The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949). Its original intentions were strictly philanthropic and spiritual, with heavy emphasis on networking’s capability to spread the word — much like a Rotary or Kiwanis Club, but without the materialism. It quickly became a reactionary force in the face of European and Western-style secularism in the Middle East. The Brotherhood in Egypt grew into an umbrella organization for Islamist organizations in Syria (where the Brotherhood was notoriously crushed in a massacre of thousands in the city of Hama in February 1982), the Sudan, Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen, Libya and Iraq.
Through his so-called Guidance Council and policy of total submission to the leader, Al-Bana was an absolutist, brooking no compromise with secular society even as he adopted (and adapted to) numerous features of secularist societies to propagate his ideas—political activity, media involvement and ownership (including the weekly Al-nadhir, or The Warning) and publicized threats to “fight any politician or organization that did not work for the support of Islam and the restoration of its glory.”
But the Brotherhood’s turn toward active violence did not develop until al-Banna’s ideological compass was replaced by that of Sayyyid Qutb, whose extremism was to seed the eventual emergence of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Inevitably, the Brotherhood provoked a reaction of its own from regimes threatened by the Brotherhood’s reach and appeal. In Egypt, the Brotherhood was alternately wooed and repressed by the successive regimes of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. Al-Banna himself was assassinated, most likely by Egyptian government agents, in 1949, when Brotherhood members had joined the war in Palestine against Israel and used it to increase their political assertiveness at home in Egypt. The Brotherhood moderated considerably in the late 1980s, taking an exclusively political role.
Whether the Muslim Brotherhood is an organized, pan-Arab network is open to question, especially in the 21st century. Muslim Brotherhood groups and splinter groups abound, but so does disagreement and dissent regarding what each country’s Brotherhood should be. The splits are nothing new: they date back to al-Banna’s time, when, in 1939, the Society of Muhammad’s Youth (Jam’iyat Shabab Sayidina Muhammad) branched off, while al-Banna himself divided the Brotherhood into a political organization on one hand and a social welfare organization on the other.