Gamal al-Banna

Gamal al-Banna (also: Jamal al-Banna, Arabic: جمال البنا‎‎; ‎ 15 December 1920 – 30 January 2013) was an Egyptian author, and trade unionist. He was the youngest brother of Hassan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna was considered a liberal scholar, known for his criticism of Islamic traditional narratives rejecting 635 Hadiths of Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim which he finds contradictory to the Qur'an. He was a great-uncle of the Swiss Muslim academic and writer Tariq Ramadan.

Born in 1920 into a pious family in Mahmudiya, Gamal was the youngest brother of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. His father mended watches for a living but spent much time collecting and classifying hadiths. As a child he was weak and sickly, so he spent his time reading with his father. After completing secondary school he refused to go to university but decided instead to start a writing career.

Gamal al-Banna represented an interpretation of Islam which is rationalist, humanist, egalitarian, feminist, anti-authoritarian, liberal and secular. As a political thinker and social reformer he adopted an anti-capitalist position. In Al-barnamadj al-islami (The Islamic Program), he wrote the following in the preface, when the end of the Cold War became apparent in 1991 ("A Disrupted World", pp. 6–8):

The collapse of Marxism doesn't mean that capitalism will succeed. Rather, this means that the mistakes of Marxism were bigger than the mistakes of capitalism. [...] Most people forget that Islam occurred at a time when the world was divided into two huge states forcing upon it humiliating subjection, class rule, and the government of tyrants. Both deprived the masses of the most fundamental principles of justice and left them in poverty and ignorance, burdened with the back-breaking load of forced labor which leaves them neither time nor health, nor opportunities to think. Both enthroned Caesars and Chosroes as gods exerting authority over life and death. Then Islam came and destroyed these systems: it replaced the class system with its elitist barriers and dead ends by the general equality of the people, the highest ranks or the strata of notables by the declaration of absolute equality among the people, without any difference between black and white, male and female, rich and poor, base and noble. [...] It was not the prayer or the fast that constituted the new gift, for the cultic commandments are represented in all religions. Rather, what was new was the spirit of freedom, the principles of justice and equality that Islam let shine. Today Islam is called upon to fulfill this role a second time."

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