Al-Ahram Weekly Issue No. 247 16 - 22 November 1995
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

The outlawed Muslim Brotherhood has no legal sanction as a political party, and yet it is a major contender in this month's elections. Amira Howeidy reviews its history and repeated confrontations with successive governments, interviews Mustafa Mashhour, one of its leaders, and invites political experts to assess its performance

Politics in God's name

Hassan El-Banna

"God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Qur'an our constitution, Jihad our way and dying for God's cause our supreme objective." This is the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, established by Hassan El-Banna in 1928, banned by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1954, but tolerated, in varying degrees, by Presidents Anwar El-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. Advocating Islam as not only a religion but a system encompassing all aspects of life, the group's objective is the establishment of an Islamic state.

The outlawed Brotherhood, officially led by Supreme Guide Hamid Abul-Nasr but under the effective leadership of Mustafa Mashhour, his deputy, has nominated about 160 candidates in the 29 November elections. Coming third only to the ruling National Democratic Party and the Wafd in terms of the number of candidates, the Brotherhood represents a political force to be reckoned with. It already controls several professional syndicates, including the Bar Association and the Doctors Syndicate.

With the approach of the parliamentary elections, a group of 49 Brotherhood figures was put on trial before a military court on charges of acting to revive the activities of an outlawed organisation and having connections with terrorist groups. The accused include Essam El-Eryan, assistant secretary-general of the Doctors Syndicate, Ibrahim El-Zaafarani, secretary-general of the Alexandria chapter of the same syndicate, and Mohamed Habib, an Assiut University professor. A second 33-man group, including journalist Salah Abdel-Maqsoud, was later put on military trial on similar charges.

The Brotherhood claims the arrests were made to sabotage its electoral chances, a charge hotly denied by the government.

This is not the first time that the Brotherhood has sought a foothold in parliament. The first member to seek election was founder El-Banna himself, who decided to run in his native constituency of Ismailia in 1942. But then Prime Minister Mustafa El-Nahhas, prodded by the British occupation authorities, persuaded El-Banna to withdraw in return for a promise that the Brotherhood would be allowed greater freedom of action.

El-Banna, along with five of his followers, made a second attempt in the 1944-45 elections but did not win. They charged that the elections were rigged.

The Brotherhood had to wait for 40 years before making its third attempt. In 1984, the group forged a coalition with the Wafd Party, which won 58 seats in the People's Assembly, right of them going to the Brotherhood. And the group scored a bigger victory in 1987 after allying itself with Ibrahim Shukri's Labour Party and Mustafa Kamel Murad's Liberal Party. The tripartite alliance, self-named "The Islamic Alliance" won 60 seats, of which 36 went to the Brotherhood.

These alliances were necessary to enable Brotherhood members to run on the slate of an official party. But with the switch to the individual candidacy system in the forthcoming elections, Brotherhood figures are running as independents, and there are many indications that the group's alliance with Labour and the Liberals is falling apart.

History

The Association of Muslim Brothers, described as the first wide-ranging, organised and international Islamic movement of modern times, was born in Ismailia at Hassan El-Banna's hands in March 1928. In the first few years of its existence, branches were set up in other Suez Canal cities such as Port Said, Suez and Abu-Sueir. An underground paramilitary wing was also established, primarily to fight British occupation forces but its targets also included Jewish interests and government figures.

One year after the group moved its headquarters to Cairo in 1932, it boasted 50 branches nationwide - all styled along the same Ismailia pattern. Each branch included an office, a mosque, a school, a small workshop and a small sporting club. El-Banna laid down three stages for the Brotherhood's further expansion; "indoctrination" - disseminating the group's message; "formation" - or recruiting and organising supporters; and "implementation" or putting the message into action.

Ideology and Structure

The Brotherhood's ideology is based on a fundamentalist approach to Islam - a return to its pure sources in the Holy Qur'an and the tradition and teachings of the Prophet Mohamed. The group views Islam not only as a religion but as a system which deals with all aspects of life.

The Brotherhood rejects the secularist approach of confining Islam to a relationship between man and his creator. It became a political movement because it demanded a reform of the government and a reconsideration of the relationship of the Umma (Muslim nation) with other nations.

As one researcher put it, the group is both a creed and a way of worship, a nation and a nationality, a religion and a state, a spirituality and a praxis, a Qur'an and a sword.

The Brotherhood is led by a Supreme Guide, assisted by a General Guidance Bureau, the executive body responsible for formulating policies and running the group's activities. There is also a constituent assembly, called the Shura Council.

As the group celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1948, El-Banna, declaring that Islam was a universal religion and that his movement was an international one, boasted that it had 2,000 branches in Egypt, 500 in Sudan and others in Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. The group's two immediate objectives, he continued, were reviving and applying the Islamic social system and contributing to social service.

Paramilitary wing

To translate the call for jihad into reality, the group's underground paramilitary wing was established in the late 1930s. It began to carry out major acts of violence in the 1940s, and was particularly active between 1945 and 1948. In just one week in 1946, four attacks, in which guns and explosives were used, were directed at British occupation forces, wounding 128 people. A group of Brotherhood figures were put on trial and found guilty by judge Ahmed El-Khazindar. Eight months later, the judge was assassinated by two Brotherhood members.

In 1947 and 1948 several Jewish-owned businesses in Cairo were bombed by the Brotherhood, which also sent volunteers to fight in the Palestine war. The government later announced that a large cache of weapons had been discovered at the home of a Brotherhood member in Ismailia.

On 18 December 1948, Prime Minister Mahmoud El-Noqrashi issued a military decree dissolving the group on the grounds that it had secretly plotted to overthrow the monarchy. Twenty days later, a young Brotherhood member carried out the group's most daring act of violence, the assassination of Noqrashi inside the Interior Ministry building.

El-Banna, who apparently realised that he had lost control over the group's paramilitary wing, declared that those who had carried out the assassination were "neither brothers nor Muslims". But the government's anger was not allayed. El-Banna was killed by government agents on 12 February 1949.

Noqrashi's successor, Ibrahim Abdel-Hadi, dealt harshly with the Brotherhood, putting large numbers of them behind bars. By the time his cabinet fell in July 1949, 4,000 Brotherhood members were in detention.

A court of law later exonerated the Brotherhood of the charge of plotting to overthrow the monarchy, and on April 30, 1951, the ban on the group was rescinded after the Wafd Party won the elections and set up a new government.

Relations with Nasser

The honeymoon between the Brotherhood and the leaders of the 1952 Revolution was short-lived. A decree dissolving political parties in January 1953 did not cover the Brotherhood on the grounds that it was not a political party. But a year later, the decree was invoked against the Brotherhood by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser who ordered that the group be dissolved. The supreme guide, Hassan El-Hodeibi was arrested, along with other leaders and members.

On 26 October 1954, a gunman fired bullets at Nasser as he delivered a speech in Manshiya Square in Alexandria. The government blamed the Brotherhood. Thousands of its members were rounded up and some were put on trial. Of these, six were sentenced to death and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Several of the prisoners allegedly died under torture, but by the beginning of 1965, most had been released.

In August of the same year, however, Nasser charged that the Brotherhood had set up an armed organisation to seize power by force and another wave of arrests followed. Hundreds of members were rounded up.

A year later, three Brotherhood leaders - Sayed Qotb, Youssef Hawwash and Abdel-Fattah Ismail - were sentenced to death and executed. More than 100 others were condemned to various prison terms.

Analysts have attributed the origins of the idea of takfir (branding the rulers and the society ruled by them as infidel) as having been a product of the sufferings of the Brotherhood's members during this period. A main proponent of this view was Sayed Qotb, who wrote several books while in detention, the most influential of which was Milestones.

And with Sadat

The result of this creed was the emergence of latter-day terrorist groups, opposed to the government and to society in general. Following Nasser's death in 1970 and Anwar El-Sadat's rise to power, jailed Brotherhood members were released. But Al-Takfir Wal Higra - a group that views society as infidel and advocates withdrawal from it - made headlines shortly afterwards by kidnapping and killing a cabinet minister and launching an attack on the Technical Military Academy.

But the mainstream Brotherhood had renounced violence, at least ostensibly. Although it remained illegal, it was tolerated by the government and, in some cases, even encouraged as a counter-balance to leftist forces whom Sadat considered the main threat to his regime.

In 1976, the group was allowed to publish a monthly magazine, Al-Dawa, which continued to appear until it was shut down by Sadat shortly before his assassination in October 1981.

In 1977, the Brotherhood filed a lawsuit with the administrative court demanding that the 1954 decree which disbanded it be declared null and void. But this demand was turned down in 1992 and the group filed an appeal with a higher court.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood became more active in civil society, winning control of several student unions and professional syndicates, and contesting parliamentary elections in 1984, 1987 and 1995.

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