Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 by the scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna. It began as a religious and social movement that preached, taught the illiterate and set up hospitals, then entered politics against British colonial rule; its stated aim is a state ruled by Sharia under a caliphate. Members assassinated the prime minister Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha in 1948, and Sayyid Qutb promoted takfirism in Milestones (1964); the group abandoned violence in the 1970s. Its candidate Mohamed Morsi became Egypt's first democratically elected president in 2012, but was overthrown in 2013, after which the group was banned in Egypt.