Mohammad Badae
Born in August 1943 in Egypt’s industrial city of Al Mahla, Badae was influenced as a young man by the Brotherhood ideologue Sayyed Qutb. In 1965, Badae was arrested along with Qutb and sentenced by a military court to 15 years. Qutb himself was sentenced to death. Badae served nine years in prison and in 1974 was pardoned by the then president Anwar Sadat.
In 1999 he was detained again and a military tribunal gave him nine years in prison after convicting him of participating in an illegal association. In January 2010 he was elected the supreme guide of the then-outlawed Brotherhood in polls dismissed by some dissidents as unfair.
In his first press conference a soft-spoken Badae said: “The Brotherhood rejects violence and condemns it in all forms being committed by governments, individuals or institutions.” Egyptians participating in anti-government protests often use the slogan, “Down with the Supreme Guide”.
Hassan Al Banna
In March 1928, Hassan Al Banna, a young school teacher, launched the Muslim Brotherhood as a pan-Islamic social and political organisation. Born on October 14, 1906, in the Nile Delta province of Beheira, Al Banna displayed early characteristics of leadership and persuasiveness.
On coming to Cairo to attend the Arabic Language College, he joined the Islamic Morals Society and was keen to attend sermons by prominent clerics in mosques. In an essay he penned during the college years he wrote: “My biggest hopes after finishing studies are ... to be a guide and a teacher spending the day teaching fathers and the night teaching sons about the objectives of their religion, using argumentation, writings and travels.”
After graduation he got a job of a teacher at a government school in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia where he founded with six fellows the Muslim Brotherhood of which he became its first supreme guide. He conceived it as a “comprehensive, reform-oriented” group based on fundamentals of Islam.
“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet,” Al Banna famously said. He was gunned down in central Cairo on February 12, 1949. Suspected killers were caught and convicted only in 1954. They were released shortly after the Brotherhood fell from the grace of then ruling military. Al Banna’s large followers call him the ‘Martyr Imam’.
Rached Ghannouchi
Few figures in modern Tunisia are as polarising as Rached Ghannouchi, the religious scholar who leads Al Nahda, the Islamist party that rules the North African country.
In March, he insisted that after more than one year in power, Al Nahda did not impose restrictions on people.
“Beaches are open, bars are open and people choose their ways. We did not impose the hijab,” he said. However, critics say that Al Nahda has two faces and does not place the country’s interests at the top. Ghannouchi, a philosophy graduate, came to prominence in 1981 after he co-founded the Islamic Tendency Movement and was subsequently arrested.
He was released three years later, but was re-arrested in 1987 months before the ousting of president Habib Bourguiba and sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 1988 and following a crackdown by President Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali on Islamists, he left for Algeria and Britain where he lived in political exile for two decades after a Tunisian court sentenced him to life in prison for plotting against the regime. He returned after Bin Ali was toppled and led Al Nahda to win Tunisia’s first multi-party polls.
Yousuf Al Qaradawi
Yousuf Al Qaradawi, an eminent Egyptian scholar, is a founder of the website IslamOnline.net and head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. In February 2011 and after Hosni Mubarak’s era, Al Qaradawi returned to Egypt after a 30-year exile in Qatar and addressed a crowd of over a million people in Tahrir Square during Friday prayers.
He is viewed as the intellectual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Qaradawi was jailed for the first time in 1949 during Egypt’s monarchical era and later sent behind bars three times during Jamal Abdul Nasser’s era for his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and subsequently stripped of his Egyptian citizenship in the 1970s — driving him to seek exile in Qatar.
He has reportedly twice turned down offers to be their leader — in 1976 and 2004 — preferring to be free of institutional restrictions. He is well known for his popular Al Jazeera programme Ash-Shariah wal-Hayat (Islamic Law and Life) that is watched by an estimated 50-60 million people worldwide. But his view that suicide bombing in certain situations is a legitimate form of self-defence has landed him in trouble with the West.
Tareq Al Suwaidan
The prominent 59-year-old Kuwaiti Islamist and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait is also an entrepreneur, author, motivational speaker and TV personality with shows ranking among the highest in Middle East satellite channel ratings.
He is also a management, leadership and strategic planning consultant and is often consulted by prominent regional governmental and private sector organisations. Al Suwaidan studied in the United States and received a BS in petroleum and natural gas engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an MSc and PhD in petroleum engineering from the University of Tulsa.
Describing himself as a “moderate Islamist”, he has often called for peace and understanding with Christian leaders, supported women’s rights within the Sharia law and pushed for reforming traditional understanding of Islam.
