THE Muslim Brotherhood which explicitly aims to establish sharia (Islamic law) through peaceful political means was founded in 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna as a reaction to British colonialism, in opposition to colonial rule and the growing influence of secular Western ideas.
Initially as a pan-Islamist, religious, and social movement, the organisation sought to revive Islamic principles and unify the Muslim world under sharia law and champion an Islamic identity. It opposed the secular regimes that followed, even though they were Islamo-centric and authoritarian.
It has been directly engaged in terrorism since the 1930s and through to the present. However, since the 1970s it has, at various times, repudiated terrorism while still providing ideological and material support to proscribed groups. To pick only the most topical, when Hamas chartered itself (1988) it was as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 2017, when Hamas nominally disavowed terrorism and religious conflict, it did so without repudiating its charter and, with a deft linguistic sleight of hand, reinterpreted terrorism as ‘armed resistance’. What such armed resistance looks like was most brutally displayed on October 7, 2023.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s international influence focuses on seditious propagandizing and disinformation. For instance, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) — founded by Muslim Brotherhood activists — currently operates on more than 600 campuses in the United States where they advance vicious disinformation about supposed Israeli and Western atrocities, and promote their radical Sunni form of Islam. They are funded by the ruling family of Qatar, which has pledged Bay’ah (loyalty) and money to the Muslim Brotherhood, a crucial and often overlooked fact, that the Institute For The Study Global Anti-Semitism Policy’s latest report highlights. And it is some funding – to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars the ISGSP reports.
Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are all countries who regard the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist threat and have banned them. Not so the countries of the West. These have remained remarkably tolerant of the Brotherhood with one exception. Austria is the only Western country to have banned affiliates in 2021, following their involvement in a terrorist attack in 2020. Prior to that in 2017 it banned the Brotherhood’s symbology.
America will be the second Western country. Last week, after embracing New York Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani, President Donald Trump ordered his government to decide which associates and chapters to designate as terrorist.
The announcement specified three examples: a chapter of the Brotherhood in the Lebanon that helped to bombard Israel after Hamas’s invasion in October 2023; Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood acolytes who provided material support to Hamas, and an Egyptian member who called for attacks on the West on the day of the invasion.
In January this year, Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s ascendant national conservative party, introduced a Bill to ban the Brotherhood. But it was shot down as ‘racist’ by politicians of the political mainstream. In the UK, Nigel Farage has promised that a government led by Reform UK would ban the Brotherhood. Advance UK agrees. But reformers are unlikely to take over Britain’s government before 2029. Even then it is likely that the administrative state would try to frustrate them.
For instance in 2015, David Cameron’s Conservative government found that ‘aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and activities . . . run counter to British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, equality and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’. Nevertheless, the same civil servants reported that ‘the Muslim Brotherhood is not the only movement that promotes values which appear intolerant of equality and freedom of faith and belief’, as though this made it unexceptional. Amid this unnecessary whataboutery, Cameron chose not to ban it.
Meanwhile governments have continued to consult the Brotherhood’s very questionable British affiliates, including the Muslim Association of Britain and the Muslim Council of Britain (which, despite the names, are unrepresentative radical Sunni groups: the latter is supported by only 2 to 4 per cent of Britain’s Muslims).
Sir Keir Starmer’s government, which relies on Muslim votes, has become more Islamo-centric because it is alarmed by Labour (Muslim) defectors who defeated Labour candidates in some local and national constituencies.
But over 2025, Muslim dissatisfaction with Labour grew because the Government sat on the fence in condemning both Hamas and Israel, failing to satisfy or repudiate the extremists on either side. In July, however, the government proscribed Palestine Action, a movement which had earlier broken with the Labour Party.
Starmer’s promotion of Shabana Mahmood from Justice Secretary to Home Secretary in September affirms the government’s Islamo-centrism. While Mahmood presents herself as a political moderate and an evidentiary lawyer, she has not challenged the two-tier justice in favour of Muslims that Starmer favours and she continues to pretend that ‘Islamophobia’ is ‘off the charts’.
France today is a clear warning for us. France has long held a larger Muslim proportion of its population – indeed, the largest in Western Europe until Germany opened its borders to supposed refugees from Syria in 2015.
This experience helps to explain why France is closer to banning the Brotherhood, despite an equally woke administrative state.
Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron has presided over governments that admit the growing proportion of Islamists, but rely on the old assumption that secular Republican values would win them over. But a wave of Islamist attacks in 2020, including the beheading of the teacher Samuel Paty, prompted Macron, in October, to rail against ‘Islamist separatism’.
The subsequent ‘anti-separatism’ law (2021) empowers government intervention in groups in receipt of public funds and places of worship that do not uphold ‘republican principles’. It bans religious symbols in public services, and requires authorisation for home schooling. The law is routinely evaded, however. Public authorities do not care to enforce it. The number of Musulmans de France (the Brotherhood’s ‘national branch’ in France) has doubled from 50,000 in 2019 to 100,000 by 2024.
This prompted, in May 2024, a long investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood. A year on, according to a confidential Interior Ministry report, the Brotherhood was found to pose a long-term threat to France’s national cohesion – not through violence, but by gradually eroding secular values at the local level. It found that the Brotherhood was trying to privilege Islam and counter gender equality in schools and local non-governmental organisations. From there, it seeks to skew local government and national government.
Yet still France did not ban it. In late September, the murder of a 19-year-old woman by an illegal immigrant from Morocco, free and un-deported in spite of a local conviction for rape, coincided with Michel Barnier’s short-lived right-of-centre administration which cancelled contracts with suspicious educational institutions, investigated religious associations and schools, and intervened with imams to disrupt extremist funding and messaging.
The Interior Minister at the time was Bruno Retailleau. He organised 28 fellow Republicans to write their own policy on Islamism, which they released this week. It complains that Islamists are taking over sports clubs, youth clubs, schools, student organisations and housing associations, and repurposing them as alternative local authorities.
Most of its 17 recommendations are calls for enforcement or extension of the measures in the ‘anti-separatism’ law. The most controversial of the recommendations include a Trump-like policy of making travel visas dependent on help to control illegal migration and banning children under 16 from wearing hijabs and fasting.
In Britain, such a hijab ban would have revealed to teachers and social workers the abuse of Sara Sharif by her father and stepmother before she died. Such a migration policy would have helped to deter them from fleeing to Pakistan (temporarily) and would help to prevent such abusers from immigrating in the first place.
Britain’s reformers must prepare Bills now to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and the seditious activities of Islamists in general, and to fix the open borders by which bad actors come and go, ready for a change of government by 2029.
