The History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (1928–1938) discusses the History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from the Brotherhood's inception to its development into a viable political force.
Early development
In 1928, six Egyptian workers employed by British military camps in Isma'iliyya, in the Suez Canal Zone in Egypt, visited Hassan al-Banna, a young schoolteacher whom they had heard preach in mosques and coffee-houses on the need for an Islamic renewal. "Arabs and Muslims have no status and no dignity," they said. "They are no more than mere hirelings belonging to the foreigners.... We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it...." They therefore asked him to become their leader; he accepted, founding the Society of the Muslim Brothers.
Banna and his followers began by starting an evening school. In its first few years, the Society was focused on Islamic education, with an emphasis on teaching students how to implement an ethos of solidarity and altruism in their daily lives, rather than on theoretical issues. The General Inspector of Education was greatly impressed, particularly by the eloquent speeches of the working-class members of the Brotherhood. Banna's deputy was a carpenter, and the appointment of people from the lower classes to leading positions became a hallmark of the Brotherhood.
The Society's first major project was the construction of a mosque, completed in 1931, for which it managed to raise a large amount of money while carefully maintaining its independence from potentially self-interested donors. In the same year, the Society began to receive favourable attention in the press, and a Cairo branch was founded.
In 1932, Banna was transferred to Cairo at his request, and the organisation's headquarters were moved there. In addition to handling the administration of the Society, Banna gave evening lectures on the Qur'an for "the poor of the district around the headquarters who were 'without learning and without the will for it'".
Over the next decade, the Society grew very rapidly. From three branches in 1931, it grew to have 300 across Egypt in 1938; thanks to an unorthodox ideology with mass appeal, and to effective strategies for attracting new members, it had become a major political opposition group with a highly diverse membership.
Ideological innovations
The Brotherhood initially resembled an ordinary Islamic welfare society. In the early 1930s, its welfare activities included small-scale social work among the poor, building and repairing mosques and establishing a number of Qur'an schools (whose role in teaching children to read and write was important in a country where 80% of the population was illiterate), setting up small workshops and factories, and organising the collection and distribution of zakat (the Islamic alms tax). As the Society grew, it increasingly founded benevolent institutions such as pharmacies, hospitals and clinics for the general public, and launched a program to teach adults to read and write by offering courses in coffee-shops and clubs.
However, Banna's vision of a new sort of organisation, capable of renewing broken links between tradition and modernity, enabled the Brotherhood to gain a degree of popularity and influence that no welfare society enjoyed. He observed that, in the midst of a flourishing Egyptian civil society and a cultural environment marked by innovations in literature, science and education, religious education had been left behind: the ideas of Islamic religious reformers were not made accessible to the general public, and there was no serious effort to make the history and teachings of Islam comprehensible to the young. He was determined to fill this gap by training a cadre of young, highly motivated preachers equipped with modern teaching methods, independent from the government and the religious establishment, and supported by an effective use of the new mass media.
The Brotherhood's second General Conference, in 1933, authorised the creation of a publishing company and the purchase of a printing press, which was used to print several newspapers during the next decade. Funds were raised by creating a joint stock company in which only members were allowed to buy shares. This approach, which protected the Society's independence from government and from the wealthy by ensuring that its institutions were owned by its members, became its standard means of financing new projects.