2 - The Muslim Brotherhood and the Environment

Summary

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) was estab-lished by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. He was a primary school teacher and preacher in the town of Ismailiya, near the Suez Canal. Although he lacked formal religious education, al-Banna was a charismatic leader with organisational skills. The Brotherhood grew rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s, building cadres in towns and rural areas. Al-Banna denounced the British involvement in Egyptian domestic affairs and mocked the country’s nominal independence.

From the beginning, the Brotherhood’s relationship with the Egyptian authorities was confrontational and antagonistic. Following the end of the Second World War, it challenged the Egyptian political establishment and its foreign patrons. The Arab–Israeli War of 1948 led to civil disturbances in Egypt. As a result, thousands of Muslim Brothers were imprisoned and tortured. The founder of the Brotherhood himself was assassinated by unknown gunmen in February 1949.

The army coup of 1952 was initially welcomed by the Brotherhood because the Free Officers, under Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew the pro-British King Farouk. Yet the new leader suppressed the Brotherhood because it was viewed as a threat to his regime. In 1966, the intellectual leader of the organisation, Sayyid Qutb, was executed for plotting to assassinate Nasser. Nasser’s successors, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, followed a less aggressive and more engaging policy towards the Brotherhood in spite of its illegal status.

The ideology of the Brotherhood has not been static and unchanging over time. Indeed, it has proven dynamic and adaptive in response to political developments and societal changes. Al-Banna professed an ideology combin-ing anti-colonialism, pan-Islamism and social justice, but he was a political entrepreneur rather than a theorist. It was Qutb who truly influenced the ideological identity of the Brotherhood. He claimed that many Muslims still lived in the age of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance) because they did not practise their religion. More importantly, he proposed the collective condemnation of unbelief (takfir). After his execution, the then leader of the Brotherhood, Hasan al-Hudaybi, attempted to moderate the ideology of the movement. In his book Duʾat la Qudat (‘Preachers, not Judges’), al-Hudaybi argued that the concept of jahiliyya does not apply to modern conditions and that only God can judge who has committed a major sin.