Newsletters
Every school morning, in front of Khatem Al-Morsaleen Al-Azhari Institute in the Omrania district near the Pyramids in Giza, a group of students used to gather in a circle to recite the Quran. At the time, I was a member of the school patrol responsible for the morning assembly and ensuring that students entered their classrooms by exactly 8 a.m.
On several occasions, that group invited me to join their simple religious activity. But my friends and I were different. We were the same group that went to cafes after school to smoke shisha (also known as nargile or hookah), play sports, exchange music tapes, and follow global fashion trends. It was very difficult for our group to mix with the religious students.
At that time, they were not called the “Muslim Brotherhood.” They were simply known as “Islamic Trend Youth.” The group was calm and largely focused on positive social engagement, religious activities, and occasionally helping poorer students. That was my first exposure to the Muslim Brotherhood.
After graduating from university, I worked with an Egyptian human rights organization concerned with monitoring all kinds of elections. My role was to observe student union elections at universities. I had to meet leaders from all political groups and prepare a report on student political life and elections.
In one interview, I met “Brother Nader”, a student at the Faculty of Commerce, Cairo University, and the Brotherhood’s representative in the faculty. He told me clearly: “This year, our agreement with security is to obtain around 25% of the candidates’ lists in the student elections across Cairo University’s faculties.”
He also made it clear that he was operating freely and in direct coordination with the university’s security officials.
Under Mubarak’s intimidating regime, such political pragmatism was shocking and hard to understand for a young liberal activist like me. Nevertheless, I documented it in my report.
At that time, the Brotherhood was able to communicate and negotiate with the Egyptian regime and worked openly within Egyptian society. It was—and still is—one of the most influential movements in the Arab and Islamic worlds. It had a strong capacity to discipline its members into what it called “the Muslim individual within a Muslim society”, with the ultimate goal of reviving the vision of a global Islamic caliphate.
This was more than 10 years before the Arab Spring. When the uprisings happened, the group responded slowly and cautiously, first in Tunisia, then in Egypt. A traditionally reformist movement could not transform into a revolutionary one overnight. Yet, a decade later, revolutionary discourse became a defining feature among the younger Brotherhood generations.
Lacking a coherent religious or intellectual foundation for modern political revolution, the group gradually adopted the language and concepts of leftist, communist, and Arab nationalist movements, which deeply altered its political ideology. Eventually, it clashed with both the Egyptian state and society and split into three main factions—inside and outside Egypt.
A new reality also emerged after the events of Oct. 7, the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the rise of Ahmad al-Sharaa.
Many may not realise that the United States played a significant role in shaping the thinking of several historic Brotherhood leaders. Sayyid Qutb, for instance, radicalized only after visiting the U.S., where he was influenced by antisemitic ideological currents. As a Brotherhood education officer, he even included "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the group’s internal reading lists.
Former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi only joined the Brotherhood while studying in the United States on a government scholarship, and the same applies to Mahmoud Hussein, the current secretary-general of the organization.
The latest U.S. presidential decision to classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization appears largely driven by direct political interests between Washington and Riyadh. The move had been discussed since Donald Trump’s first term, but Saudi Arabia now seeks to frame Oct. 7 as a global Brotherhood-linked event, not merely a Hamas operation in Gaza.
Outside Palestine, Brotherhood branches have worked hard to:
1. Portray Hamas as victorious in the Arab and Islamic imagination.
2. Continue exploiting the Palestinian issue as a powerful recruitment and mobilization tool.
The U.S. National Security Strategy in the Middle East emphasises one key concept: “ending wars forever”, a principle that closely matches the Saudi vision, recently reiterated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his November 2025 visit to Washington.
It is difficult to believe that U.S. intelligence services view the Muslim Brotherhood as a greater global threat than organizations once led or founded by Sharaa himself, a man who today seems to visit Washington more frequently than he visits Mecca.
For this reason, I believe, contrary to many analysts, that the terrorist designation might actually be an indirect invitation to a long-term strategic dialogue about the future of the Middle East and the Brotherhood’s place within it.
Just as the group once proved capable of political pragmatism with Egyptian security institutions in the early 2000s, it might now be able to reform itself under five essential conditions:
1. Abandoning clandestine operations and underground structures.
2. Renouncing the ideology of global domination and the revival of the Islamic Caliphate.
3. Ending support for armed factions and severing all ties with Iran and Hezbollah.
4. Adopting a clear position on secularism and the separation of religion and state, similar to Türkiye’s model.
5. Fully embracing democracy and human rights according to modern international standards, rather than the traditional concept of “Shura”.
1 min read
2 min read
