MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Subject: History

Context: Egypt sentences Muslim Brotherhood leader to life in prison .Court finds Mahmoud Ezzat, acting supreme guide of the country’s oldest Islamist organisation, guilty of ‘terror’ acts.

Concept:

• Muslim Brotherhood is a religiopolitical organization founded in 1928 at Ismailia, Egypt, by Hassan al-Banna.
• Islamist in orientation, it advocated a return to the Quran and the Hadith as guidelines for a healthy modern Islamic society.
• The Brotherhood spread rapidly throughout Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and North Africa.
• Although figures of Brotherhood membership are variable, it is estimated that at its height in the late 1940s it may have had some 500,000 members.

Global influence:

• His ideas led inspired a large number of Islamist political movements and parties alongwith powerful missionary and charitable initiatives all over the world.
• Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia are among the countries that have large parties that trace their origins to the Brotherhood.
• Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood has been designated as an Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) by the US. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the fugitive leader of al-Qaeda, is a former member of the Egyptian Brotherhood.

Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood:

• There is a broad consensus among historians that the Egyptian Brotherhood, as an organisation at least, has not undertaken violent action since 1960s, when it formally announced they were only “preachers”.
• In Egypt, the Brotherhood has been in Parliament since in the 1980s, and one of its leaders, Mohamed Morsi, became President in 2012, who was ousted the following year.