ANDREW BOSTOM: WHO WAS HASSAN AL-BANNA?
Al-Banna was and is Islamic “modernism” = “obscurantism” = “forever-ism” !!
Al-Banna’s “Mainstreamism”- For those who may never have actually read his main treatises/tracts
From the introduction to Charles Wendell’s magisterial translation of Hasan al-Banna’s five pathognomonic treatises, or “tracts” as Wendell translated the Arabic word “risala” in al-Banna’s case.
This seminal work is out of print and unavailable for purchase, but I photocopied it, and will give to the CSP for reproduction and dissemination.
Wendell dedicated this 1978 work to the great Orientalist Gustave von Grunebaum (d. 1972)–a champion of applying Western scholarship to the study of Islam, contra the prevailing idiocy in the academy today.
But what Wendell also knew and was unafraid to proclaim is that Al-Banna represented a continuum–not just from Afghani and Abduh and Rida, most directly–but from foundational, mainstream Islam itself–the Islam that still appeals most to the Muslim masses wherever they reside, including sadly, here in the US.
Hasan al-Banna’s fundamental conviction that Islam does not accept, or even tolerate, a separation of “church” and state, or of either from society, is as thoroughly Islamic as it can be. Any attempt to translate his movement into terms reducible to social, political, or religious factors exclusively simply misses the boat.
The “totality” created by the Prophet Muhammad in the Medinese state, the first Islamic state, was Hasan’s unwavering ideal, and the ideal of all Muslim thinkers before him, including the idle dreamers in the mosque. His ideology then, before it was Egyptian or Arab or whatever, was Islamic to the core. Since it embraced all aspects of human life and thought, it was at least as much religious as anything else. Practically all of his arguments are shored up by frequent quotations from the Qur’an and the Traditions, quite in the style of his medieval forbears. If one considers the public to whom his writings were addressed, it becomes instantly apparent that such arguments must still be the most compelling for the vast bulk of the Muslim populations of today. The nagging feeling that Islam must, and very quickly at that, catch up with the West, had even by his time filtered down from above to the masses after having been the watchword of the modernizing intellectual for almost a century. There was also the notion that all these Western sciences and techniques were originally adopted from Islamic culture, and were therefore merely “coming home”—a piece of self-conscious back-patting that was already a cliché of mist Muslim political writing.
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