The designation of the Muslim Brotherhood: a future game changer for Banking and Financial Services

The Muslim Brotherhood is an amorphous, inchoate organisation and targeting it puts most practicing Muslims in the crosshairs.

Summary: This piece examines the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood problem, its organisational structures and their diffuse nature, and, under the paywall, the commercial implications of designating it a terrorist organisation.

The Trump Administration designated the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian branches of Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation. The justification is that these branches have engaged in armed violence. However, the reality is that the group is the mother organisation behind Al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, Islamic State, and others. Our view, therefore, is that this is merely a first step, and that further designations of additional branches, and, eventually, of the entire organisation globally, are likely. Indeed, this is the official position of Britain’s Reform UK Party, which is likely to form a cabinet by 2029.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s aims

The Muslim Brotherhood’s objectives are:

1. To re-Islamise and render more conservative existing Islamic societies globally.

2. To spread Islam globally, including through immigration.

3. To enshrine the supremacy of Islam, including by making strategic alliances in Western countries to protect and expand Muslim communities.

4. To establish Islamic states, rather than secular states, wherever possible.

5. To re-establish an Islamic caliphate that can eventually become global.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s view is that Islam is the only natural religion, and that it was made to govern the entire world. Its aims are inherently subversive. Which is why we believe that the designations will expand.

Islam is different

The theological problem is that these objectives can be said to be part of the mainstream interpretation of Islam, and part of the duties of a good Muslim. To some extent, this is perfectly normal - as we have long argued, most belief systems seek to spread and to have government act in accordance with their beliefs.

That said, Islam is different. Islam perceives itself as a religion of law and governance, and is not merely a spiritual affair. Its primary truth claim is that Jews and Christians did not apply the Law of Moses properly, and that God sent prophet after prophet, anf finally Mohammad, to correct this and to re-establish the Law. Islam and law are inseparable, and Shari’ah merely means law.

All religions have a social and political dimension. However, for Judaism, the conflict between prophets and kings began in the time of King Saul, and continued throughout the history of the Jewish kingdoms: the conflicts in the Bible between prophets and kings made it clear that kingly temporal authority and spiritual authority were two different things. Christianity was persecuted for 300 years before Rome converted (and remained persecuted throughout the Muslim world through practices like dhimmitude and the enslaving Christian children in the Balkans, and remains persecuted today in China, Nigeria, and elsewhere). This created the very idea of secularism: that there are two autonomous hierarchies, one temporal and the other spiritual.

Islam never went through this historical experience. After 13 years of peaching in Mecca, Mohammad, the prophet of Islam, became the de-facto ruler of Medina, which he ruled for ten years as a temporal, military, and spiritual leader. His successors continued to rule in his name, combining temporal and spiritual authority in the caliphate, and governed societies where Muslims were often the minority. This continued until 1923, when Turkey’s Mustafa Kamal dissolved the caliphate.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 to restore the caliphate and strengthen Islam by re-Islamising society. The Muslim Brotherhood, in our view, understood a key point: no society can be governed in opposition to the religious values of its culture and its people. Indeed, culture is downstream of religion, and politics is downstream of culture. Therefore, all politics inherently has a religious dimension, and all religion has a political dimension. The aim of the Muslim Brotherhood is to end this separation, and, in Islam, this is a particularly strong and theologically sound impulse. It simply reflects Islam’s history and is in line with its truth claims.

What is the Muslim Brotherhood?

Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood’s aim of increasing Islamic temporal power by making Muslims more devout, and through cooperation with non-Muslim groups in the West to strengthen Islam, allow it an enormous level of flexibility and allows non-member individuals and groups to be part of the group’s organisational capabilities. Indeed, one hallmark of the Muslim Brotherhood is its diffuse nature. For example, the Council of American Islamic Relations, which is modelled on AIPAC, is not formally part of the Muslim Brotherhood. But it is most certainly helping its aims. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and follows its ideology to a large extent. However, it is not organisationally subject to it, even though it shares its aim of a global Muslim caliphate.

Critically, one can argue that the Muslim Brotherhood has been the single most successful global movement in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is the ruling group in Turkey, under the rubric of the AK Parti. It now will also govern Syria. In Qatar, the group dissolved itself in the late 1990s because it believed that the state had fully adopted its ideology. In Jordan, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and various other countries, it is the strongest opposition group. In Asia, its sister group, Jamaat-e-Islami, founded in 1941 by Abul Ala al-Maududi, is influential in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. In Britain, both groups influence, inform, or control the Muslim Council of Britain, the country’s most significant Islamic grouping. Even the Civil Service Muslim Network, a grouping that helps organise Muslims throughout Britain’s civil service, can be said to be supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami. Throughout Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood is a powerful organisational force, though not under its own name, but rather through various forums and organisations.

Implications:

We give this long introduction to make the following points:

1. The targeting of the Muslim Brotherhood will expand due to the role the group plays in organising Muslims politically throughout the West, something which is already a major national security threat.

2. Due to the group’s compatibility with Islam’s truth claims and history, and to Islam’s very nature as a political religion, any activist Muslim or Islamic organisation can be said to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood, or at least furthering their aims and ideology.

3. Turkey and Qatar can be described as state-sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood, while al Jazeera and numerous other media organisations can be labelled as its mouthpieces.

From Trump and Erdogan’s September 2025 meeting.

Commercial Impact:

Our view is that the targeting of the Muslim Brotherhood will expand, in line with the rise of the right, and as a result of the growing conflict between Israel and its allies and the Muslim world.

This implies the following:

1. Organisations in Europe and America, not just the Middle East, will be targeted. The question is about when, not if.

2. As designations expand, banks throughout the Western world may have to establish specialised units to examine Muslim clients and assess the risk of their being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.