Some enemies announce themselves with a roar, and some with a whisper, and the patient ones are the more dangerous. The movement we examine here has worn many faces over nearly a century—the charity and the clinic, the student association and the political party, the parliamentary bloc and the armed wing—and beneath all of them it has held, with a constancy its enemies might envy, to a single aim: the restoration of Islamic rule over every land it claims, beginning with the land of Israel and reaching, in the fullness of its ambition, to the whole of the world. The Muslim Brotherhood is the most consequential Islamist organization of the modern age, the parent or the model of a hundred movements, and the long war against the Jewish state cannot be understood without it. We trace its origin, its doctrine, its strategy, and its enmity, and we ask what the friend of Israel is to make of it.

As in all our work in this field, we keep the distinction between an organization and the millions it has touched. Many who passed through the Brotherhood’s schools and clinics knew nothing of its inner doctrine and wanted only the services it provided where the state provided none; many who voted for its candidates sought merely an honest alternative to corrupt regimes. To examine the movement’s ideology and aims is not to condemn every soul who ever crossed its threshold. It is to understand a disciplined vanguard and the idea it has carried, with remarkable patience, across the better part of a hundred years and into the founding charter of the movement that rules Gaza.

The Schoolteacher of Ismailia

In the year 1928, in the Egyptian canal town of Ismailia, a young and intense schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna gathered a handful of followers and founded a society he called the Muslim Brothers. The Egypt of his day was a land under the shadow of British power, its old certainties shaken, its faith, as al-Banna saw it, in retreat before the secular and material civilization of the West. He grieved what he regarded as the abandonment of Islam by the educated and the powerful, the seduction of the young by foreign ways, and the dismemberment of the old order. His answer was not merely to preach but to organize—to build a movement that would re-Islamize society from the bottom up, person by person and institution by institution, until the whole of life, private and public, individual and political, was brought once more under the rule of the faith.

This was the seminal insight, and it is essential to grasp it, for it distinguishes the Brotherhood from a mere revival of personal piety. Al-Banna conceived of Islam not as a private religion of the heart but as a total system—a complete order embracing worship and law, family and economy, culture and the state—and he held that no part of life could rightly be surrendered to any other authority. Religion and politics were not to be separated; the separation itself was the disease. From this seed grew the whole tree of modern political Islam, the conviction that the faith must govern, that there can be no rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, because there is no Caesar, only God and His law administered by those who serve it. The schoolteacher of Ismailia planted that idea, and it has not stopped growing since.

The Creed in a Sentence

The Brotherhood distilled its spirit into a motto that its members have recited for generations, and the motto repays close attention, for a movement’s slogan is its self-portrait. Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Qur’an is our law; jihad is our way; and death in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Read it slowly. It is not the creed of a charity or a debating society. It names jihad as the path and martyrdom as the summit of aspiration, and it does so not in some secret document wrung from the movement by its enemies but in the words it teaches its own children. Whatever the Brotherhood has said to Western journalists in the language of democracy and civil society, this is what it has said to itself, and a movement is known by what it says to itself.

The defenders of the movement will answer, and not without some justice, that jihad in the motto may carry the broad sense of striving, and that death in the way of God is a commonplace of Islamic piety with no necessary connection to violence. We have examined in another place the two faces of the word jihad, and we grant that the motto, read charitably, need not mean the bomb and the gun. But mottos live in the mouths that say them and the deeds that follow them, and the deeds of the movement’s armed expressions have settled the meaning beyond serious dispute. When the wing of the Brotherhood that governs Gaza recites that jihad is its way, it is not speaking of the struggle of the soul against sin. The motto means what its most committed adherents have always made it mean.

Sayyid Qutb and the Turn to Revolution

If al-Banna gave the movement its body, it was another man who gave its radical wing its fiercest soul, and his name was Sayyid Qutb. An Egyptian writer and thinker who spent time in the United States and recoiled from what he saw there as a soulless materialism drowning in license, Qutb returned home, joined the Brotherhood, and was imprisoned and tortured under the secular nationalist regime that came to fear it. From his prison cell he wrote the book that would become the testament of revolutionary Islamism, a slender and incendiary work whose title is rendered in English as Milestones, and in it he set forth a doctrine that pushed al-Banna’s vision to its revolutionary conclusion.

Qutb’s central and explosive claim was that the entire world—including the nominally Muslim societies of his own day—had fallen back into jahiliyya, the state of pagan ignorance that Islam had come to abolish, because they no longer submitted to the sovereignty of God alone but to the authority of men. The rulers of the Muslim world, governing by secular law rather than divine, were therefore not true Muslims at all but apostates, and the duty of the true believer was not to reform such a system from within but to overthrow it. He called for a vanguard, a dedicated few who would withdraw from the corrupt order, purify themselves, and then return to wage the struggle that would sweep it away and restore the rule of God. Here is the ideological seed of every jihadist revolution that has followed; the men who would later wage holy war against their own governments drank, knowingly or not, from Qutb’s cup. The regime that hanged him in 1966 made him a martyr and multiplied his influence a thousandfold.

The War Against the Jew

Qutb did not confine his fury to the rulers of the Muslim world; he turned it, with peculiar intensity, upon the Jew, and the tract he devoted to the subject is among the most influential works of modern Islamist antisemitism. In it he cast the conflict between Islam and the Jews not as a quarrel of his own century over a strip of land but as a cosmic and unending war reaching back to the founding of Islam, in which the Jew is portrayed as the eternal schemer against the faith, the hidden hand behind every assault upon it, the implacable enemy whom God Himself had set against the believers. He gathered the hostile verses and traditions we have examined elsewhere and forged them into a single, totalizing narrative of permanent enmity, and he bequeathed that narrative to the movement and to all who would learn from it.

The importance of this cannot be overstated, for it transformed the political conflict over Palestine into a chapter of a sacred and eternal war. A dispute over borders can be negotiated; a cosmic struggle against the eternal enemy of God cannot. By wrapping the modern conflict in the mantle of a fourteen-century holy war, Qutb and those who followed him placed the existence of the Jewish state outside the realm of the negotiable, rendering it a religious affront that no concession could remedy and no treaty could resolve. The hatred of the Jew in the Brotherhood’s tradition is thus not incidental and not strategic; it is woven into the movement’s very understanding of the world. This is the doctrine that the Palestinian wing would inscribe, decades later, in its founding charter.

The Long Game

What most distinguishes the Brotherhood from the impatient men of the bomb is its sense of time. Where the revolutionary craves the immediate cataclysm, the Brotherhood, in its classic and patient form, plays a long game measured not in years but in generations. Its method, articulated by al-Banna and refined ever since, is gradualism: to Islamize the individual, then the family, then the society, then the state, building strength quietly through education, charity, and the patient capture of institutions, and seizing power only when the ground has been so thoroughly prepared that the fruit falls of itself. Violence is not renounced in principle—the motto forbids that—but it is subordinated to strategy, deployed or withheld as the long calculation requires.

This patience is precisely what makes the movement so easy to underestimate and so hard to counter. A society watching for the bomb-thrower does not notice the schoolteacher, the social worker, the candidate for the school board, the earnest young man building a network of mutual aid in a neglected neighborhood. Yet it is by these unglamorous means, far more than by the spectacular attack, that the Brotherhood has advanced its aims across the decades, embedding itself in the institutions of a society until it is too woven in to be easily removed. The friend of Israel and of the West must understand that he faces not only an enemy who would strike him but an enemy who would outlast him, content to lose a generation if it gains the next, and that the long patience of the movement is not weakness but its most formidable strength.

The Banner of the Poor

No account of the movement’s strength is complete without reckoning the engine of its appeal, which is not its ideology but its charity. Across the lands where it has flourished, the Brotherhood built what corrupt and incompetent states would not: clinics that healed the sick, schools that taught the children, relief that fed the hungry after the earthquake and the flood, networks of mutual aid that caught the poor when the government let them fall. To the desperate, the movement came not as a band of ideologues but as the one institution that actually helped, and gratitude is a powerful recruiter. A man whose child was treated at the Brotherhood’s clinic, whose family was fed by the Brotherhood’s relief, does not easily believe the worst of it, and his sons are raised within its orbit.

This is the genius and the difficulty of the thing together, and the honest observer must hold both. The charity is real; the good done to real bodies and real children is real; to pretend the clinics are mere cynical theater is to lie and to insult the suffering they relieved. And yet the charity is also the soil in which the ideology is planted, the open hand that draws the community into the movement’s embrace, so that the doctrine of total Islamic order and cosmic war against the Jew arrives wrapped in the bread that saved a family’s life. To confront the Brotherhood, then, is never as simple as confronting a gang of terrorists, for it is also confronting the institution that built the hospital, and the West has never quite known how to oppose an enemy that is also, to millions, the only friend that ever came.

The Strategy in Its Own Words

We are not left to guess at the movement’s strategy in the West, for it has been set down in its own documents, and one in particular deserves the believer’s sober attention. In a memorandum produced for the movement’s work in North America, and later entered into evidence in an American federal court, a leading figure described the mission of the Brotherhood on that continent in language that left little to the imagination: that the members must understand their work to be a kind of grand jihad aimed at eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, by its own hand and through the hands of the believers, so that the religion of God is made victorious over all other religions. The document went on to describe a patient process of settlement, working through a web of organizations to build an Islamist presence within the institutions of the host society.

We cite this not to indulge the fevered conspiracy-thinking that imagines a Brother behind every bush, a habit of mind we reject as both false and unjust, but because the document is real, it is the movement’s own, and it states a strategy in terms the movement chose for itself in private. The honest observer holds two things together: that the great majority of Muslims in the West have no part in any such design and are themselves often its intended audience and its victims, and that a disciplined network did articulate, in its own hand, an aim of working patiently through institutions toward an Islamist end. To deny the document is naivety; to read every Muslim into it is bigotry. The truth, as usual, asks more of us than either error.

The Mother of Movements

To measure the Brotherhood by its own organization alone is to miss the larger part of its significance, for its deepest influence has been not as an institution but as a fountainhead, the source from which the wider river of modern political Islam has flowed. The ideas born in Ismailia and sharpened in Qutb’s prison cell did not stay within the movement that bred them; they seeped outward, shaping leaders and movements far beyond the formal membership, including men who would break from the Brotherhood’s patience to embrace the immediate violence it had counseled them to defer. The architect of the most infamous terror network of our age passed through this world of ideas; the founders of armed movements across the region cut their teeth on Qutb’s writings. The Brotherhood is, in a real sense, the mother of the movements, even of the wayward children who turned against her.

This genealogy matters because it shows that the Brotherhood’s defenders and its accusers are both, in part, correct, and the truth lies in holding the paradox. The movement did renounce, in many of its branches, the immediate revolutionary violence that Qutb licensed; in that sense its defenders are right that it is not simply a terrorist organization. And yet it incubated and broadcast the ideas—the total system, the cosmic war, the world divided between the camp of faith and the camp of unbelief—from which the terrorist movements drew their justification; in that sense its accusers are right that it is the ideological parent of much that has bloodied the age. A river is not the same as the floods that pour from it, but neither is it innocent of them. The Brotherhood gave the modern world its grammar of political Islam, and the violent learned to speak from the patient.

Hamas: The Palestinian Branch

All of this becomes concrete, and lethal, in the movement’s Palestinian wing, for Hamas is not an organization merely sympathetic to the Brotherhood or descended from it at a distance; it declares itself, in the second article of its own founding charter, to be one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. This is not an inference drawn by Hamas’s enemies; it is the movement’s own self-definition, printed in the document by which it announced itself to the world. The ideology we have traced—al-Banna’s total system, Qutb’s cosmic war against the jahiliyya and the Jew, the gradualism that does not exclude the gun—is the soil from which Hamas grew, and the charter wears its parentage openly.

And that same charter, as we have noted elsewhere in this series, grounds its war against Israel not in the language of national rights or territorial grievance but in the language of religious obligation and eschatological destiny, quoting the tradition of the end-times slaughter of the Jews and declaring the land of Palestine an Islamic endowment that no one has the right to surrender. Here the long war against Israel ceases to be an abstraction and becomes the program of a government with an army, a government that on a single terrible morning in our own time showed the world precisely what its doctrine meant when it was finally able to act upon it. Hamas is the Brotherhood’s ideology made flesh and armed, and the slaughter it carried out was not a departure from that ideology but its fulfillment.

The Question of Designation

The world has not known what to do with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the confusion is instructive. Several governments—among them Egypt, where the movement was born, and a number of the Gulf states—have declared it a terrorist organization and suppressed it with a heavy hand. Others, including major Western powers, have declined to designate the broad movement as such, drawing a distinction between its political and charitable activities and the violence of its armed offshoots, and wary of the practical difficulties of banning so diffuse and many-faced a network. The debate is genuine and the considerations on each side are real, and we do not pretend it admits of an easy resolution.

But the debate itself reveals the movement’s peculiar genius, which is precisely to occupy the ground between the respectable and the violent, presenting to the West the face of a civil-society organization while harboring, in its doctrine and its armed wings, aims of a very different character. A movement that runs both clinics and a terrorist army, that contests elections in one country while waging holy war in another, that speaks the language of human rights to foreign journalists and the language of jihad to its own children, is designed—whether by cunning or by the natural logic of its gradualism—to defeat the categories by which open societies judge their friends and enemies. The friend of Israel need not resolve every jurisdictional question to grasp the essential point: that the parent movement and its Palestinian wing share an ideology, and that the ideology is sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state.

The Case for the Defense

Fairness, which we owe even to those we oppose, requires that the movement’s defenders be heard at their strongest. They argue that the Brotherhood is not a monolith but a sprawling family of national organizations differing widely from one another, some of which long ago renounced violence, embraced electoral politics, and operated for decades as ordinary, if Islamist, political parties. They point out that in more than one country the Brotherhood contested free elections, won, and governed, only to be overthrown by force—hardly the conduct of a movement uninterested in the democratic path. They note its vast and genuine charitable work, the schools and hospitals and relief networks that have served the poor where corrupt states would not. And they warn, with reason, that to brand so broad a movement as simply terrorist is to drive its millions of adherents toward the very radicalism the West fears, and to slander the many for the deeds of the few.

These arguments deserve a fair hearing, and parts of them are sound. The Brotherhood is genuinely various; some of its branches have genuinely forsworn violence; its social services are genuinely real and have genuinely helped the poor; and the indiscriminate condemnation of all Islamists as terrorists is genuinely both false and counterproductive. The honest critic concedes all of this. But the concessions, fairly weighed, do not reach the heart of the matter, which is the ideology the movement carries and the aim that ideology sets. A movement may contest elections and run hospitals and still hold, as its ultimate purpose, the establishment of a total Islamic order and the elimination of the Jewish state; the means may be patient and even peaceable for a season, but the end remains, and the armed wing stands ready for the season when patience is judged to have served its turn. The defense establishes that the Brotherhood is not merely a terrorist gang. It does not establish that the long war against Israel is not its aim.

Why It Cannot Make Peace

We arrive at the hard conclusion toward which the whole examination has pointed: that the Muslim Brotherhood, holding the ideology it holds, cannot make a true and lasting peace with the State of Israel, because the existence of that state is, in the movement’s understanding of the world, a religious wrong that no settlement can right. A movement that regards the land as an inalienable Islamic endowment, that frames the conflict as a chapter in an eternal and sacred war against the Jew, and that conceives of its own mission as the restoration of God’s rule over every land once held for Islam, has foreclosed in advance the compromises that peace requires. It may agree to a truce, for the classical doctrine permits a truce with the stronger enemy until strength is regained; but a truce is a pause in a war, not the end of one, and the movement has been candid about the difference.

This is why the long and earnest labor of diplomats, premised on the assumption that every conflict yields in the end to the splitting of differences, has broken so repeatedly upon the rock of this enmity. One cannot split the difference over one’s own existence; there is no halfway point between being and not being. The friend of Israel must understand this clearly, not from cynicism but from honesty, for the gravest disservice he can do the Jewish state is to encourage the comfortable fiction that her most committed enemies can be satisfied by concession, that one more withdrawal or one more gesture will purchase the peace. It will not, because the offense is not the size or the conduct of the state but the fact of it, and that fact no concession short of disappearance can remove.

The Believer’s Response

How then shall the Christian respond, having understood the patience and the reach and the implacable aim of this long enemy of the people he loves? Not with despair, for despair is a kind of practical atheism, a forgetting of the God who holds the times in His hand; and not with hatred of the Muslims among whom the movement works, who are far more often its instruments and its victims than its masters, and for whom Christ died as surely as for any. He responds, first, with clear sight—refusing the naivety that cannot believe a patient enemy means what it says, and refusing equally the bigotry that reads a billion souls into the designs of a vanguard. He tells the truth about the movement and its aim, and he stands, steadily and without illusion, with the nation it has sworn to destroy.

And he responds, above all, with the long confidence of a man who knows that there is a patience greater than the Brotherhood’s, and a purpose older and surer than any laid down by a schoolteacher in Ismailia. The movement plays its long game across the generations; but the God of Israel plays a longer, stretching from the call of Abraham to the consummation of all things, and He has sworn that the seed of Israel shall not be destroyed and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against His purposes. The enemies of the covenant people have come and gone—Pharaoh and Amalek, Babylon and Rome, and a long procession since—each in his turn certain of victory, each in his turn swept into the silence of history, while the people they meant to destroy endure. The Brotherhood, too, for all its patience, is a thing of time, and time is the very thing the God of Israel holds. The believer stands with Israel, tells the truth, loves his enemy, fears no man, and waits—not for the long war to be won by the sword, but for the King who will end all wars to return to the city of the great King, and reign.