Is Trump’s Muslim Brotherhood Decision Redefining Political Islam?

The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 was not merely an institutional transformation that resulted in the dissolution of the Ottoman political structure; it was also a major rupture that led to a fundamental renegotiation of the concepts of authority, legitimacy, and identity in the Islamic world. As Albert Hourani notes in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1), Muslim societies during this period were grappling both with the pressures of modernization and the political structures imposed by colonial administrations. It is within this historical context that the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 becomes meaningful. When Hasan al-Banna founded the movement, his aim was to initiate a moral and social revival through which Islamic societies could redefine themselves within the conditions of modernity. In this sense, the movement drew upon classical Islamic tradition while simultaneously embracing modern methods of mass organization—this dual character, as François Burgat highlights in his analyses of political Islam, is one of the most distinctive features of the movement.

The rapid spread of the Muslim Brotherhood reflected the unrest and desire for transformation within the social structure of the period. In Egyptian society—under the influence of colonial administrations—social injustices, economic hardships, and cultural disintegration had become increasingly apparent. This environment allowed the Brotherhood to resonate with various segments of society not only through religious discourse but also via a wide range of activities such as education, social services, solidarity networks, and youth outreach. As Olivier Roy points out in The Failure of Political Islam (2), the movement’s success did not lie in offering an alternative to modernity, but in providing an Islamic framework for modernity.

During the Cold War, the Muslim Brotherhood’s position within the international system grew even more complex. In the United States’ search for regional allies against Soviet expansionism, political Islam emerged as a social force that was indirectly supported, especially in opposition to Arab nationalism and leftist movements. This dynamic, as explored in Gilles Kepel’s Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (3), paved the way for the West to view political Islam as a strategic instrument. At the same time, while many regimes in the region perceived the Brotherhood as a threat and subjected it to pressure, the general Western response to such repression was often limited to implicit distancing. This contradictory environment kept the movement’s international position suspended in an ambiguous “gray zone.”

However, the 1979 Iranian Revolution dramatically altered the Western perception of political Islam. Analyses by Iran experts such as Hamid Dabashi and Ervand Abrahamian demonstrate that the revolution led not only to a regional but also to a global political re-evaluation (4). It popularized the idea that political Islam could be a radical, system-transforming force capable of shaking the global order. From that point on, even movements like the Muslim Brotherhood began to be monitored more closely for their revolutionary potential. For the West, the concern was no longer limited to groups that employed violence; any political Islamic project that challenged the system started to be seen as a “source of political instability.”

The September 11, 2001 attacks represented the second major rupture that fundamentally redefined the positioning of political Islam within the international system. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver’s securitization theory (5) offers a highly functional framework for analyzing the post-9/11 era: a phenomenon does not need to be an objective security threat; it becomes one through the discourse of decision-makers. In this process, all variants of political Islam—including moderate, civil, and democratically oriented ones—were drawn into the same security discourse. The U.S. doctrine of the war on terror placed the majority of Islamic-referenced structures into the category of potential threats.

In this atmosphere, the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts to distinguish itself from radical movements became more visible. The Nahda movement led by Rached Ghannouchi in Tunisia, the PJD in Morocco, and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan (the Muslim Brotherhood was banned in Jordan on April 23; however, its political wing, the IAF, continues to function as a political party) were considered examples demonstrating the compatibility of political Islam with democratic processes. Asef Bayat’s concept of “post-Islamism” also gained significance during this period. According to Bayat (6), Islamic movements were increasingly moving away from ideological rigidity and toward a new political form synthesized with social demands and democratic processes.

However, the Trump administration’s attempt to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in the United States can be interpreted as a sign that this evolutionary trajectory of political Islam has reached a breaking point. The most striking aspect of this classification initiative is its potential to criminalize a broad socio-political ecosystem that has been widely recognized in the literature as representing moderate political Islam. This is because the Muslim Brotherhood is not a hierarchically centralized organization; rather, it is a multilayered network composed of varying levels of institutionalization across different countries, where social movements and political parties are interwoven. Therefore, grouping them all under a single category is problematic from both legal and analytical perspectives.

Furthermore, such a classification could significantly strain regional balances. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would welcome the move, as they view political Islam as a threat to regime security. In contrast, countries such as Türkiye and Qatar would oppose it due to their geopolitical, economic, and ideological preferences. This situation would deepen the ongoing regional competition in the Middle East and likely intensify existing rivalries.

Taken together, defining the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization does not merely amount to altering the legal status of a single movement. Rather, it represents an attempt to reshape the entire conceptual framework that governs the relationship between political Islam and the modern world. Such a designation could both restrict the avenues for political participation in Middle Eastern societies and erode the differentiated security strategies the West has sought to develop regarding the Islamic world—by collapsing them into a singular perception of threat. Suppressing political Islam as a whole could weaken the civil image of modern Muslim societies while simultaneously fueling radicalization tendencies.

Therefore, the Trump administration’s classification initiative is not simply a decision about the present; it marks a historical turning point with the potential to redefine the future of political Islam, the political architecture of the Middle East, and the international system’s relationship with the Islamic world. For this reason, the issue must be assessed not within the narrow confines of the security paradigm, but within the broader context of long-term social transformations, state-society relations, international power dynamics, and ideological competition.

Bibliography

Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Translated by Anthony F. Roberts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Roy, Olivier. The Failure of Political Islam. Translated by Carol Volk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Dabashi, Hamid. Iran: A People Interrupted. New York: The New Press, 2007.
Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998.
Bayat, Asef. Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.