Remembering Imam Hasan Al Banna

(Published Saturday, 14 February 2009)

Shakespeare left many literature lovers with a sour taste in the mouth for the month of March, when he had us warned to ‘Beware the Ides of March’ in Julius Caesar. For those who remember history and literature, Caesar, perhaps the most famous of the Roman Dictators, was assassinated in the month of March. But for this writer, as far as assassinations of important people are concerned, February should have more Ides than March. Three of this writer’s heroes were assassinated in February: Imam Hasan Al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Al Muslimun) in Egypt on February 12, 1949; Abdul Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) perhaps the greatest African-American, in the United States on February 21, 1965; and General Murtala Muhammad, Nigeria’s best ever leader, on the morning of Friday, February 13, 1976. Much has been written, and will continue to be written, on and about Brother Malcolm and General Murtala but, to many readers, Imam Hasan Al Banna is almost an unknown even among the Muslims on this side of the Sahara. But to understand why Muslims are angry with the West; to understand why Al Qaeda had to evolve; to understand why the Clash of Civilisations between Western Christendom and Islam is (almost) inevitable; to understand why Hamas and Hezbollah are steadfast; to understand the Palestiniain struggle itself; one has to understand the history and antecedents of the Ikhwan (www.muslimbrotherhood.com) and its founder, Imam Hasan Al Banna, who was assassinated on the streets of Cairo sixty years ago when he was barely 43 years old. To take a circuitous route in linking the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Ismailia, Egypt, to the US occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, one need to understand the impact of the teachings of Imam Hasan Al Banna on the Ikhwan’s leading ideologue, Sayyid Qutb. And then contemplate the influence of Sayyid Qutb on his brother Muhammad Qutb. And then reflect on the impact of the younger Qutb on Ayman Al Zawahiri, ideologue of Al Qaeda, and then Zawahiri’s influence on Osama bin Laden, who needs no introduction, and finally Osama’s impact on Mullah Muhammad Umar and the Taliban. Imam Al Banna was the Egyptian social and political reformer who established the Ikhwan as a response to British and Western colonial hegemony in the Muslim World in the centuries after the fall of Muslim Spain. Crucial in the early struggle of the Brotherhood was the question of Palestine which was, like Egypt then, under the British who were hobnobbing with Zionists hopeful on creating today’s Israel. From those early days (the Imam was assassinated just as Israel was been formed) Al Banna saw that jihad for liberating Palestine and supporting its people was a must; he said in a message to the British ambassador to Cairo - published in Al-Nazeer on 26th December 1938 that: “The Muslim Brothers will sacrifice their lives and their money for the sake of keeping every span of Palestine with its Arab and Islamic identity until doomsday.” He said also in a message that he sent in May 1939 to the Egyptian Prime Minister, Mohamed Mahmoud: “The British and the Jews will understand only one language, the language of revolution, force and blood.” Al Banna’s thought expressed an early and advanced state of maturity in the dialectics of the relation between the project of Islamic revival and the liberation of Palestine, as he saw that solving the Palestinian issue would have to be through the parallel lines of unity and jihad. The second plank of Imam Al Banna’s influence on the global Islamic Movement was his spiritual method which was one that conformed to the wide parameters of the orthodox Sunni but with an uncanny tendency to resolve controversies and challenges in a manner that seemed reasonable, consistent with the texts, and backed by scholarship. Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi, a contemporary intellectual imbued with the teachings of the Imam, is so impressed by Hasan al-Banna that he has reaffirmed in his ‘Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase’: “Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali was right to call Hasan al-Banna ‘the Mujaddid (reviver) of the fourteenth Islamic century’” - in reference to the hadith related by Abu Dawud and Hakim, wherein Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace, had said: “God will send to this Community at the head of every century one who will renew for it its religion.” One of the greatest spiritual contributions of the Imam is the Wazifa (litany) of Al-Ma’thurat. The Sufic influence is unmistakeable - a facet of the Imam’s personal being that remained with him for life, and which he attempted to impart to his movement. Despite being persecuted by successive Egyptian governments, the Ikhwan have been steadfast and populist. It is known that, were there to be open democratic elections in Egypt and many Arab countries, the Muslim Brotherhood and its ‘branches’ would win hands down. Martyrdom of the Ikwan’s leaders (starting from Al Banna himself in 1949 and the hanging of Sayyid Qutb in 1966), as well as the incarceration of Ikhwan’s workers (such as Zainab Al Ghazali), have not deterred the Movement. Today in Egypt, the Ikhwan leads almost all professional organisations (the Bar Association; Academicians; Engineers; Doctors; etc). The Ikhwan may yet one day lead Muslims out of their lethargy, not only in Egypt, but in the whole Muslim World and beyond. And may Allah’s mercy be on Imam Hasan Al Banna.