Present-Day Economic and Social Conditions 249
seek compensation for their frustration and inadequacy in some
form of political extremism. If they belong to a racial or religious
minority, as for example the Armenians in Aleppo and Beirut, the
Kurds and Orthodox Christians in Damascus, or the various alien
communities in Egypt, they often turn to Communism; if Muslim,
they resort more readily to the innumerable extreme nationalist
parties which spring up ephemerally in every Middle Eastern
country. This is the type of dissatisfied young man that supported
the military Golden Square in Iraq, that flirted with the Nazis dur-
ing the Vichy period in Syria, that supports the Young Egypt
party (Misr al-Fatat) or forms the rank-and-fde of the Muslim
Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin). This last powerful move-
ment was the creation of an Egyptian schoolmaster Hasan al-
Banna about 1930, and has won some hundreds of thousands of
followers in Egypt, and more recently some thousands in neigh-
bouring countries, by its appeal for a rejection of European civiliza-
tion with its alleged materialism and corruption, and a return to the
simple brotherhood of primitive Islam. Violently anti-foreign,
anti-Communist, and anti-Zionist, the movement has been called
Fascist by those who find it convenient to attach this label to every-
thing they dislike; but it has more evident affinities with Gandhi's
swaraj in its desire to throw offforeign forms and rebuild upon the
essentials of its native culture, though being Muslim it conspicuous-
ly lacks the Mahatma's ideal of non-violence. Like Gandhi too, its
leader, while apparently of personal integrity, is sufficient of a
realist to understand that a political movement must have material
backing if it is to be effective; and just as Gandhi, for all his con-
tempt for wealth, tacitly accepted the dependence of swaraj on the
Hindu plutocracy, so al-Banna has accommodated himself from
time to time to what seemed the strongest force in Egyptian poli-
tics. In the early years of the war the Ikhwan were subsidized by,
and made propaganda for, the Palace; after the return to power of
the Wafd al-Banna yielded to the menaces of Nahhas and trans-
ferred the allegiance of the Ikhwan to him; but it deserted the
Wafd when that party fell in 1944; and recently, no doubt with the
tacit approval of the government coalition, it was denouncing the
Wafd as permeated with Communists, taking orders from Moscow
and being 'unethical, unpatriotic, and un-Muslim'.1 All the time
it has gained adherents among the uncritical thousands of the semi-
1 Times Cairo correspondent, 13 May 1947,