The Rise of Jihad Movements: The Muslim Brotherhood

“THE RISE OF JIHAD MOVEMENTS The Muslim Brotherhood: The Qur’an and the Sword Determined to fight Western influence and restore the caliphate, Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. Al-Banna decried the abolition of the caliphate, which separated “the state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the Commander of the Faithful.” Al-Banna characterized it as just part of a larger “Western invasion which was armed and equipped with all [the] destructive influences of money, wealth, prestige, ostentation, power and means of propaganda.” 37 He saw this Western influence as all-pervasive. Al-Banna lamented that “a wave of dissolution which undermined all firm beliefs, was engulfing Egypt in the name of intellectual emancipation. This trend attacked the morals, deeds and virtues under the pretext of personal freedom. Nothing could stand against this powerful and tyrannical stream of disbelief and permissiveness that was sweeping our country.” 38 Like Islamic movements going back to Ibn Tumart’s and those before him, Al-Banna’s was a revivalist movement. In 1928, al-Banna decried the indifference of the Egyptian elite to Islam: “What catastrophe has befallen the souls of the reformers and the spirit of the leaders…? What calamity has made them prefer this life to the thereafter [sic]? What has made them… consider the way of struggle [sabil al-jihad] too rough and difficult?” 39 When the Brotherhood was criticized for being a political group in the guise of a religious one, al-Banna met the challenge head-on: We summon you to Islam, the teachings of Islam, the laws of Islam and the guidance of Islam, and if this smacks of “politics” in your eyes, then it is our policy. And if the one summoning you to these principles is a “politician,” then we are the most respectable of men, God be praised, in politics.… Islam does have a policy embracing the happiness of this world.… We believe that Islam is an all-embracing concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and rigorous order. 40 The Brotherhood invoked the Qur’an—“ Fight them until there is no fitnah [sedition] and worship is for Allah” (2: 193)—in exhorting Muslims worldwide to recapture the glory days of Islam, to reestablish the caliphate and once again make it into a great power. Al-Banna also insisted that “every piece of land where the banner of Islam has been hoisted is the fatherland of the Muslims.” In line with another Qur’anic directive, “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2: 191), the Brotherhood urged Muslims to reconquer Spain, as well as Sicily and southern Italy and the former Ottoman domains in the Balkans. 41 The Brotherhood grew in Egypt from 150 branches in 1936 to as many as fifteen hundred by 1944. In 1939 al-Banna referred to “100,000 pious youths from the Muslim Brothers from all parts of Egypt,” and by 1944 membership was estimated as being between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. 42 By 1937 the group had expanded beyond Egypt, setting up “several branches in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco, and one each in Bahrain, Hadramawt, Hyderabad, Djibouti, and even in Paris.” 43 Thus many thousands of Muslims dispersed around the world heard al-Banna’s call to “prepare for jihad and be lovers of death.” 44 The Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper explained: “No justice will be dealt and no peace maintained on earth until the rule of the Koran and the bloc of Islam are established. Moslem unity must be established. Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Palestine, Saudi-Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco all form one bloc, the Moslem bloc, which God has promised to grant victory, saying: ‘We shall grant victory unto the faithful.’ But this is impossible to reach other than through the way of Islam.” 45 Al-Banna told his followers: “Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur’an and a sword.” 46 Islam, the Answer to the World’s Problems The Armenian-American journalist Arthur Derounian met al-Banna in 1948. Writing later under the name John Roy Carlson, Derounian described al-Banna as “a short, squat ratty-faced man with puffed cheeks and fleshy nose.… We sat in the shade, under the shield showing the Koran above a pair of crossed swords.… I disliked him instantly and thoroughly. He was the most loathsome man I had yet met in Cairo.” 47 Al-Banna told Derounian: “The Koran should be Egypt’s constitution, for there is no law higher than Koranic law. We seek to fulfill the lofty, human message of Islam which has brought happiness and fulfillment to mankind in centuries past. Ours is the highest ideal, the holiest cause and the purest way. Those who criticize us have fed from the tables of Europe. They want to live as Europe has taught them—to dance, to drink, to revel, to mix the sexes openly and in public.” 48 Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s great theorist, shared that puritanical revulsion. He sharpened his distaste for the West while living in the United States from November 1948 to August 1950.49 Moving to Greeley, Colorado, he was impressed by the number of churches in the city but not with the piety they engendered: “Nobody goes to church as often as Americans do.… Yet no one is as distant as they are from the spiritual aspect of religion.” He was thoroughly scandalized by a dance after an evening service at a local church: “The dancing intensified.… The hall swarmed with legs.… Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.” 50 The pastor further scandalized Qutb by dimming the lights, creating “a romantic, dreamy effect,” and playing a popular record of the day: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” 51 He regarded American popular music in general with a gimlet eye: “Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.” 52 Ultimately he concluded: “I fear that when the wheel of life has turned and the file on history has closed, America will not have contributed anything.” He didn’t find American prosperity to be matched by a corresponding wealth of spirit. “I am afraid that there is no correlation between the greatness of the American material civilization and the men who created it.… In both feeling and conduct the American is primitive [bida’a].” 53 Qutb’s influential book Milestones positioned Islam as the true source of societal and personal order, as opposed to both capitalism and Communism. “Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,” he asserted in this Cold War–era manifesto, “not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being just a symptom and not the real disease—but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress.” Perhaps with his time in America in mind, he went on: “Even the Western world realizes that Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows that it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.” Qutb concluded: “It is essential for mankind to have new leadership!” 54 That new leadership would come from Islam. To Qutb, what the Muslim umma needed was a restoration of Islam in its fullness and purity, including all the rules of the Sharia for regulating society. “If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped in Jahiliyyah [Ignorance of the Divine guidance], and all the marvelous material comforts and high-level inventions do not diminish this ignorance. This Jahiliyyah is based on rebellion against God’s sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty, and makes some men lords over others.” 55 He advanced Islam as “a challenge to all kinds and forms of systems which are based on the concept of the sovereignty of man; in other words, where man has usurped the Divine attribute. Any system in which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the sources of all authority are human, deifies human beings by designating others than God as lords over men.” 56 Qutb taught that jihad was necessary in order to establish Sharia. “The establishing of the dominion of God on earth, the abolishing of the dominion of man, the taking away of sovereignty from the usurper to revert it to God, and the bringing about of the enforcement of the Divine Law [Sharia]… and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching; if it had been so, the task of establishing God’s religion in the world would have been very easy for the Prophets of God! This is contrary to the evidence from the history of the Prophets and the story of the struggle of the true religion, spread over generations.” 57 Qutb emphasized Islam’s universal character and call: “This religion is not merely a declaration of the freedom of the Arabs, nor is its message confined to the Arabs. It addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its sphere of work is the whole earth.… This religion wants to bring back the whole world to its Sustainer and free it from servitude to anyone other than God.” 58 Al-Banna likewise explained: “We want an Arabian United States with a Caliphate at its head and every Arab state subscribing wholeheartedly to the laws of the Koran. We must return to the Koran, which preaches the good life, which forbids us to take bribes, to cheat, to kill one’s brother. The laws of the Koran are suitable for all men at all times to the end of the world. This is the day and this is the time when the world needs Islam most.” 59 To impress upon Egypt its need for Islam, the Brotherhood attacked Jews who lived there and assassinated several leading officials, including several judges. Al-Banna ordered one young member of the Brotherhood, a twenty-three-year-old student named Abdel Magid Ahmed Hassan, to do his duty before Allah—which, a sheikh explained to the young man, involved killing “the enemies of Islam and of Arabism.” Hassan agreed to murder anyone al-Banna told him to, and so on December 28, 1948, the young man gunned down Egypt’s prime minister, Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha. 60 Al-Banna was himself assassinated on February 12, 1949, most likely in a revenge killing. 61 Qutb, hospitalized in Washington, D.C. for a respiratory ailment in February 1949, claimed implausibly that a radio broadcast of the news of al-Banna’s assassination set the hospital staff to open rejoicing. 62 Egypt’s Arab Socialist ruler, Gamel Abdel Nasser, had no patience for the Brotherhood, and had Qutb imprisoned and tortured. Qutb wrote from his prison cell: “The whole of Egypt is imprisoned.… I was arrested despite my immunity as a judge, without an order of arrest… my sole crime being my critique of the non-application of the Sharia.” 63 As his trial began, he declared: “The time has come for a Muslim to give his head in order to proclaim the birth of the Islamic movement.” 64 When he was sentenced to death, he exclaimed: “Thank God! I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.” 65 He was executed in 1966.”

— The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS by Robert Spencer