The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Muslim Brotherhood

The Society of the Muslim Brothers (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) is a political movement whose ideology is based in Islamic principles. It was one of the most significant political opposition movements in the second part of the 20th century. Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), it produced offshoots elsewhere in the Middle East, such as in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Sudan, and influenced the ideologies of Islamist movements in Northern Africa.

In the 1940s, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood became the first mass grassroots political organization in the modern Middle East. Under the leadership of Banna, it sought recruits from the educated middle class and from the lower classes—who thereby gained a nonelitist access to politics—in contrast to the recruitment of politicians from higher socioeconomic backgrounds through patronage and clientele networks. This style of recruitment partially explains the extraordinary growth of the movement, in combination with Banna’s focus on moral and religious education as well as on a practical vision of Islam reflected in active preaching and in the construction of schools and mosques. This vision brought to life many of the principles underlying reformist intellectual trends such as those inspired by Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida (1865–1935). The Muslim Brotherhood has authoritarian forms of internal governance as well as administrative structures that resemble those of a political party. Banna was not in favor of parliamentary partisan life as it played out in Egypt between the two World Wars, however, and it was not until the end of the 20th century that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and some of its offshoots located elsewhere attempted to become legal political parties.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s history is marked by internal conflicts as well as by tempestuous relations with local regimes. A secret armed wing had existed since the end of the 1930s with the intention of fighting against British occupation, and its activities created tensions with the Egyptian government in the second half of the 1940s, leading to the assassination of Banna in 1949. The movement has often been repressed, which gave it its great martyrs, such as Banna himself. In particular, its harsh repression at the hands of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government in Egypt after a short alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers’ regime explains the radicalization of some of its members, as illustrated by the ideology of Sayyid Qutb (1906–66). Influenced by the Pakistani thinker Mawdudi (1903–79), Qutb insisted on political sovereignty (ḥākimiyya) as belonging exclusively to God and argued that it must not be usurped by the tyrant (ṭāghūt) presiding over the “societies of ignorance” (jāhiliyya). In Qutb’s ideal polity, political power is not the result of human preferences: the political sovereign does not derive his power from God, but it is rather the law of God that is sovereign.

The more mainstream trend within the Muslim Brotherhood did not approve of the revolutionary appeal of such a doctrine. Although its members claim that the regimes governing their countries are not fully Islamic, they have preferred to compromise with them and have adopted a reformist stance. On the other hand, since the 1970s, some groups calling for immediate revolutionary action against “impious” regimes, such as al-Jihad, the group responsible for the assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, were inspired by Qutb’s doctrine, which they radicalized, and their strategy has been clearly denounced by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The mainstream Muslim Brotherhood does not have a homogeneous theology nor political ideology. Early on, the Muslim Brotherhood criticized the official religious institutions and their ‘ulama’ for neglecting their duty as guardians of Islam. However, leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood were also in contact with reformist ‘ulama’ from the mosque-university of Azhar, and, like them, sought a religious and political regeneration of their society. Anti-imperialism, the opposition to Christian missionary activism, and more generally the defense of Islam were at the heart of the early ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which articulated a strong critique of Western influence on Muslims. Banna blended Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Islamism, and the ambiguity produced by this combination remains important.

The Muslim Brotherhood was also radically opposed to Arabism and particularly to Ba‘thism. Conflicts with Ba‘thist regimes and political parties have run deep. In the 1950s, especially with Muslim Brotherhood members such as Egyptians Sayyid Qutb and Muhammad al-Ghazali and the Syrian Mustafa Siba’i, the theme of “Islamic socialism” and social justice became significant, reflecting a desire to reduce socioeconomic differences through redistribution of wealth while respecting private property. This reformist trend envisioned the role of the state as a central agency for welfare.

One of the most enduring elements of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology has been the critique of secularism defined as the separation of religion and politics. Developing the idea that Islam must be a comprehensive way of life, their motto, “Islam is religion and world” (al-Islām dīn wa-dunyā), means that Islam must be applied to mundane problems. The political domain is particularly central since they believe that the political system organizing the life of the community must derive from Islam: Islam is “a religion and a state” (al-Islām dīn wa-dawla). For Banna, political power was one of the “roots” of the sacred law, not one of its “branches,” going back to the classical notion of siyāsa shar‘iyya and applying it to the modern state. For the Muslim Brotherhood, the legitimate polity should be founded on Islamic legality. The political vision of Banna, which continues to influence the conception of politics of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the formation of a Muslim public opinion drawn by the principles of shari‘a.

The Muslim Brotherhood primarily has focused on legal strategies of the Islamization of institutions and in particular of the state. While it originally showed some reluctance toward party politics, since the 1970s the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood has tried to form legalized parties in order to participate in electoral politics and in government. Whether legalized, as in Jordan and Morocco in the 1990s, or not, as in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has shown a significant ability for electoral mobilization that derives from its denunciation of government corruption and authoritarianism, and more particularly its attention to social needs in domains where the state remains weak (health, education, charitable work). In Jordan and in Sudan, the Muslim Brotherhood governed the state or participated in governments after 1989, and in Morocco it governed at the local level since the end of the 1990s. Its inclusion in party competition and governance made the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideologies more accepting of its governments, which it now wants to reform from within, with remarkable convergences between all the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired movements. The Brotherhood tended to see its respective political programs as animated by an “Islamic reference” (marja‘iyya Islāmiyya) rather than by the desire to implement Islamic law, and it focused on the definition of an Islamic political ethics and citizenship. It also appealed to the expertise of the ‘ulama’ more than it used to and envisioned the ‘ulama’ as playing a significant role in policy decisions in its political programs. However, its normalization by the regimes of the Middle East remains a major point of contention among the Brotherhood, the larger public, and the state elite.