GAMAL EL-BANNA may be Hassan El-Banna’s youngest brother, but he is far from being a poster boy for the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, he has made his mark as one of Egypt’s most prominent Islamic intellectuals quite apart from the movement his family founded, choosing for the most part to keep the Brothers at arm’s length. As he sees it, they are stuck in a long gone past, chanting outdated slogans and proposing old solutions to new problems.

With over 40 books on Islam to his name, El-Banna has been at the forefront of the call for a “renewal” of Islamic thought to better fit today’s brave new world. While he believes this renewal will not see the immediate resolution of the crisis of society, he’s certain it will be the beginning of the end.

The biggest problem facing the Muslim world today, including Egypt, is the endemic misunderstanding of Islam. This is very dangerous, because Islam has been the conscience of the ummah and the basis of our ethics for the past 13 centuries. Egypt is a faith-based society; religion has been the foremost element in the conscience and pulse of the people since the days of the Pharaohs.

The problem is that the Islam propagated now by religious institutions and believed in by the entire Islamic world is not the Islam of the Prophet (PBUH) and the Qur’an. It is the Islam of the fuqaha [the jurists].

Don’t get me wrong these Islamic thinkers were geniuses, they were believers and very advanced for their times. But the fact remains that they were the sons of their age they cannot be liberated from their time. It was a closed, oppressive era back then, and the means of education and culture were very limited. And besides, Islam was under attack from the very first stages, right after the end of the rightly guided caliphate, with the advent of despotic monarchies. These rulers forced the jurists into the cocoon of ritualistic worship. It was the only domain in which they were free to act, so they wound up telling people to supplicate, pray and fast and that’s all.

The result is that the Islam of the jurists took over; it is very different from the Islam of the Qur’an, where freedom of thought reigns.

This is where we find ourselves today. The religious crisis in Egyptian society is that we are not following the Islam of God. To remedy this, we need a complete revolution in Islamic thought and fiqh, a return to the Qur’an. We are well equipped to do this because we possess not only all of the knowledge of the old times, but a hundred times more knowledge than they possessed back then.

We are living in the age of information, in a world that would seem miraculous to them. So the first step is to unshackle religion from the chains of the past and return to the Qur’an. People will say, “Well, that’s what we all want.” No, not true. We want the Qur’an of God, not the Qur’an of the interpreters and the scholars. I don’t care what Ibn Abbas had to say, or Mokatil or anyone else. They have all transgressed upon the Qur’an with their interpretations. The Qur’an is a divine text that possesses in and of itself all the power.

Leave it alone. Don’t put yourself between believers and the Qur’an.

And I am not optimistic that this ‘revolution in thought’ will occur within the next 25 years. It will take more time than that; not even 50 years is enough. If you read the story of the renaissances of nations, they take hundreds of years. And we don’t just have problems we have a quagmire. Moreover, we don’t even have an intelligentsia anymore.

The intellectuals now, they either have a Western education that is far from Islam even though they could be good Muslims or they are content to leave Islam to the official religious institutions. They have run away from the religious sphere rather than calling for its reform because they are afraid. Look at what happened to Nasr Abu Zeid, for example.

But at the same time, I think religious reform will come before political reform. This is because religion is based on thought, not power, and there is no religious core within the ruling system not to say that the religious institutions are any less strong than the political institutions. But if you look at the European renaissance, for example, you will see it began first with a religious reformation that led to political decentralization. Religious reform is an integral component of political reform.

And no, this isn’t going to happen with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Ikhwanites are one of the better Islamist currents in existence if we judge them against the others out there. But if we judge against an ideal or what should be, they are very backward.

Hassan El-Banna was a man with a broad vision. He was a son of the liberal age, of the 1920s. He believed in freedom, and when he talked about politics, he talked about the sovereignty of the ummah and the rule of the law. You will never in all his writings encounter the phrase “divine rule.” This is something very far from the thinking of Hassan El-Banna, despite the fact that he coined the phrase “Al-Islam din wa dawla [Islam is a religion and a state].” But what he meant by that was “a state in accordance with Islamic values,” not an Islamic state.

There is no such thing as an Islamic state. It is impossible to create. Our future lies in a democratic state and it doesn’t have to be a Western democracy. Democracy is not a one-size-fits-all thing.

Some Islamists are afraid of democracy because it is based on the will of the people, and they think that if the people are legislating, they will pass laws that go against religion, like legalizing gay marriages, for example.

But they are wrong. I mean, how does a democracy work? You have a government representing the people and elected by the people. And people will only elect those who represent their beliefs. So if people are religious, they will never elect representatives who will pass laws that offend their religion. The important thing is to have an Islamic society, not an Islamic state.

And, anyway, Hassan El-Banna’s ideas could have been applied or accepted in the 1940s, but they cannot be applied or accepted in 2004. Profound changes have occurred since his day. Some people ask why my ideas are so different from Imam Hassan’s, and I tell them, “You are asking me this question 50 years after his death? If Hassan El-Banna were alive today, his ideas would have changed as well.”

I mean, look, Hassan El-Banna founded the Brotherhood in 1926 in Ismailia and it was close to being a Sufi tariqa at the time. After 20 years, the Brotherhood appeared in Cairo with an international call for all Muslims and a comprehensive Islamist program. In the intervening years, there was a great evolution in the formation and organization of Al-Ikhwan. If Hassan El-Banna had lived another 20 years, of course there would have been an evolution as well.

We have to move forward, not backward.  et