Hassan al-Banna
Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, the organisation from which most modern Sunni Islamist movements descend. Born in Mahmudiyya in the Nile delta in 1906, he was the son of a watch repairer who was also a mosque teacher and a scholar of hadith, and he memorised the Quran as a boy and joined Sufi orders in his teens. He trained as a teacher at Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, arriving in a city he found dominated by British power, foreign business and, as he saw it, imported irreligion. He was posted to Ismailia in 1927, a canal town where the British base and the Suez Canal Company's European quarter stood beside Egyptian labourers' housing, and the contrast was the immediate spur. He founded the Society of the Muslim Brothers in 1928 with six workers from the canal company. Its programme was that Islam is a complete system covering worship, law, economy and state, and that reform must begin with the individual, then the family, then society. He wrote that the Quran was their constitution. The method was what made it work. The Brotherhood built schools, clinics, mosques, workshops and sporting clubs, providing services the state did not, and organised members into small cells. It grew to perhaps half a million members within twenty years, and spread beyond Egypt. It also had a secret paramilitary wing, which fought in Palestine in 1948 and carried out assassinations in Egypt, including that of the prime minister Nuqrashi in December 1948. The government dissolved the organisation, and al-Banna was shot dead in a Cairo street in February 1949, almost certainly by the political police.
- Lived: 1906 CE – 1949 CE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: religious_leader, writer
