Hasan al-Banna

Hasan al-Banna was the founder and Director-General of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, the Society of the Muslim Brothers, an Egyptian religious and political movement. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says he was born in 1906, the son of Ahmad b. 'Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad al-Banna al-Sa'ati. ¹ This record follows two articles of the encyclopaedia, one on him and one on the movement, and gives their account in their own terms without adopting it. The scan of the article on him is cut off before its final sentence, so the date and manner of his death come from the article on the Brothers. ³

His father was a watch-maker by trade and also a keen student of the traditional Islamic sciences and the editor of the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal. The article calls this paternal influence the most important in shaping Hasan's early years. His early education followed the old pattern of the sons of scholars: memorising the Qur'an and studying hadith, jurisprudence and language. ¹ The article on the Brothers adds that he was educated in the Hanbali school. ⁴

The article says he appears to have had an inborn spiritual bent: as a boy he was drawn to Sufism and was initiated into the Hasafiyya order. At the Junior Teachers' School at Damanhur his organising ability and wish to preach were already visible, and he founded a charitable society, al-Jam'iyya al-Hasafiyya al-Khayriyya. He then entered the Dar al-'Ulum in Cairo, at that time an independent teachers' training college. There, the article says, he developed the idea that the ills of Islamic society could be cured only by a return to the sources of renewal, the Qur'an, hadith and the biography of the Prophet ﷺ, and with a group of fellow students he began to preach in the mosques and meeting places of Cairo. ¹

He finished his training in 1927 and was posted to Isma'iliyya as a government schoolteacher; the next year he founded the Muslim Brotherhood. He stayed there until 1933, preaching, lecturing, writing pamphlets and shaping the organisation of his movement on the cell principle, and he travelled constantly through the Canal Zone, where branches of the Isma'iliyya headquarters sprang up between Port Said and Suez. ¹ The article on the Brothers calls the foundation in 1928 that of an Association of the Muslim Brethren, with sections formed across the Canal Zone and then, particularly after 1933, across Egypt. ²

In 1933 al-Banna was moved, still as a teacher, to Cairo, and transferred the headquarters there. The article says that in this formative period, to 1936, the movement was dominated by religious and social work. Missionaries commissioned by the founder preached in mosques and public places, and the Brethren founded schools, organised religious courses, taught the illiterate, set up hospitals and dispensaries, built mosques and launched some industrial and commercial enterprises. ² From 1936, when he espoused the cause of the Palestine Arabs, he became increasingly involved in politics and lobbied successive prime ministers for action and reform. ¹ The Brothers' support for the Palestinians, says the other article, let him spread the movement through the Middle East, especially Syria. ²

During the Second World War his government's attitude hardened: under both Sirri Pasha and al-Nukrashi he was arrested for brief periods and the movement's activities were severely curtailed. ¹ The article on the Brothers dates one imprisonment to 1941 and ascribes it to his anti-British propaganda. ^{2 3}

The Egypt article says that al-Banna's political transactions are still quite obscure. ⁵ The Brothers article adds that, besides sporting and paramilitary groups, he had probably organised a secret force, and that his plans did not rule out taking power by force. ³ It also says the movement sent volunteers to fight with Arab armies in the Palestine War of 1948. ³ These are the encyclopaedia's statements, from an article of the 1960s, and the museum does not endorse or settle them.

According to the Brothers article, the movement regarded Islam as an unrivalled order, revealed by God, with the vocation to organise all aspects of human life, valid for all people, times and places. The article holds that the originality of the movement lay not in doctrine, many elements of which it finds in the preaching of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, but in the fact that its founder simplified and tightened that doctrine and made it the ideological basis of a powerful popular movement. ⁴ It names Sayyid Qutb and Mustafa al-Siba'i, the latter leader of the Syrian association of Muslim Brethren, among the writers who later systematised the movement's social and economic doctrine. ^{3 4}

After the Palestine war the Brothers, the article says, appeared as an organised armed force able to challenge the Egyptian government. Al-Nukrashi's government ordered the organisation dissolved, its property confiscated and many members arrested. Al-Nukrashi was assassinated on 28 December 1948 by a member of the movement. Shortly afterwards, on 12 February 1949, al-Banna himself was assassinated, and the article says no investigation of the killing was ever completed. ³ The movement carried on in secret, and Hasan Isma'il al-Hudaybi was chosen as the next Supreme Guide. ³

The article on the Brothers says his writings, apart from his autobiography, Mudhakkirat al-da'wa wa-l-da'iya, consist of short pamphlets (his rasa'il), newspaper articles and lectures, which had not yet been collected in full; a collection of his letters was reissued in Beirut in 1956. ⁴ The museum has not read these works.

The articles do not give his birthplace, his date of birth within the year, or his burial place, and they are fifty years old; later scholarship on his life and on the movement is not used here and would change and extend this record.