“Wherever they settle, they ruin.” This phrase by Tunisian President Kais Saied was meant to describe the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood on politics and society, yet it is not limited to Tunisia. It summarizes an entire trajectory of Islamist movements that ended in division and failure. The Syrian experience is perhaps the clearest example of this path, as the Muslim Brotherhood there reveals a structural incapacity that cannot be fixed through documents or slogans.
An Organization Living on Ruins
Since their expulsion from Syria in the 1980s, the Brotherhood has failed to rebuild a genuine social base inside the country. Their early exclusion exposed the fragility of a project built on loyalty to the organization before the homeland, and on the idea of religious “empowerment” before citizenship and the public good.
Despite repeated attempts to return to the scene after 2011, they remained unable to regain trust or build meaningful public presence. In Syrian consciousness, their image became linked to turmoil and confrontation rather than stability or reconstruction, and to organizational interests rather than national ones. Over time, the group turned into a symbolic entity surviving on the memory of the past, drawing legitimacy more from a rhetoric of victimhood than from tangible political action.
Their crisis, therefore, is not temporary but rooted in their intellectual and organizational structure. Within the group, central obedience and discipline define the relationship between members and leadership, while the spirit of participation and accountability is absent. Consequently, they cannot evolve into a genuinely democratic actor, for their ideological foundations are incompatible with the basic principles of a modern state or an open society.
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The “Coexistence” Document: Empty Words Without Substance
The Brotherhood’s recent release of the “Coexistence” document was nothing more than another attempt to mask an old failure. The document uses polished language about democracy, pluralism, and peaceful power rotation, yet at its core it merely repeats the same discourse in new terms. It is nothing more than a process of “repackaging” old content.
The organizational mindset remains rooted in leadership centralization and the monopoly of truth, with a persistent belief that the religious project is the only legitimate framework for the state. Thus, the document represents a linguistic, not intellectual shift, an attempt at justification rather than genuine reform. It is an implicit admission of a profound intellectual crisis: the group’s inability to renew itself or to move from rhetoric to statecraft.
Isolation and Loss of Support
Historically, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was part of a broad regional network stretching from Cairo to Ankara. This provided political and financial cover and granted them space for movement and influence. However, this support gradually evaporated with the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the decline of Islamist experiments in Tunisia and Sudan, and Turkey’s shift toward pragmatic policies that prioritize national interests over ideological commitments.
With this lifeline cut, the group’s true weakness became apparent: its strength had always come from external support rather than internal roots. Its presence in the Syrian scene was merely a reflection of temporary regional backing. Now, the Brotherhood finds itself in total isolation, no allies, no social base, no public capable of embracing their outdated discourse. In the absence of all that, they turned to language instead of action, to documents instead of practice, striving for symbolic survival in a landscape that has completely surpassed them.
The Structural Crisis
The Muslim Brotherhood’s problem lies not only in their discourse but in their very structure. Their ideology is built on the logic of the “group,” not the “nation,” on vertical loyalty rather than horizontal participation. Therefore, they cannot be democratic, even if they raise democratic slogans, because their internal mechanisms are founded on obedience, not critique; secrecy, not transparency.
Every attempt at openness collides with the doctrinal wall that views disagreement as a threat, revision as deviation, and politics as a tool for empowerment rather than good governance. Thus, any reformist discourse becomes nothing more than linguistic cover for a deeper crisis: the inability to evolve from a closed missionary entity into a responsible political institution.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s failure in Syria is not circumstantial, nor merely a result of repression. It is structural, stemming from the very nature of their intellectual and organizational formation. It is a crisis of the idea itself before it is a crisis of power.
Parallel Experiences: From Tunisia to Egypt and Libya
More than a decade after the “Arab Spring,” the map of political Islam in the region has receded, marking a new phase of historical decline. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the outcome has been the same despite differing contexts: failure in governance and an inability to transition from protest movement to state institution.
In Tunisia, the Ennahda Movement rose after the revolution as a symbol of freedom but quickly became a party entangled in identity and division. Obsessed with power and alliances instead of solving economic and security issues, it lost public trust. President Kais Saied’s 2021 decisions closed an entire chapter of political Islam’s experience.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule from 2012 to 2013 was the clearest test. They entered power with the mindset of a secret organization, not a state, failing to build inclusive institutions and alienating civil forces. The experiment collapsed on July 3rd, not because of conspiracy but because of their fundamental inability to understand the logic of the modern state.
In Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood sought empowerment through chaos and factional alliances but failed to build legitimacy or preserve unity. As external support waned, their influence diminished until they became marginal, with no real political weight.
All these experiences converge on a single truth: the Muslim Brotherhood failed because they never learned how to govern. Their religious mission never became a national project, and their organization never evolved into a state.
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Beyond the Idea
After all these experiments, one can say that the movement that once declared “Islam is the solution” no longer has any solution to offer. It has turned from a moral promise into a hollow bureaucracy, from a religious project into a stagnant rhetoric reproducing itself.
In Syria, as elsewhere, the Muslim Brotherhood has lost its ability to influence because it failed to transition from “preaching” to “state,” from “organization” to “nation.”
Today, they stand as a model of a movement overtaken by time, devoid of tools for change, courage for self-critique, or awareness that what has ended is not merely their political project but the historical logic upon which their entire idea was built.
President Kais Saied’s statement encapsulates the whole experience: wherever the Muslim Brotherhood goes, division and distrust follow. Wherever they raise the banner of reform, the result is failure and disintegration. In the Syrian case, they left behind no project, no thought, only a political and cultural void that marks the end of an entire cycle of Islamist activism.
They did not only ruin cities; they ruined the idea itself, the idea of religion as a means of liberation, when they turned it into a tool of power rather than of consciousness.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of +963 association.
