Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood is the mother movement of modern Sunni Islamism: founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, parent of Hamas, intellectual source of the jihadist doctrine of Sayyid Qutb, and the author of a written strategy, in 1991, to wage “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within”. Its chapters are designated as terrorist organizations by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Russia and, since January 2026, the United States. Wikipedia’s opening now says most of that. The machinery underneath the opening, the categories that decide what the Brotherhood is filed beside, has moved the other way. The full history is on our Muslim Brotherhood page.

The opening got better. Read the categories

The article’s current opening (oldid 1373908918) records that al-Banna “accepted the utility of political violence”, that Brotherhood members assassinated Egyptian prime minister Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha in 1948, that Qutb’s Milestones promoted takfirism, that Hamas is its violent offshoot, and that as of 2026 the United States is among the governments designating it. That is what an encyclopedia should say, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Categories do a different job. They are how Wikipedia’s own navigation, its search and every system that reads it as structured data decide what a subject is. A reader who never scrolls to the bottom of the page still inherits them, through search panels, knowledge graphs and AI training. And there the Brotherhood’s record has been edited.

The Nazi record, deleted from the file

On 3 October 2018 (diff) the category “Middle Eastern collaborators with Nazi Germany” was removed with the edit summary “removed [[Category:Middle Eastern collaborators with Nazi Germany]] using HotCat”, and nothing else.

The record the category pointed to is documented. The historian Matthias Küntzel, in Jihad and Jew-Hatred (2007), sets out German funding for the Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1930s and the Brotherhood’s role in the 1936 to 1939 revolt in Mandate Palestine led by the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, who later met Hitler and recruited Bosnian Muslims for the SS. Küntzel records that in 1938 the Brotherhood led violent demonstrations against Egypt’s Jews and hosted a Cairo conference where Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed. The forged Protocols reappear as historical authority in Article 32 of the 1988 Hamas Covenant, written by the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

”Anti-imperialist” added

On 28 August 2025 (diff) the Brotherhood was filed under “Anti-imperialism in Asia” and “Anti-imperialist organizations”, under the summary “add cats”.

The movement’s anti-British agitation in 1930s Egypt is real, and a category for it is defensible. But “anti-imperialist” is not a neutral filing in 2025. It is the vocabulary the Western left uses for movements it supports, and the frame through which Hamas is presented on campuses as “resistance”. An organization whose founder praised martyrdom and whose North American plan speaks of making “God’s religion … victorious over all other religions” is not opposing empire. It is proposing one. The article files the Brotherhood beside anti-colonial movements and removes it from the file of those who worked with the Third Reich.

The plan it wrote, mentioned once

The Explanatory Memorandum, written in 1991 by Mohamed Akram, a member of the Brotherhood’s North American board and later a senior Hamas figure, set out the movement’s “General Strategic Goal” in America and called the work a “civilization-jihadist process”. The FBI found it in 2004 in the Brotherhood’s own archive in Virginia, and it was entered into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial, which ended in 2008 with convictions for funnelling millions of dollars to Hamas. In Wikipedia’s Muslim Brotherhood article it appears once.

The strongest objection, and why it fails

The defence is that categories must follow sourced article content, that “collaborator” is a strong word for a movement whose German contacts were covert, and that the memorandum was, in the words of the Holy Land Foundation trial judge’s 2009 opinion, not supporting evidence for that case’s money-laundering conspiracy.

Every one of those points leaves the facts standing. Küntzel’s documentation of German funding is published scholarship, the kind the category requires. The trial judge’s ruling was about what the memo proved in one prosecution; it did not question that the Brotherhood’s own board member wrote it, or that the Holy Land Foundation was convicted of financing Hamas. A category system that can hold “Right-wing anti-imperialism” on the strength of the 1930s can hold the Brotherhood’s 1930s dealings with Nazi Germany. One was added in 2025. The other was deleted in 2018.

What the record shows

The Brotherhood is designated by the United States, Egypt and the Gulf states, it fathered Hamas, it circulated Mein Kampf in Cairo, and it wrote down its goal for the West. France’s Interior Ministry documented 280 associations tied to it in 2025, and Qatar’s state charity financed 140 mosque and school projects for Brotherhood-linked groups across Europe. Europe, counted sets out that record. Wikipedia’s opening now admits most of it. Its filing system is still being edited to say something else.

The Muslim Brotherhood, full history · Hamas · The Hamas Covenant, 1988 · Council on American-Islamic Relations · Demographic jihad · Europe, Counted