September 30, 2025

Hosted by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID)

MPAC and CSID Teams

Executive Summary

The inaugural session of the World Policy Forum, convened by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), examined the proposal to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. The event brought together policymakers, scholars, and over two hundred virtual participants for an in-depth discussion of the political, legal, and societal implications of such a move, both abroad and within the United States.

Professor Nathan Brown challenged the premise of the proposed designation, explaining that the “Muslim Brotherhood” was not a single organization but a loose network of independent national movements with shared ideas but distinct leadership, structure, and behavior. Most had long operated within legal, civic, or political frameworks, with only a few historical instances of violence. Brown cautioned that legislative efforts to classify the Brotherhood wholesale as a terrorist entity would replace evidence-based legal standards with political expediency, risking overreach that could entangle legitimate Muslim organizations in the United States.

Dr. Shadi Hamid placed the debate in a broader regional and moral context, arguing that the failure of Arab democratization was closely linked to the suppression of religious parties that had chosen ballots over bullets. Excluding Islamist movements from politics, he said, betrayed the essence of democracy, which he defined as “the right to make the wrong choice.” Hamid warned that designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization would be an anti-democratic act, punishing peaceful participation and legitimizing guilt by association against Muslim Americans. He also highlighted how anti-Islamist rhetoric in U.S. politics often overlapped with anti-Muslim animus and unconditional pro-Israel positions.

Professor Peter Mandaville expanded on the historical and policy dimensions, distinguishing the Brotherhood’s post-1970s mainstream evolution from the extremist offshoots that later became jihadist networks. He emphasized that the movement’s renunciation of violence was both deliberate and enduring. Drawing on his experience at the U.S. State Department, Mandaville noted that U.S. engagement with the Brotherhood was once routine and strategic, curtailed only under Egyptian pressure. He warned that a sweeping designation today would cripple U.S. diplomacy in key regions, damage relations with mainstream Muslim organizations domestically, and undermine conservative political efforts to build bridges with Muslim constituencies in America.

The session concluded with a shared understanding that the Muslim Brotherhood debate is ultimately a debate about democracy itself, about whether the United States will uphold its own constitutional principles when faced with ideological diversity. The Forum reaffirmed MPAC and CSID’s commitment to fostering informed, fact-based policy discussions that defend both democratic values abroad and the civil rights of American Muslims at home.

Welcoming Remarks

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Haris Tarin opened the session by presenting the Forum as a new platform for informed dialogue on how developments in the Muslim world affect U.S. policy and the American Muslim community. He emphasized MPAC’s mission to foster balanced, evidence-based conversations that influence decision-making in Washington. Tarin highlighted the urgent relevance of the discussion, given congressional efforts to label the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, and warned of the domestic repercussions such an action could have for American Muslims.


Dr. Radwan Masmoudi, speaking for CSID and MPAC, described the World Policy Forum as a long-term initiative to confront key global issues where democracy, religion, and foreign policy intersect. He introduced the distinguished speakers: Professors Nathan Brown, Shadi Hamid, and Peter Mandaville, and outlined the event’s goal of advancing serious, solutions-oriented debate among scholars, policymakers, and citizens.

Prof. Nathan J. Brown

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Professor Nathan Brown argued that debates about “the Muslim Brotherhood” often rest on a false premise: there is no single, unitary organization that could be captured by a blanket label. While Brotherhood activists shared a vocabulary of mission and moral reform, what he described as a common model aimed at shaping individuals, families, and society along Islamic principles, the phenomenon was best understood as a network of distinct national organizations, each adapted to its local political context. 

Early on, membership was explicitly non-portable; an Egyptian Brother in Kuwait did not become a Kuwaiti Brother. That institutional pluralism explained why branches behaved so differently: during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, for example, Jordan’s Brotherhood refused official contact with American officials while Iraq’s Islamic Party (with Brotherhood roots) cooperated with the occupation. Even cross-border interaction had been sporadic; when Brown convened activists from multiple countries during his Carnegie years, they admitted they met “whenever you call us together,” underscoring loose awareness rather than centralized coordination.

This decentralized reality matters for how claims of terrorism are assessed. By standard scholarly and legal definitions, such as violence against civilians for political ends, some Brotherhood actors had met that threshold at specific moments, most notably the Egyptian Brotherhood’s assassinations in the 1940s. But that history was distant, and in more recent decades the picture was overwhelmingly case-by-case. Many branches had been lawful political or civic actors, such as the Jordanian movement (long a legal entity, though its status later grew complex) and Kuwait’s Islamic currents focused on charitable and social work. Brown treated Hamas as the principal hard case: it clearly fit terrorism definitions, yet its lineage was both derivative of and reactive to the Brotherhood. Founded in the late 1980s as an “Islamic Resistance Movement,” Hamas positioned itself against older Palestinian Brothers it viewed as insufficiently active, thereby drawing on Brotherhood social models while diverging in strategy and organizational identity. The implication was that Hamas’s trajectory could not be casually mapped back onto the vast majority of Brotherhood-inspired organizations.

Against this backdrop, Brown turned to the U.S. designation debate. Over roughly three decades, American law had built a rigorous, interagency administrative process for naming Foreign Terrorist Organizations, slow, evidence-heavy, and inevitably colored by politics at the margins, but nonetheless grounded in due process and cross-agency review. Proposals to bypass that machinery via legislation were, in his view, fundamentally different: they sought a political outcome that the existing legal process had not delivered. 

He called this unusual, noting a few past statutory maneuvers for some Palestinian groups, but argued it was especially problematic here because the Brotherhood was not a single corporate body that could be cleanly designated.

Brown warned that the draft legislative texts adopted a picture of the Brotherhood that resembled an organized-crime conspiracy, an underground hub with myriad legal “fronts.” Codifying that imagined structure would collapse dozens of independent movements across varied legal and political settings into one fabricated global entity. By making “association” elastic, such laws would expose anything “vaguely connected” to sweeping liability, creating profound over breadth. The foreseeable consequences were not limited to foreign arenas.

In the United States, Muslim institutions and individuals could be entangled on the basis of ideological affinity, historical ties, or normal community networks, despite having no involvement in violence. Some of those spillovers might be unintended, but many were likely instrumental to the policy’s purpose.

The throughline of Brown’s analysis was prudential and empirical: he urged that the Brotherhood be treated as it actually existed, a fragmented field of related but autonomous actors, and that behavior be evaluated branch by branch. Where violence had occurred, existing law already provided tools. Where movements operated lawfully, designation by legislative fiat would have substituted politics for evidence, blurred crucial distinctions, and risked chilling legitimate civic life at home and abroad.



Dr. Shadi Hamid

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Dr. Shadi Hamid began his remarks by situating the debate within the larger crisis of democracy in the Middle East. Looking across the region, he observed that the few states that had developed any semblance of democratic life, Iraq, Lebanon, and to a lesser degree Libya and Yemen, shared a grim pattern: the only groups that had survived politically were those able to combine electoral participation with coercive force. In each case, Islamist movements or parties had maintained or gained power because they also possessed armed wings. Hezbollah in Lebanon was the clearest example; in Iraq, nearly every major Islamist party, Sunni or Shia, had at some point taken up arms; and even in Syria, figures once associated with militant movements now operated as political leaders. The practical, if disheartening, lesson was that in post-conflict and deeply fragmented societies, political survival depended on control of force. Peaceful participation alone rarely led to success.

Hamid contrasted those cases with the broader experience of the Arab Spring. The Islamist parties that had chosen ballots over bullets, those that entered elections and accepted democratic rules, were precisely the ones that lost out. Their defeats, often aided or tolerated by Western powers, reinforced the cynical perception that democracy in the Arab world was a false promise. The United States, he argued, bore real responsibility for this outcome. While American officials spoke of supporting democracy, they quickly turned against it when Islamist parties such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Tunisia’s Ennahdha won free elections. That hypocrisy, he suggested, reflected a deeper discomfort among American liberals with religion in public life. Many secular observers simply could not accept that devout societies might legitimately choose religiously inspired parties.

For Hamid, this tension highlighted the need to defend democratic process over personal preference. Americans did not have to like or agree with the Muslim Brotherhood’s platform, but they had to defend its right to participate. Democracy, he said, was “the right to make the wrong choice.” Just as Americans must tolerate the electoral success of parties they dislike at home, including those they see as dangerous, they must respect the same principle abroad. To outlaw or exclude Islamist parties because of their religious identity was to betray the democratic idea itself. Proposals to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization were therefore not merely mistaken policy; they were fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-American, signaling that participation through peaceful politics would never be accepted from religious actors.

Hamid reviewed the Brotherhood’s own evolution to illustrate why such blanket condemnation was unjustified. In its early decades, particularly the 1960s and 1970s, the movement had struggled with concepts like pluralism and secular competition. Yet by the 1980s and 1990s many of its branches had consciously moved toward political participation and accepted democratic rules. They did not become liberal, but they became democratic. He stressed the importance of distinguishing between liberalism and democracy: people had the right to be illiberal democrats. Tunisia’s Ennahda was one example of a movement that had gone further in separating its religious mission from political life, even attempting a localized form of liberalization. Across the region, however, such moderation had rarely been rewarded.

Turning to U.S. politics, Hamid exposed the irony that it was conservative Christians, who themselves advocated for religion’s public role, who most vocally sought to criminalize Islamist movements abroad. Elements of the Republican Party, he noted, were more “Christianist” than most Islamists were Islamist, yet they refused to recognize the parallel. The reasons were partly ideological and partly geopolitical: entrenched anti-Muslim sentiment, fears of Islam as a civilizational rival, and above all the Republican Party’s alignment with Israel. Because the Brotherhood was unambiguously anti-Israel, politicians such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio viewed opposition to it as an extension of their pro-Israel agenda. In this way, foreign-policy postures had fused with domestic culture wars. Efforts to criminalize “anti-Israel” activism at home mirrored the drive to brand Islamist movements as terrorists abroad.

Hamid warned that this convergence had direct implications for American Muslims. During the Obama years, conspiracy theories about a supposed “Muslim Brotherhood network” in Washington had proliferated, claiming that senior officials, or even Obama himself, were secret Islamists. The danger, he said, was that designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization would legitimize those fantasies and enable guilt by association. Because the Brotherhood was not a single organization but an idea, the label could be extended to virtually any Muslim individual or institution in the United States. People could be targeted for their intellectual influences, friendships, or religious commitments, even when they had no organizational ties. Such a move would criminalize thought and faith under the guise of national security.

In closing, Hamid urged his audience to resist these attempts vigorously. Beyond their effects on Muslims abroad, they posed a fundamental threat to American democracy itself. To ban or stigmatize a movement for its religious character was to abandon pluralism and to erode the freedoms of belief and association on which the United States was built. Defending the political rights of those one disagrees with, he concluded, was not only the essence of democracy, it was a test of whether Americans truly believed in their own principles.



Prof. Peter Mandaville

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Professor Peter Mandaville began by clarifying a central misunderstanding: the Muslim Brotherhood was not a single, unified global organization but part of a much broader and more diffuse phenomenon he called movement Islam. The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt, certainly existed as a structured entity with a clear history and mission. However, the many movements that emerged across the Arab world and South Asia were not branches of a centralized body. Rather, they shared similar ideas and frameworks for activism, while remaining independent and rooted in their own political and social contexts. Efforts to coordinate these movements internationally were minimal and largely ineffective. Representatives who met under the so-called Tanzim al-Alami, the “international organization” of the Brotherhood, often spent more time debating their national priorities than forging common strategies. Despite this, advocates for the Brotherhood’s designation as a terrorist group continued to portray it as a single, tightly coordinated network, a claim that Mandaville said bore little resemblance to reality.

He then turned to the issue of terrorism. Mandaville acknowledged that Brotherhood members in the 1940s had engaged in violent acts, including assassinations, but emphasized that this occurred in a specific historical period. The critical turning point came in the 1970s, when the Egyptian state under Anwar Sadat invited the Brotherhood back into public life on the condition that it renounce violence and abstain from direct political participation. The mainstream Brotherhood leadership accepted this, marking a clear departure from militancy. The small factions that rejected the deal splintered off and eventually contributed to the emergence of extremist networks such as al-Qaeda. These groups, Mandaville explained, represented a rebellion against the Brotherhood rather than its continuation. Over subsequent decades, the Brotherhood became deeply embedded in civil society, building schools, charities, and social service networks, and its affiliates across the region embraced electoral politics and nonviolence.

Mandaville next addressed how the Brotherhood’s ideas intersected with the development of Islam in the United States. In the 1960s, Muslim students from the Middle East and South Asia helped found organizations such as the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Some of these early figures were influenced by movement Islam thought, but very few were actual Brotherhood members. Joining the Brotherhood required a long and demanding process, far removed from casual affiliation. As the American Muslim population grew more diverse, encompassing various ethnic, sectarian, and cultural backgrounds, Muslim institutions evolved beyond those early ideological currents. Over time, many of the more ideologically inclined activists diverged from mainstream Muslim organizations, which developed into broad-based institutions representing the community’s civic and social life. Unfortunately, these mainstream groups were now at risk of being swept up in the overbroad definitions used by advocates of a Brotherhood designation.

Drawing from his experience at the U.S. State Department, Mandaville recounted that until 1995, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo had routinely engaged with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was considered standard diplomatic practice, given the group’s influence in Egyptian society. That engagement ended only after the Mubarak government requested it, not because of any U.S. policy judgment about the Brotherhood itself. The decision, he said, reflected the nature of U.S.–Egypt relations more than an assessment of the movement. By the early 2000s, however, the U.S. policy of non-engagement had become increasingly disconnected from the regional reality, as Brotherhood-affiliated movements had become mainstream participants in democratic politics across the Middle East.

Mandaville concluded by outlining three major dangers of designating “the Muslim Brotherhood” as a terrorist organization. First, such a policy would harm U.S. diplomacy in key regions, preventing engagement with influential political actors in countries such as Syria, Libya, Morocco, and Kuwait, places where Brotherhood-linked movements were legal, significant, and often central to future transitions. Second, it would have grave domestic repercussions. Many American Muslim institutions that anchor civic life could be unfairly implicated under such a sweeping definition, damaging community relations and trust. Third, he argued that the move would backfire politically against the Republican Party itself. Historically, Muslim Americans, well-educated, entrepreneurial, and socially conservative, leaned Republican. But after 9/11, widespread stigmatization pushed them toward the Democratic Party. Recently, as culture-war issues like abortion and gender identity came to dominate politics, segments of the political right had found renewed common ground with Muslim voters. A broad designation that cast suspicion on mainstream Muslim organizations, Mandaville warned, would destroy those emerging alliances.

In sum, he argued that the proposed designation of the Muslim Brotherhood was not only intellectually flawed and historically inaccurate, but also strategically self-defeating, undermining both U.S. foreign policy abroad and pluralistic politics at home.

Questions & Answers session:

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Opening question 1 (future of democracy and risks of radicalization):

The moderator asked whether branding the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and thus excluding it from politics, would foreclose democratic prospects in the Arab world and push especially younger adherents toward radicalization, and whether democratization was possible without large Islamist movements.

Hamid said U.S. support for Middle East democracy had repeatedly receded once Islamists won at the ballot box, but brittle regimes cannot suppress openings forever. Despite extreme repression, including the Rabaa massacre, Egypt’s Brotherhood had shown striking restraint, which he attributed to an internal ethos and educational culture that discouraged violence; the worry, he added, was less a sudden turn to militancy than a deepening cynicism that democracy is a false promise.

Brown argued the electoral path for Islamists had already been crushed region-wide, so a new designation would change little on the ground while spreading a legal “language” that legitimizes repression across borders. He saw grounds for longer-term hope in social and cultural dynamism, especially among youth, that might eventually reenter politics in unpredictable forms, even if formal democratic openings looked distant now.

Mandaville maintained the present push was chiefly about U.S. domestic politics, not the region; movement-Islam infrastructures in places like Egypt had already been dismantled. He urged keeping the conversation focused on how a designation would be wielded at home against American Muslim institutions.

Question #2 (realpolitik frame):

One participant urged approaching the Brotherhood as a continually evolving phenomenon and democratization as the product of hard societal conflict, not courtroom-style claims about rights, arguing that counter-revolution in the region often wore anti-Islamist slogans while fundamentally opposing democracy.

Question #3 (U.S. strategy against a politically driven push):

One participant asked how Muslim-American institutions should respond when congressional proposals invert burdens of proof, stack “guilt by association,” and the executive increasingly uses rapid designations, how to mount a strategy when constitutional arguments may not persuade proponents.

Mandaville cautioned that historical nuance would not move advocates; past interagency reviews failed on the merits because there is no evidentiary basis for a coherent “global Brotherhood.” He urged organizations to speak frankly about early movement-Islam influences while foregrounding their distinct, American evolution when briefing Congress, and to engage Republican actors, including MAGA-adjacent figures, with pragmatic arguments about why a sweeping designation harms their own interests.

Speaking personally, Hamid said the most practical short-term counter was electoral: Democratic wins would likely stall designation efforts, even as Muslims should avoid becoming a partisan monolith and maintain leverage with both parties.

Brown emphasized a narrative centered on the Americanization of Muslim institutions, communities that built thoroughly U.S.-law-compatible forms of religious life, arguing that whatever the founders’ backgrounds, today’s ecosystem is firmly embedded in American civil society.

Question #4 (how far along; who’s backing it):
Another participant asked how advanced the designation push was and which foreign governments were aligned with U.S. advocates.

Mandaville said the drive predated Trump and was now seeking executive shortcuts; foreign regimes that have long campaigned against Islamists have helped shape the U.S. debate, but the immediate vehicle was domestic politics. The practical response, he repeated, was direct engagement with Republican stakeholders and clear messaging about organizational histories and present-day American identity.

Question #5 (Hamas, liberal skepticism, and public perception):

One participant argued that confronting the designation debate required squarely addressing Hamas’s electoral win in 2006 and the subsequent costs it faced, and asked how liberals could come to see Muslim congregations as part of a normal denominational spectrum, particularly in light of Gaza.

Hamid said Islamist movements were often punished for choosing ballots, and that the 2006 outcome should have been respected. At the same time, he urged unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s October 7 attacks as terrorism against civilians, noting that moral clarity can coexist with scholarly analysis of a group’s history and context.

Mandaville argued Hamas’s violence was best explained by occupation dynamics rather than Brotherhood lineage; he acknowledged a transnational donor ecosystem with movement-Islam ties whose funds can become fungible, but said targeted measures against specific individuals were the right policy tools, not a blanket Brotherhood ban.

Online question #6 (would a blanket designation reshape Islamist strategies at home and in diaspora?):
One online participant asked whether a sweeping U.S. designation would shift the ideological orientation and repertoires of Islamist movements domestically and abroad.

Hamid doubted it would catalyze near-term strategic change; many regimes had already entrenched exclusion. The larger effect, he warned, would be domestic, hardening tools that could be turned against American Muslims and, if later reversed, still tying the hands of U.S. diplomacy when political openings reemerge.

Online question #7 (does Gaza push publics toward religious conservatism that benefits Islamist parties institutionally?):
Another online participant asked whether Arab governments’ weak Gaza response might drive publics toward more conservative alignments and institutional gains for Brotherhood parties.

Hamid saw intense public anger but little immediate institutional translation, given closed political arenas; any medium-term effect would depend on future openings, when maintaining channels to residual Islamist networks could again matter for U.S. policy.

Question #8 (executive orders and “domestic terrorist” labels):
One participant warned of a faster executive route to domestic “movement” designations and asked what individuals and organizations should do if a White House order suddenly labeled a U.S. “Muslim Brotherhood” entity a domestic terrorist group.

Mandaville said communities should prepare for simultaneous legal and civic responses: litigate aggressively, and activate broad coalitions that highlight the Americanization of Muslim institutions. He stressed proactive outreach to allies across states to inoculate against stigma and contest executive maneuvers in courts and public opinion.

Question #9 (GOP engagement and grassroots education):
Another participant described efforts to educate Republican lawmakers about Muslim diversity and urged sustained engagement within the party.

Hamid encouraged such bridge-building while personally favoring increased work within the Democratic Party; he noted some shift among younger Republicans on Gaza, suggesting limited openings that should be encouraged without abandoning political leverage on both sides.

Mandaville agreed there was no long-term “home” in the GOP as currently configured, but endorsed short-term, issue-specific engagement with Republican actors on designation, since the most ardent proponents are not coterminous with the broader right and can be countered with pragmatic arguments.

Closing:




The moderator closed by refocusing on domestic priorities: safeguarding American Muslim institutions and communities so they can thrive civically, politically, and economically. He underscored that the issue’s most immediate stakes were legal and political at home and promised continued monitoring and updates to participants on next steps.

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