How strong is your society?

How strong is society? The Muslim Brotherhood is finding out. And they've been at it for nearly a hundred years—probing… testing.

Most people couldn't tell you what society is anymore. The Muslim Brotherhood could.

The art is in the pace: change enough to matter, never enough to alarm.

And while the true depth of your culture might be invisible—or transparent—to you, it is clear to them. That gap is an open door.

In the quest for a unified Islamic civilization, it is your culture that stands in the way.

Pay attention.

In the Middle East nobody is confused. Who is pushing political Islam. Which Brotherhood. Which ministry. Which militia. They argue about the pusher because they know it is being pushed.

In other countries they gathered useful idiots in every room so you would stay asleep. The professor in the school and on campus, teaching that your civilization is the crime and Islam is the victim — and failing you for noticing. The journalist in the newsroom, turning a bombing into “tensions,” a rape gang into “diversity,” a no-go street into “community relations.” The yogi in the studio, selling “all paths are one” and telling you to breathe while a political religion takes the street outside. The NGO. The local council. The workplace. The family table. They do not have to join the Brotherhood. They just have to keep their room quiet.

While you were being soothed they stripped the thing that would have refused it. The language. The calendar. The street at night. The school that taught you how to count. The right to say this is ours. Once that culture is gone you do not need a caliphate on the letterhead. You already live in their room.

What you were going through in real life is the targeting of every foundational pillar of your culture:

• Economic trade centers
• Historic Places
• Religious Temples
• Cultural monuments

Blown up. Demolished. Ruined. Repurposed without consent.

At the same time you were told: ‘Islam is a religion of peace’

AND we all nodded and agreed. Why?

A public contradiction did not produce a public rejection. Social cost made the safer move. Fear of being labeled prejudiced made silence look like virtue. Institutions repeated the line. Elites framed it. People treated the contradiction as a room rule.

Solomon Asch put one real person in a room of actors and showed them lines. One line matched. Anyone with eyes could see it. Then the actors started saying the wrong line was the right one.

Most of the real people, at least once, said it too. They did not go blind. The room had already spoken. (Asch conformity experiments.)

The confederates were the visible consensus-makers. The line lengths were the contradictions anyone could see. The unsure participant was the ordinary public. Conformity was repeating the socially approved answer.

Instead of different line lengths, the experiment conducted by the Muslim Brotherhood looked like this:

It was Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated sheikhs who allowed suicide in service of jihad—rebranded suicide that is forbidden in Islam as a legitimate act of jihad. And when people started fearing that someone wearing Islamic garb might suddenly detonate, a new term was pushed, also by the Muslim Brotherhood: ‘Islamophobia’.

The results of both experiments were similar.

People learn to suppress their own perception when the room punishes disagreement or rewards compliance.

The extraordinary thing is this: how did we become the unassuming person in the room?

It didn’t happen at once. It happened one room at a time.

The rooms were ordinary. School. Newsroom. Campus. NGO. Local council. Workplace. Family table. Yoga studio. The professor, the journalist, the yogi — useful idiots installed in each one. Each room normalized a small rule. Then the next room inherited it.

Another experiment: a waiting room. A bell rings. Everyone stands up. A new person walks in, has no idea why, and stands up anyway. Then the originals leave. The new people keep standing. Nobody left in the room remembers why. The ritual is now the room. (Stand up at the sound of the ring.)

And if you attach a real-life cost to admitting that you were wrong and just followed suit, then suddenly you have people who have a vested interest in keeping the stand-up ritual going.

Yuri Bezmenov described the same thing as policy. Former KGB. 1984. Ideological subversion. Not spies. Not shooting. He said most of the work is this: you change the rooms a generation sits in until they cannot see what is in front of them. Watch him say it.

The method has four stages. Demoralization: fifteen to twenty years — school, press, culture, religion, family — until true information bounces off. Destabilization: two to five years — economy, foreign relations, defense. Crisis: as short as six weeks. Then normalization: the new owners call the wreckage peace.

He named the useful idiots. And he named their rooms.

The professor: befriend him. Invite him. Fly him for free. Tell him he is a talented intellectual. He is not. He is a useful idiot who will come home and teach the beauties of the enemy system to the next generation of students. Academia, Bezmenov said, is famous for this. “All these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders” — instrumental only to destabilize the nation.

The journalist: Novosti was a KGB press front. He kept foreign reporters drunk for two weeks, then took the joint statement while they were shaky. Look magazine: first page to last, a package of lies sold to Americans as the journalists’ own opinions. They were preselected. If you told the truth about his country, he said, you would not last long at the New York Times. Fear. Jobs. Money. They bring the lie home and call it reporting. In his files for execution were pro-Soviet journalists he was personally friendly with.

The yogi: the KGB was fascinated by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — Beatles at the ashram, Mia Farrow and the rest coming home zonked on hash and “crazy ideas of meditation.” Sit down. Look at your navel. Don’t rock the boat. A beautiful school. A brainwashing center for stupid Americans. Anyone deep into Indian philosophy was marked recruitable. He was sent to the ashram to see which American VIPs attended. The yogi is not a side character in this method. The yogi is a room.

They serve a purpose only while the nation is being destabilized. When the job is done, Bezmenov said, they are not needed anymore. They know too much. Some of them will be lined up against the wall and shot. You can put the picture in front of a demoralized person. They will deny it. That is the room.

The Muslim Brotherhood is best understood here as a repeatable method: build dependency, gain legitimacy, shape institutions, and weaken a society's confidence in its own inheritance until cultural replacement feels like accommodation.

It is not a party. It is not an idea you ban and then sleep.

The grass pushes. The soil stays quiet. Islam is the answer in every room. Dependency first. Then legitimacy. Then the school. Then your culture is the obstacle — so they remove it.

The Muslim Brotherhood has influenced governments, shaped thought across continents, produced offshoots that altered geopolitics, and embedded itself within civil society structures in multiple countries.

It has been banned.
Crushed.
Exiled.
Imprisoned.
And survived.

They say you can’t kill ideas.

But the Muslim Brotherhood is not exactly an idea.

It’s an algorithm.

Like open-source code, it built a template, a model, for embedding an ideology into society gradually, structurally, patiently, from the ground up.

Every part connects to another—and now it runs on its own.

And Islam is what connects it all.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a network.

But what is its goal?

To understand what that means, we have to see how the Muslim Brotherhood works.

By joining in.

Knowingly.

It almost doesn’t matter where you are in the world. Once your decisions are guided by a single question —

“What advances Islamic rule?”

Those who recognize the pattern will know what to do.

It usually starts in a non-political setting. At work. At the gym. On campus. A recruiter “tests the waters” with study materials: maybe a podcast, maybe a book. Building trust. Building a personal bond.

Now things get real.
Remember: to every question asked, answer “Islam.”
Islam is the solution. To everything.

And if you have the potential to advance the movement’s objectives, you may get the “Individual Call” — a personal invitation into the inner structure. The higher you climb, the more you are invited to help shape strategy and policy.

Don’t be discouraged if you stay on the outskirts, or remain unaware of your role. In a grassroots movement, the grass is very important too.

Either way, you will start influencing the environment around you.

First your household.
Then your business.
Your children’s school.
Your town.
That is how it scales.

Grass and Soil

In a grassroots movement, the grass is very important too.

And so is the soil.

Instead of promoting Islam, you facilitate it.

If the grass (active members pushing the agenda) vote for Islam, the soil (passive enablers in society) throw their voices away.

When someone in the grass brings an imam to teach an economy class, the person in the soil remains silent and allows their child to attend.

And when their child comes home, they nod and never say: ‘This is not how it works!’

The child receives an economic explanation from an imam.

Even when the parent says ‘This is not economics’ — there is still no alternative framework. No reference. No knowledge of where to go for proper economics.

But the child needs to learn economy somewhere.

If I had to choose blindly who to learn economy from, I’d pick a Jew.

So they go to the familiar. Whether they remember the warning or not. Especially if they go to an Ivy League that enforces the wrong path by refusing to teach ‘colonial sciences’ — the correct reading of statistics and data. That has nothing to do with skin color or colonialism. It has everything to do with Qatari money that pays for bi la kaifa.

After all, someone good at math and interpolation might have noticed the results of Islamic economy as demonstrated in Turkey — a big Muslim Brotherhood operation room — ahead of time.

The seed was already planted, and without strong roots, Islam grows.

Strong roots are economic literacy, civic confidence, historical memory, family authority, and a living culture that can answer back. A warning is not roots.

You might already be part of their mechanism… and not even know it.

You do not have to be an active member. Silence, outsourcing judgment, and accepting imported frames are participation mechanisms even when you are not an ideological member.

But why are so many living comfortably in the West willing to do this? And I quote:

‘The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes…’

This is straight from their 1991 Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America. Full scan (Arabic + English): Investigative Project · PDF

Why?
What is the goal?

To answer that, we need to go back.

To 1924.

To the fall of the Caliphate.

1924

In 1924, the Ottoman Empire lay in ruins. World War I had shattered it. The victors—Britain, France—carved up its lands.

But the final blow came from within. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey, saw the old ways as chains.

On March 3, 1924, the Grand National Assembly voted.

After 1300 years, the Caliphate—symbol of Islamic unity for centuries—was abolished.

1928

Civilizational collapse.

The last Caliphate chose modernity. Four years later, in 1928, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

His idea was simple:

“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

If Muslims were weak, it was because they had reduced Islam to ritual instead of what it is.

A way of life.

From what you say, what you eat, and what you wear, to economy, governance, and philosophy.

Soaring on the feelings of resentment toward foreigners that al-Banna found in the city of Ismailia, the movement quickly grew.

No to the West, yes to Islam.

Now I want to say it plainly because there is a point here that needs to be made. European Colonialism has got a bad rep. And considering Britain would have bombed my country if it weren’t for the US stopping them, I can’t wholeheartedly defend them.

But. There is a huge but.

The Egyptians took loans they couldn’t pay back.

So let’s not pretend the decision to study economy from an imam—instead of a proper analysis of what led them to this situation in the first place—made sense. And anyway, it was better than being under the Ottomans.

Building Dependency

The way the Muslim Brotherhood built its influence was through dependency.

• They distributed food.
• They provided clinics.
• They ran schools.
• They built community institutions.

This wasn’t random charity. It was social infrastructure.

Where the state is weak, whoever feeds you earns loyalty. Loyalty to you, not the state.

Step by step, as long as it takes.

By the 1940s, the Brotherhood had grown rapidly inside Egypt—socially, politically, and organizationally. It also developed a secret apparatus involved in political violence.

The Egyptian state took notice. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Brotherhood was crushed. Leaders were imprisoned or executed. The organization was banned. For the first time.

It was banned and unbanned several times. Until Morsi took power during the Arab Spring, only to be removed by the military in a coup. Now they are officially banned. Maybe.

Members fled to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, the Gulf, Europe. Wherever they went, they spread the method: Mosques. Student groups. Associations.

The same cycle repeated again and again.

Like water seeps into gaps when it's warmer, the Muslim Brotherhood enters cracks during periods of economic boom—offering support for those left behind, and business opportunities for those who are looking to invest. When the temperature drops, they settle and expand, increasing the dependency on them. In soil, this process reduces erosion resistance. In society, it leaves behind weakened institutions, leading to accelerated deterioration.

All for the benefit of the great caliphate.
So where is the caliph?

The Modern Structure

With the founders gone, it is honestly unclear. There are some rumors of inner elections, but why think today about tomorrow? I suggest putting them all in a room and seeing who is the last one to stand. Why—what did you think? We are electing a Caliph here, not the pope.

There are many candidates, and it definitely sounds like Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, is one of them if you listen to him speak.

The main Muslim Brotherhood leadership hubs today are in Doha, Qatar; Istanbul, Turkey; and London, UK.

From there they operate media outlets like Al Jazeera, TRT, as well as build connections inside of BBC Arabic, and probably BBC in general. Invest into education and universities, but it is their ground work they are most proud of, especially when universities all over the world cheered on Hamas while they were rampaging through the streets on October 7th.

Like open-source code, it built a template, a model, for embedding an ideology into society gradually, structurally, patiently, from the ground up—and now it runs on its own.

You can watch that structure in real life. A state hosts it. A cleric updates the framing. Zakat and media move resources. Branches split and still share the goal. Ban a party, jail a cell, exile a leader—and the template keeps running somewhere else. Qatar is one place where the structure is visible.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the face of the update channel

If you need one face for the intellectual operating system behind the network, start with Yusuf al-Qaradawi (d. 2022)—Egyptian-born, long hosted in Doha, often described as the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual and legal reference even when he said he was not “the chairman.” He refused formal top leadership more than once. That did not make him distant. It made him useful: the mufti of the method, not the manager of one branch—the maintainer of the template, not one local branch.

From Qatar he reached the world on satellite and online. He shaped fatwas and framing for a generation—how to talk about jihad, Palestine, democracy as a tool, and the long civilizational project. Brotherhood circles treated him as their nearest authority. Gulf monarchies that banned the Brotherhood treated him as a threat. Qatar kept him. That is what incorporation looks like: the platform stays up.

Sunni and Shiite: cooperation when the goal advances

People who only know the Sunni–Shiite blood feud miss the operating rule: the network will work with whoever advances Islamic rule.

Qaradawi spent years in the “rapprochement” business—public calls for Sunni–Shiite closeness, shared platforms, the language of one ummah against a common outside. That was not soft theology for its own sake. It was politics: reduce friction when friction blocks the project; keep channels open when channels open doors.

Later he broke hard with Iran and Hezbollah over Syria. The flip matters—and it does not cancel the earlier phase. The method still shows the same flexibility: when the long path needs Shiite partners, partners appear. That is why a collab like October 7th—Sunni Hamas (Brotherhood line) with Shiite Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic—was possible even after one famous cleric had already turned against Tehran on another file. The network is not a personality cult. It is an algorithm that can share a battlefield with sworn theological enemies when the shared enemy is you.

Funding: Zakat is not a side note

Open-source projects need a distribution channel. Or in other words: money. Follow the money and you see how Islam secured the financial backing for worldwide ambitions and operations. The Quran took care of it—the charity it forced was always aimed at jihad. From early on, the Brotherhood’s financial system was not only membership dues. It ran on Zakat—obligatory alms under Islamic law—and on charity bylaws, committees, and “relief” structures that look like social good to outsiders and like logistics to insiders.

Zakat is hard to police from the outside because it is framed as religious duty and humanitarian care. Food, clinics, schools, orphans, “reconstruction”—the same infrastructure that builds loyalty also builds a cash rail. Charity brands, waqf, and cross-border “aid” move money under a moral shield. That is why cutting the network is never only about banning a party name. You have to see the alms machine that keeps the template fed.

Qatar did not reject the Brotherhood. It incorporated it.

Most Gulf monarchies eventually treated the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat to hereditary rule—they tried to kill the process. Qatar did not take that path. It hosted leaders, gave media oxygen (Al Jazeera), and tied organizational capacity to Qatari capital and diplomacy. The official Qatari chapter could be dissolved on paper; the patronage did not dissolve with it. That is incorporation: the host adopts the template instead of fighting it.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt cut ties and blockaded Qatar—land, sea, air—explicitly pressing Doha over its ties to the Brotherhood and related networks, among other demands. Qatar did not fold. It endured siege from its Gulf neighbors, accepted the risk, and kept the strategic bet. That is not a footnote. That is a state choosing the network over the club of monarchies that wanted the network dead—proof that once the model is embedded, even pressure from neighbors may not uninstall it.

And here is the part Western audiences still underweight: one of the most important U.S. military bases in the region—Al Udeid—sits in Qatar. American force posture and Qatari hospitality share geography with the same small peninsula that hosted Qaradawi, platformed the Brotherhood’s media ecosystem, and refused to treat the method as radioactive the way Riyadh and Abu Dhabi did. Real life: the template runs next to the bases, the cameras, and the capital.

The Military Wing

I guess it’s time to talk about the military wing. The most famous and most affiliated branch is Hamas.

The disagreement between ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood is over tactics and the application of Islam. While the latter believes in the long path, the former two don’t have the patience—or the theological flexibility—unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, which would work with anyone promoting the goal, even the IRGC. Yes, they would cooperate even with the Shiites, who are sworn enemies of Sunni Islam. This is why a collab like the one we’ve seen on October 7th—between the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood branch Hamas, Shiite Hizbullah, and the Shiite Islamic Republic—was possible. These democratic tendencies of the Muslim Brotherhood are frowned upon by many.

What began nearly a century ago as an improbable vision is now an ideological force that threatens to shake the foundations of our societies.

So while the Middle East focuses on the promotion of Islam—on who is pushing political Islam—the rest of the world should watch what is being quietly replaced. The focus should just as much be on what is being taken away.

A society that cannot define its own boundaries has already lost them.

Can you name what was taken?

It starts by relabeling your history as 'prejudice' and your traditions as 'obsolete.' When a generation is taught to be ashamed of its past, they will not lift a finger to protect their future.

And while staring into the void, in search of identity, one option remains. A distorted version of a cultural past that makes modern western culture seem feminine and unattractive, or… Islam.

Oh wait—what is Western culture without liberty, property rights, democracy, or respect for human life?

Oh yes yes:
‘The far right’.
That thing every member of society who shows a hint of a self-preservation instinct is falsely labeled as.

The real far right would know… Between Christianity and Islam—Hitler preferred Islam.

Islam is the solution.
To everything.

The Muslim Brotherhood has spread globally, including to many Western countries since the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In each country, the movement has taken on different forms, adapting to the local political conditions. All these entities work according to a common vision, but with complete operational independence. There are consultations and constant communication amongst the branches, but each is free to pursue its goals as it deems appropriate.

While retaining solid links to the Middle East, Brotherhood entities in the West have acquired a substantial level of autonomy, reshaping part of the Brotherhood’s ideology and tactics to fit into non-Muslim majority societies.

The Three Tiers in the West

Organisations and individuals linked to the Brotherhood in the West can be summarily divided into three categories according to the intensity of their links to the mother group:

The Western Partnership

Following a pattern similar to most European countries, over time, various Austrian organizations linked to the Brotherhood milieu have been entrusted with administering integration measures, various aspects of Islamic religious education in Austria and, since 2015, aiding in the reception of the large influx of Muslim migrants.

Western elites and governments engage and, at times, partner with Brotherhood organisations for several overlapping reasons. In some cases, the need for a well-structured and organized partner within the Muslim community overrides concerns about the Brothers’ views and aims. Authorities also seek to maintain a dialogue with the MB in order to avoid its radicalisation. In some cases, outreach to the MB is seen by some political forces as a way to ensure electoral successes.

The MB is a designated terrorist organization in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and a handful of other Middle Eastern countries, but neither Austria nor the European Union have designated the organisation. Despite some overlaps in ideology with Salafist and jihadist milieus, it would be a grave analytical mistake to lump the Brotherhood’s ideology together with these groups.

The Consequence

Nonetheless, the Brotherhood promotes a narrative that, through its use of victimhood and justification of violence, creates a fertile environment for radicalisation. Western Brotherhood entities have purposely exaggerated anti-Muslim incidents and attitudes (which unquestionably exist) to foster a siege mentality within local Muslim communities, arguing that the government and Western societies are hostile to them and to Islam in general. This dynamic has been particularly evident in Austria over the last few years. At the same time, the MB sees violence as legitimate in cases in which it views Muslims as under threat or occupation. Leaders and branches of the Brotherhood worldwide, including in Austria, have raised funds for Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, and endorsed terrorist acts against Israeli civilians. The spread of this narrative of victimhood mixed with justification of violence should be seen with concern given the massive rise in radicalisation seen throughout Europe during the last five years.

The network spreads through people who do not know what they are helping.

Grass that votes. Soil that stays silent. Outskirts that still scale the room. People who answer “Islam” to every question because the room already decided—and people who never ask what their own culture is, so the gap stays an open door.

The person who stops the spread is the one who knows what they stand for.

Not a slogan. Judgment recovered. Culture named. Terms made. A person—and then a room—that will not be recruited into someone else’s algorithm because they already know whose life they are living and what they will not surrender.

You do not beat a template with panic. You beat it with identity that can say no—and with a network of free people so isolated courage is not the only thing left standing.