Under Erdoğan’s Wing: The Brotherhood Reborn from Syria to Bangladesh

The slow, determined resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideological offspring is quietly shaping political and social landscapes across the Middle East, North Africa, and even parts of South Asia. This revival isn’t unfolding with grand slogans or overt declarations, but through subtle recalibrations of influence, strategic patronage, and a shrewd exploitation of geopolitical vacuums. At the center of this reawakening stands Turkey, whose own internal transformation under Erdoğan has rendered it the primary benefactor and ideological incubator of political Islam in the Brotherhood mold. Yet this revival is not confined to Turkey or its immediate neighborhood. From the battle-scarred towns of Syria to the simmering political spaces of Libya and Tunisia, the Brotherhood’s presence is reasserting itself. And in places like Bangladesh, far from the Arab heartlands, its legacy persists in altered but recognisable form. What’s more, European powers—France foremost among them—have long enabled this ideological current, knowingly or not, out of a mix of colonial calculation, short-term strategic utility, and selective blindness.

In Turkey, the Brotherhood has not only found shelter but purpose. Since the 2013 military overthrow of Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, Istanbul has served as the hub of exiled Brotherhood leadership. Media outlets, NGOs, think tanks, and political activists orbit around a Turkish state that offers more than just protection—it offers a living example of how Islamist ideology can blend with state power and democratic formality. Under Turkish patronage, Brotherhood-style influence is also reappearing in places like northern Syria, where governance models promoted in areas like Idlib and Azaz—though not formally branded as Brotherhood—reflect its core DNA: social conservatism, anti-secularism, and Islam-based governance.

Syria’s civil war, long past its most visible phase, has left behind patchworks of authority and ideology. Among these, the Brotherhood’s Syrian branch has found a tenuous foothold in Turkish-controlled zones. Turkish support for militias and governance councils that share ideological alignment with the Brotherhood—like Faylaq al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham—has created small but influential laboratories of Brotherhood-style authority in exile. The Hama massacre in 1982 may have driven the movement underground for decades, but Syria today serves again as a staging ground for Brotherhood ideas, even if adapted to new political realities.

In Libya, the struggle between east and west has allowed Brotherhood-linked actors to survive and even thrive. The Justice and Construction Party—formed after Gaddafi’s fall—has benefitted from Turkey’s unwavering support for the Tripoli-based government. Brotherhood-affiliated figures have embedded themselves in political institutions, buoyed by Ankara’s military and diplomatic backing. In a country searching for identity and governance amid war and oil wealth, political Islam offers not just a faith-based framework, but an organised and networked approach to power.

Tunisia’s Ennahda once stood as the Brotherhood’s most successful democratic experiment. Yet the 2021 power grab by President Kais Saied reversed its fortunes, marginalising the party and sidelining Islamists from public life. Even so, Ennahda’s diaspora—dispersed across Europe and the Middle East—continues to draw ideological sustenance from Turkey. That lifeline has helped preserve a sense of continuity and ideological coherence, even as the movement finds itself cornered at home.

Across the Sahel and West Africa, Brotherhood-style networks are also gaining quiet ground, especially in states undergoing political transition or crisis. Through education, charity, and social work, these groups build loyalty among populations exhausted by corruption and neglect. Turkey’s growing influence in these regions—via mosques, religious outreach through the Diyanet, and state-linked foundations like Maarif—effectively displaces more moderate or secular religious alternatives. The result is a socio-religious landscape increasingly shaped by conservative and activist Islam, with Brotherhood undertones.

Then there is Bangladesh—a nation with its own deep and complicated relationship with political Islam. While the formal political wing most associated with the Brotherhood tradition, Jamaat-e-Islami, has been legally sidelined and its leaders prosecuted for war crimes, its ideological roots have not been fully uprooted. Islamist revivalism is not a thing of the past in Bangladesh. Through charities, education networks, and informal political influence, Brotherhood-style Islam continues to shape parts of Bangladeshi society, particularly in rural and semi-urban areas. The government may project a secularist posture internationally, but domestic accommodation with religious forces remains a tactical reality. And while Turkey may not wield the same degree of influence in Dhaka as it does in Tripoli or Tunis, its model of Islamo-nationalist governance and its moral support for Islamist actors abroad inspires many within South Asia’s religious right.

Amid all this, France’s posture is nothing short of a paradox. The country presents itself as the frontline defender of secularism and Western liberalism, particularly in the wake of jihadi violence within its own borders. Yet France’s foreign policy continues to wade into contradiction. During its colonial rule in North Africa, France often favoured Islamists over nationalists, using religion as a bulwark against Marxist or pan-Arab resistance. That legacy didn’t end with decolonisation. In Algeria, Tunisia, and even Lebanon, France’s selective engagement and patronage often allowed Brotherhood-aligned or sympathetic actors to flourish when they served French interests. Today, in places like Libya and the Sahel, Paris is still willing to tolerate Brotherhood-linked political actors if they offer stability or act as a counterweight to rivals such as Russia, the UAE, or even China.

So while Emmanuel Macron lectures about laïcité and “separatism” at home, his diplomats abroad continue to make pragmatic accommodations. France does not sponsor the Brotherhood outright, but its selective blindness and historical precedent of enabling Islamists to check more immediate threats—be they nationalist, leftist, or even Salafi-jihadi—means it plays a quiet, complicit role.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s resurgence today is not defined by mass protests or charismatic leaders. It is instead a revival of quiet influence, hybrid alliances, and ideological permeation—often through proxies and under foreign flags. Turkey leads this charge not as a lone actor, but as the architect of a soft-power empire rooted in political Islam. And while Western powers wring their hands over extremism, they continue to indulge the forces that lay the foundations for its political normalization. The contradiction is not just strategic—it is historical. And it remains unresolved.