Muslim Brotherhood

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Muslim Brotherhood officially Jamiat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun [Arab.,=Society of Muslim Brothers], religious and political organization founded (1928) in Egypt by Hasan al- Banna . Early opposed to secular tendencies in Islamic nations and also anti-British and anti-Zionist, the organization has sought to foster a return to the original precepts of the Qur'an . It grew rapidly, establishing an educational, economic, military, and political infrastructure. Threatened by the group's popularity and its bombings and other politically motivated violence, Egypt's government twice banned (1948, 1954) the organization. It has since existed largely as a clandestine but often militant group, marked by its rejection of Western influences. The Muslim Brotherhood remains strong in Egypt, Syria, Sudan, and other Arab countries.

The group was permitted to operate openly in Egypt in the late 1980s and early 90s after disavowing violence in the 1970s, but the government again moved against the group beginning in the mid-1990s. Members have been elected to Egypt's parliament as independents, and in 2005 candidates linked to the group won a fifth of the seats in parliament, a record. Egypt subsequently mounted a new crackdown on the group, beginning in late 2006, and in 2007 the nation's constitution was amended to ban religious-based political parties. Candidates linked to the group won almost no seats in 2010 amid government efforts to exclude them from the parliament. The group joined in the 2011 protests that led to President Mubarak's ouster. It subsequently established the Freedom and Justice party (FJP), which aligned itself with other opposition groups. The FJP won the largest bloc of parliamentary seats in the 2011–12 elections.

The Syrian branch of the group sought to drive Hafez al- Assad from power through a terror campaign and insurgency in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which culminated in the government's 1982 massacre in Hama. In Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, the Islamic Action Front, is an important opposition party. The Muslim Brotherhood also has given rise to a number of more militant and violent organizations, such as Hamas , Gama'a al-Islamiya, and Islamic Jihad.

Muslim Brotherhood Created by the pious Egyptian Muslim schoolteachter Hasan al-Banna (b. 1906, d. 1949) in 1928 as a movement to rejuvenate Islam, it sought to impose Islamic law (Shariah) upon all social and political activity. Although it expanded to other Arab countries, most notably Syria, its political influence was largely confined to Egypt, where its membership grew to some one million during the 1940s. Because of its increasing militancy, which was very much against Hasan's own ideas, it was banned in 1948. It survived as an underground terrorist organization, which was both strongly anti-Western and against involvement with the USSR. In 1948, one of its members killed the Egyptian prime minister, in response to which Hasan was assassinated by government agents. An alleged assassination attempt on President Nasser in Egypt in 1954 led to the execution of some of its most prominent members and further wide-scale arrests.

Islamic fundamentalism

Muslim Brotherhood: see AL-IKHWĀN AL-MUSLIMŪN; ḤASAN AL-BANNĀʾ.