by Ed Husain
Born in 1906, Hasan al-Banna was the eldest son of a pious mother who recited the Quran daily in the presence of her children. But it was al-Banna’s father who exposed him to Sufism from a very young age. Sheikh Ahmad, Hasan’s father, was a watchmaker and Muslim scholar who had developed a local following in the Egyptian town of al-Mahmudiyya. At that time in Egypt, Sufi orders were under public attack by a generation of modernists who blamed their obsession with litanies, tombs and superstition as a major cause of the decline of Muslims. Al-Banna’s father not only adhered to the Shadhili Sufi order but also published a commentary, when Hasan was a child of six, on the litany of Sidi Ahmad Zarruq, who also belonged to the Shadhili order. The book was republished several times in Hasan al-Banna’s lifetime.
Al-Banna attended his first Sufi gathering in a mosque in Damanhour, on the western edge of the Nile delta, at the age of twelve. The melody and chorus of the chanting of the names of God drew him to these men who praised God in beautiful voices in unison. This group of Sufis from the Hasafiyyah order, which remains popular in the Egyptian countryside, also studied the litanies of Zarruq, about which al-Banna’s father had written.
Young Hasan returned to the gatherings of the Sufis in the mosque each week and made friends among the younger Sufis. He soon wanted to get more involved with Sufism, and became a daily visitor to a shrine not far from the mosque at the tomb of the founder of the Hasafiyyah order, Sheikh Hasanain. There he meditated and recited prayers, then returned home. Having tasted the serenity of the Sufi mausoleums, al-Banna would often walk three hours from Damanhour to al-Disuq to visit the tombs of other Sufi masters of the past. This habit stayed with him for life, to the dislike of the Salafi puritans who later joined his organisation in droves and attempted to eradicate Sufi influences from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Al-Banna’s piety, regular attendance, and commitment to Sufi teachings and practice led to him being admitted into the Hasafiyyah Sufi order in 1923, aged seventeen. His creative, managerial side quickly came to the fore, as he created a Hasafi Benevolent Society to raise funds for the order and its work. The younger members of the order, with al-Banna one of the most active, were interested not just in prayers, chanting and spirituality but also in social action. Al-Banna later described the Hasafi Benevolent Society as the forerunner of his Muslim Brotherhood organisation. For al-Banna, the aims of the society were to divert Muslims away from drinking alcohol and gambling, and to encourage them to fight against the Christian missionaries who were beginning to appear in many parts of Egypt, including al-Banna’s village.
That same year, 1923, al-Banna moved to Cairo to pursue further studies in order to become a schoolteacher. Every weekend he travelled home to help his Sufi brothers preach against the Christian missionaries, but every Friday night he would attend the weekly gatherings of the Hasafiyyah order at their headquarters in Cairo. Amid the Sufi chanting, litanies and warmth he would have found spiritual succour, but around him in Cairo he witnessed a different world – a world to which Sufi teachings did not speak. Sufism did not address what he perceived as the licentious culture of modern Cairo, for which he blamed the Europeans, who:
brought their half-naked women into these regions, their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their entertainments, their stories, their newspapers, their romances, their phantasies, their frivolous pastimes and their insolent jokes. Here they countenanced crimes they did not tolerate in their own countries, and decked out this boisterous, frivolous world, reeking with sin and redolent with vice, to the eyes of the simple-minded deluded Muslims of wealth and influence, and to those of rank and power. They were not satisfied until they had founded schools and scientific and cultural institutions in the very heart of the Islamic realm, which cast doubt and heresy into the soul of its sons and taught them to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western, in the belief that only what came from the Europeans served as the supreme model to be emulated in this life.2
Blaming the West for the evils he saw around him, without stopping to think that young Egyptians might well have willingly involved themselves in worldly pleasures, was to be a hallmark of the Muslim Brotherhood he was shortly to establish. He saw the West as being at war with Islam, and was probably the first in modern times to speak of this war with the West in the 1930s:
I was deeply pained, for I saw that the social life of the beloved Egyptian nation was oscillating between its dear and precious Islam, which it had inherited, protected, lived with and taken pride in for fourteen centuries, and this violent Western Ghazw [raid], armed and equipped with all the deadly material weapons of money, status, outward appearance, indulgence, power and the means of propaganda.3
In keeping with Sufi etiquette, al-Banna raised his concerns with a leading Sufi in Cairo, Sheikh Yusuf al-Dijwi (1870–1946). True to Sufi form, al-Dijwi took a quietist approach and said that God was responsible for what happened in and around Cairo. Al-Banna’s fury at this passivity led to him rebuking a senior Sufi in the gathering. But as was al-Banna’s way, he turned his anger into action.
He and some friends from the Sufi order in Cairo decided to take Islam to the masses, rather than wait for the masses to come to their understanding of Islam. They went out, and in brief five-minute stints addressed young men in Cairo’s popular coffee houses. In line with Sufi teachings, al-Banna did not threaten his audiences with hell, but spoke gently about the beauty of their religion and the cravings of the human soul for God – an approach that seemed to work. Encouraged by the fact that people listened, rather than walking away, al-Banna continued to preach on street corners in short stints, and then went from place to place calling people to God.
In 1927, his studies in Cairo at an end, Hasan al-Banna became a schoolteacher in Ismailia at the age of twenty-one. As he settled into his chosen career he continued his Sufi practices, but his experiences in the great city haunted him. His passion for preaching and proselytising, and his dedication to preserving Islam in the face of what he saw as threats from Western materialism and Christian missionaries, impressed other young men.
In the spring of 1928, six of al-Banna’s admirers joined him for a series of meetings in which they lamented the state of Egypt and the perceived decline of Muslims. They asked al-Banna for ideas about what could be done to improve the situation, and their discussions led to him formulating a practical way forward.
Rather than announcing the formation of a new party with Hasan al-Banna as its president, they instead swore a pledge of allegiance (bai’a, in Sufi parlance, but derived from a practice of the Prophet’s companions) to him. In due course he became known as the murshid (spiritual guide) of the group – again evidence of Sufi influence. Just as in his own order, al-Banna met with his new disciples once a week and they recited Sufi litanies. He named this small group of men ‘al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen’, the Muslim Brothers.
Within ten years al-Banna had built his organisation into a mass movement with a presence across Egypt. From university campuses to trade unions, to businesses, to mosques, to civil servants, millions embraced al-Banna’s teachings on an Islam that was opposed to the West, an Islam that was a socio-political programme, that defied the humiliation brought to Egypt by the Europeans’ ‘war on Islam’.
In April 1934, bolstered by his success in attracting vast numbers of Egyptians from across society, he wrote in a tract entitled To What Do We Summon People?:
O our people: with the Quran in our right hand and the Sunnah in our left, and with the deeds of the pious ancestors among the sons of this nation as our example, we call on you. We summon you to Islam, the teachings of Islam, the laws of Islam, and the guidance of Islam, and if this is politics for you, then it is our policy. And if the one summoning you to these principles [Islam] is a politician, then, God be praised, we are the most deeply rooted of men in politics.4
Islam, for al-Banna, was more than a rel
ationship with God. In spring 1938, addressing the Brotherhood’s students, he formally announced the organisation’s entry into Egyptian political life:
Tell me, Brothers: if Islam is something other than politics, society, economy and culture, what is it then? Is it only prostrations devoid of a pulsating heart? ... Did the Quran reveal a perfect, fixed and detailed system for just that? ... It is precisely to such a weak and narrow understanding of Islam that the enemies of Islam try to confine themselves so that they can mock and say to them: ‘We left you your freedom of religion.’5
As al-Banna put his vision into practice, he ensured that his movement was so organised that members of the Muslim Brotherhood were engaged in programmes of ‘good works’ at the same time as encouraging and monitoring each other as regards the precepts of personal morality. But al-Banna was also starting to head into more uncertain, undefined and dangerous territory.
Much as he detested European influences on his country, al-Banna was aware of the effectiveness of modern European mass political movements, and so he imitated them. His Brotherhood was thus a hybrid of Sufi influences and features of the Italian fascist and German Nazi mass movements of the 1930s. Like the Italian Blackshirts and Nazi Brownshirts, he created his own paramilitary organisation within the Muslim Brotherhood.
Al-Banna personally trained a cadre known as the Jawwala (‘Rovers’) for several years in Egyptian patriotism and Islamic zeal, recalling the great Islamic past of jihad in the time of the Prophet. Nights were spent with al-Banna in collective vigils and prayers, and the opportunity to spend time with the now famous leader was enough to draw thousands of young Egyptian men. The spirit of jihad and Futuwwa, Islamic chivalry on the battlefield, were constantly evoked by al-Banna and this elite group. Yet even as al-Banna’s organisation took on a more political and militant stance, he kept it rooted in Sufism by issuing a book of daily litanies in 1936, first for the Jawwala and later for the broader Muslim Brotherhood. He called this a wird, a practice of the Sufis – no doubt inspired by his father’s commentary on the wird of Zarruq, and his own adoption of the Hasafi wird in his teens and early twenties.
The Jawwala were not yet involved in criminal activity or any form of terrorism. Alongside al-Banna, they became the public face of the Muslim Brotherhood, because they engaged in social work and provided a martial presence and personal security for him at Brotherhood events, lending them an air of seriousness and militancy. And all the while, the military drills and indoctrination continued for a generation of young men.
In the autumn of 1937, al-Banna went further and created the Kata’ib (‘battalions’) for select members of the Jawwala. Each battalion consisted of ten to forty members who had sworn the special oath (bai’a) of dedication to ‘action, obedience and secrecy’. Al-Banna developed a tailored study programme for them, based on nightly vigils and Sufi litanies. He also wrote a series of treatises for the Kata’ib, which he later used as training material for the entire Muslim Brotherhood. His popular tract On Jihad, which is compulsory reading to this day among Brotherhood members, speaks of Muslim humiliation and the duty to pursue jihad:
As you know, the Muslims today are forced to humble themselves before non-Muslims, and are ruled by infidels. Their lands have been trampled over, and their honour has been violated. Their enemies govern their affairs, and the rites of their religion have fallen into abeyance within their own lands, to say nothing of their impotence to spread the call [of missionary Islam]. Hence it has become an imperative individual duty for every Muslim to prepare himself for jihad until the opportunity arises and God decrees a matter that shall be accomplished ... I should mention to you that before the present age of darkness in which their pride has died, the Muslims never abandoned jihad throughout history, nor did they neglect it, not even their religious scholars, Sufis, artisans and others. All were fully prepared.6
All of this incendiary activism eventually spilled over into violence. In 1949 a Muslim Brotherhood member shot dead Prime Minister Nukrashi Pasha, and Brotherhood members made an attempt on the life of another politician. Al-Banna had infused the spirit of jihad into his organisation, and the genie was now out of the bottle. The Brotherhood’s actions at home and abroad had made them too powerful for their own good, and this led to al-Banna’s own death at the hands of the Egyptian security apparatus in 1949.
Al-Banna’s teachings inspired the Muslim Brotherhood to militancy during his lifetime, and to all-out terrorism immediately after his passing. They shot and killed police officers, bombed cinemas, and often ended up in jail. This violent response came initially from the Brotherhood, but later others broke away and committed themselves solely to jihad. These included al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad al-Islami, precursors to al-Qaeda. Both of them were directly implicated in terrorism, from the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 to the first World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993 and the Luxor massacre of foreign tourists in Upper Egypt in 1997.
Meanwhile the Muslim Brotherhood’s exponential growth, from 800 members in 1936 to over 2 million in 1948, showed the power of new, politicised organisations that rivalled the old, traditional Sufi orders. The Sufis preached love and compassion, and had offered spiritual mentoring over the course of a millennium, but had no rallying call for this new age.
The political leaders of the Muslim world were admirers of the Sufis. Arab rulers regularly sat in gatherings of the Sufis, attended the annual mawlid, or celebration of the birth of the Prophet, or visited the shrines of saints, or endowed new mosques for ancient Sufi orders. In return the Sufi orders, with their many, many millions of members, spread good will toward the government. With the exception of the Gulf countries, every Arab and Muslim government has maintained this close, mutually beneficial relationship with the Sufis. Egypt’s Sadat was a member of an order; his successor Hosni Mubarak visited Sufi sheikhs and claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein venerated the Naqshbandis and Qadiris, and Syria’s Hafiz al-Assad regularly consulted and confessed to two leading Naqshbandi scholars.7
But in Iraq, Syria and Egypt this same political elite suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood as purveyors of a new Islam – or Islamism, to be precise – that refused to be co-opted and, worse, actively sought confrontation. In Egypt, the Brotherhood’s hostility to Western influences put it directly in conflict with first King Farouq and then the revolutionary military officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, national socialists who found Islamism abominable.
Two years after Egypt’s 1952 nationalist socialist revolution, the prominent literary critic Sayyed Qutb was jailed for trying to subvert Nasser’s government, or even assassinate him, as some claimed. After Qutb’s return from a troublesome stay in America, he had joined the Muslim Brotherhood. In prison, he wrote his most controversial works, including Milestones, in which he claimed that Muslim society was now jahili, that is, it had reverted to the pagan Arabian days of pre-Islamic ignorance. To reverse this, he said, Muslims must take up arms against those identified by al-Banna as corroding Muslim identity and avoiding the implementation of Islamist ideology. Haram acts must become illegal.
The Nasser government’s actions confirmed Qutb’s worst fears. In prison for a decade, he was tortured, raped, humiliated. At his lowest point he was asked: ‘Where is your God now?’ Dogs were set on him and other Brotherhood prisoners. The furious Quran commentary that he released, In the Shade of the Quran, became a bestseller in the Arab world. His call in his writings was ‘Rule is for God alone’. Citing Quranic verses literally, he claimed: ‘Those who rule by other than what God has revealed, they are the unbelievers.’
His was the same clarion call, the same conclusion, as that of the seventh-century Kharijites who killed Imam Ali. Nasser hanged Qutb in 1966 and made a martyr of him, but the horse of Kharijite ideology had now bolted from the stables of Islamism in Egypt’s prisons. The assassination of Sadat in 1981 was a direct result of Qutb’s teaching that the killing
of Muslim leaders could be justified on the grounds of Takfir – their denial of their Muslimness, which therefore rendered them apostates, deserving death.
The culture of suicide bombings, the scourge of contemporary terrorism, cannot, however, be laid at the door of these Sunni Islamists. Learning from the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, it was the Shi‘a Islamist group Hezbollah that was the first among Muslims to use this tactic of taking others’ lives by means of suicide attacks. They struck in Lebanon in 1983 against American and French marines. Three hundred marines lost their lives, and Iran erected a memorial honouring the killers as ‘martyrs’. This novel action came as a shock even to Islamist activists, who had thus far, in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Palestine when battling Israeli forces, shunned suicide attacks, as life came from God, and God explicitly forbade suicide in the Quran. Arab media began to promote such actions as ‘martyrdom operations’. Today, the Palestinian Hamas and other violent Islamist groups have made suicide bombers their weapon of choice.
So far we have only looked at Islamists from one end of the spectrum, that of Hasan al-Banna, Sayyed Qutb and the increasingly violent heirs of their tradition. But this is not the whole story. There is another, more hopeful, side to the Islamist conundrum that we ignore at our peril. Movements and ideologies, like people, change and adapt. Islamists are no different. There are shifts within these movements.