18.7 Muslim Brotherhood
(1928)
For the rest of this module, we will be exploring major Islamist extremist groups following this categorical progression:
foundation → hybrid groups → global jihad → regional insurgencies → state control → extreme culmination
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Ismailia, Egypt, by Hassan al-Banna. It became one of the most influential Islamist movements in the modern Muslim world by promoting the idea that Islam should govern not only personal faith, but also society, law, politics, and the state.
The Prophet Muhammad was a political leader, and so the Brotherhood did not invent the idea that Islam has political dimensions. What it did was revive, systematize, and modernize that idea in the context of the modern nation-state.
The group emerged during a period of European colonial pressure, social upheaval, and rising secular nationalism. Al-Banna argued that Muslim societies had weakened because they had drifted away from Islam and become too dependent on Western political and cultural models. In response, the Brotherhood called for Islamic revival through preaching, education, charity, social organization, and eventually political influence.
The Muslim Brotherhood was not originally the same kind of movement as Al-Qaeda or ISIS, which began as transnational terrorist organizations focused on mass-casualty attacks. Instead, it functioned as an Islamist ideological and organizational foundation that helped normalize the belief that Islam should serve as a complete social and political system.
To this day, the Brotherhood provides extensive, low-cost social services—including hospitals, schools, pharmacies, and aid for orphans/widows—which has gained them political legitimacy and community support in many countries. Services are provided by a mix of volunteer labor and paid professionals, organized under, or inspired by, its network.
They have influenced a wide range of movements, including some that pursued democratic elections and social reform, and others that embraced militancy and terrorism.
Most notably, Hamas emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987 during the First Intifada.
The Brotherhood has long presented itself differently in different settings. Publicly, it has often emphasized religion, morality, charity, education, and political participation. Critics, however, argue that Brotherhood-linked networks have sometimes used this public image to gain legitimacy while advancing a harder Islamist agenda underneath. This “double image” debate remains central to how the movement is discussed today.
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Another important point is that the Muslim Brotherhood is not itself a single, unified organization. Today, they have over 70 active branches and affiliates worldwide.
The group splintered over time, especially after the 2013 ousting of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi.
Morsi was Egypt’s first democratically elected president. He was sworn in as the President of Egypt on June 30, 2012, but after a year in office he faced huge protests, and the military removed him on July 3, 2013. The crackdown that followed shattered the Brotherhood’s position in Egypt, after which the Egyptian government designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
Since then, the Brotherhood has been increasingly fragmented, with older and younger factions differing over strategy, political participation, and the use of violence.
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Several countries have officially designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, including Russia (2003), Egypt (2013), Saudi Arabia (2014), the United Arab Emirates (2014), Bahrain (2014), and Austria (2021).
In November 2025, the White House ordered a process to consider designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist organizations. That same month, Texas announced a state-level designation affecting the Muslim Brotherhood, and in December 2025, Florida issued a similar state-level designation.
In January 2026, the U.S. government designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and designated the Egyptian and Jordanian chapters as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
The Muslim Brotherhood can therefore be understood as foundational, influential, contested, and not easily described in simple terms.
It is not identical to later jihadist terrorist organizations, but it helped build the ideological and organizational space in which later Islamist movements developed. It also remains politically relevant today because debates about its true nature—reformist, revolutionary, opportunistic, extremist, or some combination of these—continue to shape policy and public discussion around the world.
In section 18.8, we will examine Hamas (1987), a Palestinian Islamist movement that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood tradition but moved more directly into armed struggle and terrorism.