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Out of the perceived successes and failures of the men and movements discussed in the last few posts and others, both secular and religious, came the ideology of the Muslim Brethren. It also arose first in Egypt and out of Egypt’s history.
Egypt was a ferment of ideas in the 19th and 20th Centuries. It had emerged from direct Ottoman rule with the ascent to rule of the modernising Albanian, Muhammad ‘Ali, in 1804-5 only to be dominated by the colonising British and financing French. An anti-Western revolt in the late 1870s and early 1880s led by Colonel Ahmad Urabi had led to further British domination. Al Ahram newspaper had also begun and began to be influential in these decades with contributions from the likes of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani.
By 1922, the regime had achieved official independence albeit with the continuation of real reliance on the British. Nationalist ideology had been considered as it was being in Europe notably by the Fascist and Nazi party governments of Central and Southern Europe. The official removal of the style of caliph from the Turkish state system would soon provoke debate in Egypt concerning the return of the style in Egypt. The regime was formally liberal democratic but did not appear to be living up to what was implied by that descriptor and Egyptians were also attracted to the other European trends of socialism and Communism. There were also two trends, a secularising trend and a trend towards Western dress and pastimes, neither of which appealed to the many devout Muslims of the heartland of Egypt. The new secular Westernised example of Turkey appeared threatening to those who devoured the writings of Messrs ‘Abduh and Afghani. The Europeanisation of the giving of charity at lavish parties as adopted mainly by the urban and relatively elite upper classes was especially irksome to these devout people. There seemed to be an inherent contradiction in such an excessive event being devoted to alleviating poverty which warranted righting and thus a reform movement was born in an attempt to collect charity more properly and also promote the spread of the proper practices of Islam.
The idea for a Muslim charity organisation to compete with the hated Western model came first from the charismatic Hasan al-Banna (1906 – 1949). He had achieved the status of Effendi by a combination of religious and secular studies at the Dar al-‘Ulūm at the new University of Cairo. After thus achieving teaching registration and moving to Isma’iliyya to teach in the relatively secular state high school system there, he formed the Muslim Brotherhood (or Brethren) in 1928 in his new town. Upon later moving to Cairo, he also set up a branch there.
Each branch referred to itself as a family (usra) and al-Banna preferred the overall title of group (jama’a) rather than party (Hizb), which was used in its plural form in the Qur’an with negative connotations and so is unfortunately an offensive term to some Muslims.
Despite not being formally a party, it has had an ambiguous role in Egyptian politics since and has come to play a role in Arab and Muslim politics as well with branches in many countries. Part of its success has certainly been due to a unique access to a speaking platform (and ‘public space’ in terms of the theory of German social philosopher, Jürgen Habermas) not available to secular parties, the Mosque. As a result, secular politicians such as Yasser Arafat in Palestine in seeking to reach a religious audience have been influenced in turn by leaders of the Brethren (as well as Palestinian Christian leaders, incidentally). Arafat, though a secular politician, was first influenced by the Brotherhood much earlier, however, as a student in Cairo. Finally, however, the corruption of his Palestinian Authority government led to the election of the religious Hamas government. Secular military governments in Pakistan (of General Zia ul-Haq) and Sudan (of General Ja’far Numayri) have also found it convenient to work with Islamic figures and parties (for example with the widely educated Hassan al-Turabi and his National Islamic Front in Sudan) with this type of unique access. Numayri, in particular, was somewhat more sympathetic, personally, with Islamism than was ul-Haq. These co-operations were able to bear fruit because the parties did not seek theocracy and were limited to a concern to reform education, which the governments were confident they could control. Saudi Arabia provides a classic example (discussed a few posts ago) of a secular ruler’s (and in fact dynastic) co-operation with a national (also largely dynastic) religious elite beginning with the 18th Century agreement between Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and the first major Saudi dynast and continuing until today.
Al-Banna was eloquent, interesting and modern in his speaking style, although he was effectively preaching. Today, his published letters are the main source of our knowledge about his ideas. He appears to have been plainer spoken than most traditional preachers and this style has been subsequently copied by his successors at the helm and in positions of authority in the Brotherhood. His main interests were in the correct education of children in Islam and the building of their characters. He thought an ideal society required and would naturally follow from the kind of piety that he thought this education would bring about. His was a revivalist, activist and fundamentalist (but not violent) version of Islam that his Brotherhood first worked on promoting in Egyptian politics, society and culture.
While he thought that, as Islam was a whole-of-life religion, it was necessary in political life (he used the slogan din wa dawla), the Brotherhood was not active politically until near his death. He thought generally that a leader would be acceptable to Islam provided that s/he was responsible to God and to her/his people (though being a conservative man he would certainly have preferred a male leader) and could provide unity. He favoured a mechanism of popular supervision of government which might make use of a form of constitutional democracy. He certainly did not favour rule of the ulema although he does seem to have regarded one-party rule as less divisive and therefore better than fully pluralistic multi-party democracy.
He was rather vague and perhaps disingenuous in suggesting that God via Islam had dictated the ideal role of women in the world reflected in the tradition roles for women. Although he had no specific programme with respect to women he attracted female members who were later forced to form a breakaway Muslim Sisterhood which did formulate a programme. These women nevertheless generally favoured veiling as a valued symbol of piety and commitment to Islam.
He saw patriotism as compatible with and in fact a form of faith (he noted a Hadith that suggests this). He nevertheless thought of modern European civilisation and its forms of nationalism (which were producing Communism, Fascism and two World Wars in his lifetime) as atheistic and therefore wholly immoral. He had no real ideas on the state of American culture as the US had not been as active in Egypt in his lifetime as Europe had. He also had the idea that Islam could produce an ideal economic system on which he never elaborated much.
Among the Brotherhood’s first converts were naturally educators and education bureaucrats as al-Banna’s first interest was always in education. Several of the novels of Naguib Mahfouz depict the Brotherhood and Communism being the two major ‘grassroots’ players politically in schools in the early years of the mission of the Brotherhood.
The movement soon became more widely political, however, and conditions were not always conducive to non-violent reformism. The year of al-Banna’s assassination, 1949, saw members exchanging assassinations with a repressive Egyptian government. Many in the Brotherhood supported the coup of 1952 which led to Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser’s coming to power but by 1954 Nasser, too, had begun to suspect that the Brotherhood movement planned his assassination and suppressed it until his death, from natural causes, in 1970. These years of brutal suppression, arrest, imprisonment, torture and state sponsored murder of Brotherhood activists in fact radicalised the movement as nothing else could have. Nasser in the meantime had felt forced by Roosevelt’s attitude to seek support from the USSR in his conflicts with British, French and Israeli forces which led the people of Egypt including the newly radicalised Brotherhood to decide that the US did not support the aspirations of the Muslim nation. The Brotherhood now contained a widely disparate variety of thinkers from the modernising moderate law professor ‘Abd al-Qadir ‘Awda to the Sayyid Qutb (see below for more discussion of Qutb), initially a moderate member too, but radicalised by brutal torture in Egyptian gaols.
Anwar Sadat succeeded Nasser and continued the suppression but in his case of both leftists and the Brotherhood, which now saw him as supporting an imperialist US following his infitah (opening up of trade (especially to the West)). At the same time he sought Islamic legitimacy for his policies which was an incitement in itself to this now radical movement. In this context, his public assassination by members of his own security forces in 1981 now seems almost to have been an inevitable consequence of his policies of incitement.
Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966) was a contemporary of al-Banna at the University of Cairo’s Dar al-Ulūm and Brotherhood member who outlived him by about two decades to become radicalised by the probably unnecessarily brutal reaction to the Brotherhood of a succession of repressive and paranoid Egyptian governments. His political ideas are especially important today as inspiration for the political and terrorist movement which is now known as al-Qaeda. One of his early interests was actually literary review and he was actually quite moderate, then, in his views. He also became a teacher. He was also in government in his early career acting once as the Minister for Radio. There is evidence that he was once also considered for the position of Minister for Education but was assessed as being too radical, by that time. Several factors combined to radicalise his views in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Firstly, he visited the US to study teaching there and found both the mixing of sexes at dances and the discrimination he himself faced there as a non-white repulsive. He also suffered a total of around 11 years (in two blocks) in the brutal environment of Egyptian incarceration. He was tortured and witnessed the torture of others there.
He was eventually considered too radical by the leadership of the Brethren and was executed by Nasser’s regime. The Brethren continued under Sadat to criticise the posthumous spread of Qutb's writings, which were in fact being misinterpreted for their own reasons by even more radical Brethren splinter groups. He wrote most of his radical and most influential works in his periods of imprisonment, most notably Ma’alim fi-l-Tariq (Signposts along the Way). He also wrote much of his influential commentary on the Qur’an, In the Shade of the Qur’an (Fi Zilal al-Qur’an), in prison, which shows an aesthetic appreciation of the Qur’an reminiscent of Qutb’s early moderate works. His attention to the Qur’an is generally considered fairly scholarly concerning spiritual aspects of the Qur’an but to fall down in its discussion of political aspects.
His works emphasised the concept of jahiliyya (best translated as arrogant, corrupt ignorance) among Muslims which he regards as especially inexcusable given that Muslims are raised to be good Muslims whereas he expects less of truly ignorant non-Muslims who may be somewhat excused for being arrogant about being ignorant of Islam. This idea appears to have fed into the ideologies of violent Islam concerning the validity of the harming of ‘nominal’ Muslims in suicide bombings apparently designed to shake Muslims out of their ignorance. He also took on Maududi’s incorrect reading of God’s hākimiyyah (I will discuss Maududi in a later post). The immorality which he saw all around him appeared to completely disgust him. Nevertheless, he may well have not been a revolutionary, as his preferred method of bringing about his desired changes (as with al-Banna) remained education. Nevertheless, the killers of Sadat and subsequent terrorist organisations were probably inspired by his writings. The groups arising from his writings discussed the necessity for a hijra (emigration) from the corrupt 'Muslim' society and its takfir (sinning or apostasy) into secretive small groups of ‘true’ Muslims. The withdrawal was for the purpose of the spiritual rearmament and renewal necessary before returning to bring about change in the corrupt society. They may also be seen as responding in one sense to the writings of historian, Arnold Toynbee, who was himself an admirer of the work of Ibn Khaldoun.
Both the Brethren and these splinter groups (including ultimately al-Qaeda) remain important in the Islamic world today. The Brotherhood has branches in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Palestine and other Arab countries. The splinter groups have been created by the suppression of the Brethren and there are other radical groups in non-Arab countries that also have an international reach. The FIS (Front Islamique du Salut) in Algeria, the Renaissance Party in Tunisia (where parties cannot legally use words like Islamic in their titles) and at least one Islamic party in Sudan are similar in their aims to the Brotherhood. Thus these parties (as opposed to the splinter groups created by government suppression of the moderate parties) tend to be fairly peaceful and moderate in their intent and aims. Maududi’s Jama’at al-Islamiyya is another moderate example. It is a nasty fact that suppression of moderate parties tends to create two party wings, an accommodationist wing that renounces what the government requires it to and a radical wing which won’t, that ultimately can’t coexist in the same party. The execution of Qutb seems to have been pivotal in producing splinters in Brethren groups.
The Syrian Brotherhood began in the 1940s and was politically active from the 1950s. They produced several MPs in places like Damascus, Aleppo and Hama. In the brief period of Nasser’s control of Syria in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were suppressed as Nasser, out of an apparently unfounded fear of assassination, was suppressing them in Egypt. The minority ‘Alawite "Shi’a" Ba’ath Party-rule from 1970 by Hafez al-Assad and possibly to a lesser extent later by his son, Bashshar, continued the suppression as they sought to prove their Islamic credentials to the country’s majority Sunnis and at the same time gain and maintain the support of Iran and Iranian pilgrims. Sunnism generally (the majority sect) was somewhat suppressed (ironically as Shi’ism was in Ba’athist Iraq) and ‘Alawites were favoured. As a result, the Sunni Brethren revolted in the period 1979 to 1982 which led to further suppression.
In Jordan as in Syria, the Brethren started in the 1940s. Unlike in any other country in which it has been active, it has always been formally legal in Jordan (if occasionally mistreated by authorities). Before coming close to having a multi-party democratic system from 1989 following peaceful protests as it also had before 1957, Jordan in the meantime eventually prohibited all parties. The Brotherhood, however, escaped the definition of party at that time being viewed instead by both itself and Jordan’s government as a movement. Since the restoration of parties, the Brethren have fielded candidates under the party name, “the Islamic Action Front”. In parliament its members (along with Ba’ath Party and socialist and Communist party MPs) opposed the peace deal negotiated by the government with Israel.
Hamas was one splinter group from the Brothers born during the so-called ‘first intifada’ in Palestine. Hamas means zeal in Arabic but it is also an acronym of HArakat al Muqawama al-ASlami (Movement of Islamic Resistance). Its usual name in Arabic is thus Harakat Hamas (Zeal Movement or Movement of Islamic Resistance Movement). The Israeli government (especially conservative and religious Likud party coalition government) was the suppressor that brought Hamas about and appears to have always wanted to suppress Yasser Arafat’s relatively secular and peaceful Fatah faction of the PLO, finding Hamas useful as a radical enemy to blame for lack of progress in the peace process. The Likud Party may be seen as a virtual mirror of Hamas in Israel which explains why Ariel Sharon formed a new party in order to be able to introduce a policy of disengagement from the West Bank and Gaza that Likud would generally no more countenance than Hamas would face modifying their own claim on Israel.
Al-Qaeda came about when a group inspired by the splinter groups went to war in Afghanistan against the USSR. Its initial leadership group of three had both Brotherhood and non-Brotherhood origins. Usama Bin Laden was brought up in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia as the engineer son of the major construction family in the kingdom. He was not a Brotherhood member but was influenced by two events that both occurred in the 1970s: the Soviet invasion and the Shi’a Iranian revolution (though as a Wahhabi he was a committed anti-Shi’a). The USA was interested in recruiting and supporting and did support fighters like Bin Laden in the war against the USSR in Afghanistan.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was a Muslim Brother. Like Qutb, Zawahiri was jailed, tortured and thus radicalised in Egypt. His views were initially more radical than those of the other two leaders. He first met Bin Laden in Afghanistan as a fellow mujahid and encouraged him to consider using more violence in more situations than the then-current war against invading infidel troops.
‘Abdullah ‘Azzam was probably the least radical of the three. He was a Palestinian teacher of Law at the University of Jordan before travelling to Afghanistan in the mid 1980s to fight. He was the most theoretically disposed of the three leaders and was certainly opposed to the use of violence against civilian targets. It is believed that he was assassinated on al-Zawahiri’s orders essentially for his moderate views.
The war was won and the Taliban, a local group of narrowly focused Islamic ex-students, eventually took control. The three leaders had been successful fighters against invaders and along with many other Arab fighters were now without a cause. As with any large group of veterans, assimilation back into peaceful society is an often painful process and many wanted to find a fight. The name al-Qaeda in fact means "the Base" and refers to a database of men willing to fight for Islam in various parts of the world that was in fact kept by the leaders. Both propaganda and training for the organisation were begun using the internet. Training and development, of course, also needed to be arranged at training camps and these were soon initiated where they could be. Members were soon fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia and 9/11 and the Bali, Madrid and London bombings were a new fight that the group found. Iraq was not a focus of al-Qaeda until the US invasion in 2003 after which time it of course became a major focus as a coalition of 'infidel' countries had invaded an at least nominal Muslim one that was thus potentially ripe for radicalisation. The US had of course supported many of these fighters now fighting against them in Iraq when in Afghanistan. There is also evidence that the radical group Fatah al-Islam that committed acts of violence in the north of Lebanon in 2007 possessed US army field manuals supplied to members by the CIA in Afghanistan. Thus it is fair to say that radicalised ideas of the now quite moderate but still persecuted Muslim Brothers are now being adopted in many corners of the world inspired by persecutions and invasions by the US and US-supported governments in the Middle East.
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