Not radicalism but rivalry: Why autocrats fear the Brotherhood

The Washington Post has published many fine pieces over the years. This piece, published on March 25, 2026, entitled “The Mideast pushed out the Muslim Brotherhood. Here’s where it landed” (https://wapo.st/4v2kHhF), is not one of them. It is instead an illustration of a broader and troubling pattern in which influential Western platforms reproduce, often uncritically, the anxieties of autocracy in the language of security analysis.

The author, Tareq Alotaiba, presented to readers as a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, is no disinterested scholar. His work does not merely coincide with the strategic posture of the United Arab Emirates. It reproduces it.

The UAE is a dynastic state where dissent is treated as a security threat and opposition is extinguished rather than engaged. From such a vantage point, it is unsurprising that movements which speak the language of elections, accountability, and political pluralism are recast as dangers to be contained. What is presented here as analysis is, in reality, advocacy on behalf of a system that fears not extremism, but participation.

This narrative is not confined to a single op-ed. It has been echoed, with varying degrees of intensity, by political figures in the United States who have sought to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Efforts led by Ted Cruz, supported by Mario Díaz-Balart, and entertained during the administration of Donald Trump reflect a broader tendency to collapse political opposition into ideological threat. These positions have often aligned, whether consciously or not, with the strategic interests of Middle Eastern regimes that seek to suppress movements advocating electoral legitimacy and political accountability. What is presented as counterterrorism frequently functions as a language through which autocratic allies export their domestic anxieties into Western policy debates.

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The article’s central conceit is familiar. It presents the Muslim Brotherhood as a metastasizing ideological threat, quietly advancing under the cover of Western tolerance. What is omitted is more telling than what is asserted. The modern concern about the Brotherhood in much of the Arab world has remarkably little to do with Islam as such. It has everything to do with politics. Across decades, the Brotherhood has evolved into a largely nonviolent movement that speaks the language of elections, constitutionalism, and political participation. It challenges political power. It asks, inconveniently, why societies suffused with wealth remain governed by hereditary elites who neither consult their citizens nor tolerate opposition. 

This is the true offense. Not radicalism, but rivalry.

The Brotherhood is not a monolithic entity. Across Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and beyond, Brotherhood-affiliated actors have participated in elections, formed political parties, and accepted, at times grudgingly, the discipline of pluralism.

One need not romanticize the Brotherhood to recognize this trajectory. It is uneven, contested, and on occasions contradictory. But it is not the caricature of clandestine subversion offered by regimes that fear ballots more than bombs.

There is an irony here that the article does not acknowledge. Europe has long accommodated political movements animated by religion. Christian democratic parties have governed or shaped policy in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden. Beyond Europe, Turkey maintains a formally secular constitutional order while, for much of the past two decades, being governed by a party with a distinct religious orientation. These systems demonstrate that religiously informed political movements can operate within democratic frameworks without being cast as inherently subversive. Yet when Muslims articulate politics through an Islamic idiom, suspicion is summoned with remarkable speed. What is tolerated in one register is pathologized in another.

The article’s invocation of security threats rests heavily on association and insinuation. The intellectual genealogy from Sayyid Qutb to modern jihadist movements is invoked as if it were dispositive of every organization that traces some lineage to early twentieth century Islamic reformism. This is an argument by inheritance. It collapses distinctions that are politically and morally significant. Applied consistently, such reasoning would render much of modern political history illegitimate.

READ: Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood rejects US decision labelling it a “terrorist” group

More revealing still is what the author proposes as a model. The methods of states such as the UAE are held up as instructive. This is governance by prohibition. Political organization is criminalized. Dissent is securitized. Stability is purchased at the price of silence. It is an approach that produces the appearance of order while suppressing the conditions under which genuine legitimacy might emerge.

One might ask a simple question.

If the Muslim Brotherhood is so devoid of support, why must it be banned, exiled, and erased from public life? If it is so marginal, why does it so alarm regimes that claim overwhelming popular backing? The answer is not theological. It is political. The Brotherhood, in its various national incarnations, offers an alternative narrative. It suggests that Muslim societies need not choose between autocracy and chaos. That is a proposition no dynasty welcomes.

The binary presented in the article is false. It is not a choice between the Muslim Brotherhood and disorder, or between Islamism and extremism. It is a choice between systems that permit political participation and those that monopolize it. Western readers are invited to fear a movement that participates in elections while being reassured by dynastic regimes that do not permit them.

Readers should have been afforded the courtesy of context. The political location of the author is not incidental. It is central. An argument advanced from within an authoritarian system that prohibits dissent must be read with appropriate caution when it warns others about the dangers of too much freedom.

There is, finally, a question. If Gulf monarchies and their advocates are genuinely concerned about the appeal of movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a straightforward remedy. Offer your citizens what you deny them. Elections that matter. Institutions that constrain power. Rights that are not contingent on loyalty. Fear of the ballot is rarely a sign of confidence.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.