Three guides, no direction: Inside the Muslim Brotherhood’s terminal split

July 3 came and went, marking thirteen years to the day since Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first freely elected civilian president, was removed from office by an army coup. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood—with which Morsi was affiliated—turned 98, just two years shy of its centennial in 2028.

Between these two dates—the day of the coup and the threshold of the centenary—sits the historical arc, from rise to unraveling, of the most consequential organization in modern political Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood is no longer the same unitary, centralized group founded by Hassan Al-Banna in 1928. It has scattered, becoming an idea in pieces, a smattering of networks strung out across exiles. 

As the centenary nears, the real question isn’t whether or not the Brotherhood remains: it’s what remains of it, and what foundations it still stands on.

A worn-out body with three heads

On June 20, 2026, the anniversary of Morsi’s death, Mahmoud Hussein—one of two men claiming the title of the Brotherhood’s acting supreme guide—put out a statement titled “Our vision: one group, one leadership”. In it, he said “Closing ranks and unifying around foundational principles, is an urgent necessity that cannot be postponed or ignored.” Differences of view, he insisted, “can be a source of strength rather than division, if managed through consultation and institutional process.”

The timing of his message was no accident. Morsi’s short presidency clearly marked both the Brotherhood’s peak and the start of its collapse. The anniversary of his death condensed thirteen years into one symbol, a dream of power reduced to a fight over a title, inside a body that’s already coming apart.

If Hussein’s call for unity sounds noble at face value, it hides a confession underneath: the Brotherhood lacks unity and single leadership, and has for some time. The man demanding “one leadership” is himself a party to the split—a claimant speaking to a rival front that disputes the very post he’s claiming.

Go looking for the “center” of the Muslim Brotherhood and you will find yourself lost. What you’ll find instead are three fronts, all fighting over the legacy of Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie—in prison since 2013, under sentences of death and life. His successor as acting guide, Mahmoud Ezzat, was arrested in Cairo in August 2020. Ezzat’s own successor, Ibrahim Munir, ran the group out of London until he died in November 2022.

What followed 2013 was no temporary setback. It was a transformation from a centralized, hierarchical organization with money, decision-making power, and a support base into a body scattered across local networks, with no one left to hold it together.

Yet the split didn’t come out of nowhere. Researcher Khalil Al-Anani, writing for the Arab Center Washington DC, traces the public break to October 2021, when Munir froze the membership of six senior leaders, Secretary-General Mahmoud Hussein among them, and referred them for investigation. The frozen six answered by declaring Munir removed. Munir called their decision void.

From there, the group divided into two fronts. One in London, under Munir and then his successor Salah Abdel-Haq; the other in Istanbul, under Hussein and his allies. What followed, in Al-Anani’s terms, has moved well past personal grievance into a fight over who runs the organization.

Each side claims legitimacy, and the base is torn between loyalties it can’t reconcile

If Istanbul took the money, the media, the daily machinery, then London kept the international network and the relationships with Western governments, constructed slowly over the five decades Munir resided there.

Then a third front emerged: the General Office of the Muslim Brotherhood, a body formed inside Egypt in 2014 to run internal affairs built around cadres loyal to Mohamed Kamal—a Guidance Bureau member and former head of the group’s Supreme Administrative Committee.

That committee was born from disputes over the Guidance Bureau’s authority, after the historic leadership was jailed. Ezzat later dissolved it. Kamal’s faction—accused by Egyptian authorities of directing violence in 2015—broke away instead of falling in line. The Ministry of Interior then announced it had killed him, along with another senior figure, during a raid.

From that break came the General Office, and from the General Office came the Maydan Organization—which claims to be working toward regime change and presents itself as an alternative to the other two branches.

Al-Banna’s ordeal was easy by comparison

Each side claims legitimacy, and the base is torn between loyalties it can’t reconcile. This is a split the Brotherhood has never faced before.

Of course, there have been ruptures in the past—some of Al-Banna’s own followers even split from him while he was alive. Yet those splits produced new organizations. Nobody fought over the title, or questioned the leader’s legitimacy.

This time is different: the fight is over the title of “supreme guide” itself. Two main fronts, London and Istanbul, and a third which some inside the group recognize branching off from there—each one claiming to be the real thing, each one casting the others out.

The fight over the title of “guide” has become a fight over a position, not a direction

Making matters worse is that the Brotherhood, an organization that built its whole identity on secrecy and projecting unity no matter what, has never been this exposed, with public accusations of financial and administrative corruption tossed around social media. This reached its peak in May 2019, before London and Istanbul even split, when an audio recording attributed to Amir Bassam, a member of the group’s Shura Council, began circulating.

In it, he accuses Hussein and Mahmoud Al-Ibiary (of Abdel-Haq’s camp) of siphoning off the group’s funds—bank accounts, properties, luxury cars, all registered to leaders abroad. Members inside the organization demanded an investigation into where the donations went.

The accusation carried weight not just because of how it was amplified by social media, but because it came from the inside; a Shura Council member, not an outside enemy. The thousands of followers who had handed their sons over to prisons and exile watched their leaders abroad fight over money, property, cars. Their grievances curdled, as the leadership divided the spoils while the base paid the bill.

All three factions call this moment an existential “ordeal.” Yet still they fight over who is leading the Brotherhood through it. The old logic—that repression tightens the ranks and feeds solidarity—has inverted since 2013. It doesn’t bind anymore. It breaks.

An organization adrift

Read Mahmoud Hussein’s statement again. His call for unity isn’t the point—that repeats every year, like clockwork. The real content is what it reveals: a horizon that’s shrunk down to closing ranks, rebuilding trust, tightening “institutionalism.” No vision for the country. No political exit strategy. No plan for what comes after the ordeal.

Even the gesture toward “restoring the reformist role” gets pawned off for later, after the internal house is in order, rather than an imminently actionable program. The fight over the title of “guide” has become a fight over a position, not a direction: who gets to be the old man propped atop an exhausted body? The more pressing question—where is the organization going?—remains unanswered.

Hussein has repeated “one group, one leadership” for years, at every opportunity. That he reaches for it now, on the anniversary of Morsi’s death, what the phrase actually is: a weapon in a fight for control, not a reform project. The “unity” calls for is unity under him. The “single leadership” is his, unchallenged, leadership.

If Hussein’s call for unity is a move in the fight, London hasn’t sat still either. Since 2024, Abdel-Haq’s camp has shifted its language toward reconciliation with the Egyptian state—an initiative that would trade the release of thousands of detainees, and the overturning of their sentences, for the group withdrawing from political “competition” for at least ten years. He has even put out statements renouncing violence outright, calling bloodshed a crime.

Hunted across prison and exile

The group’s leadership had fractured and its members remains hunted. It started with the clearing of the Rabaa and Nahda sit-ins in August 2013: at least 800 dead, possibly more than a thousand, according to Human Rights Watch, which called it one of the largest unlawful killings of protesters in a single day in modern history. Then, in December 2013, Egypt officially designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Arrests followed. Assets were seized. Affiliated associations and companies were shut down.

Egyptian authorities don’t publish numbers for political detainees. Human Rights Watch publicly demanded a count in 2023 and got nothing. Rights groups and opposition figures put the number in the tens of thousands, and continue to document deaths in custody, mostly attributed to medical neglect and poor detention conditions.

It doesn’t stop at the prison gate. In March 2024, an Egyptian court upheld death sentences against Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie and a string of senior leaders, in trials international rights groups say fell short of any fair standard.

The starkest symbol of all this is Morsi himself, dying in court, in the defendant’s cage, during his own trial in June 2019. From palace to cell to courtroom death in six years, start to finish. For many, that single image encapsulated the whole political project’s fate.

But the ordeal that saw thousands of members jailed and exiled sits within a movement of millions, structured hierarchically down to the “family” units at the village and neighborhood level.

So where is everyone else? Tens of thousands, at least, who were never arrested, never left. Where are the millions of followers, the voting bloc, the crowds that used to show up at polling stations and rallies?

They’re the silent mass the real question hinges upon. And the most likely answer is that central leadership’s grip on them has mostly dissolved. Repression tore apart the machinery that used to carry instructions down the chain, collect dues, coordinate action—and a lot of the base shifted into pure self-preservation. Turning inward. Acting locally, with no center to answer to.

Most of them have stopped caring who holds the title of “supreme guide.” From where they stand, it is a distant squabble between men in exile, nothing to do with their actual lives.

The walls close in

The Brotherhood’s rise was never just an Egyptian story, and neither is its fall. From its founding through the end of the Cold War, it never lacked for hosts—regional rivalries and Cold War alignments gave it room to flourish, even as parts of the West saw the organization as a useful buffer against both communism and Arab nationalism.

What’s changed since 2013 is that this room has shrunk to almost nothing. The capitals that sheltered the group during the Arab Spring years have realigned their priorities—some even turning from host to hunter. Turkey, the most important refuge for the group’s media and cadres, began reining in its platforms in 2021, telling them to soften their line on Cairo, laying groundwork for a normalization that eventually reached the highest level.

It didn’t stop with the media. Ankara deported twelve Brotherhood members to Egypt in March 2019. In 2025, it detained leaders who had sought refuge there, amid reports it planned to hand them over—a clear enough signal of how far the reconciliation had gone, even at the expense of the same people Turkey once sheltered.

Qatar, the group’s longtime financial backer, has also repositioned itself, in step with the Gulf’s broader reconciliation with Cairo. In September 2014, under Saudi, Emirati, and Egyptian pressure, Doha gave seven senior leaders a month to leave the country.

The group has found itself unwelcome even where it once found shelter. Jordan dissolved the Brotherhood by court order and seized its headquarters in 2025. Tunisia’s Ennahda is under pressure from President Kais Saied. This decline is happening in parallel, across borders — less a crisis in one branch than the retreat of an entire era of organized political Islam.

Even the image of a safe Western haven no longer holds. 

France took the lead here. In May 2025, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau presented the Defense Council with an official report—“The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France”— warning of “infiltration” as a slow, deliberate strategy targeting institutions, schools, municipalities. By his count, roughly 280 associations and 21 schools were tied to the movement. President Macron followed with new financial and administrative measures, including freezing funding and widening the scope of administrative dissolution to cover religious endowment funds.

The leadership’s base in London is under threat now too. Britain put the Brotherhood under close review in late 2025, ahead of a possible ban under terrorism law, as pressure for that designation kept building. Meanwhile, Sweden opened its own official investigation, led by Education and Integration Minister Simona Mohamsson, into “Islamist infiltration” centered on the Brotherhood, which included a committee assessing how far political Islam has reached into public institutions, local councils, and publicly funded associations.

In November 2025, the US also designated the group a terrorist organization, adding a new layer of pressure. The logic behind that decision resembles the kind of security case built backward from its conclusion. It lines up conveniently with several Arab governments already using the Brotherhood case to tighten their grip on public life.

But the evidence doesn’t support labeling the group’s broader mass as terrorists—the individual cases that might justify it mostly trace back to the Kamal faction, which was never the mainstream. Neither of the two larger wings has been tied to violence, together or apart.

Criticizing the Brotherhood’s political and strategic failures is fair game, but a terrorism designation is something else entirely. Lumping it in with Hamas and armed jihadist groups erases real differences in how these movements think and organize—and it ignores that Hamas, under most international standards, is a national liberation movement resisting occupation, not a terrorist organization.

The regional retreat does more than dry up resources and havens—it guts the group’s own story about itself as a movement that was supposed to transcend borders, and turns its internal disputes into a war over what’s left. That’s the real substance of the London-Istanbul rift: a shrinking pot, and two sides fighting over what remains.

Change from within, or not at all

In 2014, lecturer and expert in political Islam Ashraf El-Sherif, writing for Carnegie, laid out five scenarios for where the Brotherhood could be headed: total eradication, a triumphant comeback, reconciliation with the state along Mubarak-era lines, a split into moderate and hardline wings, or renewal through deep internal reckoning.

Thirteen years on, no extreme change has taken effect, pointing toward a long middle path, consistent with El-Sherif’s own diagnosis of a group “quick to adapt tactically, slower to reshape strategy, and slowest of all when it comes to intellectual and cultural reckoning.”

The Brotherhood dissolving might be the last thing the Egyptian state actually wants

The question of violence sits at the center of all this. After a decade of repression, security studies scholar Omar Ashour has asked whether some of the group’s younger members might drift toward political violence as a reaction to a closed horizon, to the failure of the peaceful, electoral path.

The official line still renounces violence. But the leadership’s grip on the angrier portions of the youth base is slipping. Change here isn’t an intellectual luxury. Now that the vacuum left by the leadership crisis could just as easily be filled with extremism as with moderation, change from within has become an existential necessity.

El-Sherif also pushes back on the common framing that this is a fight between a hardline old guard and a moderate younger generation. Positions cut across age lines. Some of the most radical voices in the group are young, not old.

The real disagreement over reckoning isn’t ideological but about timing and tactics. The likeliest fault line isn’t doves versus hawks—it’s between those willing to accept limited integration on the state’s terms, and those who see that as surrender, a betrayal of the organization’s legitimacy in front of its own base.

Still, declaring political Islam dead is no more than a theoretical exercise. History shows that banning the group or crushing it by force has never actually ended it—not after Al-Banna’s own assassination, not under Nasser, when it was outlawed and repeatedly crushed but came back every time. What decides the idea’s fate isn’t the weight of the blows it takes. It’s two other things: whether credible political alternatives show up to fill the space, and whether the group itself is willing to change from within.

There’s a more radical idea circulating too, one researchers inside and around the Brotherhood’s own world—Essam Talima among them—have taken seriously: dissolving the organizational structure. Not the idea or the values, but the structure. Declaring an end to political activity in the old form, and letting members build new organizations under new names, with updated programs, whenever the next democratic opening comes.

This wouldn’t be surrender. It would be an admission that something born in the 1920s has run out of road—that holding onto the name and the structure has become a weight on the idea rather than a means to carry it forward. There’s precedent: organizations from the wider Brotherhood family have loosened their ties to the center or dropped the name outright—Ennahda in Tunisia, and similar repositioning in Morocco and Iraq, splitting the religious wing from the political one. Even Hamas, in its 2017 charter, declared its organizational break from the Brotherhood, to protect its own movement and its people’s rights.

And here’s the paradox Talima puts his finger on: the Brotherhood dissolving itself might be the last thing the Egyptian state actually wants. Part of the state’s own legitimacy is built on the binary of state versus Brotherhood—the group as permanent bogeyman, justifying every security measure and closing down public life. Take away the organized enemy, and that story loses its foundation.

Things will probably stay exactly as they are

My own read: the group stays where it is for the foreseeable future—divided, fractured across three narratives that don’t add up to one story. Abdel-Haq’s camp in London signals toward reconciliation and settlement. Hussein’s camp in Istanbul answers by insisting it alone is legitimate, with nothing beyond that claim. Above both, an even louder, more escalatory voice from the General Office and the Maydan platform calls itself revolutionary, claiming it can go head-to-head with the regime politically.

None of this changes on its own. Two things could shift it, and neither is in the Brotherhood’s hands: the Egyptian state deciding to give up the “Brotherhood bogeyman” it partly depends on, or the regional picture shifting enough to bring the Brotherhood back into play as a card in someone else’s calculations.

Short of one of those, this is what remains: an organization with no one holding it together, a body still being hunted, an idea stuck between a past that isn’t coming back and a future that hasn’t taken shape yet.