Let me explain to you one important fact about the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s what I usually tell the media people in Egypt especially, and the people who claim to be ex-members, I tell them: you cannot understand, properly, the Muslim Brotherhood, and fully, unless you graduated and [got] promoted from 0 to 100, unless you become a member of Makhtab al Irshad [Guidance Office], global Makhtab al Irshad, and global Shura [Council], you cannot understand. Neither the CIA, nor the Pentagon, nor the [Department of] Homeland Security, nor any other group, the KGB, they will never [understand it], because it’s a long story, Lorenzo. Long, long story. And the more you talk, the more you discover things.
—Kamal Helbawy, June 2017
The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest and the world’s most influential Islamist movement. Since its foundation in 1928, it has played a crucial role in political, religious, and social developments in the Arab world and has deeply influenced Muslim communities beyond it, including in the West. The Brotherhood’s view of Islam as a complete and all-embracing system, governing all aspects of private and public life, has shaped generations of Islamists worldwide, from those who seek to implement their vision through peaceful means to those who make acts of brutal violence their primary modus operandi.
Despite this enormous influence, few aspects of the organization are uncontested. Views of its inner workings, ideology, and aims differ widely among scholars, policy makers, and the general public, in the Muslim world as well as in the West. The group’s proverbial secrecy is one of the main reasons for this confusion. As the Brotherhood was founded and operates mostly in countries where local regimes have enacted various forms of repression against it, the movement has understandably always seen confidentiality and dissimulation of many aspects of its structure and goals as a necessary tactic to survive. In substance, a clear-cut assessment of the Brotherhood is, as Kamal Helbawy puts it in the epigraph above, a fool’s errand for anybody who does not belong to the intimate inner circle that has served in the Brotherhood’s top leadership positions at the global level.1 Moreover, a universal assessment of what the Brotherhood is and wants is further complicated by the fact that, to some degree, the organization’s ideology and tactics have changed over time and vary from country to country.
Even the very name of the organization can be interpreted in various ways. Arguably the term is most commonly used to refer to the organization founded by Hassan al Banna in 1928 in Egypt. Al Banna conceived a complex organizational structure, a web of strict rules and internal bodies aimed at making the Brotherhood a modern and efficient machine capable of Islamizing Egyptian society and establishing an Islamic regime in the country. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has gone through many phases since then, including several crackdowns on the part of various Egyptian regimes and, in the aftermath of the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, a brief moment at the helm of the Egyptian state. Still today, despite its deep crisis, the term “Muslim Brotherhood” is frequently used in reference to its Egyptian branch, the mother group from which all others originate.
But since the 1940s the Brotherhood’s message has spread to virtually all Arab and many Muslim-majority countries. In each country, individuals embracing the group’s worldview have established networks that mirror its structure and have adapted its tactics to local dynamics and political conditions. In Middle Eastern countries where it has traditionally been tolerated, like Jordan, it has outwardly operated as a social movement, devoted to education and charitable activities, and as a political party. In those where it has been persecuted, like Syria, it has remained an underground movement devoted to dawa (proselytizing) and, in some cases, to violence. It is common to refer to these networks in each country as Muslim Brotherhood “branches,” even though the term should not imply overemphasis of the authority of the Egyptian mother group over them.
The term Muslim Brotherhood is often used with a third meaning, encompassing the totality of the national branches of the organization and all the entities worldwide that adhere to al Banna’s ideology and methodology. All these actors work according to a common vision but with operational independence, free to pursue their goals as they deem appropriate. Like any movement that spans continents and has millions of members and sympathizers, what is often referred to as the global Muslim Brotherhood is hardly a monolithic block. Personal and ideological divisions are common. Senior scholars and activists often vie with one another over theological issues, political positions, access to financial resources, and leadership of the movement. Despite these inevitable differences, their deep belief in the inherent political nature of Islam and their adoption of al Banna’s organization-focused methodology make them part of the informal transnational movement of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In a 2008 interview Mohamed Habib, then first deputy chairman of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, confirmed this assessment of the organizations that locate themselves in the Brotherhood’s galaxy: “There are entities that exist in many countries all over the world. These entities have the same ideology, principle and objectives but they work in different circumstances and different contexts. So, it is reasonable to have decentralisation in action so that every entity works according to its circumstances and according to the problems it is facing and in their framework.”2
Despite this complete operational independence, the individuals and entities that belong to the so-called global Muslim Brotherhood perceive themselves as part of a larger family. Their ties go beyond a common origin and a shared ideological foundation and are shaped by a deep, global web of organizational, personal, and financial connections. Past attempts to formally coordinate and supervise them through a formal structure, the International Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, led by the Egyptian branch, gained little traction.3 But the term Muslim Brotherhood could be used to identify an informal, yet tight-knit, global network of individuals and entities that share not just an ideology but regular operational connections as well.
Finally, Muslim Brotherhood could also be used to identify a type of Islamist activism. “Ikhwanism” (from the Arabic word for brothers, ikhwan) is a commonly used term for a methodology of social-religious-political mobilization that, transcending formal and informal affiliations, is inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood. The adoption of its mindset by nonaffiliated groups has been seen positively by the “formal” Brotherhood, from its origins until today. Al Banna himself advocated for creating a global movement rather than a formally structured organization, as he saw the Brotherhood “as an idea and a creed, a system and a syllabus, which is why we are not bounded by a place or a group of people.”4 In 2005 Mohammed Akef, then murshid (supreme guide and leader) of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, explained in an interview that “a person who is in the global arena and believes in the Muslim Brotherhood’s path is considered part of us and we are part of him.”5 Other senior Brotherhood members have described the movement as a “common way of thinking” and “an international school of thought.”6
If the evolution of each national branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East took particular turns based on each country’s political culture and developments, the Brotherhood’s history is particularly peculiar in the West, where it has had the unique characteristic of operating in non-Muslim-majority societies. The first active presence of Brothers in the West can be dated to the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when small, scattered groups of militants left various Middle Eastern countries to settle in cities throughout Europe and North America. A handful of these pioneers, like Said Ramadan and Yussuf Nada, were prominent members of the Egyptian Brotherhood fleeing the crackdown implemented by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the following decades, Brotherhood members from other Middle Eastern countries similarly found refuge in the West from the repression of local regimes.
Yet the majority of Brotherhood-linked activists relocating to the West were students, members of the educated and urban middle classes of the Middle East who had already joined or had flirted with the idea of joining the Brotherhood in their home countries. Settling in the West to further their studies in local universities, these students continued their involvement in Islamic activities in their new environments. The combination of experienced militants and enthusiastic students bore immediate fruits, as Brotherhood activists formed some of the West’s first Muslim organizations. Most Western cities at the time lacked Muslim places of worship, and the Brothers’ mosques, generally little more than garages or small meeting rooms on university campuses, often were the first religious facilities for Western Muslims. The West’s freedoms allowed the Brothers to openly conduct the activities for which they had often been persecuted in their home countries. With few funds but plenty of enthusiasm, they published magazines, organized lectures, and carried out all sorts of activities through which they could spread their ideology.
The arrival of the first Brothers in Europe and North America was hardly the first phase of a concerted and sinister plot of the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamize the West, as it is sometimes portrayed.7 They initially represented a small, dispersed contingent of militants whose move reflected not a centralized plan but rather personal decisions that fortuitously brought some Brotherhood figures to spend years or the rest of their lives in the West. Yet the small organizations they formed soon developed beyond their most optimistic expectations. The Brothers’ student groupings evolved into organizations seeking to fulfill the religious needs of the West’s rapidly growing Muslim populations, and their mosques—often structured as multipurpose community centers—attracted large numbers of worshippers. Following al Banna’s complex organizational model, they established youth and women’s branches, schools, and think tanks. The ample funds they received from wealthy public and private donors in the Arab Gulf allowed the Brothers to operate well beyond what their small numbers would have otherwise provided for.
By the late 1970s the Brothers’ isolated clusters throughout the West increasingly began to interact with one another, thereby establishing formal and informal networks that spanned Europe and North America and reinforcing their position on both continents. Yet because most of the pioneers’ hearts were still in their native countries, they viewed their sojourn in the West as only a temporary exile in a convenient sanctuary before returning home to continue their struggle. Nevertheless, some Brotherhood activists slowly started to perceive their situation differently. Redefining some centuries-old religious qualifications, they increasingly stated that the traditional distinction between dar al Islam (land of Islam) and dar al harb (land of war) did not reflect the current reality.8 While the West could not be considered dar al Islam, because sharia was not enforced there, it could not be considered dar al harb either, because Muslims were allowed to practice Islam freely and were not persecuted. Brotherhood scholars like Faysal Mawlawi and Yusuf al Qaradawi decided, therefore, that it was possible for them to create a new legal category. They concluded that the West should be considered dar al dawa (land of preaching), a territory where Muslims live as a minority, are respected, and have the affirmative duty to spread their religion peacefully.9
The implications of this decision go far beyond the realm of theology. By redefining the nature of the Muslim presence in the West, the Brothers also changed their own role within it. While still supporting in words and deeds their counterparts’ efforts to establish Islamic states in the Muslim world, they increasingly focused their attention on their new reality in the West. Having redrawn the West as dar al dawa, they intensified their efforts at spreading their interpretation of Islam throughout it. They established an ever-growing constellation of overlapping organizations devoted to tasks ranging from education to financial investments, political lobbying, and charity, thereby catering to the West’s growing Muslim populations.
Moreover, in many countries the Western Brothers have positioned themselves at the forefront of the competition to be the main interlocutors of local establishments. Although circumstances vary from country to country, when Western governments or media attempt to reach out to the Muslim community, it is quite likely that many, if not all, of the organizations or individuals that are engaged belong, albeit with varying degrees of intensity, to the network of the Western Brothers. It is not uncommon to find exceptions to this situation, and things have changed in various countries over the past few years, but overall it is apparent that no other Islamic movement has the visibility, political influence, and access to Western elites that the Western Brothers have obtained over the past decades. In light of these facts, it is fair to portray the competition for the representation of Western Muslims as the relative victory of a well-organized minority over other, less organized minorities for the voice of a silent majority.
One of the most challenging aspects related to the Muslim Brotherhood in the West is identifying which organizations and individuals can be linked to the movement. Governments and commentators have endlessly debated whether the organizations founded by the Brotherhood’s pioneers and their offshoots—established decades ago and increasingly guided by a second generation of mostly Western-born leaders—can be described as Muslim Brotherhood entities. Complicating things, most Western-based, Brotherhood-linked activists, aware of the negative stigma that any possible link to the Muslim Brotherhood can create, have traditionally gone to great lengths to downplay or hide such ties.
Terminology can indeed be deceiving and, as in the Middle East, the term Muslim Brotherhood in the West can mean different things. While other categorizations are certainly possible, it can be argued that the term Muslim Brotherhood refers to three separate yet highly connected realities, which, in decreasing degrees of intensity, are the pure Brotherhood, Brotherhood spawns, and organizations influenced by the Brotherhood.
Pure Brotherhood are the nonpublic/secret networks established in the West by members of Middle Eastern branches of the Brotherhood. In all Western countries the first generation of pioneers arriving from the Arab world set up structures that mirrored, albeit on a much smaller scale, those of the countries of origin. Establishing, de facto, a small Brotherhood branch in every Western country, they re-created the organization’s traditional system of selective recruitment, formal induction, fee-paying membership, and the pyramidal structure that goes from the usra, the nuclear unit of a handful of activists that meet weekly at the local level, to an elected leadership supervising the activities in the country. The Western Brothers keep this structure strictly secret and vehemently deny it (or, in some cases, describe it as just a thing of the past) when critics bring it up. It still represents the cornerstone of the Brotherhood in the West.
Brotherhood spawns, on the other hand, are visible/public organizations established by individuals who belong to the “pure Brotherhood.” As previously mentioned, over time Western Brothers established a wide web of entities devoted to a broad array of activities. None of these organizations publicly identifies as having links (if not, at times, in purely historical or ideological terms) with any structure of the Muslim Brotherhood. But, in reality, these organizations represent the other side of the coin to the pure Brothers—the public face of the secretive network, and the part that advances the group’s agenda in society without giving away the secret structure.
Given the lack of formal affiliation and the conscious effort by the Western Brothers to downplay or deny their links to the Muslim Brotherhood, identifying an organization as a spawn is a challenge. Nevertheless, there are a number of indicators that, while not conclusive, help to assess whether a certain organization is a Brotherhood spawn. These include the history of the organization; its founders and main activists’ links to the Brotherhood; its consistent adoption of Brotherhood texts and literature; substantial financial ties with other Brotherhood structures and funders; and formal or informal participation in transnational Brotherhood initiatives and organizations.
Finally, organizations influenced by the Brotherhood are those that, while adopting an ideology that is clearly influenced by that of the organization, have no clear operational ties to it. Traces of Brotherhood presence might be present, for example, in the composition of the board, the organization’s sources of funding, or some ideological influences. But at the same time, organizations belonging to this third tier of the Western Brotherhood might have diverse memberships (including non-Islamists and even non-Muslims), might engage in progressive reinterpretations of classic Islamist thought, and might try to emancipate themselves from Brotherhood tutelage.
Inevitably, this tripartite classification cannot encapsulate all the degrees of complexity that surround organizations linked to the Brotherhood. As Brigitte Maréchal puts it, “What makes the Brotherhood so complex is that it consists of various types of superimposed structures, some of them evolving out of the local European situation, while others trace their history back to the organisation’s country of origin.”10 The movement’s secrecy makes most efforts aimed at understanding its and its spinoffs’ inner workings challenging. By the same token, fluidity is another element that needs to be taken into consideration, as it is not uncommon for organizations and individuals to increase or decrease their levels of personal, structural, and ideological connectivity with the Brotherhood and therefore shift position in the tripartition.
Despite these important limitations, this classification aims to provide some nuance and order to a debate that often becomes polarized along two “extreme” and simplistic positions: the “there is no Muslim Brotherhood in the West save some isolated activist” approach and the “all organizations with some Brotherhood trace are part of the Muslim Brotherhood” line of thinking. The rest of the book aims to provide a more substantial amount of information to clarify these murky dynamics.
Since reinterpreting their role in the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Western Brotherhood networks have understood the need to adapt their rich intellectual heritage to their new environment. Over the past thirty years the Western Brothers have tried to find ways to contextualize the teachings of their ideological forefathers to their reality as a movement operating freely in non-Muslim societies. It soon became obvious to a movement as pragmatic as the Brotherhood that blindly applying to modern Europe and North America what al Banna had prescribed in Egypt in the 1930s made little sense. The ideas of al Banna and of other leading Islamist thinkers who came after him still provide invaluable guidance on several aspects of their faith and activism, starting with the immutable idea of Islam as a comprehensive way of life and an all-encompassing methodology.11 Nevertheless, the ideas can be discussed, reinterpreted, adapted, challenged, and even dismissed as times, places, and circumstances change. The Brotherhood, in the West as elsewhere, is not a stagnant movement but rather makes flexibility and continuous evolution two of its core characteristics and strengths. Moreover, Western Brotherhood leaders often disagree with one another on how the movement should try to achieve its goals and, in some cases, even on what those goals should actually be.
Despite these complexities, it is possible to identify some goals that are common to all “members” of the Western Brotherhood. Foremost among them is the fostering of a strong, resilient, and assertive Islamic identity among Western Muslims. As individuals belonging to any religiously conservative movement, Islamists worldwide are concerned with maintaining the morality and piousness of their communities. Such defensive posture becomes even more important to Muslim minorities, as they incur the risk of being culturally absorbed by the host society. This point, along with other key principles of the Western Brotherhood’s activism, has been cogently expressed by Yusuf al Qaradawi, the undisputed spiritual leader of the global and Western Brotherhood, in his landmark book Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase (1990). “It is the duty of the Islamic Movement,” wrote Qaradawi, “not to leave these expatriates to be swept by the whirlpool of the materialistic trend that prevails in the West.”12
Yet, unlike Salafism and most other Islamist trends that seek to strengthen the Islamic identity of Western Muslims, the Brothers do not advocate isolation from mainstream society. On the contrary, they urge Muslims to actively participate in it, but only insofar as such engagement is necessary to benefit the Islamist movement and change society in an Islamic fashion. According to Qaradawi, Muslims in the West should adopt “a conservatism without isolation, and an openness without melting.”13 Finding the balance between cultural impermeability and active sociopolitical interaction is not easy, and their borders are constantly redefined. But the Brothers see themselves as capable of defining how Muslims can be both loyal to their faith and active citizens of Western secular democracies.
The Brothers see this guiding role as an unprecedented opportunity for the movement, which, in the words of Qaradawi, can “play the role of the missing leadership of the Muslim nation with all its trends and groups.”14 While in Muslim-majority countries the Brotherhood can traditionally operate only in limited spaces, as it is kept in check by regimes that oppose it, Qaradawi realizes that no such obstacle prevents it from operating in the free and democratic West. Moreover, Western Muslims, whom Qaradawi describes as disoriented by the impact of life in non-Muslim societies and often lacking the most basic knowledge about Islam, represent an ideally receptive audience for the movement’s message. Finally, no competing Islamic trend has the financial means and organization to compete with the Western Brothers. The combination of these factors leads Qaradawi to conclude that the West is a sort of Islamic tabula rasa, a virgin territory where the socioreligious structures and limits of the Muslim world do not exist and where the Brothers can implement their dawa freely, overcoming their competition with superior mobilization skills and funds.
A second goal common to all Western Brotherhood organizations is the designation as official or de facto representatives of the Muslim community of their country. Becoming the preferred—if not the exclusive—partners of Western governments and elites serves various purposes. Despite their unrelenting activism and ample resources, the Brothers have not been able to create a mass movement and attract the allegiance of large numbers of Western Muslims. While concepts, issues, and frames introduced by the Brothers have reached many of them, most Western Muslims either actively resist the Brothers’ influence or simply ignore it. The Brothers understand that a preferential relationship with Western elites could provide them with the financial and political capital that would allow them to significantly expand their reach and influence inside the community.
By leveraging such a relationship, in fact, the Brothers aim to be entrusted by Western governments with administering all aspects of Muslim life in each country. They would ideally become those whom governments task with preparing the curricula and selecting the teachers for Islamic education in public schools, appointing imams in public institutions such as the military, the police, or prisons, and receiving subsidies to administer various social services. This position would also allow them to be the de facto official Muslim voice in public debates and in the media, overshadowing competing forces. The powers and legitimacy bestowed on them by Western governments would allow them to exert significantly increased influence over the Muslim community. Making a clever political calculation, the Western Brothers attempt to turn their leadership bid into a self-fulfilling prophecy, seeking to be recognized as representatives of the Muslim community in order to actually become it.
Finally, the position of representatives of Western Muslims would allow the Brothers to achieve their third main goal: influencing Western policy making on all Islamic-related issues, whether domestic or foreign policy related. As for the former, they aim to be the interlocutors that Western policy makers listen to when deciding issues that range from religion education in schools to counterterrorism, potential bans on face veils, and integration. Influencing foreign policy is equally, if not more, important to the Western Brothers. Once again, Qaradawi’s writings perfectly encapsulate this vision. Understanding the crucial role that the policies of Western governments play in the struggle between Islamist movements and their rivals for the control of Muslim countries, he declares that “it is necessary for Islam in this age to have a presence in such societies that affect world politics” and that the presence of a strong and organized Islamist movement in the West is “required for defending the causes of the Muslim Nation and the Muslim Land against the antagonism and misinformation of anti-Islamic forces and trends.”15
In other words, Qaradawi argues that the Western Brothers find themselves with the unprecedented opportunity to influence Western public opinion and policy makers on all geopolitical issues related to the Muslim world. And indeed, over the past thirty years the European Brothers have consistently tried to take advantage of their position of influence to advance Islamist causes. From private meetings with senior policy makers to mass street protests, editorials in major newspapers, and high-profile conferences, they have used all the material and intellectual resources they possess to advance the Islamist point of view on several issues, from Palestine to Afghanistan, and on the nature of the Islamist movement itself.
Assessments of the Western Brothers closely resemble those of the global Islamist movement, with opinions split between optimists and pessimists. More specifically, optimists argue that the Western Brothers are no longer preoccupied with creating Islamic states in the Muslim world but rather are focused on social and political issues concerning Muslims in the West.16 Their main goals are simply to defend the interests of Western Muslims and to diffuse Islamic values among them. The Western Brothers are a socially conservative force that, unlike other movements with which they are often mistakenly grouped, encourages the integration of Western Muslim communities and offers a model in which Muslims can live their faith fully and maintain a strong Islamic identity while becoming actively engaged citizens.17 Moreover, the optimists argue, the Western Brothers provide young Muslims with positive affirmation, urging them to transfer their energy and frustration into the political process rather than into violence or extremism. Governments should harness the Western Brothers’ grassroots activities and cooperate with them on common issues, such as unemployment, crime, drugs, and radicalization.
Pessimists see a much more sinister nature of the Western Brotherhood. Thanks to their resources and the naiveté of most Westerners, they argue, the Western Brothers are engaged in a slow but steady social engineering program, aimed at Islamizing Western Muslim populations and, ultimately, at competing with Western governments for their allegiance. The pessimists accuse the Brothers of being modern-day Trojan horses, engaged in a sort of stealth subversion designed to weaken Western society from within, patiently laying the foundations for its replacement with an Islamic order.18 The fact that the Western Brothers do not use violence but participate with enthusiasm in the democratic process is seen simply as a cold calculation on their part. Realizing they are still a relatively weak force, the Brothers have opted for a different tactic: befriending the establishment.
According to pessimists, officials of Brotherhood-linked organizations have understood that infiltrating the system, rather than attacking it head-on, is the best way to obtain what they want; after all, in the West, at least for now, the harsh confrontations mounted by jihadist groups lead nowhere. By becoming the privileged partners of the Western establishment, they are taking advantage of the Western elites’ desperate desire to establish a dialogue with any representatives of the Muslim community and put themselves forward as the voices of Western Muslims, subsequently using the power and legitimacy that comes from such interactions to strengthen their position inside the community. Pessimists also point to a constant discrepancy in the Western Brothers’ discourse: moderate and expressing their adherence to democracy externally, radical and spewing hatred toward the West internally.
Opinions on the Brotherhood swing dramatically not just within the academic community but also within virtually every Western government. In substance, no Western country has adopted a cohesive assessment followed by all branches of its government. There is no centrally issued white paper or set of internal guidelines sent to all government officials detailing how Western Brotherhood organizations should be identified, assessed, and eventually engaged. This leads to huge inconsistencies in policies, not only from one country to another but also within each country, where positions diverge from ministry to ministry, and even from office to office of the same body.
Despite the difficulties experienced by all Western countries in doing so, determining what the Western Brothers’ nature and aims are is hugely important, as it has significant implications on several policy levels. Domestically, it plays out on many domains related to religion, integration, and immigration. In education, should Western governments partner with Brotherhood organizations, which often control a larger and better organized cadre of teachers than other Muslim organizations, to teach Islam in public schools? Should they be allowed to run private schools? Should they be the partners of Western governments in training and selecting chaplains for the prison system, the military, the police, and other similar bodies? Should they receive public funding to conduct outreach, education, and integration activities with the Muslim communities and the recent large numbers of refugees who have arrived from Muslim-majority countries? Should they be made partners in a domestic counterterrorism and counterradicalization strategy?
The implications are plentiful also on the foreign policy side. In recent years several important Arab countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) have designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. In the case of the UAE, the government has also placed several Western Brotherhood organizations on its terrorism list. Should the West follow suit, as some lawmakers in the United States have suggested? And how should the West behave toward countries like Qatar and Turkey that fund the Western Brotherhood?
These issues are deeply intertwined, making them even more complicated. It is apparent that the first step in determining cogent policies is to understand how the Muslim Brotherhood, both in the East and in the West, operates, what it believes, and what it wants. In the hope of contributing to the debate, this book, using a novel approach, seeks to shed some light on the inner workings and the worldview of Western Brotherhood milieus through the unique perspective of a handful of its former members.