The Founding of the Muslim Brotherhood

In 1928 in Ismailia, a town on the Suez Canal dominated by the offices and garrisons of the foreign-owned canal company and the British presence that controlled Egypt, a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna (rahimahu Allah), together with a small group of workers, founded the Society of the Muslim Brothers, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun. It began not as a political party but as a religious, educational and social reform movement, preaching a return to Islam as a comprehensive way of life and the self-strengthening of a Muslim community living under colonial domination and rapid Westernisation. In its early years it built mosques, schools, clinics, and small businesses and cooperatives, and spread by personal preaching and a disciplined network of branches, growing within two decades into the largest and most influential mass movement in the modern Muslim world, with a presence throughout Egypt and, through emulators and offshoots, across the Arab world and beyond, becoming a principal seedbed of modern Islamic political thought. Its later trajectory, its turn to politics, its conflicts with successive states, the questions of its relationship to violence and to democratic participation, has been intensely contested across the Muslim world and beyond, and the movement has been by turns legalised, courted, repressed and banned; the assessment of that long and divisive later history lies well beyond this scene, which records only its modest beginning. This scene depicts that founding moment, a few men with tea and notebooks in a plain room in the canal town of Ismailia in 1928.