The Sufi Side of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda Brothers

Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) in 1928 founded the Egyptian Society of the Muslim Brothers (also known as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Brotherhood, Brothers), which is Egypt’s oldest and most influential fundamentalist Sunni Muslim group. An offshoot of the Muslim Brothers, called the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (led by Sunni Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri), fused with Al Qaeda (led by Sunni Saudi Osama bin Laden) to form Qaeda al-Jihad in June 2001. What is less well known to some people is that the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda—and their fusion group Qaeda al-Jihad--are Sufi-based Islamist movements and that they became so through the influence of Sufi-Sunni Egyptian Hasan Al-Banna. The strong Sufi influence helps explain the “disciplined emotionalism” of Qaeda al-Jihad leaders and their disciples, and its rejection of science, knowledge, and learning as the way to better the lives of Muslims around the world.

Hasan al-Banna

Hasan al-Banna was born in October 1906 in the Egyptian Nile delta province of Buhayra in the small town of Mahmudiyya about ninety miles northwest of Cairo. The Mahmudiyya Canal was built in the first quarter of the nineteenth century to connect the Nile River with the city of Alexandria to provide that Mediterranean city with fresh water.

Al-Banna’s father, Shaykh Ahmad al-Banna al-Sa’ati, was not a peasant farmer (or “fellah”) like many of the townspeople in Mahmudiyya who grew corn and melons in the rich delta soil. Rather, the Shaykh was the local ma’dhun (marriage officer), imam (male prayer leader in a mosque) and teacher for the town mosque. (1) He received his college education in Cairo at al-Azhar University, the oldest university in the world, at the same time as Shaykh Muhammad Abduh, who was an Egyptian Salafist. Salafism, like Sufism, is a kind of Sunni movement. It is also known as Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Salafism favors strict behavioral adherence to the perceived purer ways of the earliest followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Shaykh Banna attended al-Azhar University at a time when its teachers taught students only the “religious syllabus, which pays special attention to the Quranic sciences and traditions of the Prophet.” (2) In 1961, nearly a millennium after its founding, the university added new colleges of “applied sciences”, such as medicine and engineering.

Hasan al-Banna was the oldest of five sons. He began his formal education at age eight years at the town kuttab school under the tutelage of Shaykh Muhammad Zahran who focused student energies on memorizing the Qur’an. Hasan said in his autobiography that Zahran most, after Hasan’s father, affected his development. The British later hanged Zahran for participating in a riot that resulted in the death of a British officer. (3) Another famous Egyptian, President Anwar Sadat, had also grown up in a small village in the Nile delta about the same time as Hasan al-Banna. Sadat later said how much he admired the courage Zahran exhibited on the way to the gallows.

When Hasan al-Banna turned twelve, he enrolled in a primary school, where his deep piety, leadership and organizational skills became well known. During his couple of years in the primary school he witnessed his first “dhikr”, a mystic circle ritual of central importance to Sufis. Enraptured by the dhikr experience, Hasan became an ardent member of the dhikr group and a disciple of its leading shaykh.

Dhikr and Sufism

A dhikr entails the prolonged repetition of divine names, supplications, or aphorisms from sections of the Qur’an or hadith literature. Its purpose is to draw the circle of participating men into a deep awareness of God. The dhikr often went on for hours and could be held more than one time per week. To observe the other-worldly experience of a dhikr, go to: http://www.zikranash.net/zikr1.html and click on part 1.

Hasan al-Banna also began to read avidly from available materials on Sufism. Sufism encompasses the ascetic and mystical movements within Islam and originated from forms of devotion and groups of early Islamic penitents, even including Ali, the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad, according to the Shia Islamic sect. (4)  Sufism stresses total reliance on God.

The word “Sufi” first appeared in the eight century, probably in connection with the coarse wool that many ascetics wore. The Arabic word “suf” means “wool” in the sense of “cloak.”

Al-Ghazzali vs. Avicenna

The greatest Islamic theologian of all time, the Persian Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazzali (1058-1111), showed that conformist Sunni Muslim religious life could and should be infused with a more personal and direct relationship with Allah through Sufi practices such as the dhikr. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the great Catholic Italian theologian, was enthralled with Al-Ghazzali’s many works, which had been translated into Latin at the University of Naples during Aquinas’ time there. Al-Ghazzali was known as Al-Ghazel in Latin.

Al-Ghazzali was a complex man. As a youth, he assiduously studied the branches of traditional Islamic religious sciences, including Sufi practices, in what is today northern Iran. In 1091 AD the vizir of the Seljuq sultans in Iran appointed him at age 33 years head of the Nizamiyyah College located in Baghdad. As head of the Islamic community, he lectured on Islamic jurisprudence and responded to questions from all segments of the community, including questions about heresy, which often required the use of logic.

After only four years, however, he had a nervous breakdown, renounced his career, left Baghdad, and wandered as a Sufi in the Levant for two years, finally making his way to Mecca. Then he retired to his home town of Tus in Persia to write and teach his Sufi disciples until his death about 14 years later.

Al-Ghazzali explains in his autobiography his own inner development that led to his conversion to Sufism. He became a deep skeptic about ever being able to learn through the senses only about the true reality of things. While studying the various branches of Islam, which included the philosophers, Sufis, and Ismailis, Al-Ghazzali concluded that there was no way to certain knowledge except through Sufi mysticism. To try to learn the truth through formal education in the sciences (philosophy) was a depressing exercise in futility that was best to avoid. This conclusion was in direct contradistinction to the philosophy (science) and medicine espoused by another great Persian Muslim named Avicenna (980-1037). Avicenna was a physician and scientist who died 19 years before Al-Ghazzali’s birth. Al-Ghazzali was undoubtedly steeped in Avicenna’s thought.

Hasan al-Banna revered al-Ghazzali and Sufism upon enrolling at age 14 in the Primary Teachers’ Training School at Damanhur, 13 miles from his home but still within the Egyptian Nile delta province of Buhayra. Banna was exposed to the medieval master’s views on learning and knowledge from studying his masterpiece entitled “Ihya’ Ulum al-Din” or, in English, “The Revival of the Religious Sciences.” (5)

Hasan al-Banna was so absorbed with al-Ghazzali’s Sufi teachings that during his last year at the Teachers’ Training School in Damanhur, he almost disavowed learning (even though he loved learning) and its benefits for individual and society, and was ready to skip the final stage in his formal training in Cairo. His teachers, however, persuaded him to put aside his doubts and go on to higher education. At the age of 16 years in 1923, he left the Teachers’ Training School and entered Dar al-‘Ulum (House of Sciences) in Cairo. Dar al-‘Ulum was founded in 1873 as the first Egyptian attempt to provide modern higher learning (i.e., the sciences so disparaged by Al-Ghazzali) in addition to the religious sciences that were the specialties of al-Azhar University mentioned earlier.
But Hasan’s earlier extra-academic education from his father and teachers was always more important to him than his formal “scientific” education. Indeed he prided himself on going beyond the dictates of his “academic program” and turned avidly to reading even more of the literature of Sufism and biographies of the Prophet. Following his graduation from Dar al-‘Ulum in the summer of 1927 at the age of 21 years, he was assigned to teach Arabic in a primary school in the Suez Canal Zone city of Ismailiyya located on the west side of the canal halfway between the northern entrance to the Suez Canal and the southern terminus. He remained a school master until his resignation in 1946, nineteen years later.

Hasan al-Banna, Muslim Brotherhood, and Sufism

The Ghazzalian lowly place of the sciences and knowledge meant that learning was to be confined to only what was necessary to “‘fulfill the religious duties and earn a livelihood.” (6) Hasan al-Banna took this Ghazzalian message to heart and made it a basic feature of his preaching to his first followers in the Society of Muslim Brothers. Throughout his career, “it sustained and reinforced what one might call the ‘practical and at the same time other-worldly’ qualities of his mind,’” according to Richard Mitchell, whose book entitled “The Society of Muslim Brothers” is considered the seminal work on the group’s origins.

Hasan al-Banna launched the Society of Muslim Brothers in March 1928. Though immersed in Sufism for most of his life, he determined that Sufism was not perfect. By contrast, he came to understand that Sufism inspired and justified a spiritual withdrawal from life that eventually led to a socially useless existence. He believed that Al-Ghazzali’s twelfth century advancement of Sufi-Sunni Islam dealt a severe blow to Islamic thought. Muslims everywhere were victimized by corrupt Sufi shaykhs who roamed the countryside preaching Sufi aestheticism and withdrawal to “drug the masses” into accepting their deteriorating economic and social fates, especially in relation to the advancing West. As al-Banna matured, he began to hold Sufism responsible for weakening the Islamic nation, resulting in the decrepit state in which he found it in the first half of the twentieth century. Al-Banna’s “scientific” education in college probably influenced his change of heart toward Sufism.

Al-Banna also moved away from Sufism during his middle years because it was a movement within Islam that tended to divide the umma. He and the Brothers strived to combat Muslim disunity by preaching the essential unimportance of the differences that permissibly exist with the body of Islam. The first step in regeneration of the Muslim community was to minimize the various movements within Islam. “The Brothers, Banna insisted, belonged to no sect or school. Differences of opinion were, of course necessary and even desirable, but carried beyond their legitimated function they became harmful to Islam.” (Mitchell, p. 217). Banna once said, “Let us cooperate in those things on which we can agree and be lenient in those on which we cannot.”

Al-Banna thus transferred his Sufi ardor from “isolated spirituality” to “social spirituality.” For the Muslim Brothers, this meant that in addition to the mystical aspect of the dhikr and the spiritual discipline gained thereby, there was an obligation to enter the world and exert effort (which he called “jihad”) towards the solution of social problems affecting Muslims.

Ayman Zawahiri

Ayman Zawahiri was born in 1951, two years after al-Bassan’s assassination, and in 1974 graduated from Cairo University Medical School, which was boiling with Islamist activism. Unbeknownst to his family, including his twin sister who attended medical school with him, Zawahiri secretly joined a cell of the Muslim Brothers. In the late 1970s, several cells joined to form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which Zawahiri eventually led. The assassination of President Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, by a military cell within the scattered ranks of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad resulted in Zawahiri’s imprisonment by President Hosni Mubarak (the current president of Egypt, as of this writing) for three years where he transformed from a relative moderate in the Islamist underground into a violent extremist. The torture received in prison created a strong appetite for revenge, according to Lawrence Wright in “The Man Behind Bin Laden.” (7)

In prison he encountered Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (born 1938, now imprisoned for life in Colorado for crimes relating to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993) with whom he had heated debates about the best way to achieve a true Islamic revolution and who should lead the revolution. Rahman, blinded by diabetes as a young child, attended Al-Azhar University in Cairo and became one of the most outspoken clerics to denounce Egypt’s secularism.

Zawahiri originally went to Pakistan as a surgeon with the Red Cross (International Red Crescent Society) to care for Afghani refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion turmoil in 1980. He learned of Osama bin Laden who was also there, and cultivated a relationship with him in earnest, according to Lawrence Wright. Zawahiri was rewarded with generous financial support for his Egyptian Islamic Jihad. In addition he began to provide medical care for bin Laden.

Sufism and Qaeda-al-Jihad

Sufi practices characterize Qaeda-al-Jihad in several ways. First, Qaeda-al-Jihad is organized as a Sufi-type brotherhood around Osama bin Laden who is the brotherhood’s spiritual leader or Shaykh. The initiation ceremony specific to many Sufi orders, called “bayat”, involves taking the hand of the group’s spiritual leader. The Prophet Muhammad established this ceremony when he allowed his companions to take his hand and commit themselves to vastly increase their love and loyalty to Allah and the Messenger, according to one report. (8) During the “taking hand” ceremony, the new Sufi initiate receives the blessings of the lineage, and a promise of spiritual protection along their life’s journey.

“Members of al-Qaeda take bayat [an oath of allegiance] to their sheik, Bin Laden, as an act of initiation…Bayat means that the link between the one making bayat, the shaykh and Prophet Muhammad is unbroken. This makes a Sufi connection possible during the solemn moment of taking bayat (pact) with the shaykh, who is the link in the chain.” The initiate becomes connected to the chain and becomes a recipient of the light of Muhammad. Bayat is the ritual of accepting the shaykh as guide and coming under the protection of the lineage of the order. The number of actual members pledging bayat is unknown, but al-Qaeda is said to have trained as many as 5000 militants in camps in Afghanistan and perhaps Indonesia.” (8)

Second, the Sufi aesthetic practice of wandering and withdrawing and living in caves is  consistent with the way in which bin Laden and Zawahiri have been living. Some may say that they have been forced to the caves by Coalition forces, but the ease with which they have adapted to this barren and difficult way of life supports a Sufi influence.
Third, Zawahiri travels around the mountains and valleys like a Sufi and even wears a turban and cloak suggestive of ancient Sufi attire. For example, Lawrence Wright wrote in September 2002: “Last March, a band of horsemen journeyed through the province of Paktika, in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. Predator drones were circling the skies and American troops were sweeping through the mountains. The war had begun six months earlier, and by now the fighting had narrowed down to the ragged eastern edge of the country. Regional warlords had been bought off, the borders supposedly sealed. For twelve days, American and coalition forces had been bombing the nearby Shah-e-Kot Valley and systematically destroying the cave complexes in the Al Qaeda stronghold. And yet the horsemen were riding unhindered toward Pakistan.

“They came to the village of a local militia commander named Gula Jan, whose long beard and black turban might have signaled that he was a Taliban sympathizer. ‘I saw a heavy, older man, an Arab, who wore dark glasses and had a white turban,’ Jan told Ilene Prusher, of the Christian Science Monitor, four days later. ‘He was dressed like an Afghan, but he had a beautiful coat, and he was with two other Arabs who had masks on.’ The man in the beautiful coat dismounted and began talking in a polite and humorous manner. He asked Jan and an Afghan companion about the location of American and Northern Alliance troops. ‘We are afraid we will encounter them,’ he said. ‘Show us the right way.’

“While the men were talking, Jan slipped away to examine a poster that had been dropped into the area by American airplanes. It showed a photograph of a man in a white turban and glasses. His face was broad and meaty, with a strong, prominent nose and full lips. His untrimmed beard was gray at the temples and ran in milky streaks below his chin. On his high forehead, framed by the swaths of his turban, was a darkened callus formed by many hours of prayerful prostration. His eyes reflected the sort of decisiveness one might expect in a medical man, but they also showed a measure of serenity that seemed oddly out of place. Jan was looking at a wanted poster for a man named Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had a price of twenty-five million dollars on his head.
Jan returned to the conversation. The man he now believed to be Zawahiri said to him, ‘May God bless you and keep you from the enemies of Islam. Try not to tell them where we came from and where we are going.’”
Fourth, probably the most telling Sufi sign among Qaeda-al-Jihad members is their “disciplined emotionalism”, a Sufi trait long cultivated, particularly during long dikhrs. Yosri Fouda, an Egyptian journalist, noted the existence of “al-Qaeda chants,” which may be used during dikhrs. (9). Fouda also noted: “Bin Laden’s mentality is not much of a compromising one. I’ve not seen it either directly or indirectly, that bin Laden would ultimately like to sit down and talk about things. Zawahiri neither. At the same time I’m not sure if it’s in their eyes it is a zero sum games because they have already expressed certain things, have highlighted certain conditions…” Fouda’s analysis of Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s behavior is consistent with Al-Ghazzali’s position that analysis and discussion cannot bring one closer to the truth; only mysticism or intuition can achieve that, in the Sufi tradition.
The disciplined emotionalism exhibited by Shaykh Bin Laden and his acolytes provides the stamina and focus necessary to triumph over the West through carefully imagined, designed, and executed terrorism atrocities produced over entire Sufi life times. 

Sources:
1. Richard P. Mitchell: “The Society of the Muslim Brothers”, Oxford University Press, 1969, 1993, p. 1.
2. “Al-Azhar University, Cairo” website at: http://www.islamfortoday.com/alazhar.htm; accessed November 24, 2005.
3. “Anwar Sadat” at: http://www.ibiblio.org/sullivan/bios/Sadat-bio.html; accessed November 24, 2005.
4. Columbia University Press: “Sufism” at: http://www.answers.com/sufism&r=67; accessed November 24, 2005.
5. “Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazzali: Muslim Aversion to the writing, Impact on Christianity,” by Wajih Saadeh, at: http://www.al-bushra.org/arbhrtg/ghazzali.htm; accessed November 24, 2005.
6. Richard P. Mitchell: “The Society of the Muslim Brothers”, Oxford University Press, 1969, 1993, p. 3.
7. Lawrence Wright: “The man behind bin Laden: How an Egyptian doctor became a master of terror.” In: “The New Yorker”, September 16, 2002. Available online at: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content?020916fa_fact2a; accessed November 25, 2005.
8. Global Security: “Sufi Islam” at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/intro/islam-sufi.htm; accessed November 25, 2005.
9. SEMP Biot #294: “Yosri Fouda on al-Qaeda’s Shia-Sunni Problem” at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_294.html; accessed November 25, 2005.