“I have a brother. He’s Muslim. And he and I have a Muslim Brotherhood,” joked Abdul El-Sayed during an interview. That is the extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood—which was never really a threat to Western countries—has disintegrated since the 2013 coup against President Morsi. The rest is propaganda: a very expensive, well-orchestrated campaign.
So what is the Muslim Brotherhood, really? Founded in Egypt in 1928 by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna and a group of followers, the organization was an answer to two Western-initiated phenomena: first, colonization (Egypt had only achieved partial independence from Britain in 1922), and second, nationalism.
Al-Banna’s ideas turned Islam into an ideology competing with others like socialism and nationalism. Inadvertently, by trying to prove Islam’s superiority over rival ideologies, he turned it into something very similar. He upheld a form of Muslim nationalism—taking the nation-state structure for granted and attaching a Muslim label to it.
Al-Banna’s vision is not bound to a single territory; his Muslim nationalism claims to connect believers horizontally to one another and vertically to God. Yet it remains a form of Arab nationalism in disguise, explicitly granting Arabs a leading role. He envisioned an Islamic nation-state to which all Muslims could belong—so long as they accepted Arab superiority.
On the surface, this sounds like an ambition to absorb Muslims worldwide and threaten Western political systems. Nothing could be further from reality. Al-Banna and his followers conceived of an Islamic nation-state within the boundaries of Muslim-majority, primarily Arab, countries. They adapted nationalist concepts to an Islam-inspired ideology to fend off secular capitalist, socialist, and communist influences.
Within this framework, they didn’t envisioned a global Islamic state, nor did they have any appetite to export their model to the West. They simply wanted a Muslim nation-state respected among the world’s other nation-states. Because they accepted the nation-state as the theoretical vessel of the people’s will, establishing an Islamic state inside a non-Muslim-majority country would be a contradiction in terms.
Later thinkers like Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb pushed al-Banna’s ideas toward more totalitarian territory. Yet their brand of Muslim totalitarianism functioned much like capitalism, communism, or socialism: it took the modern state for granted, sought to capture it to direct its goals and defined the political spectrum. Mawdudi made this explicit—much like Khomeini in Iran—by framing the state as a theological necessity and openly comparing his vision to other totalitarian ideologies. Crucially, even this later formulation contained no blueprint for expanding into or taking over non-Muslim-majority countries. Current accusations that the Brotherhood is trying to “take over” Western institutions from within are a misportrayal of its ideology.
Where the Brotherhood actually clashed was with rival visions of the state inside the Arab world—most notably in Egypt. After the 1952 revolution deposed King Faruq, the military took power with a pan-Arabist, socialist agenda fundamentally opposed to the Brotherhood’s worldview.
It didn’t start that way. Relations between the military and the Brotherhood were initially friendly, a welcome change from the king who had banned them. But once it became clear they held irreconcilable visions for Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military establishment cracked down hard. That repression fueled ideological radicalization under Qutb and drove some factions toward armed struggle. From that point until Morsi took office in 2011, the Brotherhood remained a persistent thorn in the side of the Egyptian military state.
The Brotherhood’s reach extended beyond Egypt, spawning sister organizations in Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Sudan. Türkiye was a distinct case: while influenced by the Brotherhood’s ideas, Turks forged their own brand of nationalist political Islam rooted in their own history—accepting Arab superiority was, after all, a non-starter. Qatar, often accused today of backing the Brotherhood, couldn’t be further from its Muslim nationalist ideals, even if it shares certain principles. Brotherhood ideology also helped inspire Hamas, though Hamas fights for a Palestinian nation-state, not the Brotherhood’s ideological Islamic state.
Because the movement threatened the status quo across most Muslim-majority nations, it was widely banned and suppressed, even if its relationship with specific governments fluctuated wildly—as in Saudi Arabia. Still, Egypt remained its stronghold, and the movement’s fate was bound to it.
In 2012, Mohammed Morsi—emerging directly from the Brotherhood’s ranks under the Freedom and Justice Party—was elected president of Egypt. It was the peak of the organization’s power, and the beginning of its rapid collapse.
I visited Egypt a few years after the 2011 revolution, when popular uprisings—and perhaps internal pressures—forced the military establishment to make concessions. From my conversations and the general atmosphere, one impression stood out: the military saw this moment as a chance to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, at least for a while.
In Egypt, the army is the state. The military owns vast swaths of the economy and critical infrastructure; its survival doesn’t depend on budgets approved by civilian politicians. When I was there, the army even handled essential services like rubbish collection. When Morsi took office, they simply stopped collecting the trash.
I was told major avenues piled up with garbage during Morsi’s presidency because his government lacked the trucks and infrastructure to clear it. Apply that dynamic to every lever of governance, and the picture becomes clear: Morsi’s government was doomed before it even started. When the army staged its 2013 coup, it rode a wave of popular protests sparked by those very deteriorating conditions.
I suspect—and this is purely my own speculation—that the military ousted Mubarak and permitted elections while remaining the true power brokers specifically to set the Brotherhood up to fail. They knew the country couldn’t run without them. Once it ground to a halt, they could point and say: “See? The Muslim Brotherhood is a bunch of incompetents.”
Since then, the Brotherhood—both in Egypt and abroad—has been decimated. It is internally fractured, leaderless, stripped of its assets and institutions, outlawed in many countries, and designated a terrorist group in others—a label serving local political elites rather than reflecting the group’s actual activities.
Just as fatal is the lack of generational succession. The leaders at the helm in 2012 belonged to the Egyptian generation of the ’60s and ’70s (Morsi was 61 when elected). As one online commentator put it: “You can find a ton of old Brotherhood uncles all over Istanbul, drinking sad cups of çay in the twilight of their lives.”
So why does Western media portray a decaying political movement that theoretically has no interest in imposing itself on non-Muslim-majority nations (Muslim-majority countries are another matter) as an existential threat to the social order? Largely because of two countries: Israel and the UAE.
Israel has actively pushed anti-Islamic propaganda and fear of Muslims to shore up its standing in the West—aligning with far-right parties to peddle a narrative of a “Muslim invasion” so Israel looks like an indispensable ally fighting evil. The UAE, Israel’s sole official Arab ally, has joined the effort because it views any form of Islam-inspired politics—especially the Brotherhood model—as a mortal threat.
This campaign is thoroughly documented in Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza’s recent report, “Manufacturing the Great Replacement: How a covert far-right-aligned ad campaign delivered more than half a billion recorded exposures of racist, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and anti-Qatar propaganda across Europe, Lebanon and the United States between 2023 and 2026.” (There is plenty to unpack there—I may dedicate next week’s column to it.)
Following Israel and the UAE’s lead, the U.S. and Europe have moved to designate Brotherhood-aligned groups as terrorists, crack down on the organization’s remaining fragments, and delegitimize it at home and abroad. There are even efforts to tie it to Iran. I think this is partly because the Brotherhood remains a convenient stand-in to keep the specter of Islamic terrorism alive.
Abdul El-Sayed almost certainly understands most of this. Born to Egyptian parents, he stated that his father emigrated to the U.S. to escape political repression. That is not to say he was connnected to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he must have been aware of the movement. El-Sayed fits the profile of a Muslim millennial shaped by the Brotherhood’s emphasis on strong civil society and peaceful civic engagement. In fact, he looks very much like the son of an old Brotherhood sympathizer who chose to pour his energy to the betterment of his local community rather than chase an impossible state. And there is nothing wrong with that.
