Lorenzo Vidino - The Closed Circle: Joining and Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood in the West

I first became interested in the Muslim Brotherhood in 2001, shortly after the tragic events of September 11. The ensuing investigation revealed various links between the attacks and a well-known mosque in my hometown of Milan, Italy. It was the same mosque that, in the early 1990s, had been the hub for hundreds of militants from all over the world who had gone to Bosnia to fight in the bloody conflict that had engulfed the Balkan countrytellingly the head of the Arab foreign fighters engaged in the conflict, Anwar Shabaan, was also the imam of the mosque in Milan.

What surprised me by digging into the Milan mosque was that it was financed not by a bunch of stereotypical gun-toting fanatics with bushy beards the media portrays Islamist terrorists to beor at least did back then. Rather, behind it were a few high-profile Middle Eastern businessmen who also presided over a web of companies in various continents, controlled a bank incorporated in the fiscal paradise of the Bahamas, and had spent decades rubbing elbows with the elites of both the East and the West. They were Yussuf Nada, Ahmed Nasreddin, and Ghaleb Himmat, remarkably astute members of the Muslim Brotherhood in their countries of origin who had settled in the West in the previous decades to escape persecution and had played a crucial role in establishing the network of the Brotherhood in Europe and North America.

The U.S. government and the international community, which had long known about the mosque in Milan, acted swiftlyperhaps, actually, too swiftly. In October 2001 Nada, Nasreddin, and Himmat were designated as terrorist supporters and their ample assets frozen. The designations led to criminal investigations in various countries, which ultimately led to the acquittal of the men. As one prosecutor involved in the investigation once told me, to perhaps have a chance at proving what this network was about, we should have locked in one room for at least a year a team of top prosecutors and investigators from the dozen or so countriesmany of them offshore paradiseswhere the men had interests and forced everybody to share information in ways that are rare in international investigations. Maybe that way we would have solved the puzzle.

The Milan case introduced me and, to some degree, many authorities throughout the West to the challenges related to the Muslim Brotherhood. Global jihadism, with its multiple ramifications in the West, was a relatively new and unexplored phenomenon back then. Yet despite its complexities and secrets, it wasand still isfairly linear. Jihadists have, broadly speaking, a Manichean worldview and engage in violence to defeat those whom they openly declare to be their enemies. While back then many were surprisedand to a degree, some still are todaythat jihadist ideology attracted young men who often were well educated and lived comfortable lives in the West, its message and tactics were relatively easy to understand and analyze.

But the Brotherhood, thats different. Every aspect of it is complex, never black or white, never prone to simplistic explanationsstarting with its ambiguous relationship to terrorism, which first drew me to it. The Milan cluster and those connected to it, for example, provided a glimpse into the sophistication and transnationality of the Brotherhoodbanks in the Bahamas, shell companies in Liechtenstein, a poultry factory and a software company in the United States, real estate investments in Africa and the Middle East, high-profile contacts all over the world. While investigators certainly found this complexity frustrating, from a researchers point of view it was fascinating.

Another aspect gripped me with even greater intensity. While the Brotherhood was founded in Egypt and its original ideology focused on reshaping the Muslim-majority societies of the Middle East, it was clear that it had long established a presence in the West. It soon also became evident that it had created organizations that, while not calling themselves Muslim Brotherhood and actually refuting charges of being linked to the movement, were closely linked to the movement and played a crucial role in the dynamics of Western Muslim communities. They controlled a large number of mosques and had become the de facto representatives (some would say gatekeepers) of said communities in the eyes of Western establishments. What were the implications of these developments that, albeit with some differences, had taken place in most Western countries?

Driven by these interests and concerns, I have spent the past nineteen years studying the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. In 2010 I published a book on it, which largely overlapped with my doctoral dissertation on the topic. In it I tried to describe how the Brotherhood arrived in the West (and to dispel the more conspiratorial theories about this passage), how it evolved, how it operates, and what its aims are. I also attempted to explain Western policy-making patterns toward the Western Brothers, highlighting how conflicting interests and overlapping factors have led all Western countries to struggle in finding consistencynot just among them but within each of themin assessing and interacting with the movement.