Egypt News

Hassan Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood

Hassan al-Banna (October 14, 1906 – February 12, 1949,) was an Egyptian social and political reformer, best known for founding the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the largest and most influential 20th century Muslim revivalist organizations.
Al-Banna's leadership was critical to the growth of the brotherhood during the 1930s and 1940s.

 


Early Life
He was born in Mahmudiyya, in southern Egypt. His father, Shaykh Ahmad al-Banna, was a respected local imam (prayer leader) and mosque teacher of the Hanbali rite, educated at Al-Azhar University, who wrote and collaborated on books on Muslim traditions, and also had a shop where he repaired watches and sold gramophones.
Though Shaykh Ahmad al Banna and his wife they were not wealthy and struggled to make ends meet, particularly after they moved to Cairo in 1924.
They found that Islamic learning and piety were no longer as highly valued in the capital, and that craftsmanship could not compete with large-scale industry.
When Hassan al-Banna was twelve years old, he became involved in a Sufi order, and became a fully initiated member in 1922.
At the age of thirteen, he participated in demonstrations during the revolution of 1919 against British rule.
The Dar al-Ulum Years
In 1923, at the age of 16, Al-Banna moved to Cairo to enter the Dar al-Ulum college. Life in the capital offered him a greater range of activities than the village and the opportunity to meet prominent Islamic scholars (in large measure thanks to his father's acquaintances), but he was deeply disturbed by effects of Westernization he saw there, particularly the rise of secularism and the breakdown of traditional morals.
The four years that Al-Banna spent in Cairo exposed him to the political ferment of the Egyptian capital in the early 1920s, and enhanced his awareness of the extent to which secular and Western ways had penetrated the very fabric of society. It was then that Al-Banna became particularly preoccupied with what he saw as the young generation's drift away from Islam.
He believed that the battle for the hearts and minds of the youth would prove critical to the survival of a religion besieged by a Western onslaught. While studying in Cairo, he immersed himself in the writings of the founders of Islamic reformism, including the Egyptian Muhammad 'Abduh, under whom his father had studied while at Al-Azhar. But it was 'Abduh's disciple, the Syrian Rashid Rida, who most influenced Al-Banna. Al-Banna was a dedicated reader of Al-Manar, the magazine that Rida published in Cairo from 1898 until his death in 1935.
He shared Rida's central concern with the decline of Islamic civilization relative to the West. He too believed that this trend could be reversed only by returning to an unadulterated form of Islam, free from all the accretions that had diluted the strength of its original message. Like Rida at the end of his life — but unlike 'Abduh and other Islamic modernists — Al-Banna felt that the main danger to Islam's survival in the modern age stemmed less from the conservatism of Al-Azhar and the Ulema (which he nevertheless criticized) than from the ascendancy of Western secular ideas.
He was equally disappointed with what he saw as the failure of the Islamic scholars of al-Azhar University to voice their opposition to the rise of atheism and to the influence of Christian missionaries.
In his last year at Dar al-Ulum, he wrote that he had decided to dedicate himself to becoming "a counselor and a teacher" of adults and children, in order to teach them "the objectives of religion and the sources of their well-being and happiness in life". He graduated in 1927 and was given a position as an Arabic language teacher in a state primary school in Ismailia, a provincial town located in the Suez Canal Zone.

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