After more than twelve centuries of existence, which included persecution at the hands of "crusading" medieval Christians and colonial domination by Great Britain throughout Asia and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a new fire was ignited within various individuals and groups in the Muslim world in the years between the first and second World Wars. The fire in the hearts of men like Maulana Maududi and Hasan al-Banna burned for the establishment of Muslim states in Pakistan and Egypt (and elsewhere), democracies which would restore dignity to the people by allowing them to "reassert the cultural traditions derived from their religion," and for those who "clung tenaciously . . . to the memory of a brilliant civilization which, in their eyes, was irreplaceable by anything the West had to offer." Unfortunately, the test of time has, according to the views of some Western observers, "tended to view each case as confirming the same conclusion: efforts to build an Islamic state and efforts to build democracy are mutually incompatible."
The purpose of this paper is to examine the history and evolution of the Jama'at-i-Islami in Pakistan and the Muslim Brotherhood (Jamiya'at al-Ihkwan al-Muslimin) in Egypt, and to compare and contrast the two.
The Muslim Brotherhood, created in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, was a synthesis of "the intellectual ferment sweeping through the Islamic world" in the 1920s and 1930s, and "Leninism." The melding of "a vast corpus of books, tracts, sermons, and exemplary acts" produced by scholars, teachers, and intellectuals, according to Pittaway, "infused Islam with a spirit of renewal and promulgated a powerful critique of the West, which Muslims found compelling and psychologically satisfying." This should not, however, be confused with Islamic Marxism, Pittaway insists:
there is not one shred of socialist content to Brotherhood ideology--but it originated as a revolutionar...