RISE OF THE SECULAR MODERNISTS 309Hassan Banna saw his fellow Egyptians earnestly struggling to learn Eu-
ropean languages and manners, trying slavishly to acquire enough West-
ernized polish to enter the Western world, even if only as workers of the
lowest strata. The sight of all this Egyptian envy and subservience offended
his pride. He founded the Muslim Brotherhood to help Muslim boys in-
teract healthily with one another, learn about their own culture, and ac-
quire some self respect. Boys dropped into the Brotherhood center after
school to play sports, at which time they also received lessons in Islam and
Muslim history from Banna and his instructors.
Eventually the boys' fathers and older brothers started dropping in as
well, so the Brotherhood began offering evening programs for adults,
which were so popular that new centers were opened up. By the mid-
1930s, the brotherhood had outgrown its origins as a dub for boys and be-
come a fraternal organization for men.
From this, it slowly morphed into a political movement, a movement that
declared secular Islam and Egypt's own "Westernized" elite to be the country's
chief enemies. The Muslim Brothers opposed nationalism, the impulse to se-
cure sovereignty for small separate states such as Syria, Libya, or Egypt. They
called on Muslims to resurrect instead the one big transnational Umma, a
new khalifate embodying the unity of all Muslims. Like Sayyid Jamaluddin,
they preached pan-Islamic modernization without Westernization.
The Muslim Brotherhood was taking shape around the same time the
United States was struggling with the Great Depression. In this same pe-
riod, the Nazis were taking over Germany, and Stalin was consolidating his
grip on the Soviet Union. Outside of Egypt, no one knew much about the
brotherhood, not because it was secretive (at first) but because it had few
adherents among the Egyptian elite and held little interest for foreign jour-
nalists. Even Egyptian newspapers published few stories about its activities
and the Western press none at all. Why would they? This was mostly a
movement of the urban working poor, and the foreigners who came and
went through Egypt hardly noticed those hordes moving like shadows
through the streets, doing the heavy lifting and loading, providing services,
and begging for "baksheesh," as tips were called (prompting the writer
S. J. Perlman to quip of Egypt, "It's not the heat, it's the cupidity").
As Westernization and industrialization proceeded, Egypt's urban working
poor kept proliferating. With the expansion of this class, the brotherhood