In June 2014, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Action Front Party organised a press conference to present its new and detailed economic plan in Amman. Among the many journalists present was the editor-in-chief of an Islamist newspaper, who had invited me to come as well. Sitting next to him in the front row, I could hear that the party leaders wanted to start the press conference with a recitation from the Qur’an. The problem was, however, that nobody could recite any substantial Qur’anic text by heart.

Asking around, one of the party leaders came up with the idea of reciting the very short first sura of the Muslim holy book, but this was quickly dismissed as beneath them (“Anyone can recite that!”). They then discreetly asked a journalist present at the press conference if he could recite part of the Qur’an, but this man preferred to sit among his colleagues. The matter was eventually solved in a slightly embarrassing way by getting someone who had a copy of the Qur’an with him to read part of Islamic Scripture to the assembled journalists.

Importance

The anecdote mentioned above is, in a sense, typical of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Action Front: despite those organisations’ names, Islamic Scripture is in some ways not actually all that important to them. To be sure, Muslim Brothers see the Qur’an as God’s word as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. They have also derived many political concepts from it, such as al-amr bi-l-ma‘ruf wa-l-nahy ‘an al-munkar (commanding right and forbidding wrong), shura (consultation) and bay‘a (oath of fealty), which have shaped their political views in Islamic terms.

Yet with regard to theology – a major area of Muslim religious inquiry that is of paramount importance to Salafis, for instance – members of the Muslim Brotherhood do not really seem to care much about their holy book. In 2002, for instance, ‘Abd al-Majid Dhunaybat, the leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood at the time, was asked several questions about theological doctrine, which he answered rather vaguely, emphasising that his organisation was a properly Sunni one. When the journalist questioning him subsequently asked if he could define “Sunnis”, he received similarly evasive answers and when the former asked him about the createdness of the Qur’an – a famous mediaeval source of intense theological debate – a seemingly exasperated Dhunaybat merely answered: “We are with the Sunnis.”

Broad view

Dhunaybat, who probably did not know the answer to the journalist’s question, is not an exception. I personally recall asking Hammam Sa‘id, a more recent leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood who is also a religious scholar, detailed scriptural questions, only to be assured that his organisation “does not go into issues of jurisprudence”. Sa‘id also told me the reason for this, namely that the Muslim Brotherhood is interested in Islam as a broad ideology, not as a set of detailed rules.

This broad conception of Islam has, in fact, been a feature of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning. Because of this approach, a wide and often divided group of Islamic activists have been able to find a home in the organisation. When confronted with the need to make important decisions, however, these divisions came to the fore, such as when the organisation had to decide whether to participate in or boycott elections for the Jordanian parliament.

Consequences

It is at times of such decision making that splits within the organisation occurred, which made it easier for the regime to marginalise the group’s critical parts and allow the more friendly ones. This was obviously not a direct result of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s lack of interest in theological details found in the Qur’an. Yet its only partial attachment to the Muslim holy book (and its broad ideology in general) allowed it to paper over real internal divisions, which indirectly made it susceptible to more effective pressure from the regime at times when it mattered most.
Such internal divisions and the resulting splits in combination with regime pressure have had drastic consequences for the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood. The organisation disintegrated in the years 2014-2015 as a result of internal fissures, allowing the state to support a more regime-friendly version of the Muslim Brotherhood while dismissing the original group. This process was finished some two months ago, on 15 July 2020, when a Court of Cassation issued a final verdict that the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation with an almost 75-year history in the country, had been dissolved.

Joas Wagemakers is an associate professor of Islamic & Arabic Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His latest book, The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, was published on 17 September 2020 in the Cambridge Middle East Studies Series.