The West doesn't understand the Muslim Brotherhood

For decades, the Muslim Brotherhood has loomed large in the Western imagination, often described as the ideological mother ship of global Islamism. A movement in declineThe Muslim Brotherhood was once a formidable force, especially in the mid-20th century, when Egyptian exiles and migrants spread its ideas far beyond Cairo. The blind spot in Western capitalsParadoxically, in the West, the Brotherhood still commands an outsize focus. To treat every Islamist group as “the Muslim Brotherhood” is both inaccurate and dangerous. The Muslim Brotherhood today is less a centralized empire than a faded logo — yet one whose ideas continue to animate Islamist activism in new forms.