Introduction

Despite the militant imagery that characterized the Society from the first night of its existence, Banna always insisted that he had no intention of staging a coup or seizing power. The Society’s chief aim was education.
He believed that when the people had absorbed the message of Islam and allowed it to transform them, the nation would become Muslim without a violent takeover. At the very beginning, Banna formulated a six-point program, which revealed his debt to Afghani, Abdu, and Rida’s sa.lafi.yyah reform movements: (1) the interpretation of the Koran in the spirit of the age, (2) the unity of Islamic nations, (3) raising the standard of living and achievement of social justice and order, (4) a struggle against illiteracy and poverty, (5) the emancipation of Muslim lands from foreign dominance, and (6) the promotion of Islamic peace and fraternity throughout the world. Banna did not intend his Society to be violent or radical, but was principally concerned with the fundamental reform of Muslim society, which had been undermined by the colonial experience and cut off from its roots. Egyptians had become accustomed to thinking themselves inferior to Europeans, but there was no need for this. They had fine cultural traditions too that would serve them better than any imported ideologies. They should not have to copy the French or Russian revolutions, because the Prophet Muhammad had already proclaimed the need for liberty, equality, fraternity, and social justice 1300 years before. The Shariah suited the Middle Eastern environment in a way no foreign law code could. As long as Muslims imitated other people, they would remain “cultural mongrels.”
But first the Brothers and Sisters had to reacquaint themselves with Islam.
There was no shortcut to freedom and dignity; Muslims would have to rebuild themselves and their society from the ground up. Over the years, Banna evolved an efficient, modern system, constantly subject to review and self-appraisal, to achieve this. In 1938, members were divided into “battalions,” each consisting of three groups--one for workers, one for students, and one for businessmen and civil servants.
The groups met once a week to spend the night together in prayer and spiritual instruction. By 1943, when this system had not brought in the harvest of recruits that had been hoped for, the “battalions” were replaced by “families,” each of which had ten members and was a unit, responsible for its actions. The family members would meet once a week, and keep each other up to the mark, ensuring that everybody observed the “pillars,” and kept clear of gambling, alcohol, usury, and adultery. The family system stressed the bonding of Muslims at a time when Egyptian society was fragmenting under the pressures of modernization.
Each family belonged to a larger “battalion,” which kept it in touch with headquarters.
A Christian reform movement at this time tended to pinpoint doctrine;
this was partly due to the rationalism of modern Western culture, which had come to see faith as adherence to a set of beliefs. The Society, however, was run according to the conservative piety of the Shariah, which helped Muslims to build the Muhammadan archetype within themselves by living in a certain way. But this old-style piety was promoted in a modern guise. The rites, prayers, and ethical disciplines were designed to create an interior orientation. to God, similar to the Prophet’s own. Only in this spiritual context, Banna believed, could modern institutions and reforms make sense to a Muslim people. In 1945, at a packed meeting, Banna decided that it was time to establish a social and welfare program that was desperately needed, but which no government had addressed effectively. The Brothers had always built schools for boys and girls beside the mosque, as soon as they established a new branch. They had also founded the Rovers, a modern scout movement, which trained young Brothers physically and practically; the Rovers had become the largest and most powerful youth group in the country by the Second World War. Now these services were to become more streamlined and efficient. The Brothers ran night schools for workers, and tutorial colleges for the civil-service examinations ; they founded clinics and hospitals in the rural areas, and the Rovers were also actively involved in improving sanitation and health education in the poorer, country districts.
The Society also founded modern trade unions, and instructed the workers on their rights. They made public some of the worst labor abuses, and were active in job creation, by establishing their own factories and light industries in printing, weaving, construction, and engineering.
The Society’s enemies always accused Banna of having created a “state within a state.” He had indeed built a massively successful counterculture which highlighted the deficiencies of the government in a way that was clearly threatening. It called attention to the government’s neglect of education and labor conditions; the fact that the Society alone was able to appeal to the fellahin was also disturbing. But, more important, all the Society’s institutions had a distinctly Muslim identity. Its factories all had mosques and gave the workers time to make the required prayers; in accordance with the social message of the Koran, working conditions and pay were good;
workers had health insurance and decent holidays; disputes were arbitrated fairly. The extraordinary success of the Society was a dramatic demonstration of the fact that, whatever the intellectuals and pundits claimed, most of the Egyptian people wanted to be religious. It also showed that Islam could be progressive. There was no slavish return to the practices of the seventh century. The Brothers were extremely critical of the new Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and condemned its literalistic interpretations of Islamic law, such as cutting off the hands of thieves or stoning adulterers. The Brothers had no definite notions about the kind of polity the future Islamic state should have, but they insisted that to be faithful to the spirit of the Koran and Sunnah, there must be a fairer distribution of wealth than there was in the Saudi Kingdom. Their general ideas were certainly in tune with the times: rulers should be elected (as in the early Muslim period), and, as the rashidun (“righteous”) caliphs had urged, a ruler must be accountable to the people and must not rule dictatorially. But Banna always felt that precise discussions about a possible Islamic state were premature, because there was still much basic preparation to be done. Banna simply asked that Egypt be allowed to make its state Islamic; the Soviets had chosen communism, and the West democracy; countries where the population was predominantly Muslim should have the right to construct their polity on an Islamic basis, if and when they so wished.
The Society was not perfect. Because of its appeal to the masses, it tended to be anti-intellectual. Its pronouncements were often defensive and self righteous The Brothers’ image of the West, which stressed its greed, tyranny, and spiritual bankruptcy, had been distorted by the colonial experience. The object of Western imperialism had not simply been, as one of the Society’s spokesmen maintained, “to humiliate us, to occupy our lands and begin destroying Islam.” The Society’s leaders were intolerant of dissension in the ranks. Banna insisted on absolute obedience and did not delegate responsibility sufficiently. As a result, after his death, nobody could take his place, and the Society was virtually destroyed from within by fruitless infighting.
But by far its most serious and damaging failing was the emergence in 1943 of a terrorist unit known as “The Secret Apparatus” (al jihaz al-sir ri It remained marginal to the Society as a whole. Because it was so clandestine, we have very little information about it, but in his definitive study of the Society, Richard P. Mitchell states his belief that by 1948, the unit only had about a thousand members, and that most of the Brothers had never heard of its existence until this date. For the vast majority of members, social and spiritual reform was the raison d’etre of the Society, and they abhorred the terrorism of the Apparatus. Nevertheless, once a movement has started killing in the name of God, it has embarked on a nihilistic course that denies the most fundamental religious values.
The 1940s were very turbulent years in Egypt. It had become obvious that liberal democracy had failed, and most Egyptians were thoroughly pessimistic about the parliamentary system. Neither the British nor the Egyptian nationalists had understood that it was not possible to impose a modern system of government on a country that, as a result of superficial and too rapid modernization, was still basically feudal and agrarian. Between 1923 and 1950, all seventeen general elections were won by the nationalist Wafd party, but they were only allowed to rule five times. Wafdists were usually forced to resign by either the British or the palace. In 1942, even the Wafd lost the respect of the people when the British forced the pro-German prime minister to step down and replaced him with a Wafdist government, as the lesser of two evils. There was an atmosphere of violence in Cairo during the Second World War and a desperation, subsequently compounded by the ignominious defeat of the five Arab armies, including that of Egypt, which invaded Palestine after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The loss of Palestine and the world’s apparent indifference to the plight of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees who were forced to leave their homes in 1948 demonstrated Arab impotence in the modern world.
Arabs still call the events of 1948 al-Nakhbah: a “disaster” of cosmic proportions. In this grim atmosphere, some believed that terror was the “only path.” That was certainly the opinion of Anwar al-Sadat, later to become president of Egypt, who founded a “murder society” in the late 1940s to attack the British in the Canal Zone and Egyptian politicians who were seen to “collaborate” with the British. There were other paramilitary groups that also saw violence as the only way:
the Green Shirts, who were attached to the palace, and the Blue Shirts, who were associated with the Ward.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that the Society of Muslim Brothers, which was now such a major player on the Egyptian political scene, should have its terrorist wing too, but it was a tragic development. It is not clear how far Banna himself was implicated in the activities of the Secret Apparatus. He always denounced them, but he was also virulent in his denunciation of the government during these years. Banna could not control the terrorist unit, whose activities initiated a series of events that led to his death, tainted the moral credibility of the Society, and eventually resulted in its destruction. In March 1948, members of the Secret Apparatus started a campaign of terror, which began with the murder of Ahmed al-Khazinder, a respected judge, continued throughout the summer in violent raids and bombing of the Jewish district in Cairo, in which property was damaged and scores of people were injured or lost their lives, and culminated on December 28,1948, in the assassination of Prime Minister Muhammad al-Nuqrashi.
The Society repudiated these killings, and Banna professed horror at the murder of Nuqrashi. Nevertheless, the new prime minister, Ibrahim al-Hadi, who was loathed by all the articulate sectors of society, seized the opportunity of eliminating the Brotherhood, which had become far too powerful. The Society was suppressed, members were rounded up, arrested, and tortured, and by the end of July 1949, when Abd al-Hadi finally resigned, there were over four thousand Brothers in prison. But on February 12, 1949, Banna had been shot in the street outside the headquarters of the Young Men’s Muslim Association, almost certainly at the behest of the prime minister.
The Society began to regroup secretly in 1950 and elected a new leader, Hasan Is mail al-Hudaybi, a judge who was known for his moderation and aversion to violence. It was hoped that he would give the Society much needed respectability. But Hudaybi was unequal to the task. Without Banna’s strong leadership, factional strife broke out among the leaders, and Hudaybi proved to be incapable of controlling the Secret Apparatus, which brought the Society down once again in 1954.
By that time, Egypt was ruled by the formidable young army officer Jamal Abd al-Nasser (1918--70), who had overthrown the old, discredited regime in a military coup on July 22, 1952, with his association of Free Officers, and set about creating a revolutionary republic in Egypt. Nasser espoused a militant nationalism that was quite different from the old liberal ideal. Unlike the Egyptian intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, the new Arab nationalists were not enamored of the West, and had no time for the parliamentary “liberalism” that had so signally failed in the Middle East. Nasser’s regime was defiantly socialist, and he courted the Soviets. He was determined to get the British out of Egypt once and for all; his attitude toward both Israel and the West was cathartic ally defiant for his people. His foreign policy was pan-Arab and emphasized Egypt’s solidarity with other Asian and African countries who were struggling to free themselves from European control. Nasser was also a determined secularist; nothing, including religion, must be allowed to interfere with the national interest; everything, including religion, must be subordinated to the state. Eventually Nasser would become the most popular ruler in the Middle East, and “Nasserism” the dominant ideology. But in these first years, Nasser was struggling: he was not very popular and could not permit any major rival to survive.
At first, however, Nasser wooed the Brotherhood. He needed them, and, because he was happy to use Islamic rhetoric, the Society supported him and the Rovers played an important part in restoring order after the July Revolution.
But there was an incipient tension, especially when it became clear that, despite his populist Muslim rhetoric, Nasser had no intention of creating an Islamic state. When Hudaybi’s demands for a full application of Islamic principles became importunate, Nasser’s cabinet dissolved the Society once again, on January 15, 1954, on the grounds that it was planning a counterrevolution. A nucleus of the Brotherhood went underground, and the government began a smear campaign which accused the Brothers of possessing illegal arms, and of plotting with the British. The regime began to stress its own Islamic credentials, and Anwar Sadat, now secretary-general of the new Islamic Congress, founded by Nasser, wrote a series of articles on the “true” and “liberal” Islam espoused by the government in the semiofficial paper al-Jamhariyyah. Finally, however, the Brotherhood itself played into Nasser’s hands on October 26, 1954, when Abd al-Latif, a member of the Society, shot Nasser during a rally.
Nasser survived the attack, and his courage and insouciance under fire did wonders for his popularity. He was now free to destroy the Society completely. By the end of November 1954, over one thousand Brothers had been arrested and brought to trial. Innumerable others, however, many of whom had been guilty of nothing more inflammatory than distributing leaflets, never appeared in court, were subjected to mental and physical torture, and languished in Nasser’s prisons and concentration camps for the next fifteen years. Hudaybi was sentenced to life imprisonment, but six other leaders of the Society were executed. Nasser seemed to have broken the Brotherhood, and to have stopped the only progressive Islamic movement in Egypt in its tracks.
Secularism appeared to be victorious, especially after Nasser became the hero of the Arab world two years later after the Suez Crisis, in which he not only successfully defied the West but inflicted a crushing humiliation on the British. But his triumph over the Brotherhood proved in the end to be a Pyrrhic victory. The Brothers who spent the rest of Nasser’s life in the camps had experienced the onslaught of secularism at its most aggressive. We shall see that it was in the camps that some of the Brothers abandoned Banna’s reformist vision and created a new and potentially violent Sunni fundamentalism.
Iranians were also experiencing a vicious secularist assault. Reza Shah’s modernization program was even more accelerated than that undergone by either Egypt or Turkey, because when he came to power, Iran had scarcely begun to modernize. Reza was ruthless. Opponents were simply eliminated;
one of the first to go was Ayatollah Mudarris, who had opposed the shah in the Majlis; he was imprisoned in 1927, and murdered in I937. Reza managed to centralize the country for the first time, but only by the most brutal means, quashing uprisings and impoverishing the nomadic tribes, who had hitherto been virtually autonomous. Reza reformed the judiciary;
three new secular law codes--civil, commercial, and criminal--replaced the Shariah. He also tried to industrialize the country and bring it modern amenities. By the late 1930s, most cities had electricity and power plants.
But government controls stifled the development of a truly aggressive capitalist economy, wages were low, and exploitation rife. These draconian methods proved to be fruitless; Iran was unable to achieve economic independence.
Britain still owned the booming oil industry, which contributed almost nothing to the economy, and Iran was forced to rely on foreign loans and investment.
Reza’s program was inevitably superficial. It simply imposed modern institutions on old agrarian structures, an approach that had failed in Egypt and would fail here. Ninety percent of the population who were involved in agriculture were ignored; traditional farming methods continued and remained unproductive. There was no fundamental reform of society. Reza was not in the least interested in the plight of the poor, and, while the army got fifty percent of the budget, only four percent was spent on education, which remained a privilege for the rich. As in Egypt, two nations were developing in Iran, who were, increasingly, unable to understand each other.
One “nation” comprised the small Westernized elite of the upper and middle classes, who had benefited from Reza’s modernization program;
the other “nation” consisted of the vast mass of the poor, who were bewildered by the new secular nationalism of the regime, and relied more than ever upon the ulema for guidance.
But the ulema themselves were reeling under the impact of Reza’s secularization policy. He hated the clergy and was determined to curb their considerable power in Iran. His Iranian nationalism tried to cut out Islam altogether, and was based on the ancient Persian culture of the region. Reza tried to suppress the Ashura celebrations in honor of Imam Husain (recognizing their revolutionary potential), and Iranians were forbidden to go on the hajj to Mecca. In 1931, the scope of the Shariah courts was drastically reduced. The clergy were permitted to deal only with questions of personal status; all other cases were referred to the new civil courts. For over a century, the ulema had enjoyed almost unrivaled power in Iran. Now they watched their power systematically cut down to size, but, after the assassination of Mudarris, most of the clergy were too afraid to protest.
Reza’s Laws on the Uniformity of Dress (1928) show both the superficiality and the violence of this modernization process. Western dress was made obligatory for all men (except the ulema, who were allowed to wear their cloaks and turbans, on condition that they pass a state examination admitting them to clerical status) and, later, women were forbidden to wear the veil. His soldiers used to tear off women’s veils with their bayonets, and rip them to pieces in the streets. Reza wanted Iran to look modern, despite the underlying conservatism, and was prepared to go to any lengths to achieve this. During Ashura, in 1929, the police surrounded the Fayziyah Madrasah in Qum, and when the students spilled out into the street, they stripped them of their traditional clothes and forced them into Western garb. Men particularly disliked wearing the wide-brimmed Western hats, because they prevented their making the ritual prostrations during prayer. In 1935, there was an ugly incident at the shrine of the Eighth Imam in Mashhad, when the police fired on a crowd who had staged a demonstration against the Dress Laws. Hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were either killed or wounded in the sanctuary. It was not surprising that many Iranians came to fear secularization as a lethal policy, designed not to free religion from the coercive state (as in the West) but to destroy Islam.
This was exactly the kind of atmosphere in which a fundamentalist movement was likely to thrive. It did not happen during this period, but four things did occur which foreshadowed later developments. The first was the creation of a counterculture. In 1920, Shaykh Abd al-Karim Hairi Yazdi (1860--1936), an eminent mujtahid, was invited to settle in Qum by the mullahs there. He was determined to put Qum back on the Shii map, because he feared for the future of the shrine cities of Kerbala and Najaf in Iraq, which had become the intellectual center of Iranian Shiism during the eighteenth century. Shortly after Shaykh Hairi’s arrival in Qum, the British did indeed exile some of the leading ulema from Iraq and two of the most learned, one of them the “constitutionalist” mujtahid Naini, came to settle in Qum. The city began to revive. The madrasahs were refurbished, and distinguished scholars started to teach there, enabling them to attract better students.
One of the newcomers was the scholarly and unworldly Ayatollah Sayyid Aqa Husain Borujerdi (1875--1961), who became the Marja-e Taqlid, the Supreme Model of the Shiah, and attracted still more scholars to Qum.
Gradually Qum began to replace Najaf and, in the 1960s and 1970s, it would become the religious “capital” of Iran, and the center of the opposition to the royal capital in Tehran. But in these early years, the mullahs of Qum adhered to the Shii tradition of holding aloof from politics; any political activism would have incurred the wrath of the shah, and the revival in Qum would have been crushed in its infancy.
The second fateful incident was the arrival in Qum in 1920 of the man who would become Iran’s most famous mullah. Shaykh Hairi Yazdi had brought some of his pupils with him when he moved to Qum from western Iran, and one was the young Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1902--89). At first, however, Khomeini seemed a rather marginal figure. He taught^A at the Fayziyah Madrasah, but later he would specialize in ethics and mysticism (irfan), which were, compared withfiqh, definitely “fringe” subjects. Moreover, Khomeini practiced the mysticism of Mulla Sadra, upon which the establishment had long tended to look askance. He seemed interested in political questions, and this again was not calculated to advance his clerical career, especially after Ayatollah Borujerdi, who adhered strictly to the old Shii quietism and forbade the ulema to take part in politics, became the Marja. These were turbulent years in Iran, but despite his obvious political concern, Khomeini did not become an activist. Yet in 1944, he published Kashf al-Asrar (“The Discovery of Secrets”), which received very little attention at the time, but was the first serious attempt to challenge Pahlavi policy from a Shii perspective. At this point, Khomeini was still a reformer and not in any sense fundamentalist. His position was similar to that of the First Majlis in 1906, which had accepted the idea of a panel of mujtahids with the power to veto any parliamentary legislation that contravened the Shariah. Khomeini was still a supporter of the old constitution, and was trying to place this modern institution in an Islamic context. Only God had power to make laws, he argued; and it was not reasonable for Shiis to obey a ruler such as Atattirk or Reza Shah, who had done everything they could to destroy Islam. But Khomeini was still too much of a traditionalist to suggest at this early date that a cleric should rule the country directly: that would contravene centuries of Shii practice. The mujtahids, who were learned in God’s law, were, in his theory, simply permitted to elect a lay sultan who they knew would not disobey the divine law or oppress the people.