Although the Muslim Brotherhood was born in Egypt around Egyptian domestic issues, it was by prioritizing the Palestinian question that it became a global movement.
by Massimo Introvigne.
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A few months before the death of Shaykh ‘Izz-Id-Din al-Qassam, whom Hamas regards as its precursor, from August 3 to 6, 1935, a delegation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood had visited Palestine for the first time, although contacts had been established before. At the time, the Palestinian issue was already of crucial importance to the Muslim Brothers. The Egyptian nationalists viewed the issue of Palestine primarily from a geopolitical perspective since a Jewish state in Palestine would have been a permanent threat to Egypt. However, Muslim Brotherhood’s founder al-Banna and his associates saw it as a major religious issue. For them, it was a genuine “clash of civilizations,” with vaguely apocalyptic overtones, between Muslims on the one hand and Jews and their Christian allies on the other.
Palestine was not just one of the many issues in which the Muslim Brotherhood became interested in the 1930s and 1940s. It was the fundamental issue used by al-Banna to lead his followers to understand the supranational dimension of the umma, transforming a movement born with a limited Egyptian horizon into a global Islamic reality. On the one hand, the Muslim Brothers gave the question of Palestine precedence over the question of Egypt, thus losing a number of Egyptian members. On the other hand, they had an opportunity to clearly distinguish themselves from Egyptian nationalism. Propaganda in favor of the Palestinian cause was the very basis of the movement’s international success in the years 1935–1945, which could not have been achieved so quickly otherwise. Finally, it was because of the Palestinian issue—and not, initially, of domestic Egyptian problems—that the Muslim Brotherhood gradually transformed its boy-scout-like youth organization into a clandestine military agency.
For the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian issue played a crucial role both in its development in Egypt and in its expansion into numerous countries. One of the outcomes of this interest was the founding of a Palestinian branch of the movement. Volunteers recruited by the Brothers in Egypt and elsewhere participated in the 1936–1939 uprising and the 1948 war. The number was far less than either the ten thousand cited by al-Banna in a speech in Cairo on December 14, 1947, or the more modest 1,500 boasted in 1948 during the same al-Banna’s visit to Palestine. It was more likely to be around one thousand. However, the Brotherhood volunteers were genuinely popular in Palestine and will acquire a mythical status later among Hamas followers.
After the founding of the Syrian and Lebanese groups in 1937, the Palestinian and Transjordanian branches of the Brothers were founded in 1945 through the work of the then 20-year-old Said Ramadan (1926–1995), al-Banna’s son-in-law and the father of the now well-known Islamic intellectuals Hani and Tarik Ramadan. Said Ramadan’s activities were extraordinarily successful: in one year, from 1945 to 1946, he gathered fifteen thousand Muslim Brotherhood members in Palestine. In 1947, the figure exceeded twenty thousand. Given the urgencies of the hour, this mobilization was mainly translated into preparation for the armed struggle, in which the Palestinian Brothers participated along with volunteers sent by the foreign branches of the Brotherhood. They distinguished themselves by their uncompromising stance and rejection of any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue.
On December 8, 1948, the Egyptian government outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood. On February 12, 1949, al-Banna was assassinated while he was leaving the Young Men Muslim Association headquarters in Cairo. The assassins were never identified. As a consequence of these events, the Muslim Brothers in the Gaza Strip, Egyptian nationals, were exposed to the risk of arrest, although the Egyptian army was reluctant to deprive itself of their cooperation. In fact, it still collaborated with them well after the Brotherhood had been outlawed in Egypt in December 1948.
Even after the armistice between Egypt and Israel of February 24, 1949—which the now clandestine Egyptian Brotherhood denounced as treason—the administrative authorities in Gaza tolerated the presence of a group considered patriotic and ready to mobilize for the defense of the borders. Officially outlawed, the Gaza Brotherhood continued to exist concealed behind an organization proclaiming itself to be only religious and educational, the Jamiat al-Tawhid (“Society of Monotheism”).
In the West Bank, which had been annexed to Jordan since 1950, the Brothers were fewer in number than those in Gaza. However, they were members of an association that, unlike Egypt, the Jordanian government regarded as legitimate and indeed had officially recognized. In fact, until the death of King Hussein (1935–1999) in 1999, the Muslim Brotherhood, amidst ups and downs, played the role of a “loyal opposition” to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. The Jordanian Brothers prioritized an Islamization “from below” over armed uprisings. On the Palestinian issue, the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank will always remain in a somewhat subordinate position to its counterpart in the Gaza Strip, especially after the undisputed leader of the Palestinian Brothers, Shaykh Yassin, emerged from the ranks of the latter in the 1950s.
Ahmad Is’mail Yassin (1936–2004), not to be confused with the Moroccan politician and Sufi leader Abd as-Salam Yassin (1928–2012), was born in al-Jura, a village near Ashkelon in the Gaza Strip, in 1936. At the age of fourteen he suffered, during a soccer game, a serious accident that left him semi-paralyzed. It will force him to move around in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. While attending high school he joined the semi-clandestine Muslim Brotherhood in 1955. From 1958, he worked as a teacher in Gaza.
It was precisely in the years 1955–1958 that the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza became involved in prominent political-military activities, from the boycott in 1955 of the Egyptian plans to move Palestinian refugees from Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula to the anti-Israeli armed struggle in the four months of occupation at the turn of 1956–1957 through the clandestine military cells Shabab al-Tha’r (“Youth for Vengeance”) and Katibat al-Haq (“Justice Battalion”). This military activity was also at the origins of divisions within the Palestinian Brotherhood.
In Egypt, President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), who had also been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth, outlawed it again in 1954 as part of a clash between nationalists and fundamentalists typical of the newly independent Middle East nation-states. The Brothers, led by radical theorist Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), responded with terrorist attacks, which in turn caused a violent governmental repression.
Two lines emerged among the Palestinian Brotherhood as a result of these events. The first anticipated what will be the Brotherhood’s position in Egypt after Qutb’ execution in 1966. It envisioned a step back from the armed struggle for the establishment of a shari’a-based society, and a long march that should patiently Islamize society through a religious awakening and the creation of Islamic institutions in the cultural, educational, and economic spheres. This is the line that Italian sociologist Renzo Guolo calls “neo-traditionalist,” or “Islamization from below,” distinguishing it from the “radical” fundamentalist position that advocates instead “Islamization from above” through armed struggle, coups, and terrorism.
While the neo-traditionalist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood was present in Palestine and strong in the West Bank, the radical wing prevailed in Gaza. However, it called for postponing the explicit struggle for the establishment of shari’a to a later time and focused its efforts of the moment on the armed struggle against Israel. In a memorandum dated July 1957, Brotherhood Palestinian leader Khalil al-Wazir, who would later become known by the nom de guerre of Abu Jihad (1935–1988), proposed to split the structure of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, creating “a parallel special organization that would lack a visible Islamic coloration or program, but would declare as its sole purpose the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle.”
Supporters of the al-Wazir memorandum (including all the members of the clandestine armed organization Justice Battalion and most of the members of the Brotherhood’s other military cell, Youth for Vengeance) between 1958 and 1959 formed Fatah (“Conquest,” but also the initials, read from right to left, of “National Movement for the Liberation of Palestine”). It eventually became the largest component of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded with Egyptian support in 1964.
When they started perceiving the direct heir of the Muslim Brotherhood, i.e. Hamas, as a rival, the leaders of the PLO tried to hide their past cooperation and even membership in the organization founded by al-Banna. For example, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyab, 1933–1991), one of the PLO’s most prominent leaders in the 1980s, stated in 1981 that he had never been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The statement was promptly denied by several comrades who had participated with him in the founding of Fatah. On the other hand, claims by PLO leader Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) that he was never a member of the Muslim Brotherhood were more believable. In his student days, he had joined the League of Palestinian Students, founded among students originally from Palestine in Egyptian universities with the support of the Brotherhood, but not formally part of the movement. Later, he was at various times both an ally and a rival of the Brotherhood.
