Sa'id Hawwa

Sa'id Hawwa ( Arabic سعيد حوى, DMG Saʿīd Ḥawā ; * 1935 in Hama , Syria ; † 1989 in Amman , Jordan ) was a leading member and prominent ideologue of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood . He was a representative of jihadism .

biography

Sa'id Hawwa grew up in the Syrian city of Hama in ʿAliliyat, the largest and one of the poorest districts. After the death of his mother, whom he lost at the age of one, and since his father Muhammad Dib Hawwa had to leave the city to escape a blood revenge, Said lived with his grandmother during this time. When his father returned after six years, he set up a vegetable stall in the town market where the boy had to help out, but at the same time the father made sure that Said read books and learned to recite the Koran . Muhammad Dib was also an active member of the socialist movement of Akram al-Haurani and represented the ʿAliliyat district towards the city's large landowners. Said was too young at this time to be able to understand Haurani’s political activities firsthand, but received his political views through his father. Although Hawwa embarked on a completely different ideological career than the socialist Haurani, he inherited from him the methodology of organization and the strategies necessary to lead the masses to the realization of political goals.

After three years in the market, the family's economic situation improved. Sa'id Hawwa was initially able to attend an evening school belonging to a branch of the Salafiya . He then moved to the largest middle school in the city, where Muhammad al-Hamid (1910–1969) became his teacher and shaped his religious beliefs. Al-Hamid had studied at the Faculty of Sharia of al-Azhar University in Cairo and was influenced during this time by Hasan al-Bannā , the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt . After his return to Hama, he worked there as a cadi and preacher. In addition, he in turn set up a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and was Sheikh of local Nakschibendi -Ordens while other Salafists in Syria at that time, the life of Sufism resisted.

In 1953 Hawwa joined the Muslim Brotherhood under the guidance of his teacher al-Hamid and soon proved to be a talented rhetorician and organizer. He was one of the founders of an armed organization that was directed against various left groups in what was then Syria.

In 1955 Hawwa left the city of his birth for the first time and enrolled at Damascus University , where he was influenced by Mustafā as-Sibāʿī , the then dean of the Faculty of Sharia. After completing his studies in 1961, Hawwa became a religion teacher in al-Hasakah Governorate and in Salamiyya . After the suppressed uprising in Hama in 1964, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had to reorganize. Hawwa became their leading ideologue and went to Saudi Arabia in 1966 , where he lived until 1971 and wrote his first books.

Hawwa propagated the idea that the Muslim society had fallen from the faith through the influence of people of different faiths and called for a radical turning away from social life in favor of a strictly Islamic code of conduct. He declared music, the consumption of secular media or the study of secular philosophical or ethical works as incompatible with Islam. In addition, he called for armed struggle as jihad against Baathists, secularists, nationalists, communists, Shiites, Sufis and liberals.

After Hafiz al-Assad came to power through the corrective movement in 1970, Hawwa returned to Syria. In 1973 he led a campaign against Assad's proposed constitution and spent the next five years in a military prison in Damascus, where he wrote an eleven-volume Koran exegesis and several books on Sufism. After his release in 1978 he performed the Umra and then went to Jordan , where he spent the rest of his life. From his exile he participated in the uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in its final phase. He suffered from various illnesses including diabetes and died in Amman in March 1989.

literature

• Itzchak Weismann : Sa'id Hawwa: the making of a radical Muslim thinker in modern Syria . London, Routledge 2007. ( Online )
• Itzchak Weismann: Sa'id Hawwa and Islamic Revivalism in Ba'thist Syria . Studia Islamica No. 85, 1997, pp. 131-154. ( Online )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Alison Pargeter: The Muslim Brotherhood - From Opposition to Power , London, 2013, p. 78
2. ^ I. Weismann: Biography