This is a guest post by Raziq
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The Muslim Brotherhood is the largest Islamist party in the world today. It also claims to be a democratic party. In this article I will be looking at its founder Hasan al-Banna, the reasons why he established the Muslim Brotherhood and his Nazi sympathies.
Hasan al-Banna was born in 1906 to a poor family in Southern Egypt. During his teenage years he took part in demonstrations against British Rule. He later went on to become a school teacher and in 1928 founded the ‘The Muslim Brotherhood’ (MB), the world’s largest Islamist group.
Although the end of the Ottoman Empire was brought about by Turkish secular Muslims, some Muslims, like Banna, blamed “the West” and thus he established the MB with the aim of creating an Islamist State in direct antithesis to western ideals. Banna was able to recruit from a large cross-section of Egyptian society by manipulating issues such as social inequality, public health and the growing conflict in Palestine. Banna claimed his group would solve all these problems and thereby resurrect lost Arab glories.