Eurasia Press & News
The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Islamist movement dedicated to the remaking of society and government according to the dictates of Islamic law, or sharia. Founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher who famously asserted that “Islam is the solution,” the Brotherhood quickly became influential among Egypt’s poor by providing educational and health services alongside a steady diet of Islamist teachings. By the middle of the 20th century, it had established branches and affiliates across the Arab world. While not formally functioning as either a political party or an international organization, the Brotherhood has shaped Muslim communities across the Islamic world and beyond by matching its rigid Islamist ideology with tactical flexibility. In some contexts, it engages in violence and terrorism. In others, it participates in the political process, even competing in elections, although its dedication to democratic government remains suspect.
- Sayyid Qutb, one of the movement’s key ideologues, helped shift the Brotherhood in a more radical and violent direction.
Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian educator whose writing remains a staple of the Brotherhood canon, even among those who reject his calls for violence. In 1948, Qutb spent two years in the United States to learn about the American educational system and returned to Egypt with a reinforced loathing of the West’s soullessness and materialism. He cited a church dance as an illustration of America’s “animal-like” mixing of genders and denounced modern societies as living in “jahiliyya” — a state of pre-Islamic ignorance. He even concluded that Muslim nations had succumbed to jahiliyya and that a revolutionary Islamic vanguard would have to wage jihad to restore Islam within the Muslim world. This warrant for violence against other Muslims was one of Qutb’s most radical innovations, laying the groundwork for generations of extremists, including al-Qaeda. Qutb would spend more than a decade in prison before his execution in 1966.
- The Brotherhood’s worldview is hostile to moderate Muslims, religious minorities, women, LGBTQ, and liberal democratic values.
The Muslim Brotherhood sees itself as the embodiment of Islam itself — a vanguard of the Muslim society it seeks to establish. In its view, its path is the only straight path, and any deviation is a spiritual deviation. It has engineered its own insular society, with its own values and worldview that stands in opposition to national identity and more inclusive and pluralistic Muslim identities. The Brotherhood is hostile toward moderate Muslims — who reject rigid binaries and seek a faith lived through integration, not isolation. For the Brotherhood, moderation is a threat to its claim of religious monopoly. Though the Brotherhood often uses the language of social justice, its core ideology is exclusionary. It seeks to enforce patriarchal roles and opposes gender equality in the public sphere, restricting the participation of women in education and the workforce. The Brotherhood also legitimizes the violence of husbands towards wives; in 2013, it protested a UN declaration calling for an end to violence against women, saying, “This declaration, if ratified, would lead to the complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries.” The Brotherhood also opposes LGBTQ rights, purposefully misrepresenting homosexuality as a moral and social illness and encouraging violence particularly towards gay men. Brotherhood rhetoric on religious minorities emanates from its theological supremacism, with non-Muslims regarded as, at best, second-class citizens under a future Islamic order.
- Antisemitism is woven deeply into the Muslim Brotherhood’s worldview.
Brotherhood ideology integrates Islamic and European forms of antisemitism to blame the state of the world on Jewish perfidy. According to Sayyid Qutb, the Jews became undeserving of their theological status as ahl al-kitab (“People of the Book”). In his book Our Struggle With The Jews, he wrote “Everywhere the Jews have been, they have committed unprecedented abominations,” accusing “the agents of Zionism today” of seeking “the destruction of Islam at the first auspicious opportunity.” The Brotherhood further draws upon European influences, particularly “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabrication of the Russian Tsarist secret police first published in 1903, which falsely claims to expose a global Jewish conspiracy.
The Brotherhood rejected the idea of Jewish statehood on theological grounds well before the establishment of the State of Israel. Consequently, there is little prospect of Brotherhood support for a lasting, authentic peace — as opposed to tactical ceasefires and truces — with Israel as a Jewish body politic.
- Hamas is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Starting in the early 1970s, Muslim Brotherhood leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin established a network of mosques and social services in Gaza. He then cofounded Hamas in 1987, during the First Intifada, or “uprising,” against Israel. Hamas’s suicide bombings and other attacks against Israelis helped derail the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the mid-1990s. Through additional suicide bombings, shootings, and other attacks, Hamas killed hundreds of Israelis during the Second Intifada, which lasted from 2000 to 2005. The group then won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating the corrupt and divided Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2007, Hamas violently seized the Gaza Strip. Its rule has been marked by repression, corruption, and four wars with Israel provoked by its relentless attacks on the Jewish state in 2008-09, 2014, 2021, and 2023. Hamas launched the current war with its massacre in Israel of more than 1,200 people and abduction of over 250 on October 7, 2023, amid atrocities that included mutilation and systematic rape.
- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have long banned the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to the stability of their regimes.
A concern for stability and power has led several Arab governments to ban the Brotherhood. With its tendency to declare that even devout Muslim leaders have betrayed the faith, the Brotherhood poses a risk to those inside as well as outside Islam. The group has also demonstrated the patience necessary to spend decades building fervent grassroots support that authoritarian rulers often lack.
In Egypt, after the fall of the Hosni Mubarak regime in 2011, the Brotherhood prevailed in both presidential and parliamentary elections, yet the increasingly autocratic conduct of President Mohammed Morsi provoked a mass movement against the Brotherhood. The tensions culminated in a military coup that entailed massacres of Morsi supporters and the proscription of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
Saudi Arabia designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in March 2014, with the Emirates following in November. In both countries, religious institutions have played a central role in framing the Brotherhood not just as a political threat but also as a religious deviation. Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti declared the group a “terrorist organization that does not represent the true path of Islam, pursues partisan goals, hides behind religion, and engages in actions that contradict it — sowing division, inciting strife, and committing violence and terrorism.”
- Qatar is a leading supporter and exporter of Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
Qatar’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood dates to the 1950s when Doha welcomed the movement inside its borders. Qatar’s local Muslim Brotherhood chapter disbanded in 1999, but Doha directed its support to other branches. For example, Qatar pumped approximately $8 billion into Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, which assumed power in 2012 under the leadership of Mohammed Morsi. After Morsi’s ouster in 2013, Qatar offered sanctuary to Egyptian Brotherhood members and to the movement’s de facto spiritual leader, the late Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Meanwhile, Doha threw its weight behind other Muslim Brotherhood branches during the Arab Spring, including in Tunisia and Libya. Qatar is likewise a patron of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian offshoot. Qatar has provided Hamas-run Gaza with over $1 billion while hosting Hamas’s political office and sheltering its leaders. The Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Media Network promotes Muslim Brotherhood ideology to audiences around the world.
- Turkey’s president is a champion of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a long-time champion of the Brotherhood and provided a base of operations for its leaders following the fall of Mohammed Morsi’s regime in Egypt in 2013. After the October 7 massacre, Erdogan intensified his public support for Hamas, refused to condemn its atrocities, and vociferously denied the organization’s terrorist nature. For years, Turkey has provided sanctuary to Hamas leaders and fostered a permissive environment for terror financing.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) is the Turkish arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, assisting the network’s establishment of television and radio channels, foundations, schools, and businesses throughout Turkey. The AKP supported Morsi’s election campaign in Egypt in 2012 and organized numerous public demonstrations inside Turkey to protest Morsi’s ouster by Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in 2013. The AKP has inspired the formation of other ideologically congruent parties in the Middle East, including in Libya. Along with Qatar, Turkey is the main state advocate for the Brotherhood.
- The Muslim Brotherhood’s tactics are diverse and adaptable, shifting to fit the local political landscape it inhabits.
The Brotherhood adapts to survive, presenting itself as a local actor while retaining transnational Islamist ambitions. In some contexts, such as Syria in the 1970s and 1980s, it pursues violent revolution. In other cases, it accepts significant restraints on its pursuit of Islamist government.
In Tunisia, the Ennahda Movement, inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, shed its Islamist label after the Arab popular uprisings that emerged in 2010, embracing coalition politics, secular allies, and constitutional protections for civil liberties. Morocco’s Justice and Development Party took a similar path, avoiding direct confrontation with the monarchy while calling for accountability rooted in the Islamic values of justice and solidarity. In Jordan, the Islamic Action Front claimed to reject violence and emerged in 2024 as the largest bloc in parliament. Yet in April 2025, authorities exposed a Brotherhood network planning terror attacks, underscoring the tactical nature of the movement’s professions of moderation.
Since its early days, the Muslim Brotherhood has deflected blame for violence committed by its members or affiliates. When its Egyptian branch created a secret armed wing that carried out assassinations — including the 1948 killing of Prime Minister Mahmoud El-Nokrashy — founder Hassan al-Banna responded to public outrage with a now famous line: “These are neither brothers nor Muslims.” That phrase became the Brotherhood’s go-to escape hatch, repeated whenever bloodshed pointed back to its ranks.
- Europe is the Muslim Brotherhood’s “domain of preaching.”
From the 1950s, when Muslims from the Middle East and Asia began emigrating en masse to Europe, the Brotherhood began focusing on the possibilities for Islamizing the West. Adjusting the traditional Islamist view of international relations that divides the world between a dar al-Islam (“domain of Islam”) and a dar al-harb (“domain of war”), Brotherhood ideologues like Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi determined that Europe — where sharia law does not prevail, but where Muslims are free to practice their faith — constituted a dar al-dawa (“domain of preaching”). Following the 2001 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in the United States, a “Red-Green Alliance” between Islamists and the far left began to coalesce in multiple European countries. The Brotherhood’s implacable anti-Communist ideology did not prevent Muslim communal organizations in Europe from joining with far-left groups to combat both “imperialism” and “Zionism.” A June 2025 report from the French interior ministry warned that organizations with close ties to the Brotherhood were attempting to influence European Union institutions through “significant lobbying activities,” noting that funding for these groups came from Qatar and Kuwait.
- The Muslim Brotherhood has had a deep influence on Iran’s clerical regime.
Even though the Brotherhood belongs to the Sunni branch of Islam and Tehran’s clerical regime belongs to the Shiite branch, the former has left a deep imprint on the latter. In the 1950s, translations into Persian of key Brotherhood texts began to be published in Iran, including many by Sayyid Qutb. In 1966, future Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei personally translated one of Qutb’s books, The Future in the Realm of Islam. Later, Khamenei would explain that he undertook the translation because Iran’s “newly emerged Islamic movement … had a pressing need for codified ideological fundamentals.” After the 1979 revolution in Iran, printing houses continued to churn out dozens of texts by Qutb and other Brotherhood authors. The Tehran regime also put Qutb’s portrait on a postage stamp. Like the Iranian Shiite revolutionaries, Qutb advocated taking power in the name of Islam, even if it required inflicting violence on others who professed to be faithful Muslims.
