Muslim Brotherhood

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MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Sunni fundamentalist movement (Jama?at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) created on 11 April 1928, in Ismailia, Egypt, by a young teacher, Hassan al-Banna, who had been influenced by the ideas of the reformer Rashid Rida. The doctrine of this brotherhood stressed the refusal of cultural, political, or economic subservience of the Muslim community toward foreign powers; the establishment of an Islamic political, economic, and social order; the restoration of the shari?a (Islamic law) in the juridical domain; and the rejection of all nationalism. In the middle of the 1930s, the Muslim Brotherhood started focusing on political action, to the detriment of social action, in opposing the Wafd Party.

Between 1945 and 1948, the radical wing of the party orchestrated a number of attacks on highly placed Egyptian political leaders, notably against the prime ministers Ahmad Mahir and al-Nuqrashi Pasha. Reacting to the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in 1948, the brotherhood, allied with the communists, became a threat to the Egyptian regime. On 12 February 1949, Hassan al-Banna was executed by the police. In the early 1950s, the movement became more radical, under the direction of Sayyid Qutb, who introduced a political doctrine based on the theory of an Islamic and socialist state. He recruited many officers in the Egyptian army, and in so doing, participated in the coup d'état of July 1952. Relations were tense between the Muslim Brotherhood and the new Egyptian regime, which led to its banning by Gamal Abdel Nasser, in January 1954. The following 26 October, a member of the Brotherhood, firing several shots with a revolver, tried to assassinate President Nasser.

The failed attempt led to massive repression of the movement, which nevertheless succeeded in establishing itself in the Egyptian political picture. Fearing a new attempt on his life, Nasser had nearly 20,000 Muslim Brothers arrested in 1957. Seven years later, they benefited from a general amnesty, which was annulled in August 1965, after another plot against the state was uncovered. Sayyid Qutb, theoretician of the movement, was hanged by Egyptian authorities. According to the indictment, the accused had received financial help from Saudi Arabia via Sudan. Between 1970 and 1981, the policy of openness promulgated by President Anwar al-Sadat allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to reconstitute itself and to become very active, particularly in the universities and among the middle classes. The movement benefited from the religious revival that surfaced after the Arab defeat in the June 1967 war. In spite of their opposition to his policy of reconciliation toward Israel, their activities were tolerated by Sadat as a counterweight to the Nasserists and the extreme left. Brothers were allowed to return to al-Azhar University, from which they had been forced out. Although Sadat would not legalize the Brotherhood as a political party, they ran candidates in the elections of 1976, supported by a popular base and a significant financial network, either as independents or as members of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), the ruling party in which Sadat allowed factions of left, center, and right to organize and run separate lists. Nine Muslim Brothers were elected deputies as independents and six as ASU members, including one who became the leader of the center faction. Branches of the Muslim Brotherhood were formed in the Palestinian territories, in Jordan, Syria, Sudan, Kuwait, Yemen, and Algeria. In 1979, the installation of an Islamic regime in Iran and the signature of an Israeli-Egyptian peace accord strengthened their position, particularly in the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Jordan.

The assassination of President Sadat, on 6 October 1981, by a conspiracy of Islamist officers, resulted in new repression of the Brotherhood. In Syria, threatened by a revolt spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrian president, Hafiz al-Asad, undertook a very harsh campaign of repression. In Aleppo and Hama in early 1980 general strikes were broken up by the security forces with mass arrests and summary executions. After an unsuccessful attempt on Asad's life in June 1980, membership in the Brotherhood was made a capital offense, and the regime attacked again, putting an end to the rebellion. (Two years later there was an Islamist uprising in Hama that was put down even more brutally by the army, resulting in the death of as many as 10,000 people.) In the Egyptian legislative elections of 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood was present on the lists of the Socialist Workers Party, which won fifty-six deputy seats. In December 1987, when the first Intifada began in the Palestinian territories, members of the Muslim Brotherhood formed HAMAS, an armed resistance organization.

In the 1990s, implicated in terrorist actions that were becoming more common in Egypt, the Brotherhood found itself marginalized from Egyptian political life, especially after the vain attempts of one of its moderate currents to form a political party in conjunction with the Copts. Although banned, the movement has been tolerated by the Egyptian regime. In 1990, when it held thirty-seven deputy seats, the movement decided to boycott the legislative elections, and to withdraw provisionally from parliament. At the time of the Gulf War of 1991, the Brotherhood denounced the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, but opposed a foreign presence in the region. In 1995, when the Muslim Brotherhood accounted for sixteen of the twenty-four seats among the Egyptian Attorneys Union, the government passed a law allowing it to exercise control over the principal union organizations. The Brotherhood won no seats at the legislative elections of the same year. In the spring of 2000, the government suspended the activities of the Socialist Labor Party, which had welcomed into its ranks numerous Islamists. As a result of the legislative elections of the following November, while the party of President Husni Mubarak, the National Democratic Party, had won the majority of the 454 seats of the Assembly, the Muslim Brotherhood gained 17 seats, thereby becoming the largest opposition bloc. As of 2004, the Muslim Brotherhood is headed by Mustafa Mashur, seconded by its spokesperson, Maamun al-Hodibi.