The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood

Abstract

THE ORPHAN SCANDAL: CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD Beth Baron Stanford, CA: Stanford Universit y Press, 2014 (x xi + 245 pages, maps, photographs, index) $85.00 (clot h), $24.95 (paper)In 1933 the case of a teenage girl beaten at the Swedish Salam Mission in Port Said, Egypt, brought the issue of state neglect of orphans, who had been "saved" or "served" by missionaries in increasing numbers since the nineteenth century, into the spotlight. What had happened to fifteen-year-old Turkiyya Hasan? The young woman claimed she had received the beating for not accepting Christianity, while the missionaries claimed that Turkiyya willfully misbehaved in order to provoke a disturbance and create a media firestorm. The location and context of Hasan's story are also significant. Although Egypt had technically received its independence from Britain in 1922, the British continued to exercise control in matters concerning minority communities, as well as communications and defense. At the heart of Britain's strategic interest in defense lay the Suez Canal-hence the importance of Port Said. It was in this area where foreigners, generally, and the British in particular, struggled for the hearts, minds, and bodies of Egyptians with competing brands of "muscular Christianity."Taking the case of Turkiyya Hasan as its starting point, Beth Baron's Orphan Scandal investigates how Egyptians responded to this "muscular Christianity" and, in particular, how Christian missionary practices influenced the development of the nascent Muslim Brotherhood. It also charts the relationship between Christian missionaries and the establishment of the welfare state in Egypt. At the time of the Hasan affair, the Egyptian government, for its part, did not speak with one voice, and the British continued to interfere on multiple levels. The authoritarian king sought to benefit from government sponsorship of new institutions and donations for new Muslim institutions, and Egyptian government officials attempted to navigate the waters between multiple aggrieved parties. Ultimately, Baron argues, the Turkiyya Hasan affair allowed King Fu'ad to buttress his Islamic credentials, force Britain to the negotiating table, and put the wheels in motion that would create the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936), which in turn would spawn the Ministry of Social Affairs in 1939. Baron contends that the "ministry grew in part out of calls generated during and after the orphan scandal for the expansion of state welfare services for the young and vulnerable" (190). Eventually, it would pave the way for the welfare state created in the wake of the 1952 revolution.In The Orphan Scandal we see the Muslim Brotherhood in its early years, defining its course. Previous works on the Brotherhood, such as the groundbreaking research of Richard Mitchell, Brynjar Lia, and Gudrun Kramer, focused on Hasan al-Banna and the dynamic of the larger organization. Baron examines the connections between evangelizing missions of the Canal Zone and Upper Egypt and ordinary members in the emerging organization. A major argument of the book is that the Muslim Brotherhood and the men who populated its ranks were profoundly affected by evangelical Protestantism in two ways. The first seems apparent and is more easily demonstrated: a basic sense of "fight them with their own weapons" (117). In its efforts to combat the missionaries, the Brotherhood watched their organizational strategies and utilized the same tactics in order to gain adherents and teach them the proper, purified form of Islam. Baron lays out how, in this case, the Brotherhood was aware of the Salam Mission and thus was able to respond quickly to Turkiyya Hasan's situation, create a media blitz, and present a petition to the king. …