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Intel - Terrorism
Hassan al-Banna

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• "If the Jewish State becomes a fact [the Arabs] will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea." (1948)

• From the Muslim Brotherhood of Hassan al-Banna, the radical armed group founded in 1928 in Egypt, Islamism took the figure of the charismatic leader and the blind loyalty of his followers.
• Al-Banna had in turn borrowed these concepts from Italian Fascism. Central to the Brotherhood Manifesto was the marriage between the spiritual and the physicial, a concept translated by Islamist armed groups into the Jihad.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 154]

• Banna's guiding star was al-Ghazali, whose books he read and re-read.
  [source: Hostage to Khomeini, p. 142]

• Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, considered the i'dah al-khilifa al-mufqudah/restoration of the lost caliphate to be the chief political goal of his party.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 146]

• Furthermore, it was Hasan al-Banna who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1929, and it was al-Banna who first prescribe a regiment of Islamic activism and renewed Qur'anic commitment to rearm Islam in the face of political paralysis and British colonial domination of Egypt.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 54]

• Hasan al-Banna formed the Young Men's Muslim Association in 1927, to help begin to answer the thirsting of Egyptians for inspiration to "return to true Islam" in a new revivalist movement.

• The following year, as a 22-year-old elementary school teacher, al-Banna formed "Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimoon" ("The Muslim Brotherhood), ideologically rooted in the teachings of al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Muhammad Rida.

• In his essay on jihad, Hassan al-Banna ridiculed those Muslims who deny that jihad implies the use of force. For al-Banna there are two patterns of jihad, the lesser one (al-jihad al asghar) and the greater one (al-jihad al-akbar). The latter, for him the true Islamic jihad, is a distinctly violent one.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 58]

• Hassan al-Banna, in his essay "The Way of Jihad," states that jihad is a duty incumbent upon every Muslim, stressing that this duty "cannot be ignored nor evaded". This perspective on jihad begins a crucial departure away from the more scholarly elders (Abduh, Rida, and to a lesser extent, al-Afghani) and launches the Muslim Brotherhood in the direction of Ibn Taymiyyah. A second point of departure for al-Banna towards the violent ideology of Ibn Taymiyyah is his reading of the word jihad as synonymous with violence, "to warfare, to the armed forces, and all means of land and sea fighting".

• The Muslim Brotherhood, under Hassan al-Banna, unlike Ibn Taymiyyah, did not seek to return to the ways of the seventh century. For instance, the organization was relentless in its outspoken criticism of the literalist interpretation of Wahhabi Islam in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

• Hassan al-Banna studied the history of revolutions, and explained to his followers, there was no need to emulate the French or Russian revolutions. Instead, the Ummah should follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad, who had already proclaimed the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity, and social justice 1300 years earlier, proclaimed al-Banna.

• Al-Banna, however, was more activist than theorist; he committed little doctrine to paper. Hence, when he was assassinated in 1949, he left both a vital Islamic organization and what Gilles Kepel calls an "ideological vacuum" in his wake.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 55]

• Under al-Banna's guidance, the Brotherhood insisted on Islam as the universal and comprehensive arbiter of all aspects of life, a definition developed, in part, in opposition to the perceived growth of nihilism, materialism, and secularism in Egyptian culture.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 55]

• Although al-Banna publicly disassociated himself from violent coups (he indicated that education would solve most of the problems encountered by the Ummah), it is well established that the Muslim Brotherhood of Hassan al-Banna had a terrorist wing to its operations. Evidence directly tying Hassan al-Banna to terrorism is rather questionable, to say the least. It is unclear to what degree al-Banna was actually involved with the terror wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. More clear, is that al-Banna seems to have been either unable or unwilling to control the terror wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

• The Muslim Brotherhood, under Hassan al-Banna, had an official policy of not only denying responsibility for killings but actually denouncing terrorist attacks.

• It is also the case that this terrorism was not an isolated phenomenon. The future successor to Nasser, Anwar Sadat, led an underground "murder society" in the 1940s, to resist British colonialism and combat the "Al Nakbah" ("The Disaster") - the word used by Arabs to describe the rise of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948.

• . To this end, it seems, al-Banna may have been led astray and used by the Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser, who sought to overthrow the Egyptian King Farouk in a military coup, and install Muhammad Naguib as the first secular President of modern day Egypt. The end result of a brief alliance with Nasser was that there would be no Caliphate forthcoming, and the Muslim Brotherhood started to makes moves against Nasser.