- Influential Islamist organization
- Ideological forebear of Hamas and al Qaeda
- Supports imposition of Shari’a law
- Approves of terrorism against Israel and the West
See also:
The Muslim Brotherhood's "General Strategic Goal" for North America
The Muslim Brotherhood "Project" for Israel and America
Hasan al-Banna Sayyid Qutb Yusuf al-Qaradawi
Founded in 1928 by the Egyptian schoolteacher/activist Hasan al-Banna (a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis), the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) -- a Sunni entity -- is one of the oldest, largest and most influential Islamist organizations in the world. While Egypt historically has been the center of the Brotherhood’s operations, the group today is active in more than 70 countries (some estimates range as high as 100+). Islam expert Robert Spencer has called MB "the parent organization of Hamas and al Qaeda." In 2003, Richard Clarke – the chief counterterrorism advisor on the U.S. National Security Council during both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations – told a Senate committee that Hamas, al Qaeda, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were all "descendants of the membership and ideology of the Muslim Brothers."
MB was established in accordance with al-Banna’s proclamation that Islam should be “given hegemony over all matters of life.” Toward that end, the Brotherhood seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate, or kingdom -- first spanning all of the present-day Muslim world, and eventually the entire globe. The organization further aspires to dismantle all non-Islamic governments wherever they currently exist, and to make Islamic Law (Shari’a) the sole basis of jurisprudence everywhere on earth. This purpose is encapsulated in the Brotherhood’s militant credo: “God is our objective, the Koran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, struggle [jihad] is our way, and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”
Consistent with the foregoing credo, MB since its founding has supported the use of armed struggle, or jihad, against non-Muslim “infidels.” As al-Banna himself wrote: "Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor evaded." Added al-Banna: "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet."
In the 1930s, the Brotherhood was largely an underground organization. Paramilitary in nature, it stockpiled weapons and operated clandestine camps that provided instruction in military and terrorist tactics. Partly due to its call for a return to traditionalist Islamic values, and partly because of the unpopularity of the Egyptian monarchy, MB's membership swelled throughout the Thirties and early Forties. By 1944, the Brotherhood in Egypt consisted of some 1,500 branches and as many as a half-million members. As of 1948, its membership may have exceeded 2 million. During the Forties, the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat fought alongside MB.
According to scholar Martin Kramer, the Muslim Brotherhood of that period had "a double identity":
"On one level, they operated openly, as a membership organization of social and political awakening. Banna preached moral revival, and the Muslim Brethren engaged in good works. On another level, however, the Muslim Brethren created a ‘secret apparatus’ that acquired weapons and trained adepts in their use. Some of its guns were deployed against the Zionists in Palestine in 1948, but the Muslim Brethren also resorted to violence in Egypt. They began to enforce their own moral teachings by intimidation, and they initiated attacks against Egypt’s Jews."
In December 1948, a Brotherhood member assassinated Egyptian prime minister Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi. Egypt's government retaliated by banishing MB from the country. Then, in February 1949, Hasan al-Banna was killed by government agents in Cairo. A harsh, official crackdown was initiated against the Brotherhood; thousands of its members were imprisoned and many others were confined to detention camps.
With Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolutionary seizure of power in Egypt in 1954, MB split into two factions. One, led by Hasan al-Hudaybi, favored working with Nasser's secular government in an effort to gradually move the country toward Islamic fundamentalism. A more radical faction, led by the writer and ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1909-1966), advocated armed revolution against corrupt (i.e., non-Islamist) regimes in the Middle East and, more broadly, against unbelievers in Western nations.
Qutb -- whose wordview distinguished sharply between “the Party of Allah and the Party of Satan,” -- declared that Egyptian society under the secular Nasser was contrary to authentic Islam. Asserting that the Prophet Mohammad himself would have rejected such a government, Qutb claimed that Muslims had both a right and an obligation to resist it. Qutb's writings -- which challenged the views of mainstream Sunni theologians, who extolled the Islamic tradition of deference to the state and ruler -- are now cited by many scholars as some of the first formulations of political Islam.
A corollary of Qutb’s fundamentalist critique of Egyptian society was his abiding contempt for the Western, especially the United States, which he regarded as spiritually vacant, decadent, idolatrous and fundamentally hostile to Islamic piety.
After MB member Abdul Munim Abdul Rauf tried to assassinate President Nasser in October 1954, the Brotherhood, which had recently received permission to resume its operations in Egypt, was outlawed again. Thus it receded as a political force.
MB re-emerged under Anwar Sadat, a sympathizer of the group, when he became Egypt's president in 1970. Taking advantage of the Brotherhood’s militant aversion to secularism, Sadat sponsored the organization against his communist and socialist political opposition. Later, however, MB joined the political Left in opposing Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel, believing the normalization of relations with the Jewish State to be a betrayal of Islam.
Sadat was assassinated in October 1981, after a fatwa (religious edict) calling for his death had been issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Islamic Group leader who despised Sadat for having struck a bargain with Israel. At that point, the Brotherhood began to chart a more mainstream course, and in 1987 it won many government seats in an “Islamic Alliance” with other parties. Although it remains officially banned in Egypt to this day, MB actively participates, with success, in the country's parliamentary elections, running candidates as “independents” under the slogan “Islam is the Solution.”
Continuing to embrace al-Banna’s belief that Islam is destined to eventually dominate all the world, MB today is global in its reach, wielding influence in almost every country with a Muslim population. Moreover, it maintains political parties in many Middle-Eastern and African countries, including Jordan, Bahrain, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and even Israel. Not only does the Brotherhood exist in Israel proper, but its Palestinian chapter created the terrorist organization Hamas, through which MB has supported terrorism against Israel ever since. Article II of the Hamas charter explicitly identifies Hamas as "one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine." In January 2006 Hamas defeated the rival Fatah party to win the Palestinian legislative elections, thereby becoming the first branch of MB to control an official government.
Outside of the Middle East, MB exercises a strong influence in Muslim communities throughout Europe. Among the more prominent Brotherhood organizations in the region are: the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations, the Muslim Association of Britain, the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland (IGD), and the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF).
MB also has expanded its operations to the United States. The first American chapter of the Brotherhood was formed in the early 1960s after hundreds of young Muslims came to the U.S. to study, particularly at large Midwestern universities such as Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Some of these students had been MB members in their homelands and now wanted to spread the group's ideology in America. MB's early activities in the U.S. centered around the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada, founded in 1963.
In the 1970s, the United States experienced a new influx of Muslim Brothers from the Middle East. At that time, MB launched a five-year plan that sought to make the period of 1975-1980 "an era of dedication for general activism." This phase was characterized by a growing emphasis on secrecy, as well as the development of a long-term strategy.
The Brotherhood initiated a second five-year plan for 1981-1985, with a focus on using Da'wa (proselytization) to increase MB's influence in organizations that were evolving among young Muslim immigrants.
In 1982, MB adopted a 14-page strategic plan known as "The Global Project for Palestine," which outlined a 12-point strategy to “establish an Islamic government on earth.” Departing from standard Islamist rhetoric (i.e., “Death to America! Death to Israel!”), this Project represented a flexible, multi-phased, long-term plan for a “cultural invasion” of the West. Calling for the utilization of multiple tactics -- including immigration, infiltration, surveillance, propaganda, protest, deception, political legitimacy, and outright terrorism -- the Project has served, since its drafting, as the Muslim Brotherhood “master plan.” For details about this Project, click here, here, and here.
In May 1991, MB issued to its ideological allies an explanatory memorandum on "the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America." Asserting that the Brotherhood's mission was to establish "an effective and ... stable Islamic Movement" on the continent, this document outlined a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" for achieving that objective. It stated that Muslims "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands ... so that ... God's religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions." Through stealth jihad, the Brotherhood would seek to impose Islamic values and customs on the West in piecemeal fashion -- gradually, incrementally gaining ever-greater influence over the culture. The memorandum listed some 29 likeminded "organizations of our friends" which sought to realize the same goal. These included:
At a 1995 conference (hosted by the Muslim Arab Youth Association) in Toledo, Ohio, MB spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi vowed that Islam would "conquer Europe [and] America -- not through sword but through Da’wa [proselytizing]." He also urged Muslims to "continue to fight the Jews" and "kill them."
In more recent years, the Brotherhood has attempted to forge a reputation as a moderate and reformist Islamic group that has renounced its violent past, in favor of participation in local and national politics. Some Islamist groups have condemned such engagement in secular politics as a heretical abandonment of jihad's mandates. In practice, however, MB's political involvement has not replaced, but rather has supplemented, its pursuit of jihad-by-the-sword.
Indeed, numerous statements by MB leaders offer compelling evidence of the group's undiminished militancy. For example, Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, head of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, has repeatedly pledged his support for the terrorism of Hamas and Hezbollah. Muhammad Mahdi Othman Akef, MB's Supreme Guide, expressed his support for suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq (during the Iraq War), "in order to expel the Zionists and the Americans."
Many other MB luminaries have likewise justified jihadist terrorism against Israel and the United States. Yusuf al-Qaradawi has written: "There is no dialogue between them [the Jews] and us, other than in one language -- the language of the sword and force." Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, was a member of the Brotherhood. Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian MB preacher, was a mentor to al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden. And bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a Brotherhood member as a young man, though he later broke with the group because of its willingness to participate in political elections. In 2006, Rajab Hilal Hamida, a Muslim Brotherhood member serving in Egypt's parliament, said:
"From my point of view, bin Ladin, al-Zawahiri and [the late radical Islamist] al-Zarqawi are not terrorists in the sense accepted by some. I support all their activities, since they are a thorn in the side of the Americans and the Zionists."
In January 2011, as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's hold on power was threatened by massive swarms of protesters rioting in the streets to express their opposition to his government, there was much speculation that the Muslim Brotherhood -- which was still banned in Egypt -- stood a strong chance of filling the power vacuum in the event of Mubarak's downfall. In a television interview, MB deputy leader Rashad al-Bayoumi declared:
"After President Mubarak steps down and a provisional government is formed, there is a need to dissolve the [1979] peace treaty with Israel."
In early February, Muhammad Ghannem, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, told the Iranian news network Al-Alam that “the people [of Egypt] should be prepared for war against Israel,” emphasizing that “the Egyptian people are prepared for anything to get rid of this regime.” That objective was entirely consistent with MB Supreme Guide Muhammad Mahdi Othman Akef's 2007 assertion that his organization had never recognized Israel and never would: “Our lexicon does not include anything called 'Israel.' The [only thing] we acknowledge is the existence of Zionist gangs that have occupied Arab lands and deported the residents. If they want to live among us, it will have to be as [residents of] Palestine.”