Hassan al-Banna Founds the Muslim Brotherhood
Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood with six workers from the Suez Canal Company in Ismailia in March 1928. The immediate context was the humiliation of the 1924 caliphate abolition, the cultural shock of British colonialism, and what al-Banna saw as the moral corruption of Egyptian society by Western influence. His diagnosis was simple: the crisis of Muslim societies was not political but spiritual — Muslims had drifted from their religion, and the solution was not nationalism or socialism but comprehensive Islamic revival. Al-Banna was a brilliant organiser. Unlike previous Islamic reform movements that had focused on scholars and texts, the Brotherhood built mass institutions: schools, hospitals, social welfare networks, sports clubs, and small businesses. By the 1940s the Brotherhood had perhaps half a million members in Egypt and was operating across the Arab world. Al-Banna's genius was to combine the mobilising power of a religious revival with the organisational methods of a modern political party — creating, in effect, the first modern Islamist political movement. The Brotherhood's ideology rested on four principles: the Quran and Sunnah as the fundamental constitution; Islam as a comprehensive system covering politics, economics, law, and social life; the need for Islamic governance; and the ultimate goal of an international Islamic order. These principles, worked out by al-Banna and his successors over decades, became the template for Islamic political parties from Hamas (founded as a Brotherhood offshoot in 1987) to the AKP in Turkey to Ennahda in Tunisia. The Brotherhood's relationship with violence has been contested from the beginning. Al-Banna himself condemned terrorism but authorised a 'special apparatus' that carried out assassinations — including of Egyptian judges — in the late 1940s. In 1948 the Egyptian government banned the Brotherhood after a series of bombings. Weeks later, a government agent assassinated al-Banna himself on a Cairo street — he was forty-three years old. His death made him a martyr and ensured that his ideas would outlive any government repression. The Brotherhood's subsequent history — repressed by Nasser, who executed Sayyid Qutb in 1966; partially rehabilitated under Sadat; oscillating between politics and violence across the Arab world — is the central thread of Sunni political Islamism throughout the twentieth century.
- Year: 1928 CE
- Category: Political
