Muslim Brotherhood “co-existence” manifesto a sign of the times
28. November 2025
During the recording of the song “Walad al-Huda” (“The Prophet Was Born”), which Umm Kulthum performed at the Prophet’s birthday celebration in Cairo’s Ahly Club in November 1949, an incident occurred that the composer Riyad al-Sunbati only recounted some 14 years later.
In the middle of rehearsal, the diva was interrupted by a messenger from the royal palace objecting to one of Ahmed Shawqi’s verses praising the Prophet Muhammad:
The socialists – you are their imam,
Were it not for their partisanship and excess.
King Farouk, so the story goes, saw the line as an endorsement of a political current he despised. The idea that “socialists” could claim the Prophet as their leader was, for the monarch, a step too far.
Only a few years later, Mustafa al-Sibai (1915–1964), founder of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, would take that same idea and build a doctrine around it in his book Islamic Socialism (Ishtirakiyyat al-Islam).
From “Saving Palestine” to the age of coups
In the introduction to his book, al-Sibai writes that “the mission of the prophets and reformers, across all ages, has been to call for justice for the downtrodden, mercy for the poor and the lifting of social oppression.”
It was an attempt to speak to a political climate dominated by Arab nationalism and the left. He rejected the notion that socialism was a fleeting “fashion”, insisting it was a “human tendency” driven by the desire to escape “the horrors of social injustice and shameful class inequality that degrades human dignity.”
This was, by the Brotherhood’s standards, a bold intellectual move — and an effort to address the dilemmas facing the newly independent Syrian state. That state was born under the weight of two external questions that quickly entangled with fragile domestic politics.
The first came with the UN’s decision on 30 November 1947 to partition the British Mandate of Palestine. The new Arab states — Syria among them — felt obliged to send troops, forming what became known as the “Arab Salvation Army”.
The second came through the hyperactive role of foreign embassies and intelligence services, which soon began shaping Syrian politics. Their involvement helped usher in the era of military coups, beginning with Husni al-Za’im’s coup in March 1949 — the first of no fewer than nineteen.
Meanwhile, the rise of the Soviet Union proved alluring to post-colonial elites. Moscow offered both a geopolitical counterweight to the West and a tempting model — imagined or not — for “building socialism”. Al-Sibai was explicit: “Since at least 1948,” he wrote, “I have been calling for cooperation with the Soviet Union in political and economic fields… provided we preserve our beliefs and our neutrality.”
He was not alone. Other Islamist thinkers, among them Sayyid Qutb, were grappling with the same question: how to appropriate the appeal of socialism while insisting on an Islamic civilisational frame.
“A society that resonates with our beliefs”
Islamic Socialism was, at heart, an attempt to address the fierce battles over power, wealth and culture in the young republic. People were flocking to socialist ideologies, al-Sibai argued, because they saw them as the only path to justice. So why not guide them to “another path” towards the same goal — one rooted in their own faith?
By blending what he saw as socialism’s ethical core with Islamic principles, al-Sibai imagined “a solid, sound foundation for establishing a socialist society in our lands — one whose laws and institutions resonate with the feelings and beliefs of the nation.”
Fast-forward several decades, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Document on Living Together in Syria, issued on 18 October 2025, reads like a distant echo — and also an inversion. The word “socialism” has vanished; what remains is a shared semantic root, sharak (“sharing”), linking both ishtirakiyya (socialism) and al-‘aysh al-mushtarak (co-existence). It has been repurposed for a shattered society that must now learn how to coexist.
After the crimes committed under Baathist “socialism” — arguably the most abused of the party’s trinity of slogans (unity, freedom, socialism) — the Brotherhood has shifted from promising justice through Islamic socialism to speaking of a modus vivendi among “Syrian enemies”, to borrow the title of Fawaz Haddad’s well-known novel.
The document is steeped in the language consent: “seeking common understandings”, “agreeing on shared foundations”, “choosing curricula that build common values”, “launching initiatives to strengthen mutual understanding.”
Most striking is its call for a democratic state based on political pluralism, peaceful rotation of power, citizenship, rule of law, separation of powers, freedom of belief, guarantees for religious freedom, and the empowerment of women.
Two answers to two eras
Al-Sibai, both political leader and thinker, was trying in Islamic Socialism to bridge the divides of his time. His project was tailored to the age of independence, decolonisation, Soviet ascendancy, the founding of Israel and the rise of leftist movements. He aimed to reconcile the social aspirations of Syrians with their Islamic heritage — a heritage he believed communists had attacked and Western societies lacked.
The Living Together document is the Brotherhood’s attempt to answer the questions of this era: the wreckage of the Syrian revolution, the deepening sectarian and ethnic fractures, and the collapse of the old state. By embracing the core principles of the modern democratic state — party pluralism, elections, rule of law, freedom of expression — it offers both a self-correction and a proposed roadmap for Syria’s immediate crises.
Between the call for Islamic socialism and the plea for a shared civic compact lies the weight of the region’s transformations: from the confidence of mid-century Arab–Islamic revivalism to a movement forced to reckon with its own tragic trajectory, and a country broken socially, economically and culturally by predatory authoritarianism.
This intellectual shift also reflects the scale of the dilemmas Syrians now face, and the existential threat confronting the very idea of a Syrian nation. Syria is stumbling toward what might be called a second founding: after the bloody events on the coast and in Suwayda; amid the dominance of the SDF in the northeast; under constant Israeli pressure; and with the emergence of a local entity that sees sheltering under Israel’s umbrella as the answer to its fraught relationship with a state under perceived “Islamic” rule.
In that sense, the Brotherhood’s journey from Islamic Socialism to Living Together is more than a shift in rhetoric. It is a mirror held up to a country forced, once again, to ask itself what kind of state it wants — and whether Syrians, after everything, can still imagine a future shared under one roof.
