A 90-year reckoning for the Brotherhood

Exactly 90 years have passed since the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood organization (Ikhwan). In March 1928, in the Egyptian city of Ismailia, a young teacher of about twenty-five named Hasan al-Banna came together with six friends and set out on the basis that a duty imposed on them by the current state of the ummah had to be undertaken, starting from somewhere. The conditions of the ummah of that day presented, in general, a picture in which the caliphate had been abolished in the Ottoman Empire, Muslims worldwide had been left completely deprived of political representation and will, the lands of the former caliphate were entirely under occupation, and in Egypt in particular British colonialism continued in all its density.

For Muslims there is no organ, no institution, no initiative that can respond to the conditions of the new world and represent and express Islam in the conditions of that day. This in fact imposed an obligation on all Muslims. Someone had to be a pioneer in this and fulfill this obligation.

The young teacher Hasan al-Banna, with all his pure intention, proceeding from the necessity that Muslims be one and together and unite their strength and will to fulfill the duty God had imposed on them in the Holy Qur'an, laid the foundation of the movement that seemed very modest at first and in time turned into a worldwide organization.

As far as they understood, they thought that the movement should be based entirely on the Qur'an and not on any extra thought, symbol, tendency or narrow sectarian understanding. In order to rely on the Qur'an and the Sunnah as the most basic common point among all Muslims and take on no other quality, they named themselves in the simplest form "Muslim Brothers," as God commanded all Muslims to be. Thus they found a ground that makes all Muslims in the world, whether they belong to this particular movement or not, brothers to themselves, and themselves brothers to all Muslims.

The quality of brotherhood is not something that demands a separate intellectual engagement for Muslims. A Muslim's quality of being a brother with past Muslim generations or with Muslims all over the world, wherever in the world he may be, is not something open to dispute.

From the moment the movement was founded, by either not entering at all into any issue that was a matter of dispute in Muslims' intellectual and political history, or not deviating into excess or negligence, and by focusing instead on the defense of the Qur'an and the Sunnah as the most basic unifying discourse, they responded very effectively to a demand that already existed throughout the Islamic world. This ensured their rapid spread across the entire Islamic world. Today the Ikhwan, with its organized structure in almost every part of the Islamic world, has acquired an influential presence in the political, cultural and social depth of society.

In many countries the Ikhwan, with its politically organized structure, sits in parliament either in power, as a partner of power, or as a legitimate opposition. In countries where political activities are not permitted, it continues its activities as civil society organizations or as a community, and in places where even that much is not permitted, it tries somehow to survive.

But its feature of not resorting to violence anywhere does not change. Although it is labeled a terrorist organization as Hamas in Palestine for its stand against the occupation, in an environment where the occupier Israel's oppression has reached its extreme, no one has a right to say a word against the right to legitimate resistance, for which no other way has been left. Apart from places like Yemen and Syria, where no one has been able to stop being part of the war, the Ikhwan has adopted the path of violence nowhere.

Even in Egypt, where there are massacres, torture and unjust arrests against its members, it never opens the way to violence, even on grounds such as self-defense or rightful revenge.

Despite this, it is very clear that Sisi's greatest wish is for the Ikhwan to resort to violence. If the Ikhwan had resorted to violence, everything would have been much easier for Sisi and for all the enemies of the Ikhwan. Never mind their "moderate Islam against militant Islam" babble. What local or foreign Islamophobes like to see in the name of Islam is not a reasonable, moderate, real Islam but, on the contrary, a typology of Islam identified with terror in all its savagery. When such an Islam never emerges from among Muslims, we see that they do not refrain from producing it in their own studios or with the direction of their own agents. It is clear that the Islam they really fear is precisely the Islam that the likes of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb expressed with all their discursive superiority, defiantly, without resorting to any defensive or complexed, self-effacing, apologetic discourse.

For 90 years the Ikhwan has been a movement that has stubbornly, insistently and successfully waged Islam's struggle for survival against the colonialists who thought they had buried Islam alive. At the point it has reached today, it exhibits a stance that amounts to a pang of conscience for both the imperialists and their collaborators. They do not finish them by killing. They are subjected to coups, their ringleaders are killed, the rest are arrested, thrown into prison, stay for years in dungeons, are subjected to torture, are exiled, but they have an interesting capacity of endurance toward all of this, with a patience hard to believe. This is truly an extremely remarkable situation in the history and total experience of the 90-year-old Ikhwan movement. All its leaders have either been killed or each spent no fewer than twenty years in prison, yet there is no murder or act of violence attributed to them.

Yesterday there was a commemoration meeting in the Ali Emiri Hall in Fatih on the occasion of the Ikhwan's founding anniversary. What I heard at this meeting made me think of these things in the first place. Khaled Meshaal, one of those who attended the meeting and delivered a speech, also gave interesting advice to the Ikhwan-ı Müslimin, which has countless experiences in 60 countries over 90 years. Advice including words such as "updating," "self-criticism," "rejuvenation." Perhaps on some occasion we will continue our reflections along this line later.