The paper presents a critical reading of the intellectual and educational aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s literature related to citizenship, while demonstrating its urgent need for revision and renewal to keep pace with the requirements of our present age, far from the sermons and messages inherited from Hassan al-Banna and others.
The reader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s literature, with a careful and thoughtful eye, will find it clear that the Muslim Brotherhood today is no different from its counterparts of yesterday, as long as they insist on drinking from the same cup in the same way, either directly or indirectly, which is the cup of the sermons and letters of Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), the man to whom the title of Imam was attached and who is presented as one of the reformers in the history of Islam, to the point of claiming that the man is subject to the effect attributed to the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, which states: “God sends to this nation at the beginning of every century someone who will renew its religion for it.” It is noticeable that the Brotherhood views its men from different countries as reformers and they are presented in the public space on this basis, such as: al-Turabi in Sudan, Ahmed al-Raysuni and Abd al-Salam Yassin in Morocco, and al-Ghannouchi in Tunisia.
The truth is that renewal is only possible through renewing the philosophy of understanding and consideration, in understanding reality and the past and anticipating the future, in addition to the fact that renewing the methods in criticizing and constructing various types of knowledge means going beyond the old and creating what is better in value.
But unfortunately, in the name of renewal, al-Banna took the worst of the Islamic heritage. Among what he took was the illusion of superiority and preference over others, and even the superiority of the Muslim Brotherhood over other Muslims. In this context, we recall the words of Hassan al-Banna: “Our mission is to rule the world and guide all of humanity to the righteous systems of Islam and its teachings, without which people cannot be happy.” [1 ]
The limits of understanding and looking at reality
When we search for the meaning of the righteous systems of Islam and the teachings of Islam among the Muslim Brotherhood, between yesterday and today, we find the result of summoning everything latent in history from the concepts, sayings and opinions of the ancients, and thus they are in a continuous migration to the past, and in constant activity and vitality in order to rebuild the image of Islam as it was before. If contemporary civilization and culture are characterized by scientific and technological superiority… despite the pitfalls of modernity, and this is another topic, then the Muslim Brotherhood’s state of mind says directly or indirectly, “It is better for us to remain within the limits of the intellectual and cognitive heritage curriculum,” rather than investing contemporary knowledge curricula in the struggle for religious renewal and reform.
Religious renewal and reform are the important and primary demand of our time, but instead of directing the energies of the youth towards awareness of the challenges of their time and renewing their discourse, we find al-Banna directing the youth by saying: “The whole world is confused and disturbed, and all the systems in it have failed to treat it, and there is no cure for it except Islam, so come forward in the name of God to save it, for everyone is waiting for the savior, and the savior will be none other than the message of Islam, whose torch you carry and with which you preach” [2] .
This complex is still attached to the Muslim Brotherhood to this day, and is embodied in the claim of saving society. However, historical experiences after the departure of Hassan al-Banna have proven that the youth who were considered part of his group, whether he preached to them or they read his work, did not save the world, but rather contributed to the destruction of their countries from within, according to his perceptions and directives about Islam. Which later became the perceptions of his group; the Muslim Brotherhood, with the same narrative and thesis that Hassan al-Banna planted in it, and that is specific to the “religious state.”
This approach accompanied the group until they came to power after the events of what is known as the “Arab Spring.” In Egypt, it is natural that at the moment of Mohamed Morsi’s presidency, they would be drawn toward the religious state in Iran, whether openly or unannounced, as a model in their consciousness that should be emulated and adopted. This is a psychological issue in the consciousness of most political Islam groups. Returning to the founding discourses that state that “the Brotherhood believes that the Caliphate is a symbol of Islamic unity and a manifestation of the connection between the nations of Islam, and that it is an Islamic ritual that Muslims must think about and care about. The Caliph is entrusted with many rulings in the religion of God… This is why the Muslim Brotherhood places the idea of the Caliphate and working to restore it at the top of their curriculum. However, they believe that this requires many necessary preparations, and that the direct step to restore the Caliphate must be preceded by steps” [3] , and those steps, as Hassan al-Banna defines, “begin with the formation of the Muslim individual, then the Muslim household, then the Muslim people, then the Muslim government, then the greater Islamic Caliphate that gathers what colonialism has torn apart” [4] .
It is true that al-Banna delivered his speeches and wrote his letters in a specific political and cultural context, and there is nothing in everything he wrote that makes him a man of renewal. His time included many figures of knowledge and science, in addition to the fact that the men of the renaissance before him inaugurated an open horizon for the subject of reform, which is the horizon that he – Hassan al-Banna – dwarfed with his thought that gathered people around him. There is also nothing in it that makes him an imam for people to follow him in it. It is true that he has the ability to gather and attract a crowd of people, but without a clear goal or objective related to human freedom, and this is the case with various ideologies across the world.
The professorship complex in the Muslim Brotherhood culture
The complex of mastery and superiority among the Muslim Brotherhood is embodied in one of its aspects in the deficient culture in their view of the other, which prioritizes the goal of “control” over the goal of “dialogue and knowledge.” Therefore, we find them dividing the world into “the House of Islam” and “the House of Unbelief.” We find that the House of Islam is defined as “the house in which the laws of Islam prevail, and in which Muslims rule according to the rule and teachings of Islam, even if the majority of the inhabitants of that country are non-Muslims. The House of Unbelief is defined as the house in which Muslims do not rule, and in which the application of the teachings of Islam does not appear, or in which Muslims are a non-ruling minority.”
This issue was a matter of dispute among Muslim jurists regarding this division of the world. Although the majority accepted it as a fait accompli, a group of them assumed the existence of a third abode, the abode of peace, or the abode of covenant. According to this doctrine, Islam recognized non-Muslim peoples who concluded a treaty or peace with Muslims on the condition that they pay the jizya. But other jurists did not accept this, and never recognized peace. Their argument was that when the inhabitants of a region concluded a peace treaty and paid the jizya, they thereby became part of the abode of Islam, and Islam must guarantee them protection. The abode of Islam was – theoretically – in a state of conflict with the abode of war, because the ultimate goal of Islam is for the entire world to be under Muslim control . [5]
While current relations between states and societies have become more intertwined and complex, the Muslim Brotherhood continues to reduce the world to their view of the other and the homeland within the limits of that understanding of the abode of Islam and the abode of disbelief. Here we are not talking about Islamists and their perceptions, nor do we stop at individuals and their opinions, but rather we are talking about the references from which the Muslim Brotherhood set out in building their political and social positions, to the point where it is noticeable that this reference of theirs prevents them from being children of their time rather than the times of others.
Islamic State Theses
After bitter experiences, Dr. Ahmed Al-Rasuni, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, tried to make the demand for an Islamic caliphate or an Islamic state a secondary demand and not a necessary demand. In his estimation, “the great mistake and dangerous predicament that some Islamic movements have fallen into and are falling into is being preoccupied with the means rather than the goal, and wasting the goal in order to preserve the means. Many are those who have spent their lives, consumed their lives, and exhausted their efforts on the path to establishing a state, without any trace or news of this state appearing. Perhaps the state has only become more distant and difficult thanks to their efforts. Thus, neither the state was established by them, nor did the nation benefit from them . ” [6]
In fact, this opinion of Al-Raissouni does not stem from an intellectual or cognitive shift that heralds a departure from the sayings of Hassan al-Banna, as much as it reflects a kind of despair on the part of the group in achieving an Islamic state that applies God’s law, especially if we recall its experience in ruling Sudan, as well as in view of what ISIS did when it announced the establishment of the alleged “caliphate” in Iraq in 2014.
Rashid Al-Ghannouchi and those with him made an effort to show the Ennahda Party in Tunisia as having surpassed the visions of Hassan Al-Banna, justifying that today there is no longer an urgent need for transnational organizations such as the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood [7] . Al-Ghannouchi did not stop at this point, but rather tried to present a vision for the issue of secularism with the aim of departing from the Islamic vision in understanding secularism as the opposite and contradiction of Islam [8] .
In fact, there are many differences between the regional organizations of the group, such as in Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt, especially in terms of discourse. However, despite all of this, what Ghannouchi and the Ennahda Party did was not enough to overcome the dilemma – the dilemma of the blockage of the first version of the Muslim Brotherhood – and this is among the reasons that made the Islamists in Egypt find themselves facing a dead end. Tunisians’ perceptions of the issues of identity, religion, civilization, culture, and Islam are perceptions characterized by openness to the spirit of the age and civilization, while Ghannouchi’s sayings and writings appear disturbed and in conflict with themselves, which is the self that the Muslim Brotherhood organization and its early thinkers carved.
Citizenship in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Thought
The value of citizenship is among the most important features of the modern state, as citizenship is “the relationship between an individual and a state as defined by the law of that state, and what that relationship includes in terms of duties and rights in that state” [9]. Citizenship, in its general concept, remains the framework that unites and connects all citizens, on the basis of equality in rights and duties, regardless of their religious, cultural and ethnic affiliations…
While the Muslim Brotherhood separated the concept of citizenship from the relationship of the individual to the state, because the state system, in their view, is linked to the system of the “caliphate” state, as it was with the Ottoman Empire and before it, which is a system in which the ruler represents the sovereignty of Islam and Muslims in some way, and derives his legitimacy in ruling from a belief-based basis, and for this reason the ruler is primarily concerned with the matter and condition of those with him in belief, and for this reason citizenship for the Brotherhood has no limits, and Hassan al-Banna was explicit in this when he said: “As for the point of disagreement between us and them, it is that we consider the borders of nationalism to be the belief and they consider it to be the land borders and geographical borders, so every spot in which there is a Muslim who says there is no god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God, is a homeland for us with its sanctity and holiness, love for it and loyalty to it and jihad for its good, and all Muslims in these geographical countries are our people and brothers, we care for them and feel their feelings and sense their feelings…” [10] .
The problem that stemmed from this understanding, which linked nationalism to belief, is the problem of who the individual’s loyalty, belonging and submission should be to: to the homeland, the rule of law and state institutions, and to consider the supreme interests of the homeland above all else! Or to the doctrine represented by the organization, its decisions and those at its head! Here the individual is faced with two choices: either to respond to the positions and perceptions of the state, or to be loyal to the organization to which he belongs. This is a dilemma in which the Muslim Brotherhood holds two ends of the rope. On the one hand, they are loyal to their homelands, and on the other hand, they are loyal to Islam and Muslims everywhere. This is done by presenting the concept of the nation, “the Islamic nation”, as a national concept, and separating it from its civilizational and cultural concept. In the context of the concept of the Islamic nation, many religious and sectarian minorities coexisted, starting with the Medina Document, which the Prophet made the basis for citizenship after his migration to Medina.
Anyone who follows the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood’s experience of ruling in Egypt, for example, will realize the nature of the confusion and disarray they have between loyalty to state institutions and loyalty to the group’s decisions and visions. The truth is that this problem derives some of its aspects from some aspects of the narrow understanding of the subject of loyalty and disavowal, which is the loyalty of Muslims to one another and their disavowal of the infidels. This understanding does not align with the philosophy of the Qur’an and its guidance directed at human action.
The idea of loyalty and disavowal, meaning the Muslim’s allegiance to Muslims in all their issues by supporting them and disavowing the infidels everywhere, destroys the idea of citizenship from the ground up. For example, someone who believes in this idea while residing in a European country as a citizen with the nationality of the country and full rights and duties in that country, and if a problem occurs between that country in which he is, i.e. his homeland, and a country whose people profess Islam, then according to the idea of loyalty to Muslims, he will abandon his homeland and side with the position of that country whose people profess Islam even if it is unjust, and he will disavow the people of his homeland because they are “infidels” in his consciousness and understanding.
[1] Hassan al-Banna, A Message to What Do We Call People to?
[2] Hassan al-Banna, A Message to the Youth, Collection of Letters of the Martyr Imam, Alexandria, Dar al-Da’wa, 1992 AD
[3] Hassan al-Banna, Message of the Fifth Conference (1938 AD), Collection of Messages of the Martyr Imam, Alexandria, Dar al-Da’wa, 1992 AD, p. 144
[4] Hassan al-Banna, (A Message to the Youth), previous reference, p. 177.
[5] See: Dar Al-Islam, Research on the Concept, Abdullah Ibrahim, Tolerance Magazine, issued by the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, Sultanate of Oman, now published under the name “Al-Tafahum” Magazine, Issue 17, 2007.
[6] See: The official website of Professor Ahmed Raissouni/ The Future of Islam between Peoples and Rulers/ March 18, 2019 https://raissouni.net/900
[7] Rashid Al-Ghannouchi, Commentary on the Book of Public Freedoms in the Islamic State (Damascus: Dar Al-Baraq, 2001), pp. 170-171.
[8] Rashid Al-Ghannouchi, Approaches to Secularism and Civil Society (Dar Al-Mujtahid for Publishing and Distribution, Tunis, 2011), p. 196.
[9] See: Encyclopedia Britannica
[10] Collection of Hassan al-Banna’s Letters, op. cit., p. 21.