Description
This paper explores the ideas and practices of the Muslim Brotherhood as an anti-colonial social movement in the first half of the twentieth century. I begin with a definition of colonial relationality, drawing on Fanon to explain it as a psychoanalytic imposition and entanglement of colonisation. In the Islamicate, where the majority of communities were colonised by Europe, the role of Islam as an alternative and liberatory vehicle for reclaiming the self in severance from a colonial relationality, assumed even greater purpose and importance. I explore those Islamicate ideas of refusal and detachment, and then apply them to the practices and strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood in British occupied Egypt in the 1930s-40s. I argue, while the Muslim Brotherhood did not succeed in breaking the colonial relationality entirely, its early strategy reflected a concerted effort to apply Islamicate refusal and detachment to preserve autonomy and distinguish themselves from their rivals.
