The Muslim Brotherhood's phantom caliphate

The past years have been hard for the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, it was removed from government and crushed by the military in 2013. In Tunisia, voters elected a conservative politician in 2019 who has since become an authoritarian ruler and brands Brotherhood members as "traitors" and "agents". Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates designated it a terrorist group in 2014. Across the region, only a handful of supporters and safe havens remain, above all Qatar and Turkey.

Yet even in the relative safety of exile, the Muslim Brotherhood remains weakened and divided. The Turkish government has drastically scaled back its support, and prominent media figures close to the organisation were forced to leave the country in 2022. Islamists who have gained power in the region, such as Syria's transitional government, prefer to keep their distance from the Muslim Brotherhood rather than jeopardise relations with foreign partners.

Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, however, paints a very different picture of the organisation's prospects. In "Caliphate by Design", the French anthropologist's book, which has also been available in German since last year ("Kalifat nach Plan"), the Muslim Brotherhood is not portrayed as an organisation at the end of a lost decade. Instead, she portrays it as being on the verge of achieving its goal, if not in the Islamic world, then in Europe. In France, she argues, global "Brotherism" (Frérisme), a term she coined for the Muslim Brotherhood and its networks, is well on its way to establishing a caliphate within a few decades.

Her ideas would have been a purely French matter had the book not found fertile ground in the German-speaking world. In debates about Islamic organisations, mosque congregations and who gets to speak for Muslim communities, suspicions of "infiltration" are often voiced, while the concept of "legalistic Islamism" has proved remarkably malleable. Bergeaud-Blackler's book lends these suspicions an air of academic legitimacy. It is hardly surprising, then, that she is also being sought out by the German media.

This prompts questions about what evidence Bergeaud-Blackler uses to support her argument, and how it compares with political and social science research on one of the most thoroughly studied Islamic movements of our time.

By way of context: the Muslim Brotherhood represents a relatively moderate, system-oriented current within political Islam. Throughout its history, it has sought power and influence predominantly through peaceful means, as a religious community, a grassroots movement and a political party. Drawing on religious solidarity and a sophisticated organisation built around clandestine "cells", it withstood the Arab dictatorships far better than left-wing and liberal opposition forces, which were co-opted and marginalised one after another.

In 2011, a new era seemed to be dawning: Islamist parties affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood performed strongly in the first relatively free elections after the Arab Spring, and in Cairo and Tunis they entered government. But the Brotherhood overestimated its own popularity. Within a few years, it became clear that large sections of the population, despite their sympathy for religiously motivated political engagement, preferred the familiar authoritarian order to Islamist experiments.

Bergeaud-Blackler ignores research on Islamism

Since then, the movement has been trapped in a dilemma. Religious conservatives with pragmatic inclinations, who want to make a difference politically and socially, are looking for more dynamic and less risky alternatives. Taking the Gulf states as their model, they aspire to good governance, economic growth and an assertive foreign policy, all embedded in stable conservative social norms. Radicals, meanwhile, find in Salafism and jihadism the rebellious attitude and uncompromising utopian positions that the Muslim Brotherhood has always embraced only half-heartedly.

Who, among Islamists and their sympathisers, would want to join or submit to an organisation that presents such an unappealing image of helplessness and failure? Not to mention the many Muslims who have viewed the Brotherhood with suspicion, if not outright hostility, since long before the Arab Spring. Against this backdrop, the thesis of an unstoppable rise of "Brotherism" seems to suggest that the author has spent the past 15 years in deep hibernation.

In fact, Bergeaud-Blackler's analysis is almost entirely detached from the existing body of research on Islamism in the Arab world. She pays no attention to key contributions by French-speaking political scientists and sociologists such as Stéphane Lacroix, Marie Vannetzel, Patrick Haenni and Clément Steuer. Anyone reading "The Caliphate by Design" without prior knowledge of the subject would get the impression that, before this author came along, no one had ever seriously analysed the Muslim Brotherhood's political ideology and strategies. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But let us examine her argument from the beginning.

Bergeaud-Blackler places considerable emphasis on the Brotherhood's strategic approach, and in this respect, at least, she is quite right. Its founder, Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), firmly embedded the idea of thinking in phases and stages in the organisation's ideological framework.

Among his best-known ideas is the doctrine of the "seven stages of action", which progresses from reform of the self through the Islamisation of society and the state to "world leadership" (ustadhiyya). Another is the "three stages of the mission": making the message known, building a cadre organisation and implementing the Islamisation programme.

Later members added a fourth element: the movement's "consolidation of power" (tamkin). From the 1980s onwards, activists in the diaspora developed this thinking further, turning their ideas about a global mission into to-do lists and devising bold visions of the Islamisation of the globe.

Yet, as the Muslim Brotherhood's almost century-long history demonstrates, this optimistic managerial mindset has produced above all an illusion of control. 

It has undoubtedly appealed to generations of young Islamists, giving them the feeling that they are part of a dynamic, successful movement. But the Brotherhood has rarely managed to translate its conceptual models into reality, particularly in the political sphere. The hopes of devout supporters that the Arab Spring would finally usher in the phase of "consolidation of power" were spectacularly dashed against the political realities of Egypt and the wider region.

How plausible is a Muslim Brotherhood rise in Europe?

These experiences have left their mark. Since the 2000s, there has been an ideological softening, if not increasing disillusionment, within the movement. Against this backdrop, Bergeaud-Blackler at times comes across as one of the last true believers when she proclaims the indestructibility of the caliphate project: "The whole of [Brotherism's] energy is devoted to this task across generations, hence its extraordinary strength, resilience and staying power."

In her favour, one could argue that Europe's specific reality may be making possible what failed in the Middle East. Perhaps Western European societies offer the organisation a habitat in which it can flourish: political and civil liberties for a programme of non-violent Islamisation, plus a growing Muslim population that can be instrumentalised. Where else could it still gain a foothold?

But it is precisely on this key issue that Bergeaud-Blackler's study stumbles. Does she outline a plausible scenario of the Muslim Brotherhood's rise in Europe, one that is grounded in evidence from political and social sciences and is open to scholarly scrutiny? Research on extremism asks about the social causes of undemocratic attitudes, the cultural frames that foster them and the size and composition of the sympathetic milieu.

One would therefore expect the author to provide a thorough analysis of France's Muslim population, one that might reveal some uncomfortable findings. How widespread are religious and political attitudes sympathetic to Islamism? What social conditions encourage such trends, and what undermines them? In which spaces and milieus do Islamists entrench themselves, and how many Muslims do they reach as a result? And can the Brotherhood compete at all with other, mostly far more radical actors?

The book falls short of answering such questions. Its core chapters are a long, at times confused enumeration of individuals, associations and movements, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, all of which—the author is certain of this—are pieces of the Muslim Brotherhood's grand Islamisation plan.

In the chapter "Left-wing and right-wing Brotherists", we meet the anti-globalisation left (allegedly infiltrated by Islamists), Islamic feminism (which supposedly wants to make Muslim women believe that the headscarf and personal freedom are compatible), the advocacy group L.E.S. Musulmans ("seemingly moderate"), ultraconservative Salafism, Muslim gangsta rappers (some of whom later turn devout), halal entrepreneurship, Islamic coaching and life advice, and so on.

This list alone shows that "Brotherism" is not an empirical object of research at all but a rhetorical device. The term reflects the author's unease about the spread of Muslim ways of life and expressions of identity in France, and seeks to pin it on a single collective actor. Whether the Muslim Brotherhood is actually behind it is entirely beside the point.

Every visible form of Islamic piety, the author insists, fits her argument, even when those involved do not sympathise with the movement. Every Muslim woman who wears a headscarf is a piece of the puzzle in the caliphate project, whether she supports it or not.

Secularism deserves a better defence

Bergeaud-Blackler's thesis is thus rendered immune to any scrutiny. Whatever you observe—politicised or wholly apolitical piety, radicalism or conspicuous moderation, structures clearly traceable to the Brotherhood or barely connected—can be interpreted as either clear evidence or a smokescreen. No conceivable finding could undermine the narrative of "Brotherism".

This is also precisely where the line is drawn between a scientifically grounded scenario and a conspiracy theory. The persistence of conservative Islamic religiosity in the diaspora and the Islamisation effects that come with it, which other observers by no means deny, appear not as the outcome of social processes involving a multitude of actors with differing aims and interests, but as the unfolding of a preconceived plan by a conspiratorial secret society.

Subversion, infiltration, destruction, deception and manipulation are the methods of choice here. As the anthropologist Margot Dazey has shown, this leads to explanatory frameworks that have, in the social sciences, been regarded as outdated for decades because they stand in the way of empirically robust, open-ended research.

This is all the more unfortunate because Bergeaud-Blackler ultimately purports to defend a political project of Western societies that is not based on pseudoscientific conspiracy theories, but on the philosophy of the Enlightenment: secularism.

Secularism, particularly in its French form of laïcité, is undoubtedly difficult to reconcile with the desire of many conservative Muslims to make their religious identity publicly visible and to shape their social environment according to their own norms in places where they constitute a substantial proportion of the population.

How European societies should deal with this is no trivial question, provided one considers secularism a fundamental constitutive value. And it arises in much the same form in Austria and Germany, as well as in the Netherlands and France.

It calls for reasoned debate and democratic competition, in which majority views carry weight while compromises are sought in a spirit of mutual respect. Those who wish to advocate a consistent form of secularism or laïcité are free to do so. But a clear-eyed view of social realities, underpinned by empirically gathered social science data, is essential to any debate about fundamental values and the search for practical solutions.

The author may even be partly right in her accusation that social scientists tend to lean politically to the left and would rather study racism and mechanisms of exclusion in majority society than problematic developments within migrant communities. Her own approach, however, is even further removed from the ideal of ideologically impartial, open-ended scholarship.

"Brotherism" as presented by Bergeaud-Blackler is a hallucination; the Muslim Brotherhood's global caliphate is a phantom. Neither emerges from a careful examination of the evidence and its considered synthesis into an overall picture. Instead, both derive from a narrative that was fixed from the outset. European secularism deserves better defences than warnings about a phantom caliphate.

Caliphate by Design: Brotherism and its Networks in Europe
Florence Bergeaud-Blackler
Published in French in 2023 and German in 2025 (no English translation)