The Brotherhood Without a Headquarters
The Muslim Brotherhood is often described as an organization. That description may be part of the reason the West struggles to understand it.
Search for its headquarters, leadership structure or membership list, and little seems to materialize. There is no single bureau directing every affiliate and no neat organizational chart revealing who answers to whom. To the casual observer, it can look like an organization that barely exists.
But that is precisely what makes it effective.
During Stefan Tompson's (Visegrad24) conversation at Cambridge University with researcher Charles Asher Small, founder of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, he described the Brotherhood not merely as an organization but as a transnational ideological movement - one capable of operating through religious networks, charities, universities, media outlets and political campaigns without always displaying its name.
The West keeps looking for a command centre. It should be looking for the ecosystem.
An Ideology Built for the Long March
Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged partly as a reaction to British colonial rule. But its project quickly developed into something much broader: the replacement of secular government with a political order governed by its interpretation of Islam.
Small argues that antisemitism was not a later corruption of the movement but became embedded in its ideological foundations. Brotherhood-linked figures adopted European antisemitic conspiracies and fused them with a reactionary interpretation of Islamic politics.
The movement’s ambitions were never limited to Israel. Antisemitism, Small warns, is used as an instrument for dividing and destabilising democratic societies themselves. This matters because the Brotherhood’s modern strategy does not primarily resemble conventional terrorism. Its greatest successes have not necessarily come through bombs, militias or territorial conquest. They have come through patience.
Its supporters learned Western languages, entered Western institutions and studied the political and cultural weaknesses of liberal democracies. They understood that open societies could be influenced through the very freedoms intended to protect them. Meanwhile, the West frequently dismissed Islamists as unsophisticated fanatics. That arrogance created a strategic imbalance: they studied us while we refused to study them.
Doha Pays. Istanbul Directs. London Legitimises.
Small offered a striking summary of the Brotherhood’s modern geography:
“Qatar is the money. Istanbul is command and control. London is money laundering.”
The formulation captures a network whose influence no longer depends upon one recognised centre.
Qatar possesses extraordinary financial power for a country with only several hundred thousand citizens. Its investments stretch across universities, media, aviation, property, hospitality and European football. These investments generate commercial returns, but they also purchase access, prestige and influence.
A regime associated in the public mind with Qatar Airways, skyscrapers and the World Cup has embedded itself within many of the West’s most prestigious institutions. According to Small, Qatari money has flowed into major Western universities on an enormous scale. His concern is not simply that foreign governments fund education. It is that Western institutions accept the money without seriously confronting the ideological interests accompanying it.
The same strategy can be seen in sport and culture. Qatar’s ownership of Paris Saint-Germain did more than acquire a football club. It attached the Qatari state to one of Europe’s most powerful cultural brands. Political leaders now publicly celebrate its contribution to European sporting success. This is soft power at its most effective: influence presented as generosity, prestige and partnership.
The Red-Green Alliance
Perhaps the strangest element of this story is the alliance between radical Islamists and the Western progressive left.
On almost every fundamental question, these movements should be enemies. Islamists oppose the freedoms progressives claim to defend: equality between men and women, religious pluralism, gay rights, freedom of expression and the separation of religion from political power.
Yet on Western university campuses, radical left-wing activists increasingly portray Islamist movements as participants in a global struggle for liberation. Small calls the radical left the Islamists’ “useful idiots.” The left believes it is recruiting Muslims into its struggle against capitalism and Western power. The Islamists understand that they are borrowing the language, institutions and political energy of the left to advance a very different project.
History offers a warning. During the Iranian Revolution, Islamists and Marxists cooperated in overthrowing the Shah. Once power had been secured, the Islamists turned upon their former allies.
The same contradiction exists today. “Queers for Palestine” and “Feminists for Palestine” imagine themselves standing alongside movements of liberation. In reality, they often provide political cover for forces that would eliminate their freedoms if given the opportunity.
This alliance thrives because Western education increasingly teaches students to divide the world into oppressors and oppressed. Once Islamists are placed in the second category, their beliefs become almost irrelevant. Reactionary movements are rebranded as progressive merely because they oppose the West.
The West Is Sleeping Through a Revolution
This is not an argument against Muslims. Small repeatedly stressed that Muslims are the overwhelming majority of the victims of radical political Islam, and that many of the West’s most important allies against the Brotherhood are Muslims who understand its methods firsthand.
Nor is integration impossible. But integration requires more than physical residence or legal citizenship. It requires acceptance of the democratic social contract.
A liberal democracy can respect religious and cultural differences while insisting upon one public legal order. It can protect minority rights while refusing to tolerate female genital mutilation, religious intimidation, antisemitism, the persecution of Christians or violence against homosexuals. The problem is not that liberal democracy lacks the principles necessary to defend itself. The problem is that its leaders have become embarrassed to enforce them.
Western states weakened their capacity to integrate newcomers just as mass migration accelerated. Universities abandoned confidence in the civilisation that created them. Political leaders accepted foreign money while refusing to ask what influence it purchased. Institutions that should defend democracy instead began teaching generations of students to despise it.
Small ended the conversation by recalling Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning about institutions “sleeping through a revolution.” The West may now be doing precisely that. The Muslim Brotherhood does not need to conquer Western capitals militarily. It needs Western institutions to become financially dependent, intellectually confused and morally incapable of defending themselves.
The answer is neither collective suspicion of Muslims nor the abandonment of liberal democracy. It is a more confident liberal democracy: one that identifies political Islam clearly, works with Muslims who oppose it, scrutinises foreign funding and demands loyalty to the same laws from every citizen.
The Brotherhood has spent decades learning how the West works. It is time the West learned how the Brotherhood works.
