A Brief History of Syria and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was established around 1945 or 1946 in Damascus, although accounts of its date of formation vary widely. The group did not have a distinct ‘hour of birth’, but its establishment marked the formal amalgamation of reformist Islamic political currents and groups that had been operating in Syria since the late 1800s. Indeed, by the time the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood emerged in the 1940s, Syria had witnessed more than a century of Islamic reform. These reform trends were not isolated from regional Islamic reform debates, but the Syrian movements had a distinctively local flavour, cloaked in the Syrian cultural milieu as well as the political environment of the Ottoman Empire’s last century of existence. Between the First and Second World Wars, out of these movements developed Islamic jamiyat (societies or associations), which were the direct organisational antecedents to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. This is important, because political organisation theorists note that the experiences and characteristics developed