The Documented Strategy of Civilization Jihad By The Muslim Brotherhood
- PAUL PRESTONxd
- 5 hours ago
- 7 min read
AENN
December 8, 2025
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For years, conversations about the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in the West have been dismissed as fringe, conspiratorial, or Islamophobic. The result is that many policymakers, security professionals, and community leaders have been conditioned to recoil from even discussing the issue, but the facts are not controversial. They are not secret. They are not speculative. The Muslim Brotherhood itself laid out its strategy in writing more than three decades ago and we are living with the consequences of ignoring it.
This is not about Islam as a faith. I wrote on this issue here that both Islamists and those who have hostility to Islam, mutually reinforce each other in their extremist narratives. This is about a political movement that has systematically politicized Islam, distorted it into an ideological program, and built vast networks designed to shape institutions from within. If we fail to draw that distinction clearly, we fuel both extremism and anti-Muslim sentiment at the same time, doubling our workload.
The recent debate triggered by Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s designation of CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations, followed by President Trump’s targeted FTO and SDGT designations for specific MB chapters overseas, underscores how poorly understood this movement still is. Whether one agrees with those designations or not, the larger issue remains: too many Americans have no idea how the Muslim Brotherhood actually operates, or why its documented strategy matters for homeland security.
If we want to protect constitutional freedoms, strengthen genuine Muslim-community partnerships, and maintain trust-based counterterrorism frameworks, we need to be honest about what the Brotherhood has publicly committed itself to achieving.
A Political Movement, Not a Religious One
The Muslim Brotherhood is often portrayed as a charity network or social movement. In reality, it is a political project built on the belief that Islam is not simply a faith but a complete governance system that their group has the authority to implement. This distinction is critical. While most Muslims are simply practicing their religion, the Brotherhood turns Islam into a political identity, one that divides the world into Islamist and non-Islamist, believer and opponent. It is this worldview that has served as the ideological wellspring for more overtly violent groups like Hamas, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. They differ in tactics, not in their ultimate objectives.
When the Brotherhood politicizes the faith, it creates two problems simultaneously:
It provides ideological justification for extremist violence.
It causes ordinary Muslims to be viewed with suspicion, because the public cannot easily distinguish between the religion and the political ideology claiming to speak in its name.
The Strategy They Put in Writing
In 1991, the FBI uncovered a Muslim Brotherhood document titled An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America. Written by a senior Brotherhood operative who was also a leading Hamas figure, the memorandum lays out a long-term strategy for establishing influence and reshaping Western society from within.
The memo describes the Brotherhood’s work in the United States as a “grand jihad,” not in the sense of an armed struggle, but a civilizational one. Rather than operating as a single organization, it outlines a network of affiliated institutions that include student groups, community associations, advocacy organizations, and religious centers, all intended to advance the same ideological agenda.
This strategy is not hypothetical. It is not an outsider’s misinterpretation. It is the Brotherhood’s own articulation of what it intended to do.
Where Infiltration Happens
The Brotherhood’s strategy has always focused on influence-building inside institutions that shape public life. This is not espionage in the Hollywood sense. It is slow, methodical, bureaucratic penetration, and over decades, it has proven highly effective.
Brotherhood-linked actors have gained leadership roles in major Mosques and Islamic centers across North America. Their messaging emphasizes political grievances and identity narratives rather than traditional Islamic scholarship. This has marginalized apolitical Muslim voices and created an artificial sense that Islamist discourse represents mainstream Muslim thought.
Groups such as the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and their partnerships with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) show how Islamist ideology blends with progressive activism. These groups frame anti-Israel and often anti-Jewish rhetoric as “social justice,” normalizing hostility that would be unacceptable in any other context. Do note that MSA chapters are not monolithic, and many are simply religious or cultural student groups with no ideological agenda. However, historically and organizationally, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in North America emerged in the 1960s as a project of the Muslim Brotherhood’s U.S.-based networks, and the intellectual DNA of that founding still influences certain chapters today. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is primarily a progressive activist organization rooted in anti-colonial, anti-Zionist, and intersectional social-justice frameworks. While not Islamist, SJP’s ideology overlaps strategically with Islamist worldviews regarding Israel, victimhood narratives, and resistance rhetoric. Importantly, both these groupings receive foreign funding from adversarial states, and have been a part of such influence operations upon the student populations for decades.
Even more striking is the irony in their methods: the same campus organizations that decry Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslims, frequently deploy bullying, harassment, and intimidation tactics against Jewish students, precisely the behavior they claim to oppose. Protesting Jewish businesses, intimidation at Synagogues … just imagine if Halal businesses or Mosques were targeted by non-Muslims because of what ISIS was doing. The hypocrisy is staggering, but more importantly, it reveals that their activism is not rooted in universal justice but in ideological dominance.
Civil society and advocacy networks
Organizations that present themselves as civil-rights defenders often act as gatekeepers, claiming to speak for all Muslims while advancing a narrow Islamist political program. When public officials, media outlets, and academic institutions accept these groups as the default representatives of Muslim communities, the Brotherhood’s framing becomes entrenched.
This is one of the least-discussed but most impactful areas. When school boards, health agencies, DEI offices, libraries, public-sector unions, or government training programs seek “Muslim voices,” they rarely vet them.
The result is that individuals aligned with Islamist ideology are frequently invited to:
Develop curriculum materials
Advise on diversity frameworks
Train government staff on Islamophobia
Shape community outreach strategies
Influence mental-health, youth services, and social-policy initiatives
This provides extraordinary influence over how Islam, identity, discrimination, and public policy are framed, with virtually no accountability and no recognition of the diversity within Muslim communities.
Financial and charitable networks
Investigations in Europe and Canada have shown how charitable organizations, community foundations, and religious institutions can be used to funnel money, promote ideological messaging, and link disparate Brotherhood-affiliated actors under a shared narrative.
Political influence and narrative shaping
The Brotherhood has mastered the art of narrative warfare. By branding opponents as bigots, racists, or Islamophobes, it has successfully insulated itself from scrutiny while simultaneously elevating its ideological positions within political and media spaces.
Why Homeland Security Should Care
To be clear: the Muslim Brotherhood’s North American networks are not generally engaged in terrorism. That is not how they operate here. Their impact lies in something more subtle but ultimately more corrosive: shaping the ideological and social environments in which radicalization becomes more likely. It is aided and abetted by foreign adversaries and the impact is not as subtle when posters of Khamenei and Hezbollah and Hamas flags shows up at protests.
When Islamist organizations dominate Muslim representation, they crowd out moderate, apolitical, or traditionally scholarly voices. This leaves young Muslims more vulnerable to identity-driven narratives and cuts off community pathways that could reduce radicalization risk.
It also harms counterterrorism efforts by damaging trust. Law enforcement depends on community relationships built over decades. When those relationships are hijacked by ideologues who claim to speak for all Muslims, the entire ecosystem suffers. One of the ways in which this has been done is by telling Muslim organizations not to cooperate with the FBI in terrorism investigations and ensuring that any community that does so – outside of their supervision – is quickly blacklisted. Given that terrorism in the name of Islam is the greatest contributing factor to fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims, you would think these organizations would be at the forefront of rooting it out. Alas, they are instead fixated of stymying such counterterrorism efforts instead by labeling them Islamophobic.
Lessons From Abroad
Europe learned the hard way that ignoring Brotherhood networks allowed them to shape Muslim communities for generations. To this day, these groups attack counterterrorism programs and efforts, with the ultimate goal of bringing down anything that might expose their activities and their supporters. Canada’s approach, relying on tax audits and financial investigations, revealed how deep and interconnected those networks were. Australia has also seen significant infiltration by MB groups and in every single one of these examples, the tactics are the exact same. This is why you see how aligned all these groups are, in their messaging and their public presentation. That’s called working from a playbook.
The U.S. does not need to repeat these mistakes, but it does need to understand the scale and method of the challenge. Responding to the Brotherhood’s documented strategy does not require panic, broad-brush accusations, or wholesale suspicion of Muslim communities. This is just counter productive. We need to be smart, and that requires precision.
Vetting: Government agencies, school boards, health systems, and public institutions must verify who they invite as “community representatives.”
Diversifying partners: Engage Muslims who reject Islamist ideology and who represent the full spectrum of American Muslim life.
Transparency: Require disclosure of foreign funding for religious and advocacy institutions.
Religious literacy: Teach officials the difference between Islam (religion) and Islamism (political ideology).
Focused threat assessment: Target behaviors and networks, not broad identities.
Understanding What We’re Up Against
The Muslim Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” strategy is not a myth. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a self-declared blueprint for influence operations across the West. We weaken national security and public trust when we pretend otherwise.
Neither must this ever be taken as being about vilifying Muslims. I am an observant Muslim myself, and I used to be a part of these networks both as a former extremist and then as an undercover operative. I was driven by the Islamic obligation to keep the public safe from any harm, especially from those who claim my religion. This is about protecting the public from a political movement that has taken advantage of the freedoms in the West and used the guise of religion to consolidate power, spread antisemitism and Islamophobia, and distort the faith for its own purposes. It is about ensuring that public institutions are not manipulated by actors who do not represent the communities they claim to speak for.
Most importantly, it is about clarity. In homeland security, clarity is not hostility, it is preparedness. Everyone should know by know the quote by Sun Tzu about knowing yourself and your adversary. Thus, understanding the Brotherhood’s strategy is not optional. It is an imperative.
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