The Brotherhood bogeyman: How Europe and the US criminalise Muslim civic life
Across western publics, a dangerous claim is spreading that Muslim civic participation is secretly linked to a coordinated Muslim Brotherhood plot to subvert these nations from within.
They claim that Muslims - many of them third-generation immigrants - who organise in communities, assert their rights as equal citizens, and engage in democratic politics are doing so as part of a hidden takeover scheme. It is a conspiracy theory, and a familiar one.
Following the Trump administration's State Department designation of Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon as Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTO), several US state governors and European politicians have used this as a carte blanche to target their own domestic Muslim populations.
The governors of Texas and Florida have moved to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) as a terrorist organisation - a largely symbolic but still severe step towards criminalising Muslim civic engagement.
Meanwhile, the Dutch parliament voted by a slim majority to designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, while the Dutch government still has to decide how to act on this.
These politicians celebrate how some Arab countries have "pushed out" the Muslim Brotherhood, providing intellectual cover for something far more corrosive than radicalism: the systematic exclusion of Muslim civil society from democratic participation.
An authoritarian template
Some of the countries these European politicians praise did not contain the Brotherhood through democratic means.
They crushed it through authoritarian force: mass killings on open streets, executions, mass arrests, and the wholesale suppression of political Islam in any form. It is precisely the kind of state violence that has historically driven radicalisation, not prevented it.
The modern phenomenon of violent Muslim groups traces its roots directly to the brutal repression carried out under Gamal Abdel Nasser - a champion not of western democracy but of authoritarian nationalism.
It is also worth asking why Gulf monarchies like the UAE designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation when they did: in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when Brotherhood-affiliated parties were winning democratic elections across the region.
The practical effect is the chilling of an entire community's speech and civic participation - not the neutralisation of any genuine threat
Those designations were instruments of authoritarian self-preservation, not dispassionate security assessments - exported westward for legitimisation. When security experts warn of European complacency, they are in reality amplifying the security narrative of governments that had strong political reasons to destroy their domestic Muslim political opposition.
The Brotherhood that supposedly threatens Europe is an organisation with no formal headquarters, no unified leadership, and no clear membership rolls - particularly after it was largely imprisoned following the 2013 coup in its former quasi capital of Cairo.
This vagueness is treated as evidence of danger. In reality, it makes the Brotherhood an ideal bogeyman - a label that cannot be precisely defined and therefore can be applied to virtually anyone.
And it has been. Muslim student associations, civil rights organisations, advocacy groups, and anti-discrimination watchdogs have all been tarred with Brotherhood affiliation, typically on the basis of tenuous ideological proximity rather than any demonstrated operational link.
When France dissolved the Collectif Contre l'Islamophobie en France (CCIF), an organisation dedicated to documenting anti-Muslim discrimination, it did so under the banner of fighting "Islamist separatism" and alleged Brotherhood connections.
The real casualty was an institution defending civil liberties.
This pattern has a name in American history: McCarthyism. The techniques are identical: broad ideological suspicion substitutes for specific evidence, and guilt by association becomes the standard of proof.
The practical effect is the chilling of an entire community's speech and civic participation - not the neutralisation of any genuine threat. In the decades since 9/11, Americans have seen how far the logic of terrorism designation can be stretched - from people being jailed illegally in Guantanamo Bay to ICE protesters being labelled domestic terrorists.
The arbitrariness of the process is not a flaw. It is the point.
Exclusion breeds radicalisation
When European political leaders lament that Muslims are not integrated, they are simultaneously doing their best to exclude them further - denying them the basic rights enjoyed by the rest of the citizenry: free speech and the freedom to assemble.
To support integration should mean expanding democratic rights, not suppressing Muslim public life.
Societies that exclude and surveil Muslims, that ban headscarves and block the construction of mosques and shut down civil society organisations, do not prevent radicalisation.
They accelerate it by confirming to young Muslims that democratic participation is a trap and that the society they live in does not regard them as fully belonging to it.
Similar to antisemitic discourses at the turn of the 20th century, which reframed Judaism as a political ideology rather than a religion to justify exclusion, today's anti-Muslim discourse insists that Islam is not a faith but a totalitarian political project.
Europe, with its long history of suppressing minority religions in favour of dominant churches, is particularly susceptible to this framing. It should know better.
The real danger this argument poses is that it provides a respectable-sounding rationale for something far broader: treating Muslim civic engagement itself as suspect, and handing governments a tool to silence communities defending their own rights.
That is not how open societies protect themselves. It is how they hollow themselves out.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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