What is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?

For more than three decades, I have had the privilege of communicating with numerous Islamic parties around the world by virtue of my work. I connected with groups and movements from Nigeria to Sweden; Malaysia and Indonesia to Morocco; and from America and Britain to India. I often wondered what the common thread between these groups was during my meetings with them. Was it, perhaps, how to translate Islamic values and principles in today’s world?

The answer is both yes and no. While it is true that many of these movements and political groups do, in fact, focus on how to adapt Islamic values to the modern world, I was surprised to find that they focused on the nuances that were characteristics of their own country; that is, they emphasised the differences in both culture and the political reality present in their countries as opposed to emphasising the commonalities across the Islamic world at large. Just a few days ago, I had the privilege of listening to a Turkish academic give a speech on the particularities of the Turkish political scene and, in doing so, he quoted an article written by a prominent Islamic Turkish thinker titled, “The failure of political Kemalism and the victory of secular Kemalism in Turkey”. As the title suggests, secularism in Turkey is the preference of the majority of the Turkish people, even the religious amongst them.

Over the years, I have also heard similar narratives on the uniqueness of the situations in the Indonesian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Gulf, Jordanian and European arenas. Of course, one must not simply argue that every country has its specifics but that every region within that country has its own socio-political and cultural realities. Interestingly enough, the focus was on those particularities which were celebrated, despite the prevailing expectations advocated by the Islamists to overcome these specificities and work towards global Islamic unity. Yet, thinking in this way often makes people forget the reason why social movements are created in the first place; that every movement is born as a result of its environment and serves as a reflection of its reality. Remembering this helps us to explain why many communist movements failed and why we saw the emergence of different varieties of communism, as was the case in China, the Soviet Union and even Yugoslavia prior to its breakup and subsequent conflict.

Against this backdrop, the short answer to the question I pose in the title is that the Muslim Brotherhood is a movement with an Egyptian identity and national configuration. The Brotherhood originated in Egypt and the majority of its members remain Egyptian. When the movement emerged, its founding father Shaikh Hassan Al-Banna considered the possibility of moving to Yemen and then to Saudi Arabia; in the end he chose to stay in Egypt, which he described in his memoirs as the “leader of all Islamic countries” (Al-Banna mentioned Egypt nearly one hundred and fifty times in his memoirs).

His message can be summarised, as it often is in multiple texts, by the following quotation: “I call upon my Muslim brothers and sisters to commit themselves to Islam and being Muslims and to take it upon themselves to advance this religion.” Al-Banna went on to encourage Muslims to help spread the message of Islam and to stand firm in the face threats against it. We will go back to some of these questions later but the question that I would like to answer now is, have the Egyptian people responded to this call?

According to most experts and observers of the history and development of the Muslim Brotherhood, its total number of employees and supporters on the eve of the big strike, which occurred at the start of the Nasserite era in 1954-1955, is estimated at nearly half a million people. In the 2011 Egyptian elections, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won more than ten million votes. Although the first to respond to Hassan Al-Banna’s call were workers and craftsmen, the Muslim Brotherhood’s message later spread among students and teachers, especially teachers of the Arabic language and religious education, and a small segment of the bourgeoisie and people living in the countryside.

It goes without saying that people’s existing religious commitment was not necessarily their motivation for joining the movement because then there would no longer be the need to talk to people about their affiliation with Islam. It is also curious to see how few Islamic scholars now affiliate themselves with the movement despite the fact that it is quite sympathetic to people in this sector of society. According to its founders, the impetus behind the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood was to address the rise of a secular aesthetic and the spread of Westernisation.

From here we can begin to define what sectors of society responded to Al-Banna and how many rejected him. Many of those who aligned themselves with his ideology were those who rejected the cultural alienation that was beginning to take over many of Egypt’s new educational institutions. The rejection of this development was the natural reaction of the rural population and the petite bourgeoisie. A real breakthrough came with the mass recruitment of members after the outbreak of the Palestinian crisis in the mid-thirties and the Brotherhood’s decision to form the Palestine Solidarity Movement as a declaration of its rejection of colonialism and foreign hegemony in the region. The Brotherhood’s political capital increased after the outbreak of the 1947-1948 war in Palestine, the Egyptians’ rejection of a British presence in their country and the subsequent disasters of the defeat in the war with the nascent state of Israel. Anger and discontent rose as a result of the political crises in the region. With these developments, the Muslim Brotherhood aligned itself with national liberation movements.

The Brotherhood experienced a decline in popularity during the Nasser era, not because its causes were no longer relevant but simply because Nasser stole the clothes off the Islamic movement’s back by adopting its most important stances of standing against Western hegemony in the region and advocating popular causes and the rights of the poor. In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood gained a lot of leverage in the Sadat era, not because he supported it as is often claimed, but because his presidency re-oriented Egypt towards the West and abandoned the poor. Sadat took advantage of public apprehension towards the Brotherhood in order to increase the leverage of Left Wing groups in universities; such political endeavours would have been insignificant if the movement did not have a great deal of political capital and initiatives taking place on the ground.

The Muslim Brotherhood was not the leading religious movement in the 1970s; the Salafist movement surpassed it for several reasons. In his fight against religious movements, Nasser focused most of his energy on combating those of a specific, more traditional category. The strategy of traditional Islamist movements, such as the Salafis, was to publish works that called for a pre-modern way of life. Thus many traditionalists called for the publication of books that pre-dated modern heritage and interpretation, such as the works of Al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah. This new orientation not only expanded to sweep the Muslim Brotherhood under its current but also coincided with the oil boom and the migration of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, especially the workers, craftsmen and teachers, to the Gulf States.

This migration had several effects, the first being a shift in the economic hierarchy between workers and small craftsmen and the petite and traditional bourgeoisie, which dominated the cultural landscape. The second was that the Salafist migrants who went to Saudi Arabia were able to foster a message of religious simplicity that appealed to the popular classes, especially in the non-politicised version of their message, which prepared its acceptance amid the popular classes.

The Salafist movement was not the only dominant force in the political arena. The 1970s saw many trends among students in Egyptian universities, especially new universities in the countryside. These trends emerged during the absence of Muslim Brotherhood activities, as it was banned by the government and many of its leaders were in prison or exile. Despite all of these obstacles, the Brotherhood was able to attract many members later on thanks to its outstanding leadership.

In summary, one could say that the Muslim Brotherhood was formed by uniting the sectors of Egyptian society that rejected foreign domination and internal manifestations of Westernisation and secularisation, in addition to its sympathy with the disadvantaged and, of course, its religious ethos. The majority of the Muslim Brotherhood’s members were and remain outside of the influential classes. What this confirms is that the campaign to eradicate the movement aims, in effect, to eradicate the most important sector of the Egyptian people, along with its principles and values. In short, this is a war on Egypt that seeks to empower external forces, as was the case during the colonial era.

Translated from Al Quds Al Arabi, 13 April, 2015.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.