The Dangerous Liberal Fantasy Of Abdul El-Sayed And The Muslim Brotherhood

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat running to become the first Muslim U.S. Senator, has spent the final weeks of this campaign performing the classic maneuver: dismissing valid questions about his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The group is designated a terrorist organization in many nations, and it has a violent history of sowing chaos in states it deemed unfaithful to its political and ideological purposes.

Now some liberal and so-called progressive voices have come to his aid with a familiar refrain: What’s the problem with the Muslim Brotherhood? Only bigots hate them.

I have heard this line for years, usually delivered with the serene confidence of people who have never lived under the shadow of the Ikhwan, as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic. The claim is treated as settled wisdom: the Brotherhood is a social movement, a civic-minded Muslim activist group, perhaps a bit conservative, but essentially harmless. Criticism is dismissed as Islamophobia, a failure of empathy, or, wait for it, a refusal to see the “nuance.”

I grew up in Egypt, and I don’t need nuance lectures from people whose knowledge of the Brotherhood comes from press releases and so-called “academic” summaries. I watched what the Ikhwan do when they gain influence, and I witnessed what happened when they briefly held power.

The problem isn’t bigotry. The problem is the ideological project itself.

Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian Muslim preacher, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, just four years after the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate, with a clear purpose: to restore Islamic rule. His stated goal was Islamic dominance over society and, eventually, control of the state. The organization’s enduring slogan leaves little to the imagination: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the path of Allah is our highest hope.”

This is a revolutionary and unmistakably Islamist ideology. It doesn’t view liberal democracy, individual rights, or secular law as legitimate ends. They are temporary tools, useful only until the conditions for deeper transformation are met.

The Ikhwan’s history is full of documented plotting and assassinations. It is full of opponents branded apostates, declared deserving of death, and targeted in campaigns to overthrow the political order. That lineage runs straight into modern jihadism, taught by Sayyid Qutb and evidenced in the life of al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Western elites shouldn’t be deceived into expecting the Ikhwan to announce their agenda. When the Brotherhood periodically declares that it has “renounced violence,” that is political maneuvering, because it has never renounced the ideology that produces the violence.

We need look no further for proof. We have a current and devastating example: Hamas.

Hamas isn’t a distant cousin of the Ikhwan. Its 1988 founding charter states plainly that it is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.” The same charter calls for the obliteration of Israel and frames the conflict in explicitly religious terms.

When the Brotherhood’s networks celebrate or facilitate support for Hamas, the claim of pure nonviolence becomes theater.

Egyptians didn’t need academic studies to understand this. In 2012, Mohamed Morsi, a leading Brotherhood figure, won the presidency. Within months, he placed himself above judicial review and pushed through a constitution that elevated sharia principles. The country slid into polarization, economic freefall, and street violence. Copts felt the pressure acutely. Secular Egyptians, and even many ordinary Muslims, watched daily life deteriorate. By June 2013, millions filled the streets demanding his removal. This was a popular uprising against an organization that had shown what it intended to do with power.

What about the Muslim-majority world?

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt have designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and Jordan has banned it outright. These aren’t “Islamophobic” decisions. They are judgments reached by Muslims that have monitored the group’s internal structures, financing, and long-term goals for decades, and that know better than anyone what it looks like when the Brotherhood is in their neighborhood.

In North America, the Brotherhood’s own 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum,” recovered by the FBI and entered into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, described the movement’s work here as a “Civilization-Jihadist Process.” Its stated aim was “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within” and “sabotaging its miserable house.” That isn’t the language of a charity.

What’s their modern jihad? Build networks of student groups, charities, advocacy organizations, and political influence while keeping ultimate objectives opaque. The soft smiley face funds and legitimizes the harder ideological project.

In Michigan, the debate has taken on a local flavor. Family ties, old social media posts, campus affiliations, and donor networks have been waved away by some as irrelevant or “Islamophobic,” even when they track the same organizational patterns visible elsewhere. The candidate’s denials of any family connection sit uneasily for anyone who knows the Ikhwan as a unified big family.

The liberal claim that the Muslim Brotherhood is essentially benign rests on two refusals: a refusal to take the organization at its word, and a refusal to credit the testimony of those who have lived under its influence. We should all be wary of an organized political-religious movement that treats democracy as a ladder, sharia as the destination, and strategic ambiguity as a legitimate method.

Calling that out isn’t bigotry. Pretending the pattern doesn’t exist is the real fantasy.

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A. S. Ibrahim holds two PhDs in Islamic Studies. He is the author of “Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom” and “Islam and the West.” He has also authored “Muhammad’s Military Expeditions” (Oxford, 2024), “A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad” (Baker Academic, 2022), “Conversion to Islam” (Oxford, 2021), “Basics of Arabic” (Zondervan, 2021), “A Concise Guide to the Quran” (Baker Academic, 2020), and “The Stated Motivations for the Early Islamic Expansion” (Peter Lang, 2018), among others. Follow him on X: @al2ostaz