The Trump administration aims to outlaw the global networks of the Muslim Brotherhood by adopting a “bottom-up strategy” modeled after the one used against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran) in 2017.
In a letter dated June 18, 2025, addressed to the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the acting General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salah Abdel Haq, announced the Brotherhood’s “full support” for the Iranian regime and proposed a joint strategy to “gather forces” and “unify the efforts” of Islamist movements.
While expressing satisfaction over the “defeat” inflicted on Israel on October 7, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood considers the Israeli attack on Iran as “A new phase in the aggression against Palestine.”
Calling for an end to divisions between Sunnis and Shiites in the name of the necessary “unity of the Islamic ummah” in the face of the “common enemy” that is the “Zionist entity,” the Brotherhood’s Guide proposes to his Iranian counterpart a “comprehensive strategic vision” aimed at rallying the will of the “living and active forces” of the “Islamic Ummah,” by “unifying their efforts” to confront the “fire of occupation and its supporters [which] makes no distinction between our origins or our schools of thought” and seeks to “expand the aggression to the entire resistance environment, whether it be a central state like the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Islamic movement [i.e., Hamas], at the heart of which lies the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Following the release of the Elysée’s report on Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in France, Paris is planning to host a summit of European interior ministers this coming autumn, with the goal of establishing a joint European strategy to counter the Brotherhood’s lobbying and infiltration activities.
For the past 30 years, through my articles, books, and lectures, I have continuously tried to raise awareness and sound the alarm about the dangers posed by the Muslim Brotherhood Association to our societies—dangers that are even greater for Arab and Muslim societies, which this violent and reactionary entity has helped destroy or plunge into chaos (Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Libya, etc.).
Commissioned by the Élysée Palace during a special Defense Council held in January 2024, a report on the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of infiltration (entryism) in France was prepared by the Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs. Under the supervision of diplomat Pascal Gouyette and Prefect François Courtade, a group of senior civil servants—tasked in April 2024—visited four European countries and ten French departments, interviewed over 200 individuals (including intelligence officers, religious leaders, researchers, elected officials, and diplomats), and submitted a report to the authorities in July 2024.According to the Ministry of the Interior, the report “highlights a serious threat, characterized by a double discourse combining insularity, concealment, and apparent respect for the rules, with the aim of replacing national unity with new forms of allegiance that break away from the republican tradition.”Ten months later, the government—at President Macron’s request to formulate “proposals commensurate with the seriousness of the findings”—decided to publish a “redacted version” of the report (to protect sources, as is standard when declassifying documents from “Secret Défense” status).The report was described as “damning” by Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau.
Excerpts:
According to a CSA poll published on April 27, 2025, 88% of French people support banning the Muslim Brotherhood in their country. This position appears to have near-unanimous support: the desire to outlaw the Islamist Brotherhood is backed by more than three-quarters of the population, regardless of socio-professional categories, age, gender, or political leaning.
At the end of the 1950s, Saïd Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) fled Egypt and chose Geneva to set out to conquer the West. His son Hani has headed the Islamic Centre of Geneva (ICG) since 1995. His brother Tariq was the best-known French-speaking Muslim on the planet, before vice scandals toppled him in 2017. Even today, the city of Calvin is still largely under the thumb of the Ramadan family. But there was a dramatic turn of events on September 10, 2024. While Tariq Ramadan had been acquitted in May 2023 at first instance, he was sentenced on appeal to three years in prison, including one year in prison, for rape and sexual coercion.
Have our leaders been so naive over the last 30 years as to take Islamists for fervent republicans, or have they simply played a dangerous game of deadly electoralism, believing they were seducing France’s Muslims by agreeing to respond to the communitarian demands of thugs sporting trimmed beards and ties?
Yet how many journalists, researchers and politicians have warned, sometimes at the risk of their lives, of the threat posed by Islamism, and more specifically by the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe? How many martyrs of the Republic, from the Charlie Hebdo attack to the attack on Samuel Patty, did it take to understand the civilisational danger posed by these madmen of Allah?
A group of researchers from the Emirati Trends Research & Advisory center, the University of Montreal and ”Pluriel”, the university research platform on Islam based in Lyon, have been collaborating since 2021 to produce the first academic index capable of measure the global influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have just released their first report covering the period 2022/2023. Exclusive extracts.
For decades, numerous books have denounced the dangerous nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, until 2011 and the Arab Spring, very little was known about their ability to manage countries. In Cairo, as in Tunis, when they came to power, it only took them a few months, if not a few weeks, to reveal their incredible incompetence. “To rise in the hierarchy of the Brotherhood, you have to obey and, above all, not think. As a result, it’s not the most intelligent who have come to power”, notes sociologist Sarah Ben Néfissa, co-author with Pierre Vermeren of the book “Les Frères musulmans à l’épreuve du pouvoir”1.
