New Insights into the Clandestine Muslim Brotherhood Work in the United States

By Douglas Farah

Thanks to my colleague Jeff Breinholt's new post we have new insights into the long-standing, clandestine nature of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. A 1959 court case, a public record that had remained unexamined for decades, reprints the Muslim Brotherhood's constitution, found in a prison locker.

The rare document of the Ikhwan in the United States, sitting in musty but public court records since 1959, explains much about the Brotherhood and much about some of the enigmas that, to my mind, still surround the Northern Virginia Safa case and other issues.

It is important, but often forgotten, that the Brotherhood arrived here decades ago, contemporaneously with the efforts to spread Islam in Western Europe. While their activities have been successfully traced to the early 1960s, with the formation of numerous Islamist groups here at that time, this document pushes the launch date of the efforts back by several years, especially as an organized political/religious movement embedded here.

The document bears a striking resemblance to the Marxist literature of the day, defining the Brotherhood as the "vigorous, intellectual vanguard" of the global struggle to unite Islam.

It also bears a striking resemblance to the documents founding al Qaeda, with calls for the unity of Muslims and the specific design for replicating clandestine cells across the country and the world. My full blog is here.

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