Faith-Based Welfare and Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood Movement

The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood Movement (MBM) was established in 1945 by a group of activists, headed by Haj Abdullatif Abu Qourah, whose roots and origins can be traced to places outside Jordan itself, particularly Syria and Palestine (AUJRC, 1997). Like almost every Arab citizen at the time, Haj Abu Qourah and his colleagues were disappointed with the British policies in Palestine that delivered on a promise to create a Jewish home on Arab land. The ideas of al-Banna, particularly his call for jihad to liberate Palestine, appealed to Haj Abu Qourah and his followers, long known for their generosity, charity and voluntary work (Kazem, 1997). Hence, from the very beginning, not only did the men who created the Jordanian MBM’s branch have their origins outside Jordan, but the movement itself was linked to a regional, rather than a national context, namely, Palestine. Put another way, while the leadership of, for example, Hizballah, could publicly brag that ‘Hizballah is a movement whose members are Lebanese, its leadership is Lebanese, the decision is Lebanese and it is made of a Lebanese leadership’ (Quoted in Zisser, 2000, p.3), the Jordanian MBM has been deprived of this significant national context enjoyed by most other Islamic movements in the region. (On Islamist movements in North Africa, see Weitzman, 1997, Enhaili and Adda, 2003, Laskier, 2003.) This has had major implications for the movement’s operations and tactics. For example, there is an unwritten constitutional agreement among members that the Brotherhood’s overseer general must always be of Jordanian origin to give the movement a Jordanian face and, since 1953, this has been the case.