All Western countries are facing difficult questions about Islam. One of the trickiest concerns so-called “non-violent extremists:” should Western governments seek to engage with political Islamists who eschew terrorism to counter violent jihadists like al-Qaeda and Islamic State, or is this a dangerous mistake?
The main focus for this debate has been the controversy over how to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential modern Islamist organization. This diffuse global network, whose broad aim is to promote Sharia-based government and Islamic values, makes enthusiastic use of democratic institutions wherever they exist to promote its goals. But Muslim-majority countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, in particular, have put pressure on their Western allies to ban the Brotherhood as an extremist organization with links to terrorism, and hence to join their front against Qatar, the Brotherhood’s main sponsor in the Gulf.
Right-wing politicians in the United States and Britain don’t seem quite able to make up their minds about this issue. Britain’s Conservative Party, whose fourteen-year tenure in office ended this month, appeared to be taking steps in the direction of such a ban, only to reverse course. A government inquiry into the Brotherhood conducted in 2015 concluded that it was not a terrorist organization like al Qaeda but could serve as a gateway to violence, and that its claim to be a firewall against violent extremism was implausible. However, a parliamentary committee convened a year later concluded that the first study had gone too far in its condemnation of the Brotherhood, something which the British government appeared to concede in its response to their findings. In particular, it acknowledged that the parliamentarians were correct to note that “the vast majority of political Islamists are not engaged in violence.”
In the US, segments of the Right have long been keen to designate the Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) under the so-called “material support” statute, and during Donald Trump’s first administration, talk of doing so certainly intensified. Senator Ted Cruz reintroduced a bill that if passed would have required the Secretary of State to report to Congress on whether it met the criteria for being so designated. There were also press reports that, after a request from President El-Sisi of Egypt, Trump was contemplating an executive order that “would direct the secretary of state to determine whether to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization.” But the terror designation, which could well have led to the banning or prosecution of American Muslim groups close to the Brotherhood, never actually happened. Despite a heavy roster of Islamism hawks like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton on his national security staff, Trump ultimately refrained from issuing the order, although it was never categorically ruled out.
This leaves the situation ahead of a prospective second Trump Administration unsettled. It is with this in mind that I’ve written this post as a background primer with two questions in mind: Who are the Muslim Brotherhood? And how should we deal with them: repress them as extremists, engage with them as roadblocks against jihadism, or isolate them as undesirables who we’re nonetheless obliged to tolerate? I’ll address the first question in this post and the second in the next.
Who are the Muslim Brotherhood?
The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna. It advocates the adoption of Islam as a means to both personal self-improvement and broader social reform. Initially a religious and welfare organization, the group quickly adopted a political agenda. Its self-professed aim is the establishment of a state ruled by shari’a (or Islamic) law, ultimately united with others under a caliphate, which became the basic ideological template for all subsequent Islamist movements. al-Banna himself offered a five-fold formulation of its ethos that has remained the motto of the Brotherhood ever since:
Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
Implicit in this formation is a rejection of the contemporary political arrangements of his native Egypt, then under British administration. As far as al-Banna was concerned, contemporary Islam had lost its prestige and dominance precisely because most Muslims had been corrupted by Western influences. The very idea of the nation state he regarded as an illegitimate form of government of alien origin that was at odds with the imperial and ultimately global ideals of Muslim governance. He also rejected the secularizing tendencies of modernity, which, in his view, violated a proper Muslim way of life, which should be governed in all its facets by the Qur’an and the Sunnah: as the group’s most famous slogan puts this totalizing ambition, “Islam is the solution.” His ultimate goal was an Islamic, not a national state, and one which would eventually unite all the Muslims.
In accord with this global vision, al-Banna sought to establish branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in other countries. He succeeded. Soon after it was founded, the group spread beyond the confines of Egypt, establishing branches in nearly every country in the Arab world. In addition, it also provided the ideological basis for a number of other major Islamist movements outside the Arab world, especially the Pakistan-based group Jama’at-i Islami.
By the 1950s, the secular nationalist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt came to view the political Islam of the Brotherhood as a threat to the security of the Egyptian state, and members of the group were imprisoned and, in some cases, tortured. In the decades that followed, governments in other countries where the movement had established branches, including Iraq, Tunisia, and Syria, began their own crackdowns on them, prompting many Brothers (Ikhwan) to seek refuge in Europe, especially in the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland.
By the 1980s, many of the émigrés who had taken the Muslim Brotherhood to Europe realized that they would not be returning to their countries of origin any time soon. They began to create permanent organizations inspired by Islamist ideology – but with priorities adapted for new generations of Muslims born and raised in the West. This gave rise to national affiliates like the Muslim Association of Britain (est. 1997), the Union des Organizations Islamiques de France (est. 1983), and the Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland (est. 1982).
The Brotherhood also began operating in the U.S. in the 1960s after the arrival of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia. By the late 1970s it became clear that many of them were not returning to their often repressive homelands either. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Saudis intensified their focus on American Muslims, and as more funds and Islamic immigrants flowed into the country a variety of Brotherhood affiliated organizations like the Muslim Students Association (est. 1963), the North American Islamic Trust (est. 1973) and the Islamic Society of North America (est. 1981) sprang up. The best known of them is probably the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was set up following a 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and activists to discuss propaganda efforts against the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians. Its stated mission is to “enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.”
Those objectives sound innocuous enough, but advocates of repressing the Brotherhood argue that they hide sinister objectives and connections behind deceptively anodyne language in public.
