Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood: Frenemies?

Saudi Arabia’s decision to sever ties with Qatar in response to the latter’s claimed support of terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood as well as its relationship with Iran has raised a crucial question. Namely, is there any commonality between Iran and the Brotherhood that would make both enemies of Saudi Arabia? Alternatively, is the linking of the two in the recent diplomatic upheaval only a matter of coincidence? Further complicating this issue is the recent rise in sectarianism in which the Brotherhood has sided with its Sunni coreligionists to condemn Shia Iran.

Iran and the Brotherhood are sometimes referred to as “the best of enemies,” sometimes as perennial friends. Especially interesting is the avalanche of Saudi-affiliated propaganda that demonize the Brotherhood over its lax and unorthodox attitude toward Shia and its hidden organizational connections with Iran. Though these claimed logistical links between the two deserve critical scrutiny, there are traces of truth in the Brotherhood’s ideological affinity with Iran.

Further, against the conventional wisdom that dictates that everything in the Middle East be seen through a sectarian lens, placing these ideological commonalities in a wider historical context yields novel patterns of political alliances. These emerging contours could shift the existing sectarian battlegrounds to entirely new and unimagined frontiers.

The issue of the Muslim Brotherhood’s advocacy of Islamic unity, thus, its relatively softer position toward sectarian divides inside the Islamic world, goes back to the early modern era to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Al-Afghani was a Shi’a clergy who became a rising star in the Sunni reformist movement in the late 19th century in Egypt, Ottoman Empire, and Afghanistan. Among his intellectual pan-Islamist heirs were a revolutionary Iranian cleric of Shia persuasion and a Sunni Egyptian intellectual who met in 1954 in Cairo to discuss the malaise of the Muslim world and to focus attention on Islamic unity as a way to emancipate the ummah.