Homegrown Islamism: The Inconsequence of the Muslim Brotherhood

In recent years, Western policymakers have conflated the Muslim Brotherhood with other Islamist movements and continue today to overstate its significance. Meanwhile, more dangerous but unscrutinized Islamist movements operate across Europe and North America, flourishing in the background.

In the United States, the failure of government and analysts to understand today’s very different radical landscape has led to imprecise legislation, misdirected law enforcement priorities and a growing array of unchallenged Islamist threats.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was once a powerful global force. Its members, as middle-class migrants and exiles from Egypt, inspired and established branches and offshoots across the globe, including in the West.

Such was the pace of growth that by the early 1980s, Egyptian Brotherhood leadership relied on a committee named the International Organization to bind increasingly unruly foreign branches to the interests of the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide.

But the International Organization never secured the control it wanted. Its influence weakened as regional branches rejected Cairo’s grip. The Kuwaiti Brotherhood left after the International Organization backed Saddam’s invasion. In North Africa, branches produced their own Islamist thinkers with their own agendas. In Sudan, for instance, Hassan al-Turabi adapted Muslim Brotherhood ideas into a distinctly Sudanese Islamist movement, increasingly uninterested in the Supreme Guide’s ideas.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the dissent worsened. Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Europe accused the Supreme Guide’s office of “marginalizing” Brotherhood members outside of Egypt. Iraqi and Algerian Brotherhood leaders elected to pursue political power without consulting the International Organization.

Intra-branch politics were complicated, with some local activists fearing the influence of Brotherhood spin-offs such as Hamas. In Jordan, former senior Muslim Brotherhood figure Nael Masalha describes Hamas not as a loyal ally of the local Brotherhood branch, but “an organic and independent organization,” which worked to “penetrate and consequently exert control over all aspects of the Jordanian Brotherhood,” leading to a political crisis within the movement. Eventually, the Jordanian Brotherhood split into four competing components.

Following decades of decline, after the ouster of the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt in 2013, the Egyptian Brotherhood completely ruptured. Dissenting Brotherhood leaders established competing leadership groups in Doha, Istanbul and London. Further splinter groups have more recently emerged from those factions, such as Maydan, self-described “New Islamists,” whose Egyptian founders criticize Brotherhood activists as “weak, fragmented, lacking a clear vision,” while promising a new Islamist movement to serve as a home for a broader array of Islamist voices.

With the founding Egyptian Brotherhood in disarray, other branches sought a clean break. The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood explicitly ended formal ties with the Egyptian movement, while the Tunisia’s Ennahda Party began to distance itself from its Brotherhood links, which Ennahda’s supporters now describe as “merely symbolic.”

London did become a home for quite a few exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood operatives, including the disputed general guide, Ibrahim Mounir. Mounir, who once led the Brotherhood’s International Organization, died in 2022. Tellingly, the death of the appointed leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was largely ignored by Islamists across Europe and North America, including by leaders of Western Islamist organizations that Brotherhood-trained Islamists founded half a century ago.

Today, components of the movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood resemble the remnants of a dissolved franchise network. A few sporadic remaining institutions hang on, increasingly resembling old Blockbuster stores, some still sporting a familiar name or insignia, but with little shared leadership, structure, or messaging.

Analysts such as Steven Merley, editor of the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch, warn not to underestimate the “degree of global networking and deception employed by the worldwide networks of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Such claims are understandable, given the Egyptian Brotherhood’s tendency towards secrecy and conspiracy.

But claimants consistently fail to offer evidence of this theorized global intrigue, in which Islamist operatives from New York and London to Baghdad and Karachi ostensibly coordinate or take orders and direction from a unified central authority.

Too many counter-Islamist analysts credit the Brotherhood with having universally shaped both violent and nonviolent Islamist movements around the world over the past century. For all the Brotherhood’s influence, its historical image is not entirely supported by the facts.

The Brotherhood never established branches in South Asia or South-East Asia, where twice as many Muslims live as in the Middle East. Indeed, intellectually, it was Abul A‘la Maududi, the founder of South Asia’s most prominent Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami, who influenced the Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb, and not the other way round.

For every Al-Qaeda leader who started off as a Brotherhood member, there is a Salafi-jihadist who rejects the Brotherhood theologically and politically. And in the West, more jihadists have emerged from the ranks of other international movements such as Tablighi Jamaat than the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the very least, the array of ideological forces that shape Islamism around the globe is complex. In an effort to understand the Islamist politics of Muslim communities in just the United States, over the past seven years, the Middle East Forum has mapped the ideology and finances of America’s Muslim institutions and networks, building a database of 8,000 Muslim organizations and over 60,000 intra-Islamist financial transactions (along with millions of other additional datapoints), all in an effort to identify the scale of Islamist influence and uncover Muslim counter-Islamist allies.

Among Islamist institutions (which excludes radical black nationalist Muslims such as the Nation of Islam) we count eight major networks, all of which further split into multiple sub-networks.

• Salafis
• Deobandis
• Barelvis
• Qutbists
• Jamaat-e-Islami
• Turkish State Islamism
• Qatari State Islamism
• Khomeinists

[Read: A Guide to American Islamism, which breaks down the networks listed above]

The data affords some clear analyses. Little evidence today suggests that American Muslim organizations established by Muslim Brotherhood supporters from the 1960s onwards remain under the command of the Muslim Brotherhood, or what remains of it.

Decades of entanglement with non-Muslim politics, the public exposure of Muslim Brotherhood operatives by federal prosecutors two decades ago, as well as competition with dozens of other imported and domestic Islamist movements from other parts of the world, have diluted and morphed Muslim Brotherhood Islamism in North America into something definitively homegrown, far removed from its Cairene roots.

Notwithstanding the collapse of the Brotherhood’s command structure, we should certainly not ignore the ideological legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood, even if the Brotherhood no longer controls the activities and direction of Western Islamist networks.

Several American Islamist organizations still closely follow the writings of Brotherhood ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb. A few organizations, such as the Muslim Youth of North America or the Muslim American Society still appear, to some extent, to follow the recruitment practices and training regimens of the Brotherhood. Distinctly Brotherhood terms such as “tarbiyah,” for instance, underpin new generation of Western Islamist schooling and other educational initiatives.

But these groups do all this in the pursuit of a distinctly American Islamism, whose discordant politics more closely resemble America’s left-right divide than the contentions of a tired Egyptian franchise.

Such Western groups should no longer be labeled the Muslim Brotherhood, but Qutbists: Western Islamists partially inspired by the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ideology of Sayyid Qutb, but who operate under a distinctly Western framework.

The power and influence of American Qutbist networks, even if now independent of Muslim Brotherhood control, should not be underestimated. Leading Qutbist institutions, some of which subsidize and support overseas terror groups such as Hamas, move billions of dollars of revenue through a broad array of nonprofit institutions across the United States, serving to shape Western Islamism ideologically and financially.

Numerically, however, our data indicates that the Qutbists do not control the actual mosques of American Islam. America’s mosques are partly spread between the Islamist networks listed above, with the rest controlled by an array of Muslim institutions and communities drawn from different schools of thought and theology, cultures and diasporas. From close analysis, we estimate the proportion of America’s mosques under any Islamist movement’s direct and active control to be about a third.

In contrast to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the independent terrorist organization Hamas, which reportedly split from Brotherhood leadership in Jordan around 2008, continues to operate coordinated networks of supporters across the globe, including in the West.

Hamas has also been able to count on prominent Islamists in the United States and Western Europe, particularly from Qutbist networks, to serve as advocates and fundraisers for some of the terror group’s interests. In particular, Hamas has long relied on an array of Western Islamist charities to support the terror group’s social work in Gaza, even establishing an umbrella organization named the Union of Good to manage these charities.

In London, Hamas also appears to utilize an accountancy firm and a network of charities and companies. Members of this network have gone on to serve on Hamas’s political bureau. In D.C, senior Hamas officials established the United Association for Studies and Research, before later returning to Gaza to assist the Hamas terror regime. More recently, Illinois nonprofits such as the Reach Education Fund and other nonprofits appear to support and align with Hamas openly.

In recent years, Hamas has not, however, been able to count on Qutbist networks in the West to provide grassroots support, with surviving Hamas leaders instead calling for more protests from leftist students on American university campuses.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has also operated a small, insular but cohesive collection of institutions and activists in the West, held together by Syrian diasporic organization against the recently-deposed Assad regime, and which has exerted no ideological influence over American Islamism more broadly.

Finally, a few exiles from Egypt’s short-lived regime under President Morsi operate one-man offices in London and New York, but they exert little influence.

These are the exceptions, however, that underscore the broader conclusion of the global Muslim Brotherhood’s increasing irrelevance in the West.

That there is political support in the West for action against the Muslim Brotherhood is the reasonable corollary of decades of anti-American, anti-Jewish and totalitarian ideals advanced by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. Multiple branches of the Brotherhood, both when it was functional and since the movement’s rupture, having been indelibly linked to violence and terror.

However, the Brotherhood is now a belabored and outdated name within Western policy circles partly because of a failure to understand the real facts of the Islamist threat. Over the past two decades, too many analysts and journalists have used the name “Muslim Brotherhood” as a blanket reference for Islamists.

Both opponents and apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood repeat this error. In 2011, National Intelligence Director James Clapper stated, erroneously, “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’...is an umbrella term for a variety of movements.”

University of London academic Matthew Nelson, in contrast, has more sensibly urged policymakers to focus instead of South Asian Islamist movements, noting: “Too often, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is treated as an analytical bench-mark for those with an interest in political Islam. This must be avoided.”

By failing to separate Islamism into its actual constituent movements, analysts and policymakers have exaggerated the influence of the Brotherhood, while allowing a dozen other more dangerous Islamist sects to flourish in the background.

To this day, too many members of law enforcement, counter-terror analysts and policymakers do not know the actual names of the major Islamist movements operating in the United States.

For example, since NATO’s invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, at no point did the federal government, nor the legislature, seek to investigate or understand South Asia’s Deobandi movement, from which the Taliban emerged, despite twenty years of war and terrorism. In the United States, Deobandis operate extensive networks of madrassas and seminaries across the country, some of which are steadfastly extreme, receive federal grants, and are training new generations of young Muslims. Since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Deobandi supporters of the Taliban in America today openly organize and plan for the Taliban regime’s success through the 501(c) nonprofit system.

Defining Islamist threats accurately and comprehensively allows for smarter and more effective responses by policymakers, law enforcement, and counter-extremism and moderate Muslim activists. In contrast to the vagueness of the collapsed Muslim Brotherhood brand, tangible Islamist movements, which operate through international leadership and hierarchy, can be the subject of explicit designations, sanctions and law enforcement investigations.

Other undesignated Islamist movements operating in the West certainly present arguably more important priorities for designation and sanctions. Dawat-e-Islami, for instance, is a radical Barelvi organization whose members and supporters have carried out acts of terror across the globe, including a stabbing attack outside the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020. Dawat-e-Islami operates a dozen institutions in the United States, which work to advance the movements theocratic worldview, and are among the wealthiest Islamist mosques in America.

In 2016, Tanveer Ahmed, a Dawat-e-Islami member, murdered Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim, in the Scottish city of Glasgow. At a Barelvi mosque in Maryland, a New Jersey imam celebrated Ahmed, along with other convicted murderers, as “our warrior.”

Ahmed was also a member of Khatme Nubuwwat, another violent but undesignated international organization whose sole purpose is to exterminate Ahmadiyyah Muslims. Khatme Nubuwwat operates institutions across Virginia and California.

Because of its involvement with terrorist operations in Bangladesh and Kashmir, there is also a good case for the designation of Jamaat-e-Islami, the South Asian counterpart to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the United States, where the plurality of Muslims are South Asian, Jamaat-e-Islami appears to command more direct grassroots support from American Muslims than the Brotherhood ever did.

And it’s not just Sunni Islamists. South Asian Khomeinists such as Tehreek-e-Jafaria openly raise funds and operate 501(c) organizations in the United States, seemingly to benefit Hezbollah.

Among lawful Islamist networks, meanwhile, modernist Salafis in the United States are building significant political infrastructure, while establishing powerful new groups such as Ummatics, which is dedicated to exploring the development of a caliphate, in collaboration with foreign Islamist regimes.

As mainstream politicians across Europe now acknowledge, Islamism does not just present an immediate violent risk, but a long-term ideological menace as well. But it is only by understanding and defining this menace that its proponents can be battled.

There are real and present Islamist threats across America, but the Muslim Brotherhood is no longer one of those threats.

First, to avoid the previous over-focus on impalpable brands such as the Brotherhood, the full array of tangible Islamist networks must be fully researched and understood, not just by policymakers in D.C, but by law enforcement agencies and other federal departments, to ensure that the right people are prosecuted, and the wrong people never receive federal monies. Reformist Muslim allies, until now ignored by both Democratic and Republican administrations, can assist with this work.

Second, in general, counter-terrorism and counter-extremism efforts must avoid loose references to general ideological movements. Instead, we must focus on tangible networks of organizations that can be investigated, defunded and prosecuted.

Third, as the cases of Jamaat-e-Islami, Dawat-e-Islami, Khatme Nubbwat, Tablighi Jamaat, Tehreek-e-Jafaria and other Islamist groups illustrate, movements linked to violence overseas are organizing and fundraising on American soil. All should be considered for designation.

Finally, policymakers should lift the federal moratorium on the prosecution of domestic Hamas operatives and supporters. Around 2008, the federal government shut down efforts to monitor and prosecute Hamas networks in the United States, with intelligence officials referring to Hamas and Qutbist operatives as “protected sources” in the battle against Salafi-jihadist groups such as the Al-Qaeda.

Recently, domestic counter-Hamas efforts have been largely placed on countering the ostensible “red-green alliance” of far-Left and Islamist activists on university campuses. Suppressing student radicalism is Sisyphean task and of questionable long-term usefulness. A better use of government’s time would be to shut down active Hamas terror finance networks operating throughout the 501(c) nonprofit system. Almost two years since the October 7 attacks, there is still no sign of any federal effort to prosecute financial supporters of Hamas operating in the United States, despite multiple overt violations of material support laws.

One of the key lessons of the 9/11 attacks was the failure of the security establishment to keep tabs on the politics of the Muslim world, and the severity and force of the Islamist threat.

The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004 condemned government’s “failure of imagination.” Over two decades later, Islamists around the world benefit from governments’ failure of comprehension: overfocus on the overt violence of ISIS and Al-Qaeda and the familiar but redundant Muslim Brotherhood. Policymakers have been unable, or unwilling, to accept a far broader problem.