The Early Muslim Brotherhood: Tarbiyah as the Foundation of Hasan al-Banna’s Project of Islamic Revival and Reform

In Egypt in the early 20th century, an era of great political and social change defined by the growth of nationalisms, modernization, and colonialism, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn) emerged as an Islamic movement that sought to challenge secularizing trends and promote Islamic practices, ethics, and values in society, with the ambition of eventually establishing an Islamic state. This dissertation is an analysis of the thought of the movement’s founder, Hasan al-Banna, from the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to his death in 1949. As the movement’s principal thinker, his ideas remain central to the organization’s ideology and structure until today. While his political goals are often the focus of academic analysis, I bring attention to a central aspect of his thought which is tarbiyah (education and training) as the foundational element of his ideas on Islamic revival and societal reform. In al-Banna’s articles, religious tracts, manuals, and pamphlets, he promoted an Islamic theory of progressive change based on tarbiyah - defined by forms of ethical self-cultivation, spiritual refinement, and physical discipline - as an important step to Islamizing Egyptian society. My research demonstrates that Al-Banna married traditional Islamic ideas of the refinement of the soul to modern colonial and Arab theories of reform which linked the success and strength of the nation-state to the customs, habits, and ethics of its citizenry. The basis of his theory of social regeneration was the notion that cultivating modern, pious, Muslim subjects would be the means through which the Muslim Brotherhood could transform the social body in Egypt and Islamize the nation. He translated these ideas into elaborate training programs aimed at the membership of the Brotherhood, and forms of preaching and outreach directed at the wider community. My project draws on historical, textual, and ethnographic research with the conceptual tools of the self-cultivation paradigm, alongside emic Islamic concepts from the premodern Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali, to examine al-Banna’s conceptualization tarbiyah and social change, the various technologies of the self developed by the early Muslim Brotherhood, and the aims of the organization’s training programs within their long-term Islamist project.

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