The Muslim Brotherhood (2 page)

Chapter One deals with the Egyptian Ikhwan, the mother branch of the entire Muslim Brotherhood movement. Tracing its evolution from the days of its founder, the chapter explores how the Egyptian brothers became so hampered by their own traditions that they struggled to resolve their own internal contradictions.
Chapter Two
looks at what was in its heyday the other major Middle Eastern branch, the Syrian Ikhwan. This chapter examines the Syrian Brotherhood’s shift into violence in the 1980s and its subsequent return to diplomacy, something that makes it arguably one of the most progressive Ikhwani branches today.
Chapter Three
deals with the highly controversial subject of the Brotherhood’s international organisation. Whilst many Ikhwani deny it even exists, this mysterious body has played a major role in the Brotherhood’s evolution, especially during the 1980s. Its importance may have declined in recent years, but it still has a role to play within the Ikhwan’s international structures.
Chapter Four
examines the Brotherhood in Europe, looking specifically at the UK, French and German branches and at the various Ikhwani-oriented organisations and institutions that have been established there. It
assesses the challenges facing these organisations given the fact that they are minority communities with limited influence living in a secular society.
Chapter Five
offers an assessment of the Ikhwan’s relationship to violence. It explores the attitudes within the movement towards the ideology of violence through key scholars such as Sayyid Qutb and to jihad, including examining the role that the Ikhwan played in the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
Chapter Six
offers an examination of the Brotherhood’s shift from opposition movement to mainstream political actor during the Arab Spring. Focusing primarily on Egypt, it looks at how the Brotherhood responded to the revolution and worked its way into power. Finally the conclusion addresses some of the key challenges facing the Brotherhood now that power has finally become a reality.

The Egyptian Ikhwan has always been considered to be the heart and the soul of the entire Muslim Brotherhood. Not only is it the founding branch of the transnational movement – something that gives it a particular historical legitimacy – its Murshid (Supreme Guide) is spiritual guide to the Brotherhood as a whole. Decisions made in Cairo reverberate around the movement’s other branches with special significance and still carry a certain moral authority. Indeed, the Egyptian branch is considered to be the vanguard of the entire Brotherhood movement.

In many ways, the Egyptian brothers have lived up to this role. They weathered the storm of the many decades of sustained and brutal repression at the hands of the Egyptian state and despite being banned for almost a century, succeeded in maintaining a substantive grass roots following across the country. The Egyptian Ikhwan also succeeded in making its presence felt on the political scene, manoeuvring itself into parliament without even having a political party and dominating many of the country’s professional associations. The Brotherhood proved successful on the financial front too, creating its own Islamic
financing networks that sustained the movement throughout the years of hardship. As such, the Egyptian Brotherhood had established itself to such an extent that by the time the Arab Spring reached Egypt, the Brotherhood was poised to step out of the wings and into power.

Yet despite all these achievements, in the years leading up to the 2011 revolution, the Egyptian Ikhwan looked to be a movement in stasis. It was utterly bogged down in introspection and indecision, unable to take a clear stance on many issues, not least the extent to which it should reform. Indeed, the Brotherhood seemed to have got itself caught between an awareness of the need to meet the challenges of a changing world and the need to remain true to its founding principles. Thus, whilst in the years before the revolution, it adopted a more reformist discourse that was fully in keeping with the spirit of the times, at the same time it seemed unwilling to move very far from the core principles established by the movement’s founder Hassan al-Banna in the 1920s.

This basic contradiction manifested itself in an often ambiguous discourse and a basic unwillingness to spell out policies on more controversial issues, something that brought charges from within Egypt and beyond that the movement was playing a political game in order to further its own interests. Indeed, the contradictory signals that have emerged from the Ikhwan’s executive body, the Guidance Office, meant that any gains the movement made were often reversed by its own undoing.

One of the reasons the Ikhwan was so unable to articulate a more cohesive strategy is that it was forced to operate under extremely difficult conditions. Any move they made had to be a careful calculation of risk, weighing up the potential cost not only to the movement as a whole but also to individual members, who have repeatedly found themselves in prison. However, whilst state repression was certainly a factor in the Ikhwan’s inability to reform, it cannot be considered the sole cause of this failing.

Internal wrangling within the movement between those of a conservative bent and those who wished to become more engaged in the political process also played its part. Commentators often portrayed this division as a clash of generations with the conservative old guard pitted against the younger reformist faction, themselves in late middle age. Whilst such a divide certainly existed and continues to exist, it is perhaps misleading to overplay the generational factor. The group known as the reformists, which comprised figures such as Issam al-Ariyan and Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh, was a specific set of individuals who came to the Brotherhood in the 1970s as students and who were more overtly political than their predecessors. Indeed, rather than a reformist current, it is perhaps more accurate to talk about reformist figures or individuals. Their bid to push the movement to take a more progressive stance came up against repeated resistance from the more conservative elements within the leadership. That this wrangling was at times played out in the public domain only served to strengthen the impression that the Ikhwan was lacking in direction.

However, this conflict of views is not sufficient to explain the dichotomy in which the Egyptian Ikhwani found themselves. The problem was always far more complex than a simple clash of views within the leadership. Rather it was a result of the Ikhwan’s need to play to several different constituencies simultaneously and its desire to be all things to all men. As a movement, the Egyptian Ikhwan always sought to appeal to as broad a base as possible in order to challenge the regime of the day, hence the all-encompassing slogan ‘Islam is the solution’. Whilst this wide popular base was always one of the Ikhwan’s key strengths, it restricted how far it could stray from the original ideology of its founder. Many of the movement’s supporters and sympathisers backed the Ikhwan precisely because they considered that it held on to traditions such as calling for the implementation of Sharia law. Moreover some of the movement’s supporters considered the Ikhwan to be representing
Islam itself, a view that the Brotherhood was not averse to promoting over the years. It is this amalgamation of the political and the religious that has always given the Ikhwan its potency. As such the extent to which it was able to reform was always limited by the movement’s need to remain anchored in its own traditions.

However, like other Islamist groups, the Ikhwan was always anxious to demonstrate that it could be considered as a trusted political partner and that it was not seeking to overturn the state through revolution. Rather, the brothers asserted that they wanted whoever rules Egypt to do so in a proper Islamic manner, seemingly indicating that they would like to take the role of moral arbiters of the state.

Whilst the pressure to be seen as a moderate progressive organisation was exacerbated after 9/11, this tension between the need to reform and the need to hold fast to tradition was present from the very beginnings of the movement. Hassan al-Banna struggled to strike a balance between engaging with the country’s establishment and appeasing his followers, many of whom were anxious for the Ikhwan to take a more radical stance. This remained a constant pressure for the Brotherhood. Whilst other Ikhwani branches, such as the Syrians, were able to shake themselves up and put forward programmes that strayed further from the original tenets of the movement, the Egyptians repeatedly failed to break free of their own traditions.

If the Murshid is held up as the main spiritual reference for the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide, Hassan al-Banna is revered as the leader of all leaders and has attained near iconic status within the movement. Yet it is in Egypt that the figure of al-Banna looms largest and where his memory is ever present. This reverence for al-Banna is not only related to the fact that in 1928 he founded the Muslim Brotherhood;
by extension, he sowed the seeds of the contemporary political Islamist movement that would play such a major role in the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Yet a kind of personality cult has evolved around the figure of al-Banna, wherein stories about his character seem to overshadow discussions of his ideas. The Ikhwan’s website, full of descriptions of al-Banna’s personal qualities and his dedication to the cause, is testimony to this. One article on the website cites the reason for the movement’s expansion as ‘the enthusiastic and marvellous nature of al-Banna’.
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It goes on to describe him as a man with an almost superhuman capacity for hard work, stating, ‘He visited every village in the Upper Egypt in twenty days, sometimes he would be in Bai-Swaif in the morning, have lunch in Beba, in al-Wasta in the evening and stay the night in al-Fayoom … he regarded the Call for Allah first and foremost.’
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There is a tendency within the Brotherhood if not to equate al-Banna with the Prophet, then at least to depict him as more than merely mortal. For example, one of the founding members of the Brotherhood, Mahmoud Abdelhalim, describes al-Banna as ‘less than the Prophet. Nevertheless al-Dawa preoccupied him … and the likes of Hassan al-Banna are the heirs of the Prophet’.
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There are several reasons why discussions of al-Banna tend to focus more on his personal attributes than his ideology. Firstly, such descriptions reflect the fact that he appears to have been blessed with a particularly forceful personality and a special charisma. He certainly had the personal touch and those who knew him relate that he made them feel as though he had an intimate connection to them. Farid Abdel Khaliq, who went on to become al-Banna’s personal secretary, has described meeting al-Banna for the first time. From that night, he followed him everywhere he went to preach, explaining: ‘The way he spoke allowed you to see the whole sky through a keyhole.’
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Similarly, former Murshid Omar al-Tilimsani used near metaphysical terms to describe al-Banna, noting, ‘In the presence of al-Banna I was like a dead
man in the hands of someone washing my corpse.’
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Another Egyptian Ikhwani, Musa Ishaq Al-Husayni, has also commented, ‘His mastery over his followers was complete and inclusive, almost approaching sorcery.’
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Secondly, it is probably fair to say that al-Banna’s personal qualities were more impressive and left a greater impression than his ideology. Although he was able to tap into the grievances of a generation, he can hardly be considered to have been a major intellectual force or even a scholar. His ideology was drawn primarily from the great reformist Islamist thinkers of the nineteenth century such as Rashid Rida and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and as Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi has argued, ‘he came to complete the project of al-Afghani’.
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As Hanafi goes on to comment, ‘To say the truth, the ideas of Hassan al-Banna probably may not amount to much: an Islam that is simple and clear … The Qur’an, The Hadiths etc … His ideas were very clear, very pure and there was no ideological complexity, but … as an organizing power … he was something else.’
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Hanafi’s comments are probably a little harsh: whilst al-Banna may not have been a scholar in the conventional sense, he did succeed in establishing a movement that was able to present itself as something progressive and modern despite upholding traditional values, and which clearly had a broad appeal. Through the simple message that Islam was a means of regulating every aspect of life, he skilfully tapped into people’s concerns about the eroding of tradition and the increasing Westernisation of the Egyptian elite, along with the seemingly quiescent attitude of the official religious establishment. (Some scholars at Al-Azhar University seemed almost willing to adopt the secularist ideas that were openly propagated by some of the intelligentsia. Ali Abd al-Raziq, for example, denied that Islam was in any way connected to politics.)

Al-Banna articulated the anxieties of a generation who were struggling to deal with the encroaching modernisation that had
accompanied the colonial presence and which the Egyptian elite seemed more than willing to accept. Although al-Banna did not reject the West in itself, he certainly had major concerns about the impact of Western culture on his own society, asserting: ‘Western civilization has invaded us by force and with aggression on the level of science and money, of politics and luxury, of pleasures and negligence, and of various aspects of a life that are comfortable, exciting and seductive.’
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His assertion of the comprehensiveness of Islam seemed therefore to offer certainties in an increasingly uncertain world.

He also saw the Brotherhood as a champion of anti-imperialism, and his strong views about the British colonial presence certainly increased his movement’s appeal. Al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood came to present themselves as the guardians of the native popular culture against the distortions of foreign and secularist ideologies.
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Yet rather than retrenching himself in the traditions of the past, al-Banna was able to present his ideas and his desire for action as something new and exciting and it was for this reason that many of his adherents were drawn from the younger generations. As Brynjar Lia has argued in his excellent study
The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt
, the fundamental appeal of the Ikhwan was ‘its ability to link issues which were usually associated with reactionism and backwardness, such as Islamic laws and strict public morality, to the national issues of independence and development’.
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