In a move marking the culmination of a long trajectory of suspicion, infiltration, and political pressure, Jordanian authorities officially banned the Muslim Brotherhood in April 2025, declaring it an illegal organization. Yet this decision cannot be read merely as a security measure; it must be understood as part of a broader historical context in which the Brotherhood, since its inception, has served as one of the foremost instruments for dismantling the Middle East’s social and political fabric — with the active support and orchestration of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain’s MI6 and the American CIA.
The emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s was no historical coincidence. Amid Britain’s colonial retreat, MI6 identified the nascent Islamist movement as a strategic counterforce to the region’s rising nationalist and leftist currents, and as an ideological and religious bulwark against the spread of communism. The Brotherhood’s expansion into Jordan in 1945 occurred within this framework — initially presented as a charitable and proselytizing society, but covertly carrying a political project closely aligned with Western intelligence agendas from its earliest days.
During the reign of King Hussein, the Jordanian state strategically deployed the Brotherhood as a balancing force against leftist movements and armed Palestinian factions. With implicit support from Western intelligence services, the Brotherhood was permitted to embed itself within trade unions, educational institutions, and charitable initiatives — laying the foundations for an expansive socio-economic network that later underpinned its political presence.
Over time, the Brotherhood’s influence extended well beyond mosques and religious schools. The organization established extensive financial and educational institutions, many discreetly backed by Western actors, allowing it to construct a parallel economy that funded its political and missionary activities. These financial empires were not insulated from MI6 and CIA agendas but rather served as mechanisms to ensure the persistence of political Islam’s influence in Arab societies.
The 1990s saw a new chapter unfold with the advent of democratic reforms following Jordan’s 1989 uprising. The Brotherhood founded the Islamic Action Front Party, once again enjoying tacit state support under the assumption that political Islam could be co-opted within a controlled framework. However, this maneuver coincided with a Western strategy aimed at cultivating ‘moderate Islamists’ as potential alternatives to collapsing nationalist regimes.
The outbreak of the Arab Spring was a watershed moment. The Brotherhood swiftly positioned itself at the forefront of popular mobilizations, buoyed by logistical and intelligence backing from Western powers that wagered on its capacity to manage transitional periods aligned with their interests. Yet the organization’s fragmentation in Jordan by 2015, and the subsequent emergence of a licensed alternative entity, exposed ongoing Western attempts to reconfigure the Brotherhood into a more pliable and controllable force.
The Brotherhood’s populist rhetoric resurfaced in the wake of Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023, reigniting tensions with the Jordanian state. Confrontations with security forces escalated, accompanied by leaked reports of inflammatory rhetoric and transgressive field activities. These developments compelled the authorities to re-evaluate the group’s position within the national security landscape.
In April 2025, Jordanian intelligence services foiled a major terrorist plot orchestrated by a Brotherhood-affiliated cell involving drones, missiles, and explosives. Investigations revealed that several perpetrators had received overseas training in countries historically known for harbouring political Islamist movements — reinforcing the government’s conviction that the Brotherhood had irreversibly crossed the line from political activism into violent subversion, bolstered by foreign sponsorship.
Perhaps the Brotherhood’s most insidious role, driven by externally funded ideological apparatuses, lay in undermining the concept of the nation-state in favour of an ambiguous Islamic universalism. This supranational identity sought to supersede national allegiances, creating alternative loyalties that facilitated societal penetration and institutional destabilization — ultimately serving broader schemes to fragment the region.
Western support for the Brotherhood extended beyond financial and logistical aid to include substantial media backing. Global and regional outlets provided platforms to sanitize the organization’s image, portraying it as the face of ‘moderate Islam,’ particularly after 2011. This carefully curated narrative was anything but innocuous; it formed part of a long-term strategy to discredit national alternatives and constrict state options before their own populations.
Though belated, Jordan’s ban effectively restores a measure of national political coherence. The Brotherhood was never a purely indigenous project but rather a functional instrument of modern colonialism, repurposed through successive iterations of geopolitical opportunism. Its dissolution signals an Arab reckoning with a disfigured past — and the first steps toward liberating the political arena from externally manipulated ideological movements.
Since its earliest ties with MI6 in London, through its clandestine funding channels, to its final exposure in violent conspiracies, the Muslim Brotherhood has exemplified a quintessentially instrumentalised project. Its prohibition today is not merely a Jordanian decree but a pivotal moment in the region’s collective consciousness — an unequivocal declaration that the era of intelligence-sponsored religious movements is drawing to a close.
Dr. Hatem Sadek – Professor at Helwan University