The Muslim Brotherhood began with a schoolteacher | WHO IS THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD Part 1

History Onion · 2:55

In January 2026 the United States designated branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist groups. Part 1 goes back to where it began: a 21-year-old schoolteacher in Ismailia, the Suez Canal company town, in March 1928 — the schools and clinics that built a mass movement, the secret armed wing it built beside them, and the killings of 1948 that ended with the founder shot dead in a Cairo street. Context & numbers (as of 7 Oct 2026 — this story is still moving): • What the US actually designated: on 13 Jan 2026, the Lebanese branch as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), and the Egyptian and Jordanian branches as SDGTs for material support to Hamas; the Sudanese branch followed as FTO and SDGT on 16 Mar 2026. On 23 Jul 2026 the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the UK-based secretary-general of the Brotherhood's General Secretariat. The organisation as a whole has not been designated by the US federal government (the state of Florida added it to a state list on 29 Sept 2026). The White House's May 2026 counterterrorism strategy calls it "the root of all modern Islamist terrorism." • The founding scene — six Canal Company workers coming to al-Banna at night — is known only from al-Banna's own memoirs, serialised from 1947. The historian Brynjar Lia argues they are partly self-presentation. That is why the narration says "as he later told it." • Membership by 1948: half a million is the most common estimate (members or sympathisers); the highest estimates exceed a million. • The Special Apparatus, the Brotherhood's secret armed wing, was formed between 1938 and 1940. In 1948 its members killed Judge Ahmed al-Khazindar (22 March); a bombing campaign struck Cairo's Jewish quarter and Jewish-owned shops from June to November, killing around seventy people — a 1950 trial charged Brotherhood members, and historians accept the Apparatus carried out at least some of the attacks; police seized its files in a jeep in November; PM al-Nuqrashi dissolved the Brotherhood on 8 Dec and was assassinated on 28 Dec. The ban was lifted in 1951 by a new government. • Whether al-Banna controlled the Apparatus is the argument historians still have. Richard Mitchell and Lia describe a leader outpaced by his own secret wing; critics including Gudrun Krämer's biography and Hazem Kandil stress that he founded it and wrote of "the industry of death." His published condemnation of Nuqrashi's killers: "They are neither Brothers nor Muslims."