Trump govt considering ban on Muslim Brotherhood—Is the West's romance with Islamism over?

The Print

10 hours ago

Last week, almost no one noticed when Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was considering a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, describing them as 'a grave concern'. The Islamist organisation has long been proscribed in Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and most recently , in Jordan.
Then, in 2003, a police search at Heathrow Airport found $340,000 packed in his hand baggage—a little over three kilos of neat, new $100 bills. Libya had paid the money to assassinate then-Saudi crown prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Alamoudi would admit at trial . Further investigation revealed the AMC was routing funds to Hamas and Hezbollah, the FBI said.
For a time, Abdurahman Alamoudi flew with the angels , flitting across the landscape of the most powerful city on earth: Friend to America's most powerful, he served as Goodwill Ambassador for American Muslims for the State Department, and his American Muslim Council or AMC was described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as 'the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States'. Together with President George Bush, he had mourned the victims of 9/11 at the Washington National Cathedral. Later, he opened the door for an Imam to read the opening invocation for a session of Congress.
The Brotherhood, though, is also a critical ally of the nation which just donated President Donald Trump a Boeing 747, and has deep business ties to his family. For decades, Qatar has used the Brotherhood as a means to project influence across the Middle East, even providing Hamas with its headquarters and funding. Trump had promised to ban the Brotherhood in 2019, but the plan disappeared into the sands.
For Trump, acting against the Brotherhood could offer a small, but politically significant prize: A weapon to smear the pro-Palestine organisations criticising his Israel policies, and rally his core White nationalist supporters around Islamophobia. The consequences of a ban, however, will stretch across the world, dramatically impacting the Islamist political landscape.
The Global Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood was set up in 1928 by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, as the anti-colonial movement began to gather in Egypt. Frustrated at the religious establishment's failure to resist cultural Westernisation in cities like Cairo, al-Banna preached for religious revival in coffee shops, small mosques, and on the streets. Egypt's liberation, he insisted, could be brought about only by building a society based on the Sharia—not imports like liberalism or socialism. Foreign students studying in Cairo carried the message across the Islamic world, historian Lorenzo Vidino writes.
From 1940 to 1944, as the Second World War raged, British diplomats sought to buy off the Brotherhood. Scholar James Heyworth-Dunne wrote in 1950 that al-Banna offered to end anti-British mobilisation in exchange for $40,000 and a car. The talks went nowhere. According to scholar Martyn Frampton, the Middle East Intelligence Committee identified Brotherhood operatives in Sudan, Algeria, Amman, Beirut, Aleppo, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and India in 1941.
Even as the Brotherhood's special squads began using terrorism to eliminate their rivals, al-Banna reached out to diplomats from the United Kingdom and the United States, proposing a joint front against Communism. The relationship, however, proved unsustainable. In 1947, Brotherhood member Rifat Abd al-Rahman al-Naggar, an Air Force officer, bombed the King George Hotel in Ismailia. The assassination of Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi led Egypt to ban the Brotherhood, while al-Banna himself was murdered by secret police agents in February 1949.
The Egyptian revolution of 1952, which brought President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers movement to power, was greeted with joy by the Brotherhood. The Islamists had fought together with the Free Officers in Gaza against Israel and helped plot the downfall of King Farouk bin Ahmed Fuad's monarchy. The Brotherhood's insistence on Sharia, though, rapidly alienated them from Nasser, and the movement was crushed.
Far from home, though, the Brotherhood found supporters willing to offer it refuge and resources. Al-Banna's successor, Sayyid Qutb, who studied in the US on a fellowship, returned repelled by the relative sexual freedoms of American women, and jazz, which he described as the music of 'savage Bushmen'. Egyptian Islamist leader Said Ramadan travelled with a delegation of anti-Communist clerics to meet with US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. The following year, he was granted asylum in Germany.
Following this, French journalist Caroline Fourest has written that Ramadan emerged in Pakistan. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan wrote the preface to one of Ramadan's books and gave him a slot on national radio. Ensconced in Karachi, Ramadan also became close to Abul A'la Maududi, who had founded the Brotherhood's Indian wing, the Jamaat-e-Islami. Large parts of Maududi's work, interestingly, are reproduced verbatim in Brotherhood literature. According to Framton, al-Banna himself wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, describing the accession of Hyderabad and Kashmir to India as an occupation of Islamic lands.
Even as these events unfolded, Western intelligence services had begun rebuilding their contacts with the Brotherhood, journalist Ian Johnson revealed. The US and the UK had already started recruiting the remnants of the Muslim legion, hoping to use them against the Soviet Union.
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The Brotherhood in America
Later, some commentators would charge the Brotherhood with deception, arguing that it claimed to represent moderation while maintaining ties with jihadist terror. This, in Alamoudi's case, is demonstrably untrue. He publicly supported Hamas and Hezbollah, and demanded the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric jailed for plotting to blow up New York landmarks. In one phone call intercepted by the FBI, he claimed al-Qaeda's 1998 bombings in East Africa were wrong, but only because 'many African Muslims have died and not a single American died'.
Yet, for reasons that have never been explained, Alamoudi worked with the Defence Department to recruit Imams to meet the religious needs of Muslims in the United States military. President George Bush, Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator Cynthia McKinney all accepted campaign donations from Alamoudi. This, even though the AMC represented no significant group of Muslims.
Foundations for enmeshing well-funded Brotherhood front-organisations across the West were laid decades before Alamoudi and the AMC emerged. Khurshid Ahmad, among Maududi's earliest followers—and later Senator, and Minister of Planning under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's regime—was assigned the task of propagating the Brotherhood's message in the West around 1968, Vidino records.
Living in the UK, Khurshid and his colleagues from the Brotherhood began receiving funds from Saudi Arabia in 1973. This would flower into the Islamic Council of Europe (ICE), which operated from London's posh Belgravia neighbourhood. In 1977, at a conference in Lugano, Khurshid and other ICE leaders set up the Brotherhood's first operation in the US, the International Institute of Islamic Thought. From at least 1991, the Brotherhood had an informal manifesto guiding its operations in the US, advocating for creating networks of decentralised organisations.
These efforts were driving a less genteel story, too. Like generations of jihadists, the young fighters who thronged to Pakistan to combat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were drawn in by the Brotherhood's words and networks. Jihadist Abdullah Azzam, scholar Thomas Hegghammer has written, not only laid the foundations for Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda, but also for the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
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The best of enemies
Following 9/11, Western diplomatic and intelligence services severed all contact with the Brotherhood. But the stand-off was not to last long. In 2006, journalist Martin Bright revealed that the UK's foreign office was considering reopening ties with figures it described as 'moderate Islamists'. The British government paid for Brotherhood ideologue Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey, and funded two Islamist youth organisations at home, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation.
This process gathered momentum in the coming years, as the UK concluded that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable. In 2011, the Foreign Office paid for Taliban leader Abdul Salaam Zaeef to attend a conference in London, and he was then privately hosted for a hunting vacation in Scotland.
Leaked diplomatic correspondence reveals, Frampton and Ehud Rosen write, that American authorities were more hawkish in their public statements on the Brotherhood. Simultaneously, they intensified efforts to identify so-called moderates who would reject violence and thus hollow out the jihadist threat from within. The Brotherhood also proved a key ally in the long struggle to dethrone the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The Alamoudi case wasn't the only one to show the perils of that path. The prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation—alleged to have channelled millions of dollars to Hamas—threw up disturbing evidence of connivance by linked organisations named as unindicted coconspirators: the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the North American Islamic Trust. The case collapsed in 2007, but documents released during the trial established deep links between these networks and the Brotherhood, Zeyno Baran notes.
Across the Middle East, the Brotherhood's significance has appeared to wane, as new jihadist groups like the Islamic State have emerged, and the threat from al-Qaeda to the West has diminished. The ideas of the Brotherhood and its networks, however, continue to provide the bedrock for Islamist movements across the world, holding up a vast and complex system of ideological persuasion and fundraising.
Banning the Brotherhood, as well as sister organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, won't end terrorism. To misuse the issue to smear Muslim communities as a whole—a real danger under Trump—holds out the threat of alienating millions of believers at least as hostile to terrorism as the rest of their nations. The decision will, however, signal the end of a toxic romance between Islamism and the West, and make clear that ideologies propagating hate and violence cannot be tolerated in democracies.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)