Under the monarchy The
Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by
Hassan al-Banna, an
Egyptian schoolteacher, who preached implementing traditional Islamic
Sharia law in all aspects of life, from everyday problems to the organization of the government. Inspired by Islamic reformers
Muhammad Abduh and
Rashid Rida, he believed that Islam had lost its social dominance to corrupt Western influences and
British imperial rule. The organization initially focused on educational and charitable work, but quickly grew to become a major political force as well. (Sources disagree as to whether the Brotherhood was hostile to independent working-class and popular organisations,) It championed the cause of poor Muslims, and played a prominent role in the Egyptian nationalist movement, fighting the British, Egypt's occupier/dominator. It engaged in espionage and sabotage, as well as support for activities orchestrated by
Haj Amin al-Husseini in British Mandate Palestine, and up to and during
World War II some association with Britain's enemy, the
German Nazis, dissemination of anti-Jewish, and anti-Western propaganda. Over the years, the Brotherhood spread to other Muslim countries, including
Syria Jordan,
Tunisia, etc. as well as countries where Muslims are in the minority. These groups are sometimes described as "very loosely affiliated" with the Egyptian branch and each other. In November 1948, following several bombings and assassination attempts, the government arrested 32 leaders of the Brotherhood's "secret apparatus" and banned the Brotherhood. At this time the Brotherhood was estimated to have 2000 branches and 500,000 members or sympathizers. In succeeding months Egypt's prime minister was assassinated by Brotherhood member Abdel Meguid Ahmed Hassan, and following that Al-Banna himself was assassinated in what is thought to be a cycle of retaliation. In 1952, members of the
Muslim Brotherhood were accused of taking part in an event that marked the end of Egypt's "liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan" era – an arson
fire that destroyed some "750 buildings" in downtown Cairo – mainly night clubs, theatres, hotels, and restaurants frequented by British and other foreigners.
After the 1952 revolution In 1952, the monarchy was
overthrown by nationalist military officers of the
Free Officers Movement. While the Brotherhood supported the coup it vigorously opposed the secularist constitution that the coup leaders were developing. In 1954 another unsuccessful assassination was attempted against Egypt's prime minister (
Gamal Abdel Nasser), and blamed on the "secret apparatus" of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was again banned and this time thousands of its members were imprisoned, many of them held for years in prisons and sometimes tortured. One of them was the very influential theorist,
Sayyid Qutb, who before being executed in 1966, issued a
manifesto proclaiming that Muslim society had become
jahiliyya (no longer Islamic) and that Islam must be restored by the overthrow of Muslim states by an Islamic vanguard, also revitalising the ideal of Islamic universalism.
Qutb's ideology became very influential outside of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, but the Brotherhood's leadership distanced itself from Qutb and adhered to nonviolent
reformist posture. Imprisoned Brothers were gradually released after
Anwar Sadat became
president of Egypt in 1970, and were sometimes enlisted to help fight Sadat's leftist opposition. Brethren were allowed to publish the magazine
Al Dawa, though the organization remained illegal. During this time, more radical Qutb-inspired Islamist groups blossomed, and after Sadat signed a peace agreement with
Israel in 1979, the
Muslim Brotherhood became confirmed enemies of Sadat. Sadat was assassinated by a violent Islamist group
Tanzim al-Jihad on 6 October 1981, shortly after he had Brotherhood leaders (and many other opposition leaders) arrested.
Mubarak era Again with a new president, (
Hosni Mubarak), Brotherhood leaders (Supreme Guide
Umar al-Tilmisani and others) were released from prison. Mubarak cracked down hard against radical Islamists but offered an "olive branch" to the more moderate Brethren. The brethren reciprocated, going so far as to endorse Mubarak's candidacy for president in 1987. The Brotherhood dominated the professional and student associations of Egypt and was famous for its network of social services in neighborhoods and villages. In the
2000 parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood won 17 parliamentary seats. In
2005, it won 88 seats (20% of the total compared to 14 seats for the legally approved opposition parties) to form the largest opposition bloc, despite the arrest of hundreds of Brotherhood members. It lost almost all but one of these seats in the much-less-free
2010 election, which was marred by massive arrests of both Brethren and polling place observers. Under Egypt's emergency law Brethren could only stand as independents, but were easily identified since they campaigned under the slogan – "Islam Is the Solution". During and after the 2005 election the Brethren launched what some have called a "charm offensive". Its leadership talked about its "responsibility to lead reform and change in Egypt". It addressed the `
Coptic issue', insinuating that the Brethren would do away with Egypt's decades-old church
building-permit system that Coptic Christians felt was discriminatory. Internationally the Brethren launched an English-language website and some of the Muslim Brotherhood's leaders participated in an Initiative to 'Re-Introduc[e] the Brotherhood to the West', "listing and addressing many 'Western misconceptions about the Brotherhood.'" In addition, the movement has also reportedly played into the government's hands provoking non-Islamist Egyptians by staging a militia-style march by masked Brotherhood students at Cairo's Al Azhar University, complete with uniforms and martial arts drills, reminding many of the Brotherhood's era of "secret cells". According to another observer: after a number of conciliatory engagements and interactions with the West", the Brotherhood retreated into its comfort zone of inflammatory rhetoric intended for local consumption: all suicide bombers are 'martyrs'; 'Israel' regularly became 'the Jews'; even its theological discourse became more confrontational and oriented to social conservatism. Two years later the Egyptian government amended the constitution, skewing future representation against independent candidates for parliament, which are the only candidates the Brotherhood can field. The state delayed local council elections from 2006 to 2008, disqualifying most Muslim Brotherhood candidates. The Muslim Brotherhood boycotted the election. The government incarcerated thousands of rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood members in a wave of arrests and military trials, the harshest such security clampdown on the Brotherhood "in decades". and "most cohesive political movement" in Egypt. and its candidate
Mohamed Morsi won the
2012 presidential election. However within a year there were mass protests against his rule but even before it was officially legalized it launched a new party called the
Freedom and Justice Party. The party rejected "the candidacy of women or Copts for Egypt's presidency", although it did not oppose their taking cabinet positions. In its first election the party won almost half of 498 seats in the
2011–12 Egyptian parliamentary election. and a looming showdown between the two. It was said to have stopped the "second revolution" against military rule by remaining uninvolved during violent clashes between revolutionaries and the military in late 2011, and protests over the thousands of secretive military trials of civilians. Egyptian author Ezzedine C. Fishere worried that the Brotherhood had managed to alienate its revolutionary and democratic partners and to scare important segments of society, especially women and Christians. Neither the Brotherhood nor the generals showed willingness to share power and both were keen on marginalising the revolutionary and democratic forces. It is as if they were clearing the stage for their eventual showdown. While the ruling
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) dissolved the parliament dominated by the Brotherhood and other Islamic parties, the Brotherhood won the
presidential election, defeating
Ahmed Shafik, a former military officer and prime minister of Mubarak. Within a short period, serious public opposition developed to President Morsi. In late November 2012, he issued a temporary constitutional declaration granting himself the power to
legislate without judicial oversight or review of his acts, on the grounds that he needed to "protect" the nation from the Mubarak-era power structure. He also put a draft constitution to a referendum that opponents complained was "an Islamist coup".—and concerns over the prosecutions of journalists, the unleashing of pro-Brotherhood gangs on nonviolent demonstrators; the continuation of military trials; and new laws that permitted detention without judicial review for up to 30 days, and impunity given to Islamist radical attacks on Christians and other minorities—brought hundreds of thousands of
protesters to the streets starting in November 2012. During Morsi's year-long rule there were 9,000 protests and strikes. By April 2013, Egypt had "become increasingly divided" between President Mohamed Morsi and "Islamist allies" and an opposition of "moderate Muslims, Christians and liberals". Opponents accused "Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood of seeking to monopolize power, while Morsi's allies say the opposition is trying to destabilize the country to derail the elected leadership". Adding to the unrest were severe fuel shortages and electricity outages—which evidence suggests were orchestrated by Mubarak-era Egyptian elites. By 29 June, the
Tamarod (rebellion) movement claimed it had collected more than 22 million signatures calling for Morsi to step down. A day later,
mass demonstrations occurred across Egypt urging Morsi to step down.
After the July 2013 overthrow of Mohamed Morsi On 3 July, the head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi responded to the demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square during the 30 June demonstrations and after discussing the issue with the main political parties and religious leaders of the country removed President Mohamed Morsi and suspended the constitution. Brotherhood supporters staged sit-ins throughout the country, setting up camps and shutting down traffic. The crackdown that followed has been called the worst for the Brotherhood's organization "in eight decades". The sit-in dispersal lead to clashes, resulting in the deaths of 638 people and injury of some 4000. By 19 August,
al Jazeera reported that "most" of the Brotherhood's leaders were in custody. On that day Brotherhood Supreme Leader
Mohammed Badie was arrested, crossing a "red line", as even
Hosni Mubarak had never arrested him. On 23 September, a court ordered the group outlawed and its assets seized. Muslim Brotherhood criticized the decision to seize its assets and those of MB linked charities as opening the door to Christian charities and part of a campaign against Islam. Some question whether the military and security services can effectively crush the Brotherhood. Unlike the last major crackdown in the 1950s, when Egypt's "public sphere and information space" was tightly controlled, the Brotherhood has a larger and broader international presence beyond the reach of Egypt's government to sustain itself. Others—such as Hussein Ibish and journalist
Peter Hessler—believe its "unlikely" that the Brotherhood will return to political prominence soon, because of its aggressive but incompetent performance while in power. It "no longer leads the anti-government movement" and has even lost its "religious credibility", such that "at mosques, even staunch opponents of the coup told me that they wouldn't vote for the Brotherhood again". According to one Islamist but non-member quoted in the Africa Report in 2021, Hussein Ibish believes the Brotherhood is being challenged by the
Salafi movement, and is undergoing a crisis so severe that "what ultimately emerges from the current wreckage [may] be unrecognisably different" from the traditional Brotherhood. A day after the
2013 bombing of a security directorate building in
Mansoura, the interim government declared the Muslim Brotherhood movement a
terrorist group—despite the fact that another group, the Sinai-based
Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, claimed responsibility for the blast. On 24 March 2014, an Egyptian court sentenced 529 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death, an act described by
Amnesty International as "the largest single batch of simultaneous death sentences we've seen in recent years anywhere in the world". On 15 April 2014, an Egyptian court banned current and former members of the Muslim Brotherhood from running in the presidential and parliamentary elections.
Division In 2015, a split appeared in the Brotherhood between an old guard afraid that resorting to violence could mean the annihilation of the Brotherhood, and a new leadership, joined by the rank and file, that believed that "only by bleeding" the regime could it "be brought to its knees". Observers attribute the dispute to a number of factors. Robert Worth notes the disastrous situation into which the old leadership had led the MB, the disruption of the MB hierarchy by the "decapitation" of the leadership through arrests and imprisonment, and the dislocation of exile (often to Turkey and Qatar) of much of the rank and file. Samuel Tadros credits changes in the MB to the influence of Revolutionary Salafists, many of whom allied with the Brotherhood in the year before the As-Sisi coup. When Islamists broke through security barriers to join the Brotherhood at Nahda and Rab'a squares, "ideas flowed freely and bonds were created", with the Salafists influencing MB more than vice versa. It declared the As-Sisi regime criminal and murderous and stated that the current regime was an enemy of Islam, and it was the religious duty of Muslims to "eliminate it by all legitimate means. ... Any leaders, judges, officers, soldiers, media figures or politicians, and anyone [else] who is definitely proved to be involved (even if only through incitement) in violating the honor of women, shedding the blood of innocents and unlawful killing – [all these] are murderers according to the shari'a, and must be punished according to the shari'a." (The punishment for murderers per sharia is death.) As of mid-2015 over 600,000 people had "endorsed" the petition. In June 2015, the "Revolutionary Punishment" movement celebrated six months of attacks, including the killing of 157 and wounding of 452 security personal, the destruction of 162 military cars and 53 buildings. As of early 2025, the MB in Egypt has been described (by Georges Fahmi) as "marked by a divided leadership and a significant loss of members". A dispute remains between Mahmoud Hussein, the group secretary-general, Salah Abdel Haq, the acting guide of the Brotherhood, and the General Bureau of the Brotherhood, remains. The youth of the Brotherhood are described as disillusioned, with many deciding to "take a step back from the organization", disappointed by the competition among leadership and failure to develop a strategy.
More Repression As of early 2024, the movement's Supreme Guide, Mohamed Badie, his two deputies, Khairat Al-Shater and Mahmoud Ezzat, and thousands of cadres, parliamentary deputies and prominent members throughout Egypt who had been arrested following the overthrow of Morsi, remained in prison. The Turkish government, which had offered the Brotherhood "refuge and a platform" following its repression in Egypt, started to scale back its support for the group in 2022, as Turkey was suffering from an economic downturn and felt a need to repair relations with Arab countries. In July 2025, one of Brotherhood leaders who had been taking refuge in Turkey, Mohamed Abdel Hafiz, was arrested, allegedly for his part in planning/organizing terrorist plots in Egypt. == General leaders ==