# Muslim Brotherhood The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) was founded in Ismailia, [[Egypt]], in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher, as a religious-revival and social-welfare society that became the first mass political-Islamist movement — the argument that Islam is a complete system of life and that Muslim societies had declined because they abandoned it. Within two decades it had hundreds of thousands of members, a network of schools, clinics and businesses, a paramilitary wing, and a branch in every Arab country. Al-Banna was assassinated by the Egyptian state in 1949; the Brotherhood's second founding figure, Sayyid Qutb, was hanged by [[Gamal Abdel Nasser]] in 1966, and his prison writings — that modern Muslim societies live in *jahiliyya*, pre-Islamic ignorance, and that a vanguard must overthrow them — became the intellectual seed of the jihadist movements the Brotherhood itself later disavowed. Its ideology runs through the [[Islam Timeline]] and the [[Caliphate]] question; its rivals in the Gulf built [[Wahhabism]] as the state-controlled alternative. ## The Egyptian arc The Brotherhood spent most of a century banned, tolerated, or both: crushed by Nasser, released and used by Sadat against the left (then blamed for his 1981 assassination by an offshoot), permitted to run "independents" under [[Hosni Mubarak]] and winning a fifth of parliament in 2005. After the [[Arab Spring]] its Freedom and Justice Party won the 2011–12 elections and [[Mohamed Morsi]] the presidency — the only time in its history it held power — for one year. The July 2013 coup by [[Abdel Fattah el-Sisi]] was followed by the Rabaa massacre (at least 800 protesters killed in a day), a terrorist designation, mass death sentences, and the jailing of tens of thousands. Morsi died in a courtroom in 2019. The movement survives in exile (Istanbul, London, Doha) and through affiliates that are distinct organizations: [[Hamas]] began as the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch; Tunisia's Ennahda, Jordan's Islamic Action Front, and Turkey's ruling party have Brotherhood roots and have gone different ways. ## In Europe: the *entrisme* question The European debate about the Brotherhood is not about violence and not about seizing a state. It is about [[Entryism]] — and the French government has put that word at the centre of its official position. In **May 2025** a report prepared by two senior civil servants and presented to President [[Emmanuel Macron]] concluded that the movement pursues *entrisme*, political entryism, by constructing "ecosystems at local level" intended to "structure the lives of Muslims from birth." It named the **Fédération des Musulmans de France** as the Brotherhood's principal French vehicle, and counted **139 places of worship** under its control, **68** more affiliated with it, roughly **280** sporting, educational and charitable associations, and **21** schools. The report warned that the trajectory could in time press on [[Laïcité]] and on women's rights, and framed the movement as a threat to national cohesion. ⭐ **The denominator is the part that rarely travels with the headline.** France has roughly **2,800** Muslim places of worship. 139 of them is about **5%** — a bounded, local, measurable problem rather than a national one, and scholars responding to the report have argued that the European Brotherhood is oriented toward advocacy rather than the capture of state power, and that the threat assessment is exaggerated. Where such capture does occur, the first people governed by it are other Muslims: women pressured toward unofficial sharia councils, gay and secular Muslims intimidated, religious conformity enforced on a neighbourhood. That gap between the finding and its uses is what makes this page a hinge. The same 139 that describes a policing problem in the French report becomes, in [[Eurabia]] and [[Great Replacement Theory]], evidence of a planned civilizational conquest — the inflation examined at [[Entryism]] and [[Islamism]]. ## In American politics The Brotherhood is the organizing villain of the counter-jihad movement — the network the [[Islamophobia]] and [[Anti-Sharia Movement]] pages describe — whose founding claim is a 1991 internal memo, entered in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial, describing a "civilization-jihad" to destroy the West from within; that memo is the source of the recurring allegation that American Muslim civil-rights groups are Brotherhood fronts. Designating the whole movement a Foreign Terrorist Organization was proposed in Congress from 2014 and considered by the first Trump administration in 2017, and blocked each time because the Brotherhood is a legal party or governing partner in allied states (Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, Turkey) and because the intelligence community does not treat it as a single organization. Gulf money lobbied both sides — [[UAE]] and [[Saudi Arabia]] for designation, [[Qatar]] against. The second term found the workaround. Executive Order 14362 (November 2025) directed chapter-by-chapter review, and on **January 13, 2026** the State Department designated the Lebanese Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization (for rocket attacks on Israel through its al-Fajr Forces) and the Egyptian and Jordanian branches Specially Designated Global Terrorists for material support to Hamas. Texas and Florida had by then designated the Brotherhood *and* the Council on American-Islamic Relations as terrorist organizations under state law — the domestic application the memo theory was always pointing toward, now in litigation. See [[Foreign Terrorist Organization]] and [[Sanctions Designation Pipeline]] for the mechanism. ## See Also - [[Egypt]] · [[Mohamed Morsi]] · [[Abdel Fattah el-Sisi]] · [[Gamal Abdel Nasser]] · [[Hosni Mubarak]] · [[Arab Spring]] - [[Hamas]] · [[Hezbollah]] · [[Qatar]] · [[UAE]] · [[Saudi Arabia]] · [[Palestine Liberation Organization]] - [[Islam Timeline]] · [[Sunni Islam]] · [[Caliphate]] · [[Wahhabism]] · [[Religions and Right-Wing Politics]] - [[Islamophobia]] · [[Anti-Sharia Movement]] · [[Foreign Terrorist Organization]] · [[Greg Abbott]] · [[Ron DeSantis]] - [[Islamism]] · [[Entryism]] · [[Eurabia]] · [[Laïcité]] · [[Emmanuel Macron]] — the European *entrisme* debate