RENÉE MONTAGNE, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renée Montagne.
Some people in Egypt had been quietly marking the centenary of Sheikh Hassan al-Banna. In 1928, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood. It became the most influential Islamist movement in Egypt and the model for others throughout the Muslim world.
The brotherhood is a political, social and charitable organization, and although it has renounced violence, it is still officially banned by the Cairo government, which has recently intensified the crackdown on the movement.
NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Cairo.
(Soundbite of rally)
PETER KENYON: In the summer of 2005, as Egyptians prepared for their first ever presidential election with names other than Hosni Mubarak's on the ballot, the anti-Mubarak movement known as Kafaya, or enough, staged a rally in downtown Cairo.
The rally was larger than normal because Egypt's only truly organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, had asked its supporters to turn out. That became audibly clear as the anti-Mubarak chants were suddenly drowned out by rallying cries of blood and sacrifice for Islam.
(Soundbite of rally)
KENYON: To those who didn't get a clear picture of the scene - several hundred protesters hemmed in by a small army of Egyptian security forces - it may have sounded like the first stirrings of a dangerous Islamist uprising, which is something the Mubarak government has been warning the West about for years.
It was, in fact, the Brotherhood flexing its political muscle on its way to becoming the largest opposition movement in parliament. Since then, the government has arrested hundreds of Muslim Brothers, most recently after a group of Muslim Brotherhood students paraded in masks and performed martial arts moves at al-Azhar University.
The Muslim Brotherhood leadership distanced itself from the display, and the demonstrators issued a statement apologizing for what they called - their skit. The pro-government media and politicians issued dire warnings about the formation of a student militia and the arrests and interrogations continued.
To some analysts, these episodes speak volumes about the current state of the Muslim Brotherhood. The group is still highly organized and popular, especially among the legions of Egyptians who lived at or below the poverty line. But some see it now more as a useful foil for a repressive regime and its Western backers, rather than the powerful social and political force it once was.
In his Cairo apartment, a bearded heavyset man uses his cane to help him lean forward as he gently leafs through a stack of old photographs and magazines from the 1920s and ‘30s. Seif Al-Islam, the son of Hassan al-Banna, has collected as much material as he can from the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He says part of his father's genius was the organizational model he used. The same one later adopted by Islamist groups across the Muslim world. He started locally with small groups that became deeply involved in bettering their communities. They were known as families.
Mr. SEIF AL-ISLAM (Hassan Al-Banna's Son): (Through translator) He was able to engage these families in a lot of work - all sorts of different aspects of life: acting, football, oh, there was also boy scouts - all the aspects of life incorporated into the group. The difference between other political parties and the Muslim Brotherhood was the difference between building a house only with bricks, and the Muslim Brotherhood's house built with bricks cemented together using cement.
KENYON: By most accounts, the difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and the many other small Islamist societies in Egypt in the 1920s was Hassan al-Banna himself. He was a persuasive speaker and a stellar grassroots organizer. Within a decade, the brotherhood was established in every province in Egypt and well on its way toward recruiting as many as a half million members by the end of the 1940s.
Well, his view of Islam was orthodox, supporters say Hassan al-Banna saw no benefit in shutting out the rest of the world. The very first issue of the Brotherhood's magazine from 1933, led with a scientific article written by a botanist. And al-Islam says his father wrote inclusively of the Jewish and Christian faiths, and of the benefits of sharing knowledge.
Mr. AL-ISLAM: (Through translator) Hassan al-Banna didn't have anything against Western culture and civilization. He believed that we can benefit from it. We can take what is suitable for us in civilization and technology. But, of course, when it comes to religion or way of life, we have our own way of life.
KENYON: But the brotherhood flourished in violent times, and some of al-Banna's families were later overshadowed by Muslim Brotherhood paramilitary cells. Angered by both the British occupation and Egypt's liberal secular upper class, Brotherhood squads were held responsible for a series of violent riots and assassinations, including the killing of a prime minister in 1948.
That same year, the Arab-Israeli War became an important cause for the Brotherhood, which persuaded the government to let the army give Muslim Brothers military training to assist the Palestinian cause. Hassan al-Banna was himself gunned down in 1949, most likely by government agents, according to some historians.
And a few years later President Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a brutal campaign against the brotherhood. Al-Banna's youngest brother, 85-year-old liberal reformer Gamal al-Banna believes it was the torture the Muslim Brothers endured in Nasser's dungeons that drove many of them toward the extremist ideology of one of their fellow prisoners, Sayyid Qutb.
Qutb preached that Islam was the world's only true religion and violent jihad, or holy war, must be permanently waged until all other faiths were eliminated. Qutb's philosophy spawned a number of radical Islamist groups that broke away from the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Gamaat Islamiya in Egypt, the Islamic Liberation Party in Jordan and later Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
Islamist expert Diaa Rashwan at Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies says groups such as those have dominated headlines and driver counterterrorism policies in the West, but they represent a small fraction of the Muslim world.
He says Islamist groups fall into two broad categories - peaceful political movements and advocates of violent jihad. He says despite the recent successes of Hamas and the Shiite Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, if you take a wider view of elections in the Muslim world in the past 15 years, you find most support going to Islamist parties from the peaceful category, such as those in Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait.
Mr. DIAA RASHWAN (Al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies): We speak about (unintelligible) in face of (unintelligible). When the majority of Islamic movements today is pacific. The Muslim Brothers is one of the most important movements within the first category.
KENYON: But Rashwan and others believe that once it made the decision in the 1970s to renounce violence and stick to political action, the Muslim Brotherhood failed to make the transition to a modern political movement. Rashwan took that message, recently, to a centenary roundtable marking 100 years since Hassan al-Banna's birth.
In the spirit of the Brotherhood's founder, liberal opposition members were invited as well as Islamists. Rashwan told the gathering that the Brotherhood is being bypassed by other Islamist movements and needs to move quickly to clearly set out its positions on women's rights, the rights of Christians and other religious minorities, and other sensitive issues.
Mr. RASHWAN: (Through translator) If the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't reform from within, it will be - and this is the irony - it will be the last Islamist movement to do so, even though it is the origin of these movements. Their brothers have already done it in Morocco, in Jordan, in Kuwait and in Algeria. But the source, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, has not. Reform is possible under the Koran, and even the philosophy of Hassan al-Banna.
KENYON: So far the Brotherhood is not rushing to embrace those reforms, at least not in public. And the Egyptian government is showing no willingness to let the still-banned movement operate as a legal political party, whether it reforms or not. But Arab political analysts say, in one form or another, Islamist parties will continue to grow in popularity and could post strong challenges to a number of current regimes in the Muslim world.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Cairo. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
