated into the Azhar school system, under the name of “religious institutes.”

Upon completing his training, Shaykh Ahmad, as he was now addressed, returned to Shimshira. Though he was not an Azharite, as sometimes claimed in the literature, he still derived prestige, or cultural capital to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, from attending a renowned institution of higher religious learning. For a living, he practised his craft and was therefore known as “al-Sa‘ati,” the “watchmaker,” until he gave it up in the 1940s and used only “al-Banna” for what counted as a family name. At the age of nineteen, Shaykh Ahmad passed the Qur’an examination to be exempted from military service, which he – like most Egyptians – dreaded. In 1904 he married the younger daughter of a local merchant of dyed and embroidered fabrics, who reportedly had a little more money than his father’s family. The bride, Umm al-Sa‘d, was only fifteen at the time and rather pretty, of slight build and light complexion (always highly appreciated as a sign of distinction), who unlike the peasant girls had never had to toil in the fields. She was also intelligent, alert and strong-willed, if not obstinate, qualities her eldest son Hasan inherited, along with her facial features and moderate height.

Shortly after, Shaykh Ahmad left Shimshira to settle in al-Mahmudiyya, situated a little to the south on the other bank of the Nile, from where the Mahmudiyya Canal started, dug during the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali to carry Nile water to Alexandria and named after the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II. Al-Mahmudiyya was close to the al-‘Atf pumping station and for this reason the place names al-‘Atf and al-Mahmudiyya were often used interchangeably. Like many other places in the Egyptian countryside, where rural and urban settlements shared basic traits, al-Mahmudiyya could be characterized as either a large village or a small town, with little difference between the two. Semi-urban might be the best term to describe it. It was larger than Shimshira and definitely more lively. With regard to the general level of education, however, the two were quite similar: in 1907, al-Mahmudiyya had about 1,000 houses with just over 6,000 inhabitants, of whom 375 were able to read and write; the relevant figures for al-‘Atf were some 250 houses, 1,500 inhabitants and sixty-six literate individuals; in both places, not a single woman was registered as being able to read and write. Still, al-Mahmudiyya had a social and cultural life of its own that was geared to the tastes of local landowners and merchants. Theatre and music troupes touring the country came to both al-‘Atf and al-Mahmudiyya; a trade union was active among the workers of the pumping station, and so these were not places untouched by modern life.

In al-Mahmudiyya, Shaykh Ahmad bought a small house for himself and his young wife and opened a shop where he not only repaired clocks and watches but also sold gramophones and gramophone records. The latter is remarkable, for the recording business had only just started in Egypt, with the first commercial recordings being made in 1904. Much of the local production recorded Qur’anic recitation, classical Arabic poetry and religious song, especially poems in praise of the Prophet, and for this reason was not considered blameworthy or forbidden (munkar) in terms of the religious-cum-moral categories of Islamic law. There was also a close link with Sufism as Sufi chant as well as Qur’anic recitation required a trained voice. Singers thus trained were addressed as shaykh. ‘Abduh al-Hamuli (1841–1901) was perhaps the best-known Egyptian representative of this “high style” of Arabic music so appreciated by Egyptian audiences. In 1910, Umm Kulthum (b. c. 1904) made her first public appearances; over the course of her long career she would significantly alter the genre. Shaykh Ahmad was attached to Sufism and endowed with an aesthetic sensibility that he passed on to his children, two of whom, ‘Abd al-Rahman and ‘Abd al-Basit, wrote poetry; the former also played the rababa, a traditional string instrument, and the latter the ‘ud, or lute. ‘Abd al-Rahman later wrote Islamic plays for the theatre and ‘Abd al-Basit composed a number of songs. Their elder brother Hasan was more attracted to the written word.

Shaykh Ahmad was not just literate in a society that was overwhelmingly illiterate. He enjoyed reading, and not only religious material. His son Jamal recalled how his father cut out serialized detective stories published in al-Ahram and bound them in leather. In later years he subscribed to al-Lata’if al-Musawwara, a popular illustrated weekly published in 1915–41, building on the earlier al-Lata’if (1885–95), which had been a Masonic journal. Still later, he added the weekly al-Amal, published in 1925–8 by Munira Thabit, one of the first female newspaper editors in Egypt and a known Wafdist.

Even without an academic degree, Shaykh Ahmad was respected for his piety and religious learning among the community. He befriended members of the local elite, including the mayor (‘umda), shaykhs and merchants, some of whom shared his passion for religious knowledge. He grew especially close to Shaykh Muhammad Zahran, a blind preacher and teacher at one of the local mosques, who, like himself, held no Azhar degree but was deeply committed to religious study. Among other things Shaykh Zahran edited a journal called al-Is‘ad, which apparently was modelled on the famous al-Manar (The Lighthouse), the mouthpiece of the Islamic reform movement known as Salafiyya and represented in Egypt by Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935). Before long Shaykh Ahmad was invited to serve as prayer leader and Friday preacher at a local mosque. The mayor later also asked him to serve as second ma’dhun, at the time an important government official who acted mostly as notary for marriages and divorces. Still, his financial situation was not particularly good, especially after his children were born, at regular intervals, altogether five boys and three girls, one of whom died in her infancy. A grocery shop he opened failed and he incurred losses. He then decided to practise the craft of bookbinding, in which, assisted by his wife, he proved more successful.

The phenomenon of rural men (and possibly even women) engaging in religious scholarship for its own sake, without the prospect of making a career out of it, has been little studied, at least with regard to Egypt. Respecting religious learning and even collecting books was not that unusual in the Egyptian countryside. Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the educator famously turned Islamist, who was born the same year as Hasan al-Banna into a landowning family in Asyut province, is a case in point, as is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the influential scholar and “media mufti,” who was born two decades later, in 1926, into a less affluent rural family in the Delta. But Shaykh Ahmad did not content himself with studying and debating religious topics with local shaykhs and dignitaries. He began to write books of his own.

His first study was a short treatise on the prayer litany (wazifa) of the Maghribi Sufi Ahmad Zarruq (d. 899/1493–4), one of the great masters of the Shadhili tradition to which Shaykh Ahmad himself was attached.³ Shaykh Zarruq was known for his legalistic style and attitude. Even so, members of the brotherhood attributed magical or protective powers to the wazifa Zarruqiyya, and Sufism was generally under attack from reformist circles. Shaykh Ahmad made it his aim to prove that Zarruq’s prayer litany was almost entirely based on Qur’anic verses and authentic Hadiths, and thus perfectly “orthodox.” The study was first printed in 1330/1912 at his expense; by the 1950s it had seen several reprints. From the defence of a major Sufi text, Shaykh Ahmad moved to the Prophetic Traditions, testifying to the enduring attraction of Hadith studies among the learned, in his own day as much as later. His work on al-Shafi‘ i’s Musnad was eventually published in Cairo in two volumes in 1369/1950. There he also lists two more works on the Hadith collections of Abu Da’ud and Abu Hanifa respectively, which apparently remained unpublished.

His most ambitious project, however, was to classify Ahmad b. Hanbal’s collection of Prophetic Traditions, the Musnad, of which he acquired a copy in 1921–2, when he was about forty years old. As the title, which refers to Hadiths traceable through a particular chain of authorities, suggests, the Musnad was arranged according to these “traditionists” (muhaddith, rawi), and for this reason was difficult to use. To re-order it according to subject matter was a daunting task in which eminent scholars had failed. Even more ambitiously, Shaykh Ahmad also resolved to write a commentary (sharh). The work al-Fath al-rabbani fi tartib musnad al-imam Ahmad b. Hanbal al-Shaybani, with a commentary entitled Bulugh al-amani min asrar al-Fath al-rabbani, was to occupy him for the rest of his life. At the time of his death, in 1958, twenty-two volumes of what was to be a total of twenty-four volumes of al-Fath al-rabbani had been printed and were available in various editions, leather bound and on expensive white or less expensive “yellow” paper. The remaining two volumes were completed with the help of his family; the commentary was left unfinished.

Shaykh Ahmad did not see much of the world – apart from a pilgrimage to Mecca he made in the mid-1940s, he never travelled beyond Cairo and the Suez Canal Zone. Yet his intellectual horizon, or “space,” was much broader and largely defined by the fields he embraced – Qur’an, Hadith, the life of the Prophet, and Islamic jurisprudence, fiqh, combined with Sufi thought and practice of the more sober type – and the language he spoke and indeed mastered, Arabic. In spite of his focus on Ahmad b. Hanbal’s Musnad, there was no specifically Hanbali or Hanbali Wahhabi bias in the religious upbringing of his children that might explain the choices his son Hasan was later to make. As his work on al-Fath al-rabbani progressed, he corresponded with scholars in Egypt and abroad, notably in Syria, Hijaz and Yemen, establishing contacts that were to prove useful to his son in later years.

EARLY EDUCATION

Born in 1906, the first child of a young couple, Hasan al-Banna seems to have had a happy childhood. He was a healthy boy and not afflicted by disease, as many children from poorer families were. The family lived modestly, and it was of course affected by the state of the rural economy, but it was not destitute. Thus they always kept a servant or household help, who was either a member of the family or from the village, and was very much part of the household. Shaykh Ahmad was keen on giving his firstborn an Islamic education but was dissatisfied with the schools to be found locally. It was only in 1915, when Hasan was already nine years old, that Shaykh Ahmad’s mentor Muhammad Zahran opened a school that met his expectations. The school in question, Madrasat al-Rashad al-Diniyya, offered more than the ordinary village kuttab, for Hasan not only learned parts of the Qur’an and a number of Prophetic Hadiths by heart, but also basic reading and writing as well as some Arabic poetry. In contrast to many others, al-Banna retained fond memories of his early school years and he positively revered his first teacher. In fact his Memoirs do not begin with his parents, but with Shaykh Zahran, whose influence derived as much from his learning as from his personality. In an often-quoted passage, Hasan al-Banna commented on the strong emotional and spiritual bond Shaykh Zahran was able to create with his pupils – a bond that was to inspire him for the rest of his life.

When in 1918 Shaykh Zahran left his school, Hasan no longer wanted to stay there. He was now about twelve years old, and his parents hoped that he would continue with his religious education. However, the Azhar school system, which provided an avenue of upward mobility to country boys of modest means, required candidates to have memorized the entire Qur’an – and he had not yet reached this stage. Acting on his own wishes rather than his parents’, Hasan opted for the government school in al-Mahmudiyya. In line with British educational policies, instruction focused on religion and practical knowledge that was deemed appropriate for peasants – the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic – and these became the focus of his studies. No foreign languages were taught at the school, making future access to a government secondary school virtually impossible.

At school, a teacher suggested that Hasan and his friends join together to “form” their character and manners – a classic example of moral improvement (takwin al-akhlaq) through practical training rather than abstract lesson, and thus in line with both contemporary educational theories and the amr bil-ma‘ruf, the Qur’anic injunction “to enjoin good and prohibit wrong,” which was to play a crucial role in al-Banna’s career as an Islamic activist. The members of the association, called Jam‘iyyat al-Akhlaq al-Adabiyya, prayed together at the appointed times, causing the imam of their mosque some anxiety as he calculated the cost of the water they used for their ablutions and the straw mats they dirtied. Characteristically, fines were imposed for all kinds of misdemeanour. Already then Hasan’s days were filled and structured by the rhythm of prayer: before school (to be precise – and Hasan al-Banna is precise, albeit not always correct, about time and money in his Memoirs – after morning prayer) he continued to memorize the Q...