The Qur’ān as an Instrument of Education: The Legacy of Ḥasan al-Bannā in Muḥammad al-Ġazālī

The educational issue is a key element developed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founder Ḥasan al-Bannā (1906 - 1949) strongly advocates what he calls educational ğihād. Richard P. Mitchell in The Society of the Muslim Brother (1969) emphasizes that the aim of the movement is to create an Islamic order, the basis of which is education. Moreover, as is pointed out by Martyn Frampton (The Muslim Brotherhood and the West, 2018), the founder of the Brotherhood argues that an Islamic spirit is present in XX-century Egypt and that it must be revived through the call to Islam, which is based on knowledge, education and ğihād. Muḥammad al-Ġazālī (1917 - 1996), who recognizes Ḥasan al-Bannā as his teacher and recounts their first meeting several times in his writings, places the educational element at the core of his entire intellectual path. The two main products of his educational activity are his tafsīr and his sermons. We can say that the author paves the way for what Oliver Leaman defines as "popularizing tafsīr" (2020), i.e. that type of commentary that directly addresses the population, seeking to educate them about the Qur'anic text and its application in everyday life. In the al-Tafsīr al-mawḍūʿī (1995) and the sermons, the author follows the topics proposed by the sacred text - for instance, tawḥīd, the narratives of the Islamic tradition, ahl al-kitāb - always with an eye to reworking the themes in a contemporary key, an issue that is more accentuated in the sermons, in which the author is freer in his exegetical choice. The speech aims to analyze Muḏakkirah fī al-taʿlīm al-dīnī (A Memorandum on Religious Education, 1929) – one of the earliest pamphlets that al-Bannā wrote in collaboration with two other exponents of the Movement, (Aḥmad Muḥammad al-Sukkarī and Ḥāmid ʿAbduh ʿAskariyyah) – which has been analyzed mainly in Johannes J. G. Jansen (1992) and Brynjar Lia (2015); and the sermons that Muḥammad al- Ġazālī recited at the Mosque ʿAmir Ibn al-ʿĀṣ in 1973 and which are now published in two volumes entitled: Ḫuṭab al-šayḫ Muḥammad al-Ġazālī fī šuʾūn al-dīn wa-l-ḥayāt (Sermons Sheikh Muḥammad al-Ġazālī in the affairs of religion and life, 1988). The aim is to show how Ḥasan al-Bannā and later Muḥammad al-Ġazālī placed the Qur'anic text at the center of their educational activity and in what modalities (pamphlet, ḫuṭab and tafsīr) they reworked and proposed the Qur’ān to the Egyptian society.