The Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) is the founding movement of modern Sunni political Islam: a transnational network built in Egypt in 1928 on the motto “Islam is the solution,” whose Palestinian branch became Hamas, whose theorists supplied the intellectual roots of al-Qaeda’s ideology, and whose regional chapters are banned as terrorist organizations by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Russia. In January 2026 the United States joined them, designating the Brotherhood’s Lebanese chapter a Foreign Terrorist Organization and its Egyptian and Jordanian chapters Specially Designated Global Terrorists for material support to Hamas. Its relationship to Israel and to Jews is not ambiguous. It is hostile, stated in its own documents and carried out by its own founders and offspring.

Who founded it, and what it teaches

Hassan al-Banna, a 22-year-old schoolteacher, founded the Brotherhood in Ismailia, Egypt in 1928, building a movement that fused Islamic revivalism with social welfare and political organizing under the slogan “Islam is the solution.” Al-Banna was assassinated by Egyptian security agents in 1949 after years of tit-for-tat violence between the Brotherhood’s paramilitary wing and the monarchy. His most consequential successor in ideas, not office, was Sayyid Qutb, a Brotherhood intellectual whose prison writings after Egypt outlawed the group turned its social gospel into a doctrine of armed struggle against “jahili” (un-Islamic) societies, Muslim and Western alike. Qutb was hanged by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government in 1966 for an alleged coup plot; his work went on to shape Ayman al-Zawahiri and the ideological core of al-Qaeda. The Brotherhood’s leadership has since formally renounced violence inside Egypt and runs a Guidance Bureau alongside a roughly hundred-member Shura Council, a structural fact worth recording alongside what follows.

Where it operates and how it is funded

The Brotherhood or its affiliates operate under various names in at least 18 countries across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Internally it is organized in small five-member cells called usras (families) that feed into regional councils, the Shura Council, and the Guidance Bureau under a General Guide. Funding has historically drawn on member dues, businesses owned by Brotherhood leaders, charitable fronts operating in Western countries, and state patronage, chiefly from Qatar, along with earlier support from Saudi Arabia before Riyadh itself banned the group in 2014.

What it produced: Hamas and the jihadist lineage

The Brotherhood’s Gaza chapter, led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, formally reconstituted itself as Hamas in 1987 at the start of the First Intifada. Hamas never hid the parentage: Article Two of its own 1988 founding covenant states plainly that “the Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.” A later Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, rose through the same Brotherhood-linked student politics. A separate breakaway, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, split from Gaza’s Brotherhood in the late 1970s when a cadre of younger members judged the parent organization too slow to take up arms. The lineage runs earlier still: Brotherhood volunteers and press backed the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini’s 1936 to 1939 revolt against Jewish settlement in Mandate Palestine, and Brotherhood brigades crossed into Palestine to fight alongside Arab armies in the 1948 war against the newborn State of Israel. The hostility is doctrinal, not incidental: Hamas’s covenant invokes the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical authority and cites the gharqad hadith in Article Seven, promising Judgment Day will not come until Muslims fight and kill the Jews.

The designations

Egypt has outlawed the Brotherhood repeatedly since 1948, and again after the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat by an Islamist cell with Brotherhood roots. After the 2011 uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won a parliamentary plurality and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, became Egypt’s first freely elected president in 2012. The military removed Morsi in July 2013 and, on 25 December 2013, Egypt’s cabinet formally designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, criminalizing membership itself and exposing members to prison terms. Human Rights Watch called the designation “politically driven,” a criticism worth recording, though it addresses the process, not the material-support findings that followed a decade later. Saudi Arabia and the UAE followed with their own bans in 2014, and Bahrain and Russia have designated it as well. On 24 November 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14362 directing the State and Treasury Departments to review Brotherhood chapters for sanction. On 13 January 2026 the State Department designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization and its leader, Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, citing rocket fire the Lebanese chapter’s fighters joined against Israel after 7 October 2023; the Treasury Department simultaneously designated the Egyptian and Jordanian chapters as Specially Designated Global Terrorists for providing material support to Hamas.

The welfare record, and what the CAIR fight doesn’t change

For decades the Brotherhood’s schools, clinics and charities filled real gaps in Egypt’s welfare state and earned it genuine grassroots loyalty, especially among the poor, loyalty that showed up honestly at the ballot box in 2011 and 2012. On its American activities, critics including Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative call the “civilizational jihad” framing, built on a 1991 internal memo by Mohamed Akram, a Brotherhood board member in North America and a senior Hamas figure, entered as a US government exhibit in the 2007 to 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial, an overstated conspiracy theory used to smear mainstream American Muslim advocacy groups, and the trial judge’s 2009 opinion did not treat the memo as supporting evidence for the Holy Land Foundation’s own money-laundering conspiracy. That objection does not touch what the same trial actually proved: the Holy Land Foundation itself was convicted in 2008 of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations was named an unindicted co-conspirator in that same case. The memo’s framing can be argued over; the conviction and the co-conspirator finding cannot.

Hamas · The Hamas Covenant, 1988 · Palestinian Islamic Jihad · Council on American-Islamic Relations · The Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini · Who attacked first in the 1948 war