The Islamic movement that has seen the most widespread influence in recent times in the Middle East is the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun), which is currently commonly identified as HAMAS. Like the Wahhabis, it supports a complete return to Islamic orthodoxy, but it differs in many aspects, leading to conflicts with them, one of the many issues troubling the Middle Eastern world.
The Wahhabis, a movement from the 18th century, emerged when the Western world was still distant. They are a movement entirely within Islamism: they seek a return to orthodoxy and view certain innovations that have manifested over the centuries (not from the West) as deviations, particularly for the Shiites. In some ways, we can compare them to Calvinists.
The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, is a movement that originated in the 20th century in reaction to the Westernization of the Arab world, which was manifesting through colonialism. However, precisely because it is a reaction to the Western world, it also ends up having modern characteristics.
Let's provide a brief historical overview: The movement was founded by Hassan al-Banna in Cairo in 1928, in an Egypt under strong Anglo-French influence. The organization was not strictly political but had cultural, religious, and welfare goals. However, its actions inevitably involved political aspects, similar to how Catholic organizations operated in our country. It opposed nationalisms modeled after the Western ones, particularly adopted in Turkey (but not only) by Kemal Atatürk: it distinguishes between wataniyya (Islamic nationality) and qawmiyya (national citizenship, such as Egyptian, Syrian, etc.): the former extends to all Muslims, even beyond the Arab world.
If God's law is to govern all believers, then it also provides citizenship and nationality. El-Banna vigorously opposed a purely spiritualist conception of Islam: it must regulate all public and private affairs. Since the laws already exist and are eternal as they are directly dictated by God, the state does not have legislative power but only executive and administrative power: it should therefore be governed by a Caliph (successor of Muhammad) who must be chosen by the people and consult the people in important decisions.
He wanted to give everyone full rights, assistance, and education: wealth should have a social purpose, thus he spoke out against large estates and parasitic wealth. We have aspects that we can define as modern and, ultimately, borrowed from the West, although this fact was vigorously denied.
Another important figure of the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). An Egyptian official, he spent two years in the USA where he developed the idea of the irreconcilability between the West and Islam. Frequently arrested and condemned, he was hanged for treason in 1966. His most notable and interesting work is "Ma’alim fi al-Tariq" (Milestones). He starts from the opposition between Islam and Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic period). The two moments lose their temporal connotation to indicate true faith and living without God, as the modern world, which loses all values. There is a general struggle of Jahiliyya against Islam and he also hypothesizes a worldwide conspiracy to destroy Islam, of which all moderate, pro-Western regimes, and all Islamic modernists are accomplices and tools. This is a theme that has great popularity in the Arab world, which tends to explain every negative event with hidden actions, currently attributed to American-Zionist conspiracies.
His articles inspired by a stay in America are particularly interesting. In 1948 he moved to the USA for some time and stayed in the town of Greeley: his impression of America was extremely negative. He believes that while economic power corresponds to a very low cultural and moral level and also to rudeness that indicates intellectual coarseness. It is a people that has reached the peak of development and growth in the world of science and productivity, while remaining abysmally primitive in the world of senses, feelings, and behavior and that in human history America has added nothing to the treasure of moral values that distinguish man from animals. He accuses America of racism, materialism, excessive personal freedom, and an unjust economic system, in short, of all possible evils.
Therefore, the relations of the Muslim Brotherhood with post-colonial nationalist governments like Nasser's have been conflictual: the assassination of Sadat, for example, is attributed to them. They were always variously persecuted and marginalized but maintained their popularity because they managed welfare activities in countries where public assistance was almost non-existent.
The great opportunity came with the outbreak of the Arab Spring, generated by the general failure of nationalist governments. With it, there was an attempt to democratize and modernize the Arab world based on Western models, but not passively copied, rather interpreted according to local traditions and culture: similar to how the Romans related to the Greeks or the Japanese to the West.
For a moment it seemed that Egypt, the most important of the Arab countries, could reach this goal with the massive demonstrations in Tahrir Square and the ousting of Mubarak. In the elections, the majority was not achieved by the secular promoters of the Arab Spring but by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had meanwhile greatly softened their Islamic intransigence to appear very close to Western models. A member of theirs, Mohamed Morsi, was elected and managed to lead the country amidst a thousand difficulties, adhering to democratic norms. However, the secularists no longer supported President Morsi, who was democratically elected, and it led to a military coup led by al-Sisi, with which all democratic and liberal demands were brutally repressed and the Muslim Brotherhood was subjected to fierce and widespread persecution with hundreds of thousands of victims (including our Giulio Regeni), which continues to this day. It is worth noting that the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia supported the secular coup and not their coreligionists in the Muslim Brotherhood as one might have expected.
We do not know how much of the Muslim Brotherhood remains in Egypt. However, it happens that in Gaza HAMAS is an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. During Morsi's time, there seemed to be a moderating influence, but HAMAS has moved towards increasingly intransigent and fundamentalist positions.
The evolution, therefore, has been the opposite of that of the Wahhabis, who seem to be gradually abandoning their original intransigence (like bin Laden) and even seem willing to recognize Israel, which for the Arab world means abandoning the idea of America and the West in general as the embodiment of evil. The Muslim Brotherhood, closer to modernity, radicalizes while Wahhabism, a pure defense of the orthodoxy of the early centuries, evolves favorably towards the West: the opposite of what we would expect.
The problem, in our opinion, is that the cause of the Palestinians, all Sunnis (apart from Christians), is increasingly less supported by the Sunni world (and even by the Wahhabis), while the Shiites of Iran make the Palestinian issue their main cause. Today, those fighting against Israel are Shiites and their allies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, and no Sunni does anything. HAMAS is thus inevitably pushed towards the extremism of Iranian Shiite fundamentalism, towards Khomeinist doctrine, which aims at an implacable and metaphysical struggle against the great American Satan and the small satans (including Israel).