Hassan al-Banna

A contemporary of fellow Islamist thinkers Sayyid Qutb (1906) and Abdul ‘A’la Mawdudi (1903), Hassan al-Banna (1906) is the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world’s most influential Islamist organization. He was also born into a well established traditional family in a village in the Nile Delta to the north of Cairo. His father served as an imam at a local mosque. At the early age of ten, al-Banna is reported to have organized a ‘Society of Moral Behaviour’ which had fellow school children on the look for misbehaviour. He graduated from al-Azhar’s Dar al-Ulum, a higher-level teacher training institution, which Muhammad Abduh helped found in 1873 as a way of overcoming the objections against the introduction of modern curricula by conservative al-Azhar scholars.