Summary
Supreme guide of the Society of Muslim Brothers, who addressed the November 2, 1945 ‘Abdin Square rally that preceded the first modern anti-Jewish rioting in Egypt, and whose assassination the Egyptian government arranged in retaliation for a Brother’s assassination of Prime Minister Al-Nuqrashi in December 1948, in Chapter 3 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1159-1163, 1187-1193).
Details
- On November 2, 1945, thousands marched to ‘Abdin Square in Cairo, where they were addressed by the supreme guide of the Muslim Brothers, Hasan al-Banna; following the rally, some demonstrators entered the Jewish quarter and attacked bystanders, shops and synagogues, and the rioting continued the next day and spread to Cairo’s European sections and to Alexandria (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1159-1160).
- After al-Nuqrashi dissolved the Society on December 8, 1948 and sequestered its assets, a member of the Muslim Brothers assassinated al-Nuqrashi on December 28; “Unsure of its ability to obtain a speedy legal resolution that would deter the Brothers from further violence, the government arranged the assassination of Hasan al-Banna” (Chapter 3, note 26, on Mitchell) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1191-1193).
- Chapter 4 quotes a 1948 report to the Wiener Library in London, circulating among American Jewish Committee leaders, that described al-Banna in undisguisedly racist and exoticist terms — “Hasan El Benna is a short, squat, ratty little man with puffed eyes, puffed cheeks, fleshy nose. His beard, running from ear to ear, crawls up then down his upper lip in an ugly black hirsute vine. Hasan El Benna’s manner is mousy and furtive… I interviewed this religious fuhrer and was a trusted visitor at Ikhwan headquarters in Cairo and other cities” (Chapter 4, note 7) — a description whose racism enhanced its author’s conclusion that a “pogrom of Jews” was “an actual reality” in Egypt and that “The pattern is the Hitler pattern—on a small scale” (Chapter 4, note 8) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1715-1725).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Nuqrashi