This chapter sketches the Brotherhood’s early intellectual and political history, starting with its ideological precursors in the late 19th century to its founding in 1928 and up until 1966, when Sayyid Qutb was executed. It outlines the general historical context and some of the major concerns having led to the Brotherhood’s foundation before laying out an overview over the group’s central ideological features and key organizational characteristics. The chapter is based on a wide range of Oral History interviews that were conducted with Brotherhood rank-and-file members in 2012 and 2013 in Egypt, as well as a wide reading of the secondary literature about the Muslim reformers.

This chapter considers Egyptian sociocultural politics in the run-up to the revolution of 1952 and beyond. Dar al-ʿUlum’s victory in the culture war was cemented in 1946 when it became a fully fledged faculty of the University. Furthermore, the immense impact of the darʿamiyya on fields related to Arabic, Islam, and education gives them a stronger claim than Europhile modernists to the legacy of Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh. Their histories demonstrate that schools can be the key to understanding social and cultural histories, that hybridity is a major engine driving sociocultural change, and that Islamic knowledge was most authoritative in colonial and postcolonial contexts when expressed in explicitly modern, ocularcentric ways. However, efforts by alumni to defend the school and its legacy in the decades since demonstrate the lasting sting of Husayn’s critique. As early as the 1926 dress strike, Hasan al-Banna decided to take his ability to be modern and religious in a different direction. Yet, considering him alongside the bulk of the darʿamiyya makes it clear that the role of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 Revolution needs to be viewed within the 130-year history of engagement between Islamic knowledge and Egyptian modernities.

This chapter rewrites the history of Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–1952) by examining a ‘culture war’ that broke out between graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum and Europhile modernist intellectuals such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, and ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq. From 1930, Europhile modernist calls for westernisation fell on deaf ears due in large part to the darʿamiyya. Darʿamiyya continued to exercise significant influence over the teaching and reform of Arabic, including as members of the Royal Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya) from 1932. Furthermore, darʿamiyya Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani of Hizb al-Tahrir advanced explicitly Islamic alternatives to state-led projects of modernity. Their example established a new mode of religious leadership, the new religious intellectual, available to individuals without significant religious education. Europhile modernists responded differently to this loss of sociocultural authority. Haykal’s switch to writing about Islamic topics can be seen as an attempt to co-opt darʿami influence over popular views of religion. Husayn’s call for Dar al-ʿUlum to be subsumed into the Egyptian University’s College of Literature was a direct attack on the darʿamiyya’s sociocultural and professional authority.