Historians of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood have examined the group from a range of perspectives, including its political activism, social services, wartime efforts, and experiences in Egypt’s prisons. Yet for a movement organized around an ideal of “brotherhood,” the place of masculinity in the group’s ideology and activism has received surprisingly little scholarly attention.Footnote 1 This omission is striking given that, as Wilson Chacko Jacob has shown, masculinity was a foundational concern for Egypt’s early-to-mid-20th century effendiyya (sing. effendi) movements, of which the Brotherhood was a significant part.Footnote 2 This article addresses that lacuna by providing an intellectual history of an understudied dimension of the group’s interwar and wartime rise to prominence: its scouting (jawwāla) program.
Scouting was first initiated in the early 20th century by the British army officer and colonial official Robert Baden-Powell (d. 1941), but it took global form through transnational circulation and local adaptation, including in colonial societies of the global South such as Egypt.Footnote 3 Across these contexts, scouting developed as a forum for cultivating masculinity in response to anxieties about the moral and physical corruption of men due to industrialization and urbanization.Footnote 4 Such concerns were central to the Brotherhood’s discourse on scouting during the interwar and wartime periods, as articulated in its three primary periodicals: Jaridat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (JIM) (1933–37), al-Nadhir (1938–39), and Majallat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (1942–48). The Brotherhood’s scouting discourse therefore provides a revealing window through which to examine the movement’s conceptions of masculinity.
The effendiyya were an emerging urban, educated social formation in early 20th-century Egypt, composed largely of salaried professionals, students, and state employees, who positioned themselves as agents of nationalist reform.Footnote 5 Central to their project was a commitment to an ideal of manhood that Jacob terms “effendi masculinity”: not a biologically fixed identity, but one performed through affect, conduct, fashion, and participation in sports and scouting. By cultivating this masculinity, the effendiyya positioned themselves as contributors to a nationalist effort to counter colonial portrayals of Egyptian men as weak and effeminate and asserted their own claims to modernity—claims that, as Lucie Ryzova shows, were enacted through dress, taste, and comportment.Footnote 6
Building on this scholarship, this article examines the Brotherhood’s vision of the modern Egyptian man. Although existing accounts illuminate much about the social and performative dimensions of effendi masculinity, they do not fully capture the Brotherhood’s understanding of manhood or its vision of modernity. This is because masculinity in the Brotherhood’s framing was entangled with a set of metaphysical commitments rooted in Islamic conceptions of God’s relationship to men and the male soul (nafs), a dimension largely absent from existing accounts of effendi modernity, which leaves one with the impression that the effendiyya lacked such commitments. Yet manliness in the Brotherhood’s formulation was saturated by metaphysics; its claims about what it meant to be a man were built around ideals of nearness to God, spiritual purification, and eschatological preparedness. Attending to this dimension, I argue, not only foregrounds masculinity within Brotherhood studies, but also challenges approaches that interpret masculinity in colonial Egypt primarily through the lens of nationalist subject formation. It reveals what might be thought of as a distinct Brotherhood model of masculinity: a project of masculine self-cultivation that drew on effendi modernity while ultimately orienting the self toward God, the refinement of the soul, and salvation in the afterlife.
To trace this model of masculinity, this article examines the Brotherhood’s efforts to recast scouting and its practices in Islamic terms. Drawing on a rich body of articles written by Brotherhood scout leaders and members—many of whom are absent from the secondary literature—it makes two principal interventions. First, it shows that ideas about God, the soul, and the afterlife were central to the Brotherhood’s discourse on manhood and scouting. In this respect, the Brotherhood’s writings echo earlier Islamic moral traditions which, as Zahra Ayubi has shown, articulated ideals of piety through male-centered assumptions about virtue, agency, and moral capacity.Footnote 7 Although produced in a different context, the Brotherhood’s reworking of scouting similarly presumes a close relationship between masculinity and nearness to God.Footnote 8 At the same time, this discourse was shaped by contemporaneous “muscular Christianity” movements in Western Europe and the United States, which linked piety to physical strength and athleticism and formed part of scouting’s ideological wellspring.Footnote 9 Second, by demonstrating how metaphysical concerns were embedded in the Brotherhood’s scouting program, this article foregrounds the place of God in the movement’s activism. It contributes to scholarship that takes seriously how God figures in Islamic political life—not merely as an abstract reference or symbolic justification, but as an agent shaping social relations and political action.Footnote 10 The Brotherhood’s scouting discourse shows that modern Islamic activism did not simply preserve inherited conceptions of God and piety, but rather rearticulated the relationship between God and the believer through new disciplinary forms of scouting, voluntary association, and organized youth activism.Footnote 11
My argument develops through three sections. The first situates the Brotherhood’s scouting program in interwar and wartime Egypt, tracing how Brotherhood writers justified their turn toward scouting and how they reformulated it as a means of Islamic social uplift. The second section considers the gendered metaphysical dimensions of the Brotherhood’s scouting discourse, arguing that scouting was conceived as a site for cultivating masculine souls oriented toward God, the afterlife, and divine judgment. The final section offers an analysis of scouting camps, showing how they functioned as homosocial spaces that fostered male–male bonds, bonds that were depicted as privileged avenues for cultivating proximity to God.
“The Messenger of God Was a Scout By Nature”: Islam and the Spirit of Scouting
Scholars of the Brotherhood have argued that the movement’s scouting program functioned to attract members, secure and organize public events, and provide social services.Footnote 12 They also argue that scouting-derived practices, such as camps (muʿaskarāt) and excursions (riḥlāt), functioned in the movement as socialization mechanisms.Footnote 13 Brotherhood writers, however, also developed an expansive vision of what scouting meant and what kind of men it was to produce—a vision that has not been sufficiently analyzed. To recover this vision, I examine sources spanning the 1930s and 1940s. Because the Brotherhood’s conceptual framing of scouting remained consistent during this period, this article adopts a thematic rather than a chronological approach. This section situates the Brotherhood’s jawwāla program within a diverse field of early 20th-century Egyptian youth movements, probes the conceptual core of the group’s scouting discourse, and examines how Brotherhood leaders worked to assimilate scouting as an Islamic practice. This latter effort is significant because it not only reveals the Brotherhood of the 1930s and 1940s to be markedly eclectic and cosmopolitan—and therefore distinct from Islamic currents, such as Salafism, that sought to purge foreign influences from Islam—but also illuminates how Brotherhood leaders sought to distinguish their scouting program from competing religious interpretations of scouting circulating in Egypt at the time, including those promoted by Egyptian and European Christians.Footnote 14
Baden-Powell’s vision of scouting, articulated in Scouting for Boys (1908), found a receptive audience in Egypt and North Africa and the Middle East, aided in part by its Arabic translation in 1923.Footnote 15 Historians have shown that scouting was a highly adaptable practice, readily blended with local cultural values worldwide.Footnote 16 The promotion of scouting in Egypt was part of a broader turn toward physical culture across the early 20th-century Middle East among the region’s diverse religious and ethnic communities.Footnote 17 For its part, the Brotherhood’s scouting activities developed early in the movement’s history, although they were not initially organized under a formal “scouting” program. Rather, Brotherhood leaders promoted what they called excursions (riḥlāt): group hiking and camping combined with physical exercise. Those Brotherhood members who practiced these activities came to be known as “rovers.”Footnote 18 The term was used by Baden-Powell to describe senior scouts and rendered in Arabic as jawwāla. Such practices emerged within the Brotherhood only after scouting had already taken institutional form in Egypt: a royal troop was established in 1918 under King Fuʾad, followed by the National Scouting Society in 1920 and the National Association of the Boy Scouts of Egypt in 1933. In the late 1930s, the Brotherhood formalized its scouting activities into a more structured program, reflecting a wider trend within Egypt’s effendi milieu toward organizing and disciplining youth, evident in the expansion of voluntary associations such as the Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA), as well as the rise of paramilitary-style youth formations like the Wafd’s Blue Shirts and Young Egypt’s Green Shirts. This shift occurred amid the growing influence of European militarism and, in the Brotherhood’s case, unfolded alongside its expanding engagement in anti-imperial politics.Footnote 19 Scouting persisted in Egypt through the 1940s as a site of masculine ethical formation and political symbolism until the dissolution of plural youth movements after 1952.Footnote 20
As Jacob notes, the Brotherhood’s leader and founder, Hasan al-Banna (d. 1949), sought to recast scouting within an Islamic frame.Footnote 21 Most of this effort, however, fell to other Brotherhood figures, particularly those responsible for leading the jawwāla program. These leaders argued that scoutcraft was Islamically legitimate and that Islamic teachings cultivated the sensibilities scouting sought to instill, including social service and masculine moral and physical regeneration. Such sensibilities were central to Egypt’s effendiyya movements, which pursued national reform through the cultivation of disciplined, healthy male subjects.Footnote 22
Of the Brotherhood writers examined here whose social backgrounds can be established, several were products of Egypt’s effendi milieu, including Husayn Kamal al-Din, a Cairo-based engineer, member of the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau (maktab al-irshad) and founding assembly (al-hayʾa al-taʾsisiyya), and director of its jawwāla program in the 1940s; Mahmud Abu al-Saʿud, an Alexandria civil servant and late-1930s scout leader; Muhammad al-Hadi ʿAtiyya, a lawyer from Suez; and Salih ʿAshmawi, a Cairo commerce graduate, editor of al-Nadhir, member of the guidance bureau, and long-time senior Brotherhood leader.Footnote 23 Another key author, Muhammad Mukhtar Ismaʿil, the Brotherhood’s head scouting instructor in the 1930s, was introduced by JIM as “the distinguished litterateur [al-adīb al-fāḍil], Muhammad Mukhtar Effendi Ismaʿil,” reflecting the effendi social identity that structured much of the Brotherhood’s scouting discourse.Footnote 24 The articles these and other Brotherhood writers wrote appeared in national Brotherhood periodicals and discussed, as we will see in the following sections, scout activities occurring in places across Egypt, including Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Port Said, Ismaʿiliyya, Helwan, and Manfalut. The didactic character of these writings—practical instructions on troop organization, camp life, scouting techniques, and administrative matters—suggests that they were intended for the movement’s members and supporters. Although the precise readership of these periodicals is difficult to reconstruct, scholarship suggests that the Brotherhood’s support base was disproportionately literate and drawn from socially mobile Muslims employed in commerce, public administration, and the professions.Footnote 25
Discussions of scouting appeared regularly in the group’s primary periodicals, where writers presented it as a way for Egyptian men to cultivate discipline, health, and social responsibility—qualities they understood Islam itself to promote. Kamal al-Din exemplified this view. For him, scouting embodied both the orderly, efficient conduct required for social advancement and the disciplined ethos of Islam. In a regular column, he emphasized the centrality of order, arguing that “order [niẓām] is among the most important causes of progress [taqaddum] and success in all actions, and a fundamental principle of scouting.” The “brother-scout” (akh jawwāl), he asserted, must train until it becomes “imprint[ed]” (ṭābiʿ) on all his actions—a claim he supports by citing the hadith, “God loves that when one of you does a deed, he perfects it.”Footnote 26 Elsewhere, Kamal al-Din describes scouting as “practical training” (tadrīban ʿamaliyyan) in virtues such as self-confidence (thiqat al-nafs) and responsibility (ḥaml al-masʾūliyya), concluding that it constitutes “training for the Islamic formation [takwīn islāmī].”Footnote 27 Summarizing the identity of Brotherhood scouts, he depicts them as youth united in reform, service to the weak, and self-cultivation through “athletics and culture,” acting as “brothers in God” (ikhwa fī Allāh) committed to spreading virtue and Islamic principles. Their character, he maintains, models order, obedience, unity, and national honor (ʿizza qawmiyya). Paraphrasing the Qurʾan, he concludes: “They were young men who believed in their Lord, and their Lord increased them in guidance and perfected their piety.”Footnote 28
Brotherhood leaders also framed scouting as a means of instilling sound moral and physical habits in Egyptian men. In one article, Ismaʿil introduced countryside excursions (riḥlāt) as a practice promoting health and fulfilling the Prophet’s command to care for the body. Leading the Brotherhood’s excursions unit during these years, Ismaʿil lamented that “Easterners have not accustomed themselves to caring for the affairs of their bodies,” despite the prophetic saying, “Your body has a right over you.” “Brother,” he continues, “if you wish to be among the healthy, you must govern [tasūsa] your body in a healthy manner, so that you may fulfill your obligations to God, your country, and yourself.”Footnote 29 Such practices, according to another scout leader from Cairo, ʿAbd al-Hamid Hamdi—introduced as “the active sportsman” (riyāḍī nashīṭ)—were necessary for scouts to live “the life of manhood, the life of soldiery” (ḥayāt al-rujūla ḥayāt al-jundiyya).Footnote 30 Yet health and exercise, another writer cautioned, were not ends in themselves: “sportsmanship” (riyāḍiyya) was not about “vainglory” (tafākhur), but about “purifying the soul” (tahdhīb al-nafs) and fulfilling God’s will. “God made you, O Muslim brother, a sportsman [riyāḍī],” he insists, citing the bodily discipline of prayer (ṣalāh) and the cleanliness of ritual ablution (wuḍūʾ) as evidence.Footnote 31
In their discussions of scouting, Brotherhood writers echoed a familiar trope in scoutcraft and related instructional literature: that modern civilization—especially urban life—produced moral depravity and physical disease. They portrayed scouting camps (muʿaskarāt) as sites of male moral and bodily regeneration. Abu al-Saʿud, for instance, argued that it was impossible “to purify the spirit and elevate the soul” amid the city’s foul environment. Describing urban life, he wrote: “Around us is false civilization [al-madaniyya al-zāʾifa], with its tawdry adornments of life—so much so that the ear hears what it recoils from, the eye sees what it would rather not see, and even one’s breath tightens in distress.”Footnote 32 Camps in the countryside, he maintained, enabled Brotherhood members to purge this corruption and cultivate a healthy, athletic lifestyle. Through these camps, he claimed, sportsmanship was becoming popular within the Brotherhood. The “true Muslim,” Abu al-Saʿud insisted elsewhere, was not the “lazy one” (mutakāsil) who withdrew into worship alone, but one who joined devotion to “his worldly mission” (risālatuhu al-dunyawiyya). Islam, he concluded, teaches that “the strong Muslim is better than the weak Muslim,” demanding strength of body alongside strength of soul.Footnote 33
In this way, Brotherhood leaders portrayed scouting as a means of cultivating disciplined, socially responsible, and healthy men, arguing that commitment to scouting was not merely beneficial but demanded by Islamic teachings. They acknowledged that scouting discourse did not originate in the Islamic tradition but derived from Baden-Powell; nevertheless, they maintained that scouting was Islam by other means. In one article, Kamal al-Din, for instance, recalled an earlier claim he made, that “the principles of scouting are among the demands [maṭālib] of Islam,” and asserted that it mattered little that “the name scouting [al-jawwāla] is not an Arabic proper noun, nor was its established form known to our Muslim ancestors [ajdādnā al-muslimīn], for we are people of the essence [lubb], not people of outer shells [qushūr].”Footnote 34 Muslims, he argued, could adopt foreign cultural forms so long as they resonated with Islamic teaching. Abu al-Saʿud advanced a similar view, presenting Baden-Powell’s ten clauses of the Scout Law—an ethical code emphasizing loyalty, service, discipline, and moral rectitude—as compatible with Islam and its shariʿa.Footnote 35 “If scouting brings nothing new, why be a scout?” he asks, answering that “scouting is nothing other than a paved path [ṭarīqan muʿabbadan]: if we walk it, we will reach our goal.”Footnote 36
To justify such claims, Brotherhood writers focused on Baden-Powell’s Scout Law, interpreting it through the lens of the Qurʾan and sunna.Footnote 37 One author, in an article titled “The Principles of Scouting Are Islamic Principles [mabādiʾ islāmiyya],” asserted that “the scouting idea is not new to Muslims but is in fact drawn [mustaqāt] from the very essence [ṣamīm] of Islamic teachings.” He then lists the ten clauses of the Scout Law in a column labeled “scouting principles,” alongside a parallel column titled “Islamic text” (naṣṣ islāmī), which pairs each principle with a Qurʾanic verse or hadith deemed to correspond to it.Footnote 38 The most sustained effort in this regard came from Saʿd al-Din al-Walili, a prominent Brotherhood scout leader of the 1940s, who over a series of articles provided an Islamic interpretation of each of the ten Scout Law clauses. Justifying his interest in explicating from an Islamic perspective the Scout Law, he asserted that it contained “nothing but simplified meanings drawn from [mubassaṭa ʿan] true Islam, to which God’s Book had already guided you, and to which the life of the trustworthy Messenger had called you even before you put them into practice.”Footnote 39
In later articles, al-Walili elaborated on this approach. In one piece on the clause “the scout is a friend to everyone and to every other scout, regardless of race or rank,” he notes that when Baden-Powell articulated this principle of brotherhood, “he believed he had introduced something new.” “Yet,” al-Walili asserts, “he did not know that the Messenger of God was a scout by nature, a rover by calling, who summoned all people to it.” As evidence, he cites the Qurʾanic verse “the believers are but brothers,” a hadith stating, “a Muslim is a brother to the Muslim: he does not wrong him, abandon him, or betray him,” and Qurʾan 49:13, which affirms humanity’s creation in diverse peoples and tribes and defines nobility by righteousness. On this basis, al-Walili argues that Muslims must treat fellow Muslims as brothers and extend justice to followers of other “heavenly books.”Footnote 40
Although the Brotherhood writers’ approach to assimilating scoutcraft into Islam was distinctive, it did not develop in a vacuum. Scouting in Egypt was promoted not only by Muslim organizations, but also by Christian schools, expatriate resident communities, and nationalist associations.Footnote 41 Brotherhood writers were aware of these competing religious and ideological interpretations of scouting and occasionally engaged them explicitly. A revealing example comes in 1939 when Brotherhood contributors debated Egyptian scout participation in Cairo celebrations of St. George, the patron saint of scouting. One university scout criticized the Egyptian National Scout Association for attending the celebration, which featured British, French, and Greek scout troops and explicitly Christian symbolism, condemning it as an affront to “our Islamic dignity.” Whereas Christians associated scouting with St. George, he argued, Muslims should instead celebrate the Prophet Muhammad, whose life equally embodied the principles of scouting. If asked why he did not celebrate alongside Christians, the Muslim scout should reply: “You have your religion, and I have a religion.”Footnote 42 Another writer, responding under a pseudonym, disagreed and defended Muslim participation. Christians, he argued, were justified in honoring St. George just as Muslims were justified in honoring Muhammad, each seeing scouting’s teachings reflected in these pious exemplars. The real failing was not attendance at the celebration, but the neglect of the Prophet’s birthday and other Islamic commemorations by Egyptian Muslim scouts themselves.Footnote 43
Despite their disagreement, both writers clearly believed that scouting could and should be understood as tied to religious identity. Their exchange was part of a broader Brotherhood discourse on scouting, one that demonstrates that the group’s engagement with scoutcraft cannot be reduced to recruitment or organizational utility. Rather, Brotherhood leaders situated scouting within the sensibilities of effendi modernity—order, discipline, service, and athletics—while simultaneously molding it with an Islamic moral vocabulary. Scouting in the Brotherhood’s discourse emerged as both a vehicle of modern masculine formation and a practice rendered religiously legitimate. Yet the Brotherhood’s alignment of scouting with Islam extended beyond questions of order, health, and social responsibility. Scouting also was reconfigured as a site for cultivating masculine souls oriented toward God, the afterlife, and divine judgment—a theme taken up in the next section.
God and Masculinity in the Brotherhood’s Scouting Discourse
Although the Brotherhood’s jawwāla program was consonant in important respects with the ethics of effendi modernity, it also tied masculinity to explicit metaphysical claims about the male soul and men’s relationship to God. Brotherhood leaders wrote extensively about God in their discussions of scouting and manliness. This concern draws on classical Islamic ethics, in which the disciplined refinement of the male soul structured the path to vicegerency.Footnote 44 In the modern era, Muslim thinkers encountered scouting, shaped by Protestant muscular Christianity, which linked piety to bodily vigor.Footnote 45 This section argues that the Brotherhood’s scouting project was not simply a program of disciplined conduct, social service, and nationalist reform, but also a metaphysical reconstitution of masculinity grounded in Islamic conceptions of the soul, divine sovereignty, and eschatological accountability. It shows how Brotherhood writers understood scouting as a project of purifying the male soul; defined manliness in terms of a relation to God, expressed through faith, bravery, self-sacrifice, trust in divine aid, and expectation of reward; and reconfigured Baden-Powell’s Scout Law within an explicitly Islamic theological framework.
Brotherhood scout leaders framed scouting as a disciplined practice aimed at cultivating and fortifying the male soul. Ismaʿil offered the most extensive commentaries in this regard, framing participation in the Brotherhood’s scouting program not only as a matter of personal discipline, but also as the defense of the metaphysical core of Muslim youths. He likened the soul (nafs) to a besieged city and urged Egypt’s young men to fortify it by joining the Brotherhood and participating in its hiking activities. The enemies threatening this city were not merely social vices but sins that imperiled one’s standing before God. He began one article by asserting that “the Muslim youth” must “know that his soul is like a city of open doors which the enemy—Satan—steals through, destroying it through apostasy, debauchery, alcohol [khumūr], gambling, fornication, and quitting prayer. So be on guard, O brother.” Continuing, he asks, “What would be left for the Muslim youth in this life if he loses his soul?” He adds, “Oh, my brother, awaken from your slumber, become aware of your heedlessness. Repair the walls of your soul by forsaking desire, then come with the Muslim brothers and cooperate with them in fortifying the city of your soul. . . with the impregnable fortification of religion [taswīr madīnat nafsik. . . bi-sūr manīʿ min al-dīn].” Only after establishing this spiritual siege and need for fortification does Ismaʿil pivot to describe excursions and a series of physical exercises—requiring no more than “fifteen to twenty minutes” daily—that brothers should complete to maintain their health.Footnote 46 Bodily strength is subordinated to an Islamic project of fortifying the soul.
In another article, Ismaʿil further reflects on the relative importance of spiritual care and concern for the physical body in the Brotherhood’s project of building strong men. He begins marveling at humankind’s material progress, but turns to critique modern materialism, which he argues, neglects otherworldly, spiritual concerns. He laments how “foreigners” (ajānib) in far off nations—no doubt referring to the imperialist nations of the industrialized West—“waste no time in humiliating the races of humankind to satisfy their greed for material things alone.” For him, this exploitation is but a symptom of the spiritual blindness of modern civilization. He argues that material progress without a proper metaphysical orientation produces domination, not dignity. After noting how these foreigners pay no heed to “the happiness of the hereafter” (saʿādat al-ākhira) he addresses the “believing Muslim scout” (al-raḥḥāl al-muslim al-muʾmin) directly, praising him for not being deceived by material success and for “knowing the value of [his] soul.” Quoting the Qurʾan, he reminds his reader that human worth is exalted by God, as “it is God who has made you successors upon the earth.” “God,” he adds, “created the human being as a composite of two elements: a spirit and a body [rūḥ wa-jasad].” Each element has its demands—to neglect the former leads to illness, whereas neglecting the latter leads humans to become akin to beasts, or as he puts it like “livestock” (anʿām). To correctly govern their bodies and spirits, he asserts, humans need God’s guidance. “If a human being does not govern the demands of his spirit and his body by his reason, in the light of the guidance of the Creator of this existence [ʿalā ḍawʾ hady khāliq hādhā al-wujūd] and the Director of this universe, and does not guide [his spirit and his body] to the straight path, he becomes more evil than beasts and lower than every living creature.” He then pivots to discuss the Brotherhood’s scouting activities, emphasizing how true “manliness” (rujūla) emerges from the proper ordering of body and spirit under divine guidance. The Muslim scout, he writes, “recognized [his] own worth,” and therefore “persevered in acquiring noble virtues and moral excellences,” offering “the highest example in the life of true manliness.”Footnote 47 Such manliness is expressed through struggle, sacrifice, and service (striving to end the British occupation, consoling the poor, feeding the hungry, and giving water to the thirsty), acts grounded both in the Brotherhood scout’s bodily discipline and his spiritual training.
The Brotherhood’s concern for cultivating the Muslim man’s bodily strength was therefore grounded in a concern for his soul’s metaphysical health. Even when Abu al-Saʿud penned a series of articles on “sportsmanship in Islam” (al-riyāḍa fī al-islām), they were interspersed with claims that physical exercise helped brothers preserve the health of their souls and, ultimately, their relationship with God. He opens one article by noting that “sportsmanship” is not a modern Western invention but a practice dating to the earliest days of Islam, when the Prophet and his companions engaged in activities such as horsemanship and wrestling. Our pious ancestors, he explains, “practiced the sport of wrestling as a refined art and means of purifying souls [li-tahdhīb al-nufūs], accustoming them to forbearance and preparing them for the day of battle and war.” Abu al-Saʿud calls on brothers to adopt such activities so that they may cleanse their souls of the corruptions of the “shallow civilization” that has produced the youth’s “malignant afflictions” and incited them to “moral dissolution and licentiousness.” “It is incumbent upon us, the Muslim brothers,” he writes, “to adopt physical exercises as a natural means for cultivating our souls: a sound, pure, and chaste cultivation, so that our hearts may be purified and our inner dispositions refined, and that we may pattern ourselves after the model of the righteous forebears.” Even physical skills such as swimming acquire an explicitly otherworldly value: by saving someone from drowning, the brother earns divine reward, as “the angels record for him a good deed that is multiplied by God.”Footnote 48 Physical discipline becomes inseparable from the purification of the soul and the accumulation of reward before God.
Scouting in the Brotherhood’s discourse was conceived as a tool for cultivating the Muslim male’s soul. When it came to the relationship between manliness and closeness to God, however, the most extensive articulation came from ʿAtiyya, whose column on “faith and manliness” (imān wa-rujūla), although not directly concerned with scouting, expressed the same metaphysical commitments that undergirded the Brotherhood’s scouting discourse. Writing in the mid-1930s, at a moment of intensifying anti-imperial struggle and rapid expansion of the Brotherhood’s youth activities, ʿAtiyya cast “manliness” (rujūla) as the embodiment of true faith in God, and linked courage, sacrifice, and endurance to both worldly struggle and divine reward.Footnote 49
In the series’ opening article, ʿAtiyya illustrates how faith produces both sacrificial action and a reorientation of the believer’s desires. He provides readers with vivid depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions’ early struggle against the pagans of Mecca, emphasizing not only their willingness to sacrifice, but the competitive intensity with which they did so—hurrying to expend their lives and resources in the service of God. Recalling these pious ancestors, he writes, they “vied with one another in the field of sacrifice [taḍḥiya]. . . and rushed to expend life and wealth [badhl al-anfus wa-l-amwāl], their souls contented.” What, he asks, was the impetus for such sacrifice? It was “nothing other than deep, powerful faith and true manliness.” He characterizes this faith as one “whose love has become annihilation [fanāʾ] in the Essence of the Real [al-ḥaqq]—blessed and exalted. . . whose bearer is consumed by longing for meeting his Lord, and over whose senses and feelings of ecstasy [al-wajd] have taken control, such that he no longer feels the severe harm that strikes him, nor the painful torment that befalls him.” Such a faith, he adds, “turns souls from enjoyment of this temporal existence [al-ʿājila]. . . so that their hearts do not become attached to it,” and leads its possessors to “seek the afterlife [al-ākhira].” These qualities together, he concludes, constitute “true manliness” (rujūla ḥaqqa).Footnote 50
In ʿAtiyya’s formulation, manliness is connected to a proper relationship with God and an orientation toward divine reward. His writings make clear that manliness is produced by a faith that reorients the believer’s desires and attachments. Recalling the early Muslim community, he describes them as animated by the “faith” of those “trusting in God’s promise” and the “manliness” of those “prepared for death. . . plunging into terror with fearless resolve in defense of God’s religion and in struggle [jihad] to exalt the word of God.” Those who possess such qualities, he adds, are marked by souls “turned away from the world and its adornments,” desiring instead “the everlasting bliss [al-naʿīm al-muqīm] that is with God.”Footnote 51 Manliness, then, lies in the proper orientation of the soul toward its ultimate end in God. Its absence, by contrast, reflects a soul attached to worldly pleasures and passions, and unwilling to sacrifice in the service of the divine. ʿAtiyya consistently contrasts the Muslims of contemporary Egypt with their pious forebears: they are neither truly faithful to God nor properly manly, and this failure explains Islam’s loss of worldly glory. After asserting in one article that “manliness” was among the greatest causes of the success of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission, he adds that without it, “Islam’s glory will not return.” He continues by lamenting that “the children of Islam, if you scrutinize most of them, you will find them enjoying and eating like cattle [al-anʿām]. They forgot God, so God caused them to forget themselves. They take their desires as their god and become slaves to their passions [ittakhadhū hawāhum ilāhahum fa-aṣbaḥū ʿabīdan li-shahawātihim]. Can you expect good from them?”Footnote 52 His point is clear: when desires replace God as the object of devotion, both faith and manliness collapse, and with them the strength of the Muslim community.
In ʿAtiyya’s eyes, then, the restoration of Islam’s greatness depends on the cultivation of men imbued with faith which, in turn, yields manliness. To inspire readers toward such ends, he recounts stories of figures who led the early Muslim community’s military victories. After describing the early military commander, Khalid ibn al-Walid (d. 642), he writes: “Do you realize that it was perfect manliness that would not allow the heroic leader to retreat or falter? Rather, his strong faith in God reassured him of the truth of God’s promise: ‘God will surely grant victory to those who support God.’” Not only, he adds, was Khalid assured of God’s aid to the faithful, but, trusting in divine reward, he faced death without fear, content in the promise of the good that awaited those who were killed in the service of God. Two points warrant emphasis here. First, the courage and sacrifice ʿAtiyya calls his readers to are intelligible only within an eschatological framework. Speaking of Khalid’s faith, he explains that it was marked by “great confidence in the attainment of the goal and the goodness of the reward [ḥusn al-jazāʾ]. . . a faith that penetrated the deepest folds of the heart and filled the entire soul, such that its possessor deemed suffering [al-ālām] insignificant and was driven toward the field of death, reassured.”Footnote 53 In this sense, what appears as loss in this world is refigured as gain in the next, and the truly manly believer embraces sacrifice as the path to divine reward. Second, although manliness is important in the realization of Muslim worldly power, its ultimate success depends not on the agency of Muslim men, but on God. It is God who grants victory: “God has indeed promised the believing servants that they will be firmly established in the land and granted victory.”Footnote 54 Yet this promise is not unconditional. As ʿAtiyya frequently tells his readers, divine support is contingent upon proper orientation toward God. Echoing the Qurʾan, he notes that those who remember God are remembered by God, while those who turn away from God are, in turn, abandoned.Footnote 55
Importantly, divine agency, presence, and reward are also recurring themes in the Brotherhood’s broader scouting discourse. By the late 1940s, as the Brotherhood had emerged as a mass movement with a growing national presence, its leaders expressed increasing confidence in both their mission and the transformative potential of their disciplined, God-oriented young scouts.Footnote 56 Reflecting this optimism, Brotherhood scout leaders praised their members as “truly righteous men who carry the meaning of the scouting movement,” commending their efforts in combating disease, aiding victims of natural disasters, and providing social services, while reminding them to expect God’s reward for such work. “O youth scouts,” they write, “you are the source of hope and aspiration. So press forward, for God does not let the reward of those who do good go to waste [Allāh lā yuḍīʿu ajra al-muḥsinīn].”Footnote 57 Similarly, ʿAbd al-Ghani ʿAbidin, the Brotherhood’s general scout commissioner (mandūb ʿāmm al-jawwāla) in the late 1940s, praised the scouts as paragons of chivalrous virtue and service. After lauding their “manliness” and “noble character,” he exhorted them to “go forward, for God is with you and will not leave your deeds unrewarded.”Footnote 58 In another article, ʿAbidin writes, “With the message of heaven, O youth scouts, you were guided to the good and to the straight path. You rely on God and whoever relies on God, God is sufficient for him.”Footnote 59 Similarly, al-Walili instructs scouts not to waste time and to remain mindful of the many blessings God has bestowed upon them, using them to their fullest potential. Included in his instructions are reminders to the scouts of their obligations; foremost among them is their duties to God, which entail “worshipping God, attaching one’s soul to God, relying upon God, and giving thanks for God’s blessings.”Footnote 60 In this way, then, the Brotherhood framed scouting as a practice of orienting oneself toward God.
Al-Walili’s comments here bring us back to his Islamic reconfiguration of Baden-Powell’s Scout Law. Because of the Brotherhood’s commitment to cultivating God-conscious Muslim men, al-Walili reworked the law to make it fit within an Islamic theological framework. In practice, this meant supplementing the law with metaphysical concerns absent from Baden-Powell’s original.Footnote 61 Consider, for instance, al-Walili’s comments on the clause: “The scout is loyal to his king, his country, his parents, his leaders, and those under him.” Despite his evident esteem for the Scout Law, al-Walili regarded its conception of loyalty as incomplete, and so he begins by qualifying Baden-Powell’s formulation, noting that in truth, “the fundamental principle of sincerity is to be for God alone [an yakūna li-llāh waḥdahu].” For al-Walili, this means that the scout dedicates his heart to God, neither attaching it to anything else nor allowing himself to be preoccupied by anything else, so that “his life and death are for God.”Footnote 62 Similarly, on the clause, “A scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties,” he recalls for his readers the Qurʾan’s directives that the believer patiently bear hardship. He adds, “Know, O brother scout, that the perfection of Islam is that you have faith in God’s decree and will [al-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar], God’s good and evil [al-khayr wa-l-sharr], God’s sweet and bitter. If given happiness, show gratitude. If given hardship, patiently bear it.”Footnote 63 As we see here, Brotherhood scout leaders like al-Walili actively brought Islamic metaphysical commitments to bear upon, and thereby reconfigured, Baden-Powell’s program of male regeneration.
Like Egypt’s other effendi movements of the interwar and wartime periods, the Brotherhood was deeply concerned with masculinity, a concern especially evident in its scouting discourse, which treated manliness as derivative of the proper attunement of the Muslim male soul toward God. Despite robust scholarship on the movement, the place of masculinity in its activism has received relatively little attention, even as Brotherhood scouts and their leaders consistently framed their project in terms of the moral and physical regeneration of Egyptian men. For the Brotherhood, however, as we have seen here, masculinity was not only performed through everyday activities and participation in scouting and athletics, but also cultivated through purifying the soul and orienting it toward God and the afterlife. This emphasis on the individual soul, however, raises a further question: How did this divine orientation operate not only within the self, but between men? The following section turns to scouting as a collective practice, examining how God functioned as a binding force within intensely homosocial settings, and how Brotherhood scout leaders depicted male–male bonding as a privileged avenue for drawing closer to God.
“Brothers in God”: Homosociality and Male Bonding in the Camps (Muʿaskarāt)
As the Brotherhood’s scouting program developed from the 1930s through the 1940s, the summer camp (muʿaskar) became a central component. Brotherhood camps were held in different locations, including Helwan on Cairo’s outskirts, Dikhayla, west of Alexandria, and cities such as Suez, Port Said, Ismaʿiliyya, Assiut, and al-Manzala.Footnote 64 They ranged from ten days to thirty days, to sixty days, and combined life in the open air with physical exercises, religious lessons, worship, and communal living.Footnote 65 The Brotherhood’s periodicals celebrated the summer camps, especially those held in Helwan and Dikhayla, and described them as important spaces in which brothers immersed themselves in an atmosphere of piety, masculine discipline, and martial training. In this section, I examine the discourse Brotherhood scout leaders elaborated around the camps and their functions within the jawwāla program. My interest here is in exploring the extent to which Brotherhood writers presumed homosocial bonds, especially those fostered in camps, acted as mechanisms for cultivating masculine virtue and realizing greater proximity to God. On one level, scouting was a collective activity, and Brotherhood writers viewed its shared routines and close interpersonal bonds as intensifying individual piety. The idea was that through sustained contact with fellow brothers, scouts became mutually susceptible to one another’s piety, inspiring moral emulation and deepening devotion.Footnote 66 On another level, camps were themselves depicted as devotional retreats where collective worship strengthened belief in God.
One of the most extensive reflections in this regard came from ʿAshmawi. Describing his twelve-day visit to a camp held in July 1939 at Helwan, ʿAshmawi opens lamenting life in a society in which people “have given free rein to their appetites [shahawātihim]. . . and taken their desires as their god [ittakhadū ilāhum hawāhum].” He presents his attendance at the camp as a temporary escape from this corrupt environment, seeking instead the company of those who take “God as their goal. . . the Messenger as their leader. . . [and] the Qurʾan as their constitution.” At the camp, he recounts, this ethos was enacted through collective early morning performance which entailed the chanting of one of the Brotherhood’s mottos.
The leader stood and raised the flag, and we stood in rows to greet him, with salutes and chants that filled the air and reached the heights of the sky. Our chant was nothing but praise and exaltation: “God is greatest, and to God belongs all praise. God is our goal [Allāhu ghāyatunā], the Messenger is our leader [al-rasūl zaʿīmunā], the Qurʾan is our constitution [al-Qurʾān dustūrunā], jihad is our path [al-jihād sabīlunā], and death in the path of God is our highest aspiration [al-mawt fī sabīl Allāh asmā amāninā].
Collective experiences such as these made the camp an intensely affective and transformative space for ʿAshmawi. He notes, for instance, that reciting the Qurʾan felt sweeter there, and that each Brotherhood anthem (nashīd) they sung together there took on heightened meaning. Reflecting on the days after the experience, he writes:
And now that the days of the camp have come to an end, each one has returned to his home carrying within him the sweetest memories. I can imagine one of us, stirred by recollection, recalling the days of the camp and his fellow camp brothers [ikhwān], his eyes overflowing with tears. Then he is seized by a feeling of elation and recites from the depths of his heart, as though he were still among them and they with him: “Our spirits have been bound together in brotherhood for the sake of God [taʾākhat ʿalā Allāh arwāḥunā], a brotherhood [al-ikhāʾ] that unsettles the very structure of time.”Footnote 67
Such collective experiences were seen by leaders like ʿAshmawi as central to fostering intimate bonds among brothers and deepening their commitment to the movement. More importantly, as both the chanting of the Brotherhood’s motto and ʿAshmawi’s poetic reflection suggest, participants understood these gatherings as binding them together through a shared orientation toward God, in which piety and brotherhood were cultivated simultaneously.
Other Brotherhood leaders expressed similar sentiments while observing scouts at work, not only in camps but also in their activities at local headquarters. They portrayed these practices as cultivating a form of brotherhood grounded in transcendence, articulated through a language that drew on the Islamic ideal of brotherhood in God (ukhuwwa fī Allāh).Footnote 68 ʿAbd al-Basit al-Banna (d. 1971), a police officer and younger brother of Hasan al-Banna, for instance, recounts visiting jawwāla units in Port Said and Ismailia in 1936. Recalling the militant tone of ʿAtiyya’s articles on sacrifice, struggle, and faith, al-Banna writes that the young men (shabāb) who gather around the Brotherhood’s banner (liwāʾ al-ikhwān), “pledge to their Lord [yuʿāhidūna rabbahum] obedience and jihad, and pledge among themselves love and brotherhood [al-ikhāʾ], sacrificing [muḍaḥḥīna] all that is dear in the pursuit of their goal.”Footnote 69 With God’s aid, he notes, they seek to return glory to Islam. Witnessing their “ordered movement,” you will hear them call with their voices the anthem (nashīd):
O Messenger of God, would it please you
That we have risen as brothers in God [ikhwa fī Allāh], through Islam?
Today we shake the dust of sleep from ourselves
Not to cast ourselves away to death, but rather in hope
That God may see us in the field of sacrifice.
“If you heard them,” he adds, “sing this anthem with hearts alive and souls pure, your spirit would be lifted, moving from this world [ʿālam al-dunyā]. . . to the everlasting life of the garden [ḥayāt dāʾima fī al-janna].” Clearly such collective, disciplined performances of brotherhood were impressive to observers like al-Banna and ʿAshmawi, who saw in them the enactment of male solidarity grounded in a shared disposition toward God.
The camps were regarded as especially salubrious arenas for cultivating such dispositions, as well as discipline, order, and martial virtue. As many authors have argued, the seclusion these camps provided from the distractions of everyday life, along with close-quarters living among like-minded men, created ideal conditions for the fortification of belief. Removed from the city, writes Abu al-Saʿud, the brother encounters “nature speaking [al-ṭabīʿa nāṭiqa] with the majesty of creation and the greatness of the Creator [ʿaẓamat al-khāliq]. . . not letting the contemplator of God’s creation doubt God’s power. . . . [and] increasing the believer in his faith and strengthening his certainty.” Among fellow brothers, he adds, one finds “love in God, brotherhood in God [al-maḥabba fī Allāh wa-al-ikhāʾ fī Allāh], and preference for the path of God.”Footnote 70 Other writers echo this theme, noting how in the camps “Muslim brothers isolate their bodies and spirits from the tumultuous, clamorous world” to strengthen “the truth of faith in God.”Footnote 71 In another article ʿAbidin praises Brotherhood scouts, describing them as “soldiers of God,” who spend their nights in the camps as “monks” (ruhbān) worshipping in prayer and thanking God, and spend their days in the camps as “knights” (fursān) engaging in perpetual service and activities.Footnote 72
The notion of Brotherhood scouts as knights by day and monks by night captures the atmosphere of martial virtue and devotion the camps intended to promote. As ʿAbidin’s comments imply, just as the camp was conceived as an arena for cultivating faith, it was equally understood as a space for training in discipline and a military ethos. According to Abu al-Saʿud, for instance, through the regimented atmosphere of the camp, brothers “accustom the soul to obedience and train it in order.” Camps, he adds, are among the best means for brothers to learn an “orderly life.”Footnote 73 When writing about camps, Brotherhood writers also drew parallels between the ordered routines of collective worship and the habits required of soldiers. Recalling a two-month camp held from late July through late August 1938 in Dikhayla, one author notes that “the days of your encampment were purely Islamic days, which called to mind the simple life of the desert, where the soldiers of God [junūd Allāh] stand in orderly rows, worshipping God in silence and humility.”Footnote 74 Yet another author, writing about a camp held in Helwan in summer 1946, described a daily regimen in which brothers, gathered in a spirit of obedience to Islam, moved seamlessly between bodily training and spiritual purification, sleeping after the evening meal until the call to prayer, rising for worship, athletics, and scouting instruction, which together fortified brothers for “jihad and sacrifice” (jihād wa-tadḥīya).Footnote 75
The close living quarters, regimented lifestyle, and communal life promoted by scouting practices—structured around intense male companionship—were seen by Brotherhood leaders as ideal avenues for instilling a martial ethos grounded in sacrifice, discipline, and jihad. Crucially, these qualities, as we have seen, were not treated as separate from religion but were closely linked to worship, devotion, and the cultivation of faith. Scout leaders like al-Walili and Kamal al-Din described scout practices as fostering conformity, obedience, and equality, which they likened to communal prayer on the one hand and family relations on the other. Al-Walili emphasized that obedience was equally necessary in the family and among soldiers, explaining that the scout “knows how to show complete respect to his parents and full obedience to his leadership, for he learned it in the prayer niche [al-miḥrāb] just as he learned it in the ranks [al-ṣaff].”Footnote 76 Here, the discipling of the self in prayer becomes indistinguishable from the disciplining of the self in military ranks, connecting devotion and military command. Kamal al-Din similarly stressed the scout’s uniformity in dress, movement, and conduct, arguing that visible equality formed the basis of collective unity. The scout unit, he adds, is “like one family. . . cooperating in righteousness and piety.”Footnote 77
Although not always stated explicitly, the discourse Brotherhood writers elaborated around camps and scouting practices clearly presumed that male–male bonding in intensely homosocial settings was especially salubrious for cultivating masculine virtue, martial discipline, and heightened God-consciousness. The activities they highlighted were overwhelmingly collective—performed among other men—and included, as we have seen, uniform dress, communal prayer, marching in ordered ranks, collective chanting, group athletics, martial training, and life within structured hierarchies of command: precisely the kinds of practices Jacob identifies as constitutive of effendi masculinity. Here, however, these practices were embedded within a broader set of disciplines oriented toward cultivating a relationship with God, such that the collective itself became a conduit for piety. In this way, masculine formation in scouting took on a distinctly Brotherhood-inflected tone, one that linked bodily discipline to spiritual transformation.
Conclusion
This article has argued that the Brotherhood’s scouting program offers a vantage point from which to rethink both the movement’s activism and the history of masculinity in colonial Egypt. Far from being peripheral or imitative, scouting emerged as a central site through which Brotherhood thinkers articulated a distinctive vision of manhood—one that cannot be fully appreciated through the analytical lens of modern nationalist subject formation. By centering the metaphysical commitments embedded in the Brotherhood’s scouting discourse, this article has instead traced a distinct Brotherhood model of masculinity—one that drew on the social and performative repertoire of effendi modernity, but ultimately aimed at cultivating subjects whose masculine self-formation was directed toward nearness to God, the refinement of the soul, and the afterlife.
Situating the Brotherhood’s scouting discourse within both Islamic ethical traditions and transnational movements such as muscular Christianity also highlights the hybrid character of this project. The Brotherhood did not simply adopt global models of masculine formation, but selectively reworked them, embedding modern practices within a distinctly Islamic moral ontology. More broadly, this article contributes to ongoing efforts to take seriously the place of God in modern Islamic activism. From the perspective of the Brotherhood’s discourse on scouting and manliness, God emerged not as an abstract principle, but as an active force binding men together, shaping their conduct, and orienting their activism. God in this discourse, however, was not a transhistorical essence. Rather, Brotherhood writers used modern forms of self-fashioning, such as scouting, voluntary associations, and physical culture, to rearticulate the relationship between God and the believer.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this article for the thoughtful feedback and suggestions.
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