Ismailiya - the most Europeanized of Egyptian towns - was the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood and its founder, Hassan el-Banna . As a child, El-Banna nailed up leaflets calling upon Muslims to renounce gold and silks, and awoke his neighbours before dawn prayers. When older he campaigned against female emancipation, delivering fiery sermons in rented cafés. He founded the Ikhwan el-Muslimeen in 1928 and within fifteen years the Brotherhood had spread throughout Egypt and spawned offshoots across the Middle East, articulating an Islamic response to modernization on Western terms.

 

From campaigning for moral renewal it went on to organize paramilitary training and terrorist cells, and was outlawed by King Farouk (whose agents assassinated El-Banna) in 1949. Despite this, the Brotherhood mounted attacks against the British and an economic boycott in the Canal Zone. The British suspected that they received arms from sympathizers in the Egyptian police and tried to disarm the main barracks outside Ismailiya, whose garrison was ordered to resist by their superiors and only surrendered after fifty of them had been killed. The Battle of Ismailiya (January 25, 1952) outraged Egyptians and provoked an orgy of rioting in Cairo next day - "Black Saturday" - when the police stood by as Brotherhood activists sped around in jeeps, torching foreign properties.

Legalized after the 1952 Revolution, the Brotherhood was soon suppressed again for trying to kill Nasser in Alexandria. Hundreds of Brothers spent years in concentration camps, until amnestied by President Sadat, who sought to co-opt them as a counter-weight to the left. Eventually, their growing influence and criticism of his policies led Sadat to jail them en masse, whereupon his assassination by Al-Jihad proved that other groups had grown up in the Brotherhood's shadow and surpassed it in radicalism. To isolate these new militants, Mubarak, too, wooed the Brotherhood with all kinds of concessions short of legalization, but in recent years has turned against them, ordering the arrest of scores of Brothers and the closure of their headquarters in Cairo.