islamic history

Hasan al-Banna
1906 - 1949

Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hasan al-Banna was born in October 1906 in al-Buhayra, one of Egypt's northern Nile delta provinces, to a religious father. He was educated first at a traditional Islamic kuttab (religious school) and later, at the age of twelve, joined a primary school. During the early part of his life al-Banna became involved with Sufism and continued that association for most of his life. At the age of fourteen he joined a primary teachers' school and two years later enrolled in Dar al-Ulum College, from which he graduated as a teacher.

In Cairo during his student years, al-Banna joined religious societies involved in Islamic education. However, he soon realized that this type of religious activity was inadequate to bring the Islamic faith back to its status in the public life of Egypt. He felt that more activism was needed, so he organized students from al-Azhar University and Dar al-Ulum and started to preach in mosques and popular meeting places. During this period, al-Banna came to be influenced by the writings of Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, and Ahmad Taymur Pasha.

When he graduated in 1927 he was appointed as a teacher of Arabic in a primary school in alIsmaʿiliyya, a new small town in Egypt with a semi-European character. It hosted the headquarters of the Suez Canal Company and a sizable foreign community. In al-Ismaʿiliyya al-Banna started to preach his ideas to poor Muslim workers, small merchants, and civil servants, warning his audience against the liberal lifestyle of the Europeans in the town and the dangers of emulating it, thus cultivating fear and anxiety in them.

In March 1928 he founded the Muslim Brotherhood, or Muslim Brethren. In the first four years of its existence, al-Banna's primary goal was to recruit membership, establishing branches along the eastern and western edge of the delta. The quick and remarkable spread of the Brotherhood engendered governmental resistance, especially during the cabinet of Ismaʿil Sidqi.

In 1932 to 1933 al-Banna was transferred to Cairo and his group merged with the Society for Islamic Culture, forming the first branch of the Muslim Brothers, and Cairo became the headquarters of the society. During this period, the number of branches reached 1,500 to 2,000; most branches ran schools, clinics, and other welfare institutions. Branches also were established in Sudan, Syria, and Iraq, and the society's publications were distributed throughout Islamic countries.

At the beginning of his political career al-Banna did not have an elaborate program; his message focused on the centrality of Islam. Gradually, he developed the notion of Islam as a religion that embraces all aspects of human life and conduct. He declared that the objective of the Muslim Brotherhood was to create a new generation capable of understanding the essence of Islam and of acting accordingly. He believed that Islam was the solution to the problem of Egypt and the Islamic world. Following World War II, al-Banna assumed a greater political role. He started to call for the replacement of secular institutions by Islamic-oriented ones and asked for major reforms. However, al-Banna did not advocate violent political action as the means toward achieving political goals; in fact, he and several members of his organization ran for parliamentary elections more than once and lost. Al-Banna accepted the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime and tried to work from within the system. His condemnation of Egyptian parties was not based on a rejection of the idea of multiparty systems but on the rejection of corruption and manipulation. This is why the Egyptian Brethren today have been able to embrace as legitmate theories pluralism, human rights, and democracy (respectively, ikhtilaf, al-huquq al-sharʿiyya, and shura).

By the end of World War II al-Banna was an acknowledged political figure, and the Muslim Brethren had emerged as a strong force presenting itself as a political alternative. As was the case with other parties, the society established a military wing, which assassinated a number of its adversaries. The Brethren reached its apogee during the Arab-Israel War of 1948, in which the Muslim Brothers participated through their paramilitary organizations. However, the expansion of the society, its growing influence, and its development of a strong military force brought it into a clash with the government. In February 1949 al-Banna was assassinated by police agents. Today, his ideology still informs most of the moderate Islamic movements across all of the Islamic world, and his movement is still the leading ideological power behind the expansion of Islamism.

Bibliography

Brynjar, Lia. The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt. Reading, U.K.: Garnet Publishers, 1998.

Moussalli, Ahmad S. Moderate and Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Quest for Modernity, Legitimacy, and the Islamic State. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999.

posted by Ikhsan_Albanjari @ 11:31 PM