Resuming The Debate over The Muslim Brotherhood in United States

By Robert G. Rabil

Recently, in mid-April 2025, Jordanian authorities banned the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Members of the MB were caught planning sabotage activities in Amman. Jordan’s interior minister Mazin al-Farrayeh declared a total ban on the group in a press briefing, saying that “any activity by the group, regardless of its nature, is considered a violation of the law”. He also emphasized that “affiliation and any interaction with the group is now banned and that promotion of its “ideology” will result in criminal prosecution.” 

Jordan has been added to the list of Arab countries, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. 

Significantly, this development sparked anew the debate in Washington as to whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated as a terrorist organization. In 2017, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the “Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act,” which provoked controversy over its intent. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, among other advocacy Muslim organizations, questioned the Act’s derivation and emphasized that it was designed as the basis for an anti-Muslim witch hunt. 

The Act was regarded as Islamophobic. Moreover, any attempt at criticizing the implications of the ideology and praxis of the Muslim Brotherhood and its manifold offshoots for the national security of United States have been rebuffed as Islamophobic, even though enough evidence shows otherwise. The MB was founded by Hassan al-Bannah in Egypt in 1928. He envisioned the establishment of an Islamic utopia by placing a religious value on worldly affairs. He looked at the state as a steppingstone to this utopia whereby state institutions would serve as instruments to instill Muslim morality, to implement Muslim social justice, and to enforce Shari’a [Islamic law] as a comprehensive code of conduct valid for all times and places. Sayyid Qutb, the main ideologue of the MB, sharply divided the world into a Jahili [derives from jahiliyah and connotes idolatry] society and a true Muslim society where governance belongs to God. There exists no neutral space between the two worlds. The Jahili society has to be wiped out in order to reclaim God’s sovereignty and rule as laid down in Shari’a. 

Qutb traced much of his clash with the Jahili Western civilization to Jewish conspiracy against Prophet Muhammad’s message and creed of Islam. In his article “Our Struggle with the Jews,” Qutb argued that the Jews have confronted Islam with enmity from the moment the Islamic state was established in Medina; the Muslim community continues to suffer from Jewish conspiracies; the Jews will be satisfied only with the destruction of Islam; and the war with the Jews, which has not been extinguished since Prophet’s time, continues until this moment. This constituted the ideological foundation that informs Islamists of all stripes. 

This ideology migrated to United States and Europe with MB and student activists in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s following the suppression of the MB in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The defeat of the atheist Soviet Union in Afghanistan thanks in no small measure to MB recruitment of Jihadis only reinforced the dedication of MB members to implement their ideology whether in Jahili society, the West, or the Muslim world. 

 In 1993, the FBI wiretapped a meeting of top Hamas activists in the US held in Philadelphia. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood established by a network of Muslim Brothers. The wiretaps revealed an internal debate how to improve activities in support of Hamas and how to prevent Hamas from being designated as a terrorist organization. One senior member said: “I swear by Allah that war is deception…deceive, camouflage, pretend that you are leaving while you are walking that way. Deceive your enemy.” Another senior member underscored the importance of forging influence with Congress. He underscored that “this can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities and research centers…[and] by working with Islamic political organizations.”

During the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which was designated as a terrorist organization in 2001, as a front for Hamas a memorandum was introduced as evidence in which a reflection of MB’s nefarious aims was revealed: “The Brothers 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.”

Today, one could safely argue that it is not a coincidence that the demonstrations on and off university campuses regarding the Gaza war have been partly guided by the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on Islamic and Palestinian organizations. One could not but notice the slogans of Hamas emblazoned on the demonstrators’ placards and signs: “From the River to the Sea,” “By any Means Necessary,” and “Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism.” 

Given the upward trajectory of Islamist activism and ideas, which carved out an ideological foundation in the West, including in United States, it is imperative for Washington to examine carefully the evolution of Islamist ideology as spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood. What happened in Jordan is a testament and foreshadowing of what’s in the ideological store of United States. 

The Muslim Brotherhood is trying to redefine jihad by imprinting on it the stamp of moral obligation. Jihad against Israel is now no less a violent resistance against an oppressor and aggressor than a legitimate resistance guided by a moral obligation rooted into sacred universal values.  Mohanned Al-Arabiat perceptively reflected that the response of the Muslim Brotherhood to Jordan’s assertion that the Brotherhood posed a domestic threat was that the Brotherhood “attempted to reframe the plot as part of the broader “resistance axis,” painting it as an extension of the region’s moral confrontation with Israel — not an act of subversion against Jordan. In this telling, the operatives were not saboteurs but committed activists.”

It follows from this that the Brotherhood is now using the Gaza war as a vessel to reframe the narrative as a worldwide moral duty to resist Israel. The transformation of the discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood from applauding Sinwar as the “noble knight and courageous hero, the leader of the glorious epic of October 7,” to “committed activism” as a moral obligation to resist Israel is a surreptitious jump of ideological faith. This is no less than an appeal to sanctify transnational actions against Israel for a generation of Middle Eastern and Western youths fed the diet that Israel is a colonial entity and an aggressor protected by its imperialist patron the United States. 

The near quiet on university campuses and along the rivers of the Potomac, Seine and Thames is none other than the calm of the new storm upholding the warped moral authority promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and misguided Western intellectual movements. 

It is about time for Washington to resume the debate over the Muslim Brotherhood and qualify its role and nature in no uncertain terms. The sword of Islamophobia held over the necks of those who criticize radical Islamism should be sheathed.  As Franck Salameh argued, “One ought to imagine the assaults that Voltaire, Rousseau and other eighteenth-century luminaries mounted against Christian dogma being described as ‘racism’ or ‘Christianophobia’ by their contemporaries—and their modern offspring. Indeed, it is likely that Christianity might have remained ossified, unable to evolve, had it been left to its own devices, immune from criticism.”

United States and the West are facing today in as much a struggle for their own soul and mind as a struggle against the creeping despotism of Islamism. To shy away from this two-pronged struggle is to lapse into what Islamists call “jahiliyah”! And that will certainly doom the future of our youthful generation.

Robert G. Rabil is a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. His views do not necessarily reflect those of FAU. You can follow him on Facebook, @robertgrabil and www.robertrabil.com