On Nov. 24, the Trump administration issued an government order starting the method of designating sure branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as international terrorist organizations. The manager order provided scant proof or rationale for the designation. Taken collectively, the idea amounted to some incendiary rhetoric by Jordanian and Egyptian Brotherhood leaders after the Oct. 7, 2023, assaults and the minor function allegedly performed by Lebanon’s Brotherhood department in missile assaults on the identical time. Because the administration’s paltry presentation suggests, there merely isn’t any good, new proof that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group.
The push to get the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group is a nasty concept with a lengthy historical past relationship again to at the least 9/11. It has been repeatedly pushed by right-wing teams in the US and by anti-brotherhood allies within the Center East, together with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Israel. And it has been repeatedly rejected. As former President George W. Bush amongst others understood, this designation wouldn’t solely be inaccurate, it might undermine human rights and democracy throughout the Center East.
On Nov. 24, the Trump administration issued an government order starting the method of designating sure branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as international terrorist organizations. The manager order provided scant proof or rationale for the designation. Taken collectively, the idea amounted to some incendiary rhetoric by Jordanian and Egyptian Brotherhood leaders after the Oct. 7, 2023, assaults and the minor function allegedly performed by Lebanon’s Brotherhood department in missile assaults on the identical time. Because the administration’s paltry presentation suggests, there merely isn’t any good, new proof that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group.
The push to get the US to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group is a nasty concept with a lengthy historical past relationship again to at the least 9/11. It has been repeatedly pushed by right-wing teams in the US and by anti-brotherhood allies within the Center East, together with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Israel. And it has been repeatedly rejected. As former President George W. Bush amongst others understood, this designation wouldn’t solely be inaccurate, it might undermine human rights and democracy throughout the Center East.
The Trump administration, nevertheless, doesn’t care about both reality or democracy and has purged lots of the professionals within the civil service who may provide knowledgeable evaluation. Because of this, it’s now making ready to take this step at a time when it is going to be each ever extra irrelevant within the area and ever extra damaging at residence.
Within the Center East, America’s allies have spent greater than a decade unleashing the complete fury of unrestrained safety apparatuses on the Brotherhood (and all different civil society or oppositional forces). Because of this, the Muslim Brotherhood has been largely decimated as a well-liked power, and key regional backers akin to Qatar and Turkey now not care as a lot to defend it. In America, nevertheless, there’s each cause to concern that the Trump administration will use the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist designation as a instrument to focus on its personal political enemies. The end result shall be to accentuate an already harmful crackdown on migrants, left-leaning civil society, and home political opposition.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been the article of intense conspiracy theories since 9/11, significantly among the many far-right constituencies that dominate the present Trump administration. Because of this, it’s necessary to separate out the myths from the fact.
There isn’t a singular International Muslim Brotherhood—one thing that even U.S. President Donald Trump’s government order acknowledges by specifying particular person branches of the Brotherhood relatively than a extra international common designation. The Muslim Brotherhood was based in Egypt in 1928 and unfold shortly throughout the area and globally. Every nationwide department shared overarching organizational and ideological commitments, however every advanced primarily in response to native situations, and none took its orders from a central workplace in Cairo, Europe, or wherever else. They’d household resemblances relatively than a central command and management. Key Islamist organizations akin to Tunisia’s Ennahda denied that they had been a part of the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time as they pursued related organizational and ideological methods.
Branches of the Brotherhood in numerous nations shared ideological references akin to Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb and adopted a typical set of latest non secular authorities akin to Yusuf al-Qaradawi. However every nation’s department advanced its personal political leaders and non secular guides. Throughout the area, Brotherhood branches nearly at all times pushed for extra non secular societies and conservative social insurance policies. Nevertheless, they typically didn’t put on their theology particularly closely. In distinction with the intensive Quranic commentary favored by Salafi actions or Islamic State circles, Brotherhood figures tended to maintain their theology easy and concentrate on the practicalities of political energy and social group.
Because of this, through the many years previous to 2011, the Brotherhood resembled the evangelical American Christian proper greater than it did al Qaeda. It was an unlimited, sprawling motion oriented towards constructing a extra non secular society by proselytizing, offering social providers, and fascinating in bare-knuckled political competitors. Most Brotherhood organizations maintained a community of social providers and charities and operated brazenly even in nations the place they had been technically unlawful. The Brotherhood’s cadres tended to be middle-class city professionals, not the disenfranchised and impoverished youth who gravitated towards extra violent jihadist or extra doctrinaire Salafi organizations. Brotherhood organizations constantly participated in elections when given the possibility—and constantly gained.
When this occurred, the Brotherhood confronted accusations that its dedication to democracy was purely instrumental: “one man, one vote, one time.” Whether or not honest or not, the group was by no means given an opportunity to refute this accusation. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood gained the post-2011 elections solely to be overthrown by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s 2013 army coup. In Tunisia, Ennahda gained post-2011 elections solely to be criminalized a decade later by the populist secular President Kais Saied.
This isn’t to say that the Muslim Brotherhood has by no means been implicated in violence. Whereas official Brotherhood rhetoric rejects using violence and has vocally opposed violent jihadist rivals like al Qaeda, its organizations have certainly engaged in violence—significantly within the face of violent state repression. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood cut up within the Sixties partly over the query of violence and solely reemerged on the scene within the Seventies after renouncing its extremist wing. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, for its half, adopted way more excessive rhetoric and violent practices within the Seventies within the face of the Assad regime’s repression. Later Syrian Muslim brothers, principally in exile, performed a key function facilitating exterior intervention into the post-2011 civil warfare. Hamas emerged out of a Muslim Brotherhood-style group in Gaza within the context of the 1987 Palestinian Intifada, and pioneered suicide bombings in opposition to Israelis through the Oslo years. And Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood organizations performed a key function within the Iraqi Sunni insurgency in opposition to American occupation after 2003.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s complicated nature has been mirrored within the evolving U.S. political debate. Within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, critics centered on the violence of Hamas and the Iraqi insurgency, in addition to the Muslim Brotherhood origins of key al Qaeda figures akin to Abdullah Azzam and Ayman al-Zawahiri. However others noticed the Brotherhood extra as a firewall in opposition to radicalization, utilizing its tenacious and strong group and ideological indoctrination to recruit and retain potential radicals.
The Bush administration’s method to the Brotherhood exemplifies these contradictions. Many hawkish ideologues on the time advocated for concentrating on the Brotherhood, claiming it was moderate-looking however a harmful stepping stone on the trail to radicalization. Others, together with key neoconservatives, most well-liked together with the Brotherhood inside democratic openings in hopes of moderating the group and entrenching democratic practices throughout Arab societies. That’s why key administration members supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation within the 2005 Egyptian elections and Hamas’s inclusion within the 2006 Palestinian elections. In Iraq, the counterinsurgency mind belief round Gen. David Petraeus got here to acknowledge the worth of fine-grained distinctions amongst various kinds of Islamists. This led to the 2006-08 “Sunni Awakening” that allied the US with nationalist Islamist insurgents typically rooted within the Brotherhood in opposition to al Qaeda and the emergent Islamic State.
After 2011, each the talk and the realities modified quickly. The Brotherhood emerged as a robust power through the Arab uprisings that swept the area in 2011 and toppled a number of regimes. Deeply frightened regimes throughout the area singled out the Brotherhood as the best risk to their survival—not as a result of they had been terrorists, however as a result of they had been a well-liked and efficient social motion. They fumed on the Obama administration’s willingness to offer the Brotherhood an opportunity, particularly in Egypt, and on the assist Qatar and Turkey provided the group.
The backlash got here shortly, as two years of Brotherhood political advances led to intense repression by authoritarian regimes throughout the Center East. The UAE took the lead, supporting Egypt’s July 2013 army coup and defending the bloodbath of Islamist protests at Rabaa a month later. The brutal repression that adopted included the arrest of an estimated 60,000 political prisoners and the confiscation of nearly all identifiable Brotherhood monetary and bodily property. It additionally noticed the launch of a world propaganda marketing campaign supposed to solid the Brotherhood because the equal of al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Particular considerations drove every regional nation’s embrace of this marketing campaign. The Saudi crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood got here as a part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s blitzkrieg assault on the ability of the dominion’s Islamic non secular institution. A fusion between Salafi theology and Brotherhood politics had been the important thing driver of the Saudi Sahwa (Awakening). This was a well-liked motion sympathetic to the Brotherhood that includes widespread social media figures akin to Salman al-Awda who used their non secular platform to criticize Saudi insurance policies at residence and overseas. Most of its key figures are actually in jail or the graveyard, regardless of having no connection to terrorism.
Jordan equally moved in opposition to the Brotherhood, which had advanced from a key pillar of assist for the monarchy into its major organized political opposition. Going through an escalating home political disaster and rising strain from its monetary backers within the Gulf, Jordan took unprecedented steps to interrupt the Brotherhood—sponsoring an alternate management, stripping its monetary property, and in the end criminalizing it.
The regional marketing campaign in opposition to the Brotherhood got here to a head in 2017 when the UAE and Saudi Arabia blockaded Qatar and demanded Doha finish its regional assist for the group. The strain prolonged to Washington, the place an assortment of assume tanks and public relations corporations lobbied the primary Trump administration to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist group. Whereas the MAGA base thrilled to anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, the so-called adults within the room on the time pushed again.
When former President Joe Biden took workplace in 2021, the UAE and Saudi Arabia quietly ended the boycott of Qatar, mended fences with Turkey, and scaled again the regional anti-Brotherhood marketing campaign. However the harm had been carried out. At the moment’s Muslim Brotherhood is a shell of its former self. Throughout a lot of the area it has been forcibly stripped of the social providers and public presence that underpinned its political energy. Its popularity has been badly broken by the relentless propaganda campaigns. Because of this, it now not represents a big political power—though regimes anxious about one other spherical of protests nonetheless concern its resurgence.
The Hamas assaults on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, turbocharged scrutiny of the Muslim Brotherhood’s historic connections with and assist for Hamas. That’s the direct set off for the renewed push to lastly get Washington on board with the terrorist designation. Israel views this as a part of its full-spectrum warfare on Hamas and what it sees because the group’s international assist base. Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia are hoping to safe this concession in return for lending their assist to Trump’s Gaza plan. And Qatar and Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood’s conventional protectors, are actually much less at the moment in sacrificing on its behalf after years of rising frustration with Hamas.
If the designation goes by, it would intensify current developments towards repression within the area whereas pushing what stays of the Brotherhood additional to the shadows.
However the true driver and first influence of Trump’s government order could lie in American politics. Designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist group might put official muscle behind the Trump administration’s efforts to demonize, strain, and criminalize its opponents. For much-right conspiracy theorists, the Brotherhood affords an amorphous, loosely outlined goal that features American Muslim organizations such because the Council on American-Islamic Relations, greater training and Center East research facilities, nongovernmental organizations, and even Jewish scholar protesters in opposition to genocide.
Trump’s designation of the Brotherhood might set up a authorized foundation for scrutinizing these organizations’ funding, licensing, and membership. It might additionally develop into the idea for much more aggressive State Division screening of visa candidates in addition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement harassment and deportations. Designating the Brotherhood will not be about addressing a safety risk—it’s one other escalation towards authoritarianism within the Center East and the US alike.
