The religio-political Muslim Brotherhood (Arabic: Al-ikhwan Al-muslimun), founded in 1928 at Isma'iliyah, Egypt, by Hassan al-Banna', advocates a return to the Qur'an and the Hadith as guidelines for a healthy, modern Islamic society.

The brotherhood will spread rapidly throughout Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and North Africa.

The Muslim Brotherhood begins to politicize its outlook after 1938, demanding purity of the Islamic world and rejecting westernization, secularization, and modernization.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has organized a terrorist arm in Egypt, poses a threat to the monarchy and the ruling Wafd Party when the Egyptian government seems to weaken in the mid-1940s.

British bulldozers and Centurion tanks had demolished fifty Egyptian mud houses to open a road to a water supply for the British army in December 1951.

This incident and one that follows on January 25 provoke intense Egyptian anger.

On January 25, 1952, the British attack an Egyptian police barracks at Ismailiya (Al Ismailiyah) when its occupants refuse to surrender to British troops.

Fifty Egyptians are killed and one hundred wounded.