H -B1 S Q2
© 2009 Hartford Seminary.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148 USA.
294
Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK MUWO The Muslim World 0027-4909 1478-1913 © 2009 Hartford Seminary XXX Original Article H-BaSQ XX
Hasan al-Banna and
Sayyid Qu†b: Continuity
or Rupture?
Ana Belén Soage
University of Granada
Spain
I
n the history of Islamism, two characters stand out over the rest: Hasan
al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brothers’ Society ( Jam“iyyat
al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) in the late 1920s, and Sayyid Qu†b, who was the
Society’s main ideologue for much of the 1950s and 60s. Al-Banna was a
charismatic leader who inspired hundreds of thousands of Muslims with his
project to regenerate society through Islam. He was not a prolific author, but
he wrote a series of “epistles” addressed to his followers and to Egyptian, Arab
and Muslim leaders in the 1930s and 40s setting out his reform. Following a
series of murders and other acts of violence committed by members of his
organization, al-Banna himself was assassinated — probably by the Egyptian
secret police — in 1949. As for Qu†b, he was already an accomplished author
by the time he joined the Society in the early 1950s, and was rapidly put in
charge of its propaganda section. He was imprisoned by the Nasserist regime
in 1954 and spent most of the rest of his life in prison, where his thought
became increasingly radical and utopian. He was finally executed in 1966. In
the Society’s mythology, both al-Banna and Qu†b are considered “martyrs.”
But Qu†b’s uncompromising discourse was a liability for an organization
that aspired to return to legality, and the Society’s leadership soon started to
distance themselves from his writings. In 1969 Hasan al-Hudaybi, who had
been appointed as al-Banna’s successor as the Society’s General Guide, wrote
in his prison cell Du“at, la qudat (Preachers, not judges), in which he criticized
a series of concepts and notions introduced into Islamist thought by Abu
al-A’ là Mawdudi. Although ostensibly a criticism of Mawdudi, the book was a
less-than-veiled denunciation of Qu†b, who had been very influenced by the