Brotherhood In Islam Quotes

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.

The great majority of us are Muslims. We follow the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed (may peace be upon him). We are members of the brotherhood of Islam in which all are equal in rights, dignity and self-respect. Consequently, we have a special and a very deep sense of unity. But make no mistake: Pakistan is not a theocracy or anything like it.

None of you believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.

America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.

Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence.

Terrorism has nothing to do with religion, Islam or otherwise. Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.

যারা তাদের ভাইদের প্রয়োজনে তাদের পাশে এসে দাঁড়ায় না; তারা অতি শীঘ্রই ইতিহাসের আস্তাকুঁড়ে নিক্ষিপ্ত হবে কোন সন্দেহ নেই।

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion. The mosque was truly an open construction, to God and to breeze. We sat cross-legged listening to the imam until the time came to pray. Then the random pattern of sitters disappeared as we stood and arranged ourselves shoulder to shoulder in rows, every space ahead being filled by someone from behind until every line was solid and we were row after row of worshippers. It felt good to bring my forehead to the ground. Immediately it felt like a deeply religious contact.

Before the Brotherhood came, you could see everyone's arms and legs. We never used to notice. But now that woman are covering so much, all I can think about is those round calves and silky arms and the hair, smelling of coconut. I never used to think about a neck before, but ooh, a neck is so sexy now.

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.

The brotherhood’s motto is: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.

You must remember, the so-called Jihadis who are in reality, mentally unstable individuals run by Quranic fundamentalists, do not represent the whole Muslim population of the world.

But for now, I would be the happiest of men if I could just swallow the overflow of saliva that endlessly floods my mouth. Even before first light, I am already practicing sliding my tongue toward the rear of my palate in order to provoke a swallowing reaction. What is more, I have dedicated to my larynx the little packets of incense hanging on the wall, amulets brought back from Japan by pious globe-trotting friends. Just one of the stones in the thanksgiving monument erected by my circle of friends during their wanderings. In every corner of the world, the most diverse deities have been solicited in my name. I try to organize all this spiritual energy. If they tell me that candles have been burned for my sake in a Breton chapel, or that a mantra has been chanted in a Nepalese temple, I at once give each of the spirits invoked a precise task. A woman I know enlisted a Cameroon holy man to procure me the goodwill of Africa's gods: I have assigned him my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on the relationship between my devout mother-in-law and the monks of a Bordeaux brotherhood. They regularly dedicate their prayers to me, and I occasionally steal into their abbey to hear their chants fly heavenward. So far the results have been unremarkable. But when seven brothers of the same order had their throats cut by Islamic fanatics, my ears hurt for several days. Yet all these lofty protections are merely clay ramparts, walls of sand, Maginot lines, compared to the small prayer my daughter, Céleste, sends up to her Lord every evening before she closes her eyes. Since we fall asleep at roughly the same hour, I set out for the kingdom of slumber with this wonderful talisman, which shields me from all harm.

One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally rank among the best organized and most coherent groupings in society. They constitute ready-made organizations - social-based NGOs, if you will - for maintaining Islamic culture and practices under periods of extreme oppression and for fomenting resistance and guerrilla warfare against foreign occupation. The history of Sufi participation in dozens of liberation struggles is long and widespread across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Sufi groups were prominent in the anti-Soviet resistance, and later against the American in Afghanistan and against US occupation forces in Iraq.

In 1928, an Egyptian school teacher by the name of Hasan al-Banna, founded a society named the Muslim Brotherhood. This was a fundamentalist group dedicated to the reintroduction of traditional Islamic teachings (Koran and Sunnah) and law, (Sharia) to the Muslim world, and the forced imposition of Islamic rule over the whole world. Whilst they believed in the use of violence to achieve their goals, they understood that the West was too powerful to defeat in this way, and instead set about utilizing the other tactics of Jihad such as “Taquiya” or sacred deceit, corruption and infiltration.

The West is courting its own destruction, but this is in line with Barack Obama’s consistent position. He has said repeatedly that “as Americans, we are not and never will be at war with Islam” – even though a large part of Islam has declared war on us. He has cultivated ties with Muslim individuals and groups deemed “moderate,” including the Brotherhood itself.75 In his Cairo speech in 2009, Obama echoed the Brotherhood’s anti-free-speech agenda: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereo-types of Islam wherever they appear.”76

Why is it so hard to question anything about Islam? The obvious answer is that there is now an internationally organized 'honor brigade' that exists to prevent such questioning. The deeper historical answer may lie in the fear of many Muslim clerics that allowing critical thought might lead many to leave Islam. [...] a staunch Medina Muslim and a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said: 'If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment Islam would not exist today.' [...] The clerics fear that even the smallest questions will lead to doubt, doubt will lead to more questions, and ultimately the questioning mind will demand not only answers but also innovations.

The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism. In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran. The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.

Dawa is happening not only in Muslim communities but also in Western prisons. Believing that religious education will benefit prisoners, the authorities mistakenly give agents of dawa access to Muslim prisoners. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they claim to be religious community representatives, all the while harboring links to terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and Hizb ut-Tahrir.

The only way to reverse this trend is to mount a campaign to put Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood at the forefront of the political debate, and to educate Americans about the real dangers we face. Americans need to become aware of the Islamic supremacist threat, of the malignant designs of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the disasters that may lie ahead because of the Obama administration’s policies of appeasing and enabling their evil ambitions.

How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world. Do you not hear the words of God (Blessed and Almighty is He!): ‘Fight them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God’?” Where possible, this fight would be gradualist and peaceful. Toward non-Muslims, so long as they did not oppose the movement and paid it adequate respect, the early Muslim Brotherhood counseled “protection,” “moderation and deep-rooted equity.” Foreigners were to be treated with “peacefulness and sympathy, so long as they behave with rectitude and sincerity.” Therefore, it was “pure fantasy” to suggest that the implementation of “Islamic institutions in our modern life would create estrangement between us and the Western nations.

The Allah of Islam is the same as the God of Christians and the Ishwara of Hindus. Even as there are numerous names of God in Hinduism, there are as many names of God in Islam. The names do not indicate individuality but attributes, and little man had tried in his humble way to describe mighty God by giving Him attributes, though He is above all attributes, Indescribable, Inconceivable, Immeasurable. Living faith in this God means acceptance of the brotherhood of mankind. It also means equal respect for all religions.

Many people in the West who stereotype all Muslims as terrorists don’t know about the side of Islam that reflects love and mercy. It cares for the poor, widows, and orphans. It facilitates education and welfare. It unites and strengthens. This is the side of Islam that motivated those early leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, there is also the other side, the one that calls all Muslims to jihad, to struggle and contend with the world until they establish a global caliphate, led by one holy man who rules and speaks for Allah.

Although the US State Department has not officially designated the MB [Muslin Brotherhood] as a terrorist organization, Egypt did so in 2013; and in 2015, a British government review “concluded that membership of or links to it should be considered a possible indicator of extremism.” However, in 2003 the FBI uncovered the MB’s multifaceted plan to dominate America through immigration, intimidation, education, community centers, mosques, political legitimacy, and establishing ‘interfaith dialogue’ centers in our universities and colleges. A document confiscated by the FBI outlines a twelve-point strategy to establish an Islamic government on earth that is brought about by a flexible, long-term ‘cultural invasion’ of the West. Their own plans teach us that ‘the intrusion of Islam will erupt in multiple locations using mulciple means’. But near the top of this strategy is immigration. To be more specific, the first major point in their strategy states; ‘To expand the Muslin presence by birth rate, immigration and refusal to assimilate.’ This strategy transformed Indonesia from a Buddhist and Hindu country to the largest Muslin-dominated country in the world. As Europe has discovered, open borders for refugees may be viewed as a compassionate response to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, but it has long-term risks and consequences.

Al-Zawahiri, the son of an upper middle-class family who had grown up in Al-Maadi, an affluent Cairene suburb, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of fifteen right after the 1967 defeat. He quickly moved from the Brotherhood's ordinary ranks to join (and create) independent, highly radicalized cells. Though he had no links to the murder of Sadat, he was imprisoned in the major incarceration waves that followed the crime, and was sentenced to three years. Having served his prison sentence, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia, then soon afterwards to Afghanistan to join in the fight against the Soviets. It was during that time that he met Dr Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian godfather of many militant Islamic groups and the founder of the Jihad Service Bureau, the vehicle that helped recruit thousands of Arabs to the Afghanistan War. Al-Zawahiri became a close friend and confidant of Azzam. After the Soviets' withdrawal from Afghanistan, he returned to Egypt where he became the effective leader of the Al-Jihad group. In 1992, Dr Al-Zawahiri joined his old Arab Afghan colleague, the Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden, in Sudan, and from there he continued to lead Al-Jihad, until its merger with Al-Qaeda in 1998. Dr Al-Zawahiri presented his thinking and rationale for ‘jihad by all means’ in his book Knights under the Prophet's Banner.38

My greatest desire is to be human. In Islam, it is taught we are born man but we must evolve to be Human. To be human is to know compassion for others. to understand Ethics and morality, all of which we are born with but still must learn in practice.Our intellect does not make us human. Intelligence as shown that we separate ourselves more from humanity through our evolution of inventiveness than we have ever before. We depend on our gadgets to tell us to think and what to think. We have become servants of I-Phones and pads and computers and slaves to clocks that have now become our task master. We answer to alarms and "Tweets" and " FB Notifications like pavlovian dogs wagging our tails at each blip of a cybernetic announcement. We are further losing ourselves to technology that we thought would make our lives easier but has simply made it more complicated and filled it with less time for interaction with our fellow man because we have lost sight of verbal communication. Of being in eye contact with each other because our heads are leaning down into video screens and our ears are covered with sound buds.. We have become an extension of our devises when we should be an extension of each other in a real physical world and not the matrix of AI and computer stimuli we have become sadly slaves to. I want to be human and see the true smile of my friends and hear the real voice of their ideas and not typed words of color on a screen. I want to experience the knowledge of seeing my fellow men and woman talking verbally to each other and espousing real IDEAS and not merely replaying sound bytes hey have heard from the latest PROGRAMMING. I want to be HUMAN and know the Humanity of my brotherhood of HUMANS!

The whitewash of Kingdom of Heaven Kingdom of Heaven is a classic cowboys-and-Indians story in which the Muslims are noble and heroic and the Christians are venal and violent. The script is heavy on modern-day PC clichés and fantasies of Islamic tolerance; brushing aside dhimmi laws and attitudes (of which Ridley Scott has most likely never heard), it invents a peace-and-tolerance group called the “Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians.” But of course, the Christians spoiled everything. A publicist for the film explained, “They were working together. It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar caused friction between them.” Ah yes, those nasty “Christian extremists.” Kingdom of Heaven was made for those who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the wicked white men of America and Europe would be more tolerant. Ridley Scott and his team arranged advance screenings for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, making sure that sensitive Muslim feelings were not hurt. It is a dream movie for the PC establishment in every way except one: It isn’t true. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of A Short History of the Crusades and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all” as it “depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.

If we cannot understand the depth of feeling in the Muslim world toward Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islam as a political force, then we will be doomed to failure in every encounter we have with the world.

As just one example, Great Britain had supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as far back as 1928, as it identified it as “an anti-nationalist and anti-liberal vehicle” to be used against the prodemocracy forces in that country. It continued to back the Brotherhood against the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secularist who had the audacity “to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.”3 And indeed, just around the same time it was trying to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, Britain was trying to assassinate Nasser, who represented the distinct danger of spreading secular democracy throughout the Arab world.4 As for Iran, when its revolution came in 1979, it was led by the Islamic leaders of that country more than the Left, which the United States had made sure was suppressed and crushed throughout the reign of the Shah, and even later as we will see. In other words, it was the United States’ own policies that made a revolution, and specifically an Islamic revolution, both possible and probable.

Pushed by Casey, American scholars and CIA analysts had begun in the early 1980s to examine Soviet Central Asia for signs of restiveness. There were reports that ethnic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks, and Kazakhs chafed under Russian ethnic domination. And there were also reports of rising popular interest in Islam, fueled in part by the smuggling of underground Korans, sermonizing cassette tapes, and Islamic texts by the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing networks.

Now that we have seen what is in the Koran, let’s consider what is not in the Muslim holy book. Islam, being one of the “world’s great religions,” as well as one of the “three great Abrahamic faiths,” enjoys the benefit of certain assumptions on the part of uninformed Americans and Europeans. Many people believe that since Islam is a religion, it must teach universal love and brotherhood—because that is what religions do, isn’t it? It must teach that one ought to be kind to the poor and downtrodden, generous, charitable, and peaceful. It must teach that we are all children of a loving God whose love for all human beings should be imitated by those whom he has created. Certainly Judaism and Christianity teach these things, and they are found in nearly equivalent forms in Eastern religions. But when it comes to Islam, the assumptions are wrong. Islam makes a distinction between believers and unbelievers that overrides any obligation to general benevolence. A moral code from the Koran As we have seen, the Koran recounts how Moses went up on the mountain and encountered Allah, who gave him tablets—but says nothing about what was written on them (7:145). Although the Ten Commandments do not appear in the Koran, the book is not bereft of specific moral guidelines: its seventeenth chapter enunciates a moral code (17:22–39). Accordingly, Muslims should:           1.    Worship Allah alone.           2.    Be kind to their parents.           3.    Provide for their relatives, the needy, and travelers, and not be wasteful.           4.    Not kill their children for fear of poverty.           5.    Not commit adultery.           6.    Not “take life—which Allah has made sacred—except for just cause.” Also, “whoso is slain wrongfully, We have given power unto his heir, but let him not commit excess in slaying”—that is, one should make restitution for wrongful death.           7.    Not seize the wealth of orphans.           8.    “Give full measure when ye measure, and weigh with a balance that is straight”—that is, conduct business honestly.           9.    “Pursue not that of which thou hast no knowledge.”           10.  Not “walk on the earth with insolence.” Noble ideals, to be sure, but when it comes to particulars, these are not quite equivalent to the Ten Commandments. The provision about not taking life “except for just cause” is, of course, in the same book as the thrice-repeated command to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5; 4:89; 2:191)—thus Infidels must understand that their infidelity, their non-acceptance of Islam, is “just cause” for Muslims to make war against them. In the same vein, one is to be kind to one’s parents—unless they are Infidels: “O ye who believe! Choose not your fathers nor your brethren for friends if they take pleasure in disbelief rather than faith. Whoso of you taketh them for friends, such are wrong-doers” (9:23). You

Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people.

But of course, both these—liberal multiculturalism and the Islamic resurgence—are not to be seen as separate but two sides of the same coin. While they may portray each other as the adversary/enemy, both equally feed off a vicious cycle of othering. This is perhaps most visible in the common forms of demonization deployed by both Islamofascists and Western anti immigrant racists (us-them, civilized-barbaric, pure-corrupt, more permissive, etc.). But ultimately, this is a false and mystifying conflict, each binary pole generating and presupposing the other. Instead, both sides are to be seen as symptomatic of the antagonisms of today’s (still mostly) Western Dominated global capitalist order. For one thing, several of the “fundamentalist”/“terrorist” groups that the West rails against are in fact Western creations, often initially supported to suit short-term geopolitical interests (e.g., British promotion of the Saudi Wahhabis [after World War I] and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood [during World War II] as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; US backing of the Taliban to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s; Israeli support of Hamas in the 1980s to undermine the PLO). Moreover, the United States and Europe have a long history of championing totalitarian regimes, especially in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt, Iran under the shah, etc.): it is not implausible, in fact, to suggest that the West is (and has been) invested in these countries remaining undemocratic so that they can be counted on for their geopolitical support, and perhaps especially their oil reserves. Western economic interests thus trump Middle Eastern political well-being, with Islamic religious resurgence as a resulting symptom.

Political Islam has served as a vehicle for resistance as well as collaboration in different eras of Palestinian history, notably in the form of the grassroots combination of Islamic revival and nationalism espoused by the charismatic Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, whose “martyrdom” in 1935 can be said to have inspired the revolt of 1936–39. The same can be said of the more recent Islamic Jihad movement, an offshoot of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founders were disgusted with the Brotherhood’s quietism and passivity toward—and, some even alleged, collaboration with—the Israeli occupation. Their attacks on Israeli military personnel in 1986 and 1987 helped spark the first Palestinian popular uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 and helped provoke the transformation of the major part of the Muslim Brotherhood organization into Hamas. Hamas itself has played a major part in the resistance to Israel, although some of the tactics that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have pioneered in the Palestinian arena, particularly suicide attacks on civilians inside Israel, have been both morally indefensible and disastrously counterproductive strategically.

There had already been one attempt to form an Islamic party, the French Muslim Party, but it soon fell apart over the embarrassing anti-Semitism of its leader--so extreme that it drove him into an alliance with the far right. The Muslim Brotherhood learned its lesson and was careful to take a moderate line.

Although many Islamic clerics and theologians participated in the campaign to demand Pakistan’s transformation into an Islamic state, the blueprint for a step-by-step transition was offered by Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), the South Asian analogue of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood. Maududi, joined by Mufti Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, a cleric elected to the Constituent Assembly on the Muslim League platform, called for the future constitution of Pakistan to be based on the underlying assumption that sovereignty rested with Allah and that the state’s function was solely to administer the country in accordance with God’s will. Both Islamic scholars also insisted that only the ulema (those trained in Islamic theology) could interpret the laws of Allah.

Religious conservatism, even of the most uncompromising sort, had gone mainstream, and this was a reality the Brotherhood could not ignore. The Brotherhood, as always, was pragmatic, but pragmatism can cut both ways. In some contexts, the desire to maximize votes pulls ideological actors to the center. Other times, it may push them to adopt more conservative positions that they would otherwise avoid. Democracy opens the door to the proliferation of Islamist parties, which outbid each other over who can be more “Islamic.

Anger against the West and particularly the United States spills all over the Land of Islam. But there are groups that all the signs keep pointing to—the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al Qaeda, of course—and there’s one place that serves more than any other as the principal backer: Saudi Arabia.

The Safavids were either of Kurdish or Turkish origin. In the late thirteenth century, a member of the Safavid family founded a Sunni Sufi religious brotherhood in Azerbaijan, the Turkish-speaking region of northwestern Iran. The brotherhood attracted an ardent following among the Turkish pastoral tribes of the area, and by the late fifteenth century its influence had expanded into Anatolia and Syria. The heads of the brotherhood led the tribes in a series of expeditions against the Christians of the Caucasus, thereby acquiring temporal power as well as enhancing their reputations as servants of Islam. Their Turkish followers were known as Qizilbash, the Redheaded Ones, after the red headgear they wore to identify themselves as supporters of the Safavid brotherhood.

After three years of undercover activism, a group of believers emerged stamped by a spirit of brotherhood and cooperation with one definite objective in their mind: propagating and deeply establishing the call unto Islam. For full three years Muhammad (May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) had been content to teach within a rather narrow circle. The time, however, had come to preach the faith of the Lord openly. Then Revelation descended giving Allah’s Messenger (May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) the duty of publicizing it for his people, to confront them, invalidate their falsehood, and crush down their idolatrous practices.

When Iran exported its jihad to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood in several regions around the world, these all indirectly threatened the United States. These terrorists threatened our greatest ally in the region, Israel, while destabilizing countries we depend on to help bring security to that area. These terrorists harm our allies with violence while sowing hatred for our values, thus hurting our national interests abroad. Until 2001, these organizations had not historically attempted to carry out terrorist attacks on the American homeland. With the Sunni-Shiite divide once again put on the back burner to tackle a bigger enemy, the relationship between al-Qaeda, another Sunni terrorist organization, and the Shiite regime in Iran is all about destroying the United States of America. Their relationship began a long time before the United States even knew about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden as public enemy number one.1 Today, ISIS is perhaps public enemy number one. Yet the most interesting trait common to ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran, and every other Islamic terrorist group is this: they are all motivated by the same anti-Western, jihadist ideology.

Mustafa al-Sibai, the first Syrian General Guide, came from a traditional religious family that had long supplied preachers to the Grand Mosque of Homs and was sent to Al-Azhar in Cairo aged eighteen to study Islamic law. Whilst in Cairo, he came into contact with Hassan al-Banna and became heavily involved with the Brotherhood.

Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

Al-Banna had supplemented the traditional Islamic education for the Brotherhood’s male students with training in jihad, holy war. It was not a fact many people knew, said Bairstow, but while studying at university, Osama bin Laden was influenced by the religious and political ideas of several professors with strong ties to the Brotherhood.

Even the interior minister, Na’if, had to admit that Saudi Arabia had a problem with Islamic militants. In November 2002 he said, “All our problems come from the Muslim Brotherhood. We have given too much support to this group. The Muslim Brotherhood has destroyed the Arab world.” Na’if went on to accept, at least minimally, Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for militant Islam.

So the Islamic Army is one of those offshoots?” Alex asked. “You’ve got it. Their motto is taken directly from that of the Brotherhood: ‘Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.’ They have been blamed for a slew of beheadings in recent times and are known to have links to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Needless to say, they are a tough bunch, and they mean business.

All during the war we knew that if the Muslim Brotherhood won, our country would become a strict Islamic nation ruled by Sharia Law. This would affect women the most as we would not be able to get jobs, drive or even walk alone in the street. And we’d always have to wear the burka covering our whole body. There was nothing we could do to stop the fighting except pray, so our church, along with many others, fasted for the country’s freedom and for the civil war to end. My pastor felt we needed to pray and fast for our nation for 21 days, so different members of the congregation would take spans of days during this time—some one to three days, some seven, some ten, some the whole 21 days . 

About that time, due to its growing popularity, the Egyptian government legalized the Brotherhood again, but only as a religious organization. It was, however, again banned in 1954 because it insisted that Egypt be governed under shari’a, or Islamic law. That year, Abdul Munim Abdul Rauf, a Brotherhood activist, was accused of trying to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser and was executed, along with five others. Four thousand members were rounded up and jailed, and thousands of others fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Lebanon.

Nasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, promised the Brotherhood that Islamic law would be implemented and released all of the prisoners. But the Brotherhood soon lost its faith in Sadat, accusing him of the ultimate betrayal when he signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. Sadat was assassinated in September 1981. The blame fell on the Brotherhood.

As we’ve examined, the anti-American insurgency in Iraq drew its strength from Sunni revanchism. One way to view Baathism historically is as one among many exponents of Sunni political power. It competed in its heyday with pan-Arab nationalism, as expounded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Islamism of Sayyed Qutb’s Brotherhood, and the Salafist-Jihadism of bin Laden. Indeed, the Islamic Faith Campaign was meant to preempt Salafism’s usurpation of Baathism. Today, the secular socialist ideology is in a tenuous state of coexistence and competition with the caliphate-building takfirism of ISIS.

The politics of the 1970s were the second factor in this social shift. In his efforts to confront the Nasserite and socialist forces in Egypt, President Anwar Sadat unleashed Egypt's Islamic forces. He released thousands of the Muslim Brotherhood's leaders and members from jail (after years of imprisonment and prosecution under Nasser), and allowed the Brotherhood's old newspaper the Call (Al-Dawaa) to be reissued. He tried to assume the mantle of Islam by calling himself ‘the guardian of the faith’; emphasized that his first name was ‘Mohamed’ not ‘Anwar’; promoted religious schools; authorized a major increase in the budget of Al-Azhar and an expansion of its parallel educational system; opened the door for leading religious scholars and commentators to dominate the state-controlled media; introduced apostasy laws in Egypt after years of a highly liberal intellectual atmosphere; declared sharia law (Islamic jurisprudence) as the principal source for the Egyptian constitution (after decades during which religion was generally marginal to legislation with the exception of personal status laws); and declared himself the leader of ‘an Islamic pious country’.

the factor that really cemented the Brotherhood's social re-emergence, and founded the Islamic movement's social base, was its highly efficient services infrastructure.

Egypt nevertheless remained socially liberal until the 1970s, when Nasser’s successor, Anwar Al-Sadat, brought the rank-and-file of the Muslim Brotherhood back from exile (they had mostly decamped to Saudi Arabia) and used them to counter the influence of the leftists, who had organized in protest at Nasser’s increasingly despotic rule. During that decade, and throughout the 1980s, Islamic fundamentalism therefore grew in influence in Egypt, and “belly-dancing nightclubs were torched and dancers were barred from television.”36 Today, dancers are free to perform in Cairo’s city center, but they must cover their navels or risk fines or arrest.

So effective has their propaganda been that an American official was moved to describe the Brotherhood as “a loose network of secular groups.”27 This kind of ignorance in the West about Egypt presents the Brotherhood with a tremendous opportunity for media manipulation. Scratch the surface, however, and you find a detailed political platform published in 2006. The president cannot be a woman because the post’s religious and military duties “conflict with her nature, social and other humanitarian roles.” A board of Muslim clerics would oversee the government. The freedom of association guaranteed civil organizations in the West would, in an Islamist Egypt, also be conditional, once again on their adherence to the strictures of Islamic law. Egypt would have a shura (consultative assembly) system, whereby a body of compliant old men nod through whatever the leader, who is assured “veneration,” sees fit, while a Supreme Guide presides benevolently over the personal morality of the masses.28 In Saudi Arabia and Iran, that system exists now.

The charm offensive was complemented by the work of a number of Islamic intellectuals with strong links to the Egyptian Islamic movement in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Tariq Ramadan was the most famous of these. The grandson of Hassan Al-Banna and a scholar at Oxford University, he argued for a heterogeneous Islam that combined the religion's traditions with new aspects rooted in the experiences of Muslims living in the West.

economic aspect of Islamism penetrated a number of the economy's industrial and service sectors. For example, eight of the twenty richest families in Egypt throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with vast and interconnected equity stakes across the country's private sector, had direct links to either the Muslim Brotherhood or other Salafist groups.52

the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, political Islam in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particu lar, believed that Egypt's future was theirs.

In the end, the majority of Egyptians overwhelmingly approved the proposed constitutional amendments. Of the more than 18 million Egyptians who voted on the 19 March 2011 referendum, more than 77 per cent voted in favour of the amendments, paving the way for the parliamentary elections. It was a major success for political Islam in general, and the Brotherhood in specific.

the Brotherhood succeeded in crafting a network of branches and organisations across Europe, the Middle East and beyond, becoming perhaps the most influential Islamist opposition movement in the world.1 From its various centres, it worked to further the cause of Islam in the hope that it would one day come to power and realise its dream of creating an Islamic state.

Iran’s zeal to export the Islamic Revolution and expand its network of terror did not end with the creation of Hezbollah. That was simply the beginning. A much larger and more sinister goal is afoot. And in order to achieve this goal, Iran is creating a network of terror with a global geographic reach. In order to defeat Israel and the United States, Iran is working with its centuries-old rivals, even funding certain terrorist groups in some regions while battling those same entities in other regions. These unholy alliances between Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas destabilize communities, murder countless humans, and endanger our national security.

What the Western world does not understand about Islam is that its adherents’ first and foremost identity is being a Muslim, without the limitations of national boundaries or allegiances. There is no such thing called Sunni dar al-Islam and Shiite dar al-Islam. There is only one dar al-Islam and then there is the rest of the world, dar al-harb, or the house of war. Sunnis and Shiites understand this basic distinction and easily set aside internal conflict to deal with an external power. That is to say, the Sunni-Shiite conflict is secondary only to the Muslim–non-Muslim conflict. According to one author, “One of the myths of modern Islamist terrorism is that Sunni and Shi’a do not get along; but when it comes to common enemies or objectives or using force to replicate the Iranian revolution in other localities, they work together quite frequently.”18 There is no better example of such a display of unity against the Western influence, the external power, than the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The doctrine of jihad against nonbelievers coupled with the model of the Iranian Revolution has been a strong impetus for both Sunni as well as Shiite jihadist organizations.19 Iran sees the United States and Israel as such grave, existential, external threats to Islam that thwarting and ultimately destroying both the United States and Israel are important enough to temporarily put aside theological differences with heretical Sunni organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, making these some of the scariest partnerships in the unholy alliance.

...the War on Terror is in fact a war against Islam. After all, this was never conceived of as a war against terror per se. If it were, it would have included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christian insurgency in East Timor, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, the Jewish Kach and Kahane underground in Israel, the Irish Republican Army, the Sikh separatists in the Punjab, the Marxist Mujahadin-e khalq, the Kurdish PKK, and so on. Rather, this is a war against a particular brand of terrorism: that employed exclusively by Islamic entities, which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the persons who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and the organisations that supported them, but also an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups such as Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Chechen rebels, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban, and any other organisation that declares itself Muslim and employs terrorism as a tactic.

Muslim identity and thought in Nigeria derive from the Sufi brotherhoods of Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, primarily as a result of the historical role of the Kanem-Borno and Sokoto caliphates in the spread of Islam. The Sufi orders and the Izalatul Bidi’a wa Ikhamatis Sunnah (People Committed to the Removal of Innovations in Islam; hereafter Izala) are the two dominant contemporary Muslim foci of identity. The disdain towards and fear of boko (Western education) arose from its historically close association with the colonial state and Christian missionaries. This also suited colonial educational policy well, as the British had no intention of widespread education anyway. The aim of colonial education, particularly in northern Nigeria, was to maintain the existing status quo by “imparting some literacy to the aristocratic class, to the exclusion of the commoner classes” (Tukur 1979: 866). By the 1930s, colonial education had produced a limited cadre of Western-educated elite, who were conscious of their education and were yearning to play a role in society. Mainly children of the aristocratic class, the type of education they received was “different from the traditional education in their various societies, and this by itself was enough to mark them out as a group” (Kwanashie 2002: 50). This new education enabled them to climb the social and economic ladder over and above their peers who had a different kind of education, Quranic education. This was the origin of the animosity and distrust between the traditionally educated and Western-educated elite in northern Nigeria. Though subordinate to the Europeans, these educated elite were perceived as collaborators by their Arabic-educated fellows. Thus the antagonism towards Western education continues in many northern Nigerian communities, which have defied government campaigns for school enrollment to this day.

Shireen Baraka Barghouti lives in a cauldron of hate that often boils over. She’s never been outside the Gaza Strip even though it’s only twenty-five miles long and three miles wide at the narrowest borders, seven miles at the widest. Qasem Soleimani, until his death in 2020, was the major general over Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who invested monstrous sums of Iranian money in the youth of Gaza. In fact, Hamas simply could not exist without the Iranian money he supplied. And to make sure he covered all the bases, Soleimani also funded the rival Islamic Jihad. Shireen doesn’t hold back when speaking about the climate of death and destruction that has helped create. “In Gaza, terrorism is our number-one export,” she said. “How sad that whenever the Gaza Strip is mentioned, people automatically think of radical Islamic terrorists. But how could they not? Our Gaza government is run by them. Iran gives Hamas thirty million dollars a month. “At different times we’ve had al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in charge, to name just a few. New groups form every year, and our young Gaza boys see these ‘freedom fighters’ as heroes to emulate. “In Europe, people idolize soccer players. But not in Gaza. Here, men dressed in green uniforms, toting AK-47s, and shouting ‘death to Israel’ are featured on billboards. “The explosions are enough to cause you a nervous breakdown. A few years ago Hamas fired over ten thousand rockets into Israel in one extended attack over several months. We knew it was just a matter of time before the Israelis responded, and once we heard the drones humming over Gaza, we took cover. “Hamas has done nothing for the people of Gaza. While they line their pockets with millions of dollars, the people go without eating. They are cruel and intentionally keep us in this senseless war with Israel. “You might think because I live in Gaza and grew up Muslim that I hate Israel. But I don’t. I do detest Hamas, however—and all the other terrorist groups that make life unbearable in the Strip.

Brotherhood is a state which permits a group to move from the realm of a cooperative effort to the imperative of a shared destiny. It is a standard by which the success of a group is measured by the success of its individuals, and by which the strength of a group is measured by the strength of the bond that unites its members. The success of a group does not depend on its ability to unite over a cause or by its ability to work toward achieving a cause. Rather, the success of a group depends on its ability to transform its own members into a cause.

The Bedu of Central Arabia herded camels in empty deserts where there were no mosques or schools. They produced warriors, not scholars, and their understanding of Islam was limited. The original idea behind the Ikhwan, or Brotherhood Movement, was to settle the Bedu in order to improve their religious practices.

The Islamists’ view of religious minorities is crucial for the understanding of the principles underlying their ideas about democracy and the state. Ḥamās’ position relies closely on the classical Islamic teaching on this question. There, Jews and Christians—as well as other non-Muslims possessing a scripture—are recognised as "People of the Book". Those residing in territory ruled by Muslims (dār alḅarb) were tolerated religious minorities, called dhimmīs. Dhimma means a contract which the believer agrees to respect and the violation of which makes him liable to blame (dhamm). The security of life and property and an indefinite assurance of protection (amān) are guaranteed by the Muslim state. But as dhimmīs are not true believers, they are not entitled to full membership in the Muslim brotherhood. As a sign of submission to the Islamic state, dhimmīs have to pay a poll tax.

If someone sits in my company three times without having need of me, I learn where he is placed in the world. Sa’id ibn al-’Ās said: – I owe my sitting-companion three things: on his approach I greet him; on his arrival I make him welcome; when he sits I make him comfortable. God (Exalted is He!) said: – Full of mercy one to another. (Qur’ān 48.29)15 These words point to compassion and generous treatment. Part of complete compassion is not to partake in solitude of delicious food, nor to enjoy alone an occasion of happiness; rather should the brother’s absence be distressing and the separation sad.

The Egyptian’s asset,” Ron Carter began, tapping a brief command into his laptop to bring an image up on the screen at the front of the room, “is this man. Amr Shafik. He was a member of Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party from 2012 to 2013, and was imprisoned when the military overthrew Morsi and cracked down on Muslim Brotherhood activities in the country. In prison, he made contact with extremist elements, and was drawn into the orbit of the Islamic State. It's not completely clear even at this juncture whether he did so of his own accord or at the order of the Mukhabarat.” Egypt's intelligence service, Kranemeyer thought, looking over at Bell to see the DNI listening intently. As feared and brutal today as it had ever been in the days of Mubarak. A brutal necessity, perhaps. Or at least that’s what they told themselves. He wondered sometimes, about cause and effect. “What we do know is that he was re-arrested for such affiliations soon after release and it was then, if not before, that Egyptian intelligence brought him on side. And that, according to what they’ve shared with us, is where he’s been ever since. Providing intelligence on the Islamic State’s leadership in the Sinai, particularly Umar ibn Hassan. As he’s done now, in giving us Hassan’s location for noonday tomorrow, local time.

Don't you know that Al-Azhar is a hotbed of Islamic militancy? It is been thoroughly penetrated by the forces of Al Qaeda and the Muslim brotherhood. - Gabriel Allon

the Brotherhood was not a throwback to the past but a reflection of its modern rivals, with attributes that would allow it to take on such ideologies and defeat them.

These mega-mosques are making a supremacist statement. Most people assume they’re just like synagogues or churches. They don’t realize that Islam has political goals that are expressed through the mosques, and that the mosques often symbolize that Muslims are claiming a particular territory as their own. For the Muslim Brotherhood, mosques aren’t just houses of worship. They’re centers of political power, from which plans are made to increase that power in various ways.

true brotherhood I had seen in the Holy World had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision. Every free moment I could find, I did a lot of talking to key people whom I knew around Harlem, and I made a lot of speeches, saying: “True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete. “Since I learned the truth in Mecca, my dearest friends have come to include all kinds—some Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and even atheists! I have friends who are called Capitalists, Socialists, and Communists! Some of my friends are moderates, conservatives, extremists

just took their weighty German word for it. Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha—at the very outset the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better state hereafter or an improved social order or any reward other than a certain “psychological state in the here and now,” as Weber put it. I suppose what I never really comprehended was that he was talking about an actual mental experience they all went through, an ecstasy, in short. In most cases, according to scriptures and legend, it happened in a flash. Mohammed fasting and meditating on a mountainside near Mecca and—flash!—ecstasy, vast revelation and the beginning of Islam. Zoroaster hauling haoma water along the road and—flash!—he runs into the flaming form of the Archangel Vohu Mano, messenger of Ahura Mazda, and the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Saul of Tarsus walking along the road to Damascus and—flash!—he hears the voice of the Lord and becomes a Christian. Plus God knows how many lesser figures in the 2,000 years since then, Christian Rosenkreuz and his “God-illuminated” brotherhood of Rosicrucians, Emanuel Swedenborg whose mind suddenly “opened” in 1743, Meister Eckhart and his disciples Suso and Tauler, and in the twentieth-century Sadhu Sundar Singh—with—flash!—a vision at the age of 16 and many times thereafter;

Hamas is the armed wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. When such groups and theocratic regimes reach power, this is terrorism.

The Brotherhood’s campaign to intimidate and silence officials in Washington who link Islam and terrorism is working brilliantly. The 9/11 Commission Report used the word jihad 126 times, Muslim 145 times, and Islam 322 times. A decade later, they have been virtually banished from official U.S. government documents. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon and the 2009 National Intelligence Strategy have zero mentions of jihad, Muslim, or Islam. Instead, they refer to “violent extremism” in general.