Political Islam in America

Political Islam — sometimes called Islamism — is a political ideology that uses Islamic theology as its justification. Its central claim is that Islamic law, or sharia, should govern political life, that Western democratic institutions are fundamentally incompatible with Islamic civilization, and that Muslims living in non-Muslim countries have a religious obligation to work toward replacing those institutions from within.

The goals of Islamists in America, as articulated by the movement's own leadership, are not modest. They describe a long-term project of cultural and political transformation — not primarily through violence, but through the deliberate, patient use of America's own institutions: its universities, its media, its courts, and its elections.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher who believed that Islam's decline in the modern world could only be reversed through the creation of an Islamic state. The Brotherhood spread across the Middle East and eventually the world, spawning or inspiring Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS), and dozens of other extremist movements.

The Brotherhood arrived in America in the 1960s through the Muslim Students Association, founded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The MSA became the organizational nursery for what would become a dense network of American Islamist institutions: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and ultimately the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), founded in 1994.

These organizations are not secret. They operate openly, hold press conferences, lobby Congress, and run political action committees. What is less widely understood is their ideological lineage and the explicit strategy their founders articulated for operating inside American democracy.

In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood's American leadership produced an internal strategic memorandum. It was not intended to be public, but was entered into evidence in 2008 during the Holy Land Foundation trial — the largest terrorist financing prosecution in American history — where it became part of the public record.

The memorandum described the Brotherhood's strategy in America as "civilization jihad." The goal, in the document's own words, was "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house." The method was not terrorism. It was the deliberate infiltration and subversion of American institutions "by their own hands and the hands of the believers."

The document listed the organizations through which this strategy would be pursued: ISNA, ICNA, MAS, MSA, NAIT, and others. Several of these organizations were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial. In 2014, the United Arab Emirates — a Muslim-majority American ally with deep knowledge of the Brotherhood — designated CAIR, ISNA, and MAS as terrorist organizations.

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This is not an abstract threat. These organizations have lobbyists, political action committees, university endowments, media operations, and endorsed candidates. In 2026, their combined electoral apparatus deployed more money than at any point in American history.

The civilization jihad strategy did not begin with elections. It began with culture.

Over the past two decades, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Brotherhood-linked foundations have poured billions of dollars into American universities. They have endowed chairs, funded research centers, and shaped curricula. The Qatar Foundation alone has given hundreds of millions to American institutions including Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, and the Ivy League. This investment is not philanthropic. It is strategic: a generational effort to shape how Americans — and particularly America's future elites — think about Islam, the West, and political violence.

That investment paid dividends in 2023 and 2024, when campus protest movements erupted across American universities following the October 7 massacre in Israel. Students radicalized on Qatar-funded campuses celebrated Hamas, chanted "Death to America," and hounded their Jewish classmates to the point where large majorities reported hiding their religious identity. Social media amplified their message to millions.

Now that radicalization is moving downstream into electoral politics.

Political Islam does not operate alone in American politics. It has found a coalition partner in the Marxist left — a movement that shares none of its theology but much of its political agenda: opposition to American power, support for open borders, and a view of Western civilization as something to be dismantled rather than defended.

This red-green alliance — red for Marxism, green for Islam — is a documented convergence of interests that has been building for decades. The Democratic Socialists of America and Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations have marched together, endorsed the same candidates, signed the same legislation, and drawn from the same donor pools. They share a common enemy: the American-led international order and the domestic institutions — police, immigration enforcement, the military — that sustain it.

The result is a coalition more powerful than either movement alone. Islamist money funds socialist candidates. Socialist organizing infrastructure turns out Muslim voters. Each uses their own language: the left calls it revolution and the Islamists call it jihad.

What happened in New York on June 23, 2026 was a proof of concept.

The Islamist electoral network has been building for years — funding candidates, training operatives, and developing donor infrastructure through Emgage PAC and other CAIR-linked committees. In previous cycles it was a marginal force. In 2026, with American Priorities PAC deploying $3.1 million in its first five months of existence, it became a major player in Democratic primary politics capable of determining outcomes in competitive races.

This network is electing candidates who have volunteered with al-Qaeda front organizations, expressed solidarity with a Manhattan synagogue bomber, co-founded a group that declared its goal to be "the total eradication of Western civilization," and joked publicly about wiping themselves with the American flag. These same candidates will sit on committees, draft legislation, and cast votes on American foreign policy, immigration, and national security.

The 1991 Brotherhood memorandum described a strategy of destroying Western civilization from within using its own institutions. What this tracker documents is that strategy — patient, legal, and increasingly well-funded — operating through American electoral democracy exactly as its architects intended.

Support for violent Islamist terrorism is a plurality view within a growing demographic. And the candidates this network is electing reflect it.