By Kirollos Abdalla —
Born in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Egypt.
It is banned or a designated terrorist organization in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Russia, Austria and Jordan.
Meanwhile, it is welcomed most heartily in the United Kingdom.
“Actually, the UK today is the only place where the group can have an office with its name,” says Egyptian political analyst Dalia Ziada. “The Muslim Brotherhood can have an office and the banner on this office with their name. We’re living in a crazy world.”
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz hopes this year his legislation to ban the Muslim Brotherhood will pass Congress this year in the United States.
Dalia is one of many voices warning the world about the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood, but will their facts be ignored by Western democracies lulled into languor by a sense of imperviousness. Leftists refuse to admit any facts about Islam on the basis historical, scriptural and socio-political critiques, calling them evidence of “Islamophobia” to be fought against with the same fervor of anti-racism.
The Muslim Brotherhood became the fountainhead of all subsequent Islamist and terrorist groups: ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Boko-Haram, Al Shabab, Hamas, Hezbollah, IRGC, etc., Dalia says.
The Muslim Brotherhood “has founded the ground upon which all the jihadists we know today, literally all the jihadists we know today, stand on, claiming that this is the right Islam or the right form of Sharia,” Dalia says.
Dalia is a moderate Muslim and scholar in Egypt until she fled for her life to the U.S. when she condemned Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023. She now works in Washington D.C. as Coordinator & Research Fellow for Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
The Muslim Brotherhood was started in 1928 by a 22-year-old school teacher, Hassan al-Banna, in the small town Ismailia to rise up against British Colonialism after the Ottoman Caliphate was destroyed by Britain and regions were divvied up into nation states. Most of Egypt resides in towns (today 70% of people) and they resent the wealth of Cairo and Alexandria and despise the worldliness of the cosmopolitan cities.
With the fertile ground of envy, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to imminence, with jihadist militancy right from the beginning.
Twice Egypt has cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood — once during the Marxist regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-’80) and again under the regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi (2130-present). Where did all the militants go to escape the government persecution? Many of them went to the West, especially the United Kingdom, where they continue to propagate their extremist doctrines in mosques and Islamic Centers, Dalia says.
“The Muslim Brotherhood was suppressed,” in Egypt, Dalia says. “Either they went under the ground again inside Egypt. Many of them were put in prison and many many, many fled where once again to the Western World. And this time they did not only go to the UK or the US, but they went to Australia. He went to some European countries, the most famous of them is Germany and so on.”
Turkey also took in large numbers of Muslim Brotherhood because President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan increased his popularity with the masses outside the big cities by projecting a strong Islamic ideal.
Since 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood in America has adopted its “Explanatory Memorandum” on the doctrine of tamkeen, which is translated “empowerment,” though some say it’s translated “settlement.”
“They say, ‘Our role here as a Muslim Brotherhood is to lead a civilizational jihad with the purpose to destroy he western civilization from within.'” Dalia says. “The goal is to radicalize the Western society.”
Even the Federal Bureau of Investigations exposed the threat, but “there are people in the American society who don’t want in in in in the west in general actually who don’t want to accept that the Muslim Brotherhood is a real threat to them,” Dalia says. “They are empowering them out of belief of free speech, freedom of religion.
“But I’m telling you as Muslim, you will make me more safe, you will make me more safe, if you fight against these radicals,” Dalia adds.
Many observers give scant chance to pass Ted Cruz’s legislation banning the Muslim Brotherhood. There are hurdles, such as no centralized leadership, and the enshrined freedoms of the Bill of Rights.
Still, it would be good for us to pay attention to the people who know firsthand, the Arab countries that have banned the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sources: Erin Moran, others.
