Australia’s Family First party has called on the federal government to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and investigate organisations that may be connected to it. The proposal follows an appeal by British historian Andrew Roberts, who told an audience at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney that the Brotherhood and its network of companies, charities, nongovernmental organisations and media outlets should be proscribed. The demand is politically understandable. After the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023, the growth of openly antisemitic agitation and the murder of 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, the old distinction between extremist propaganda and extremist violence has become considerably less reassuring. Ideas do not remain peacefully suspended in the air. They create communities, legitimise enemies and gradually make violence appear permissible, necessary or heroic. But banning the Muslim Brotherhood presents a problem that cannot be solved merely by adding another name to a government list. The Brotherhood is not a single organisation with a headquarters, membership register and unified chain of command. It is simultaneously an Egyptian movement, an ideological tradition, a model of political organisation and an extended family of parties, charities, student groups and religious institutions. Some are formally connected; others have borrowed its language and methods without ever receiving instructions from Cairo. Roberts’s description of it as the world’s largest jihadist organisation captures the scale of its influence but blurs an important distinction. The Brotherhood’s historical achievement was precisely to create an Islamist ecosystem broader than clandestine militancy. It made the transformation of society into the preliminary stage of the conquest of the state. The mosque, school, charity, welfare organisation and student association were not incidental to the political project. They were its infrastructure. This is also why an Australian inquiry confined to organisations carrying the Brotherhood label would be largely theatrical. The more relevant South Asian model is Jamaat-e-Islami, founded in British India in 1941 by Abul A’la Maududi. Jamaat is not a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the two movements emerged independently. Yet they are ideological siblings. Maududi and the Brotherhood’s principal thinkers imagined Islam not simply as a religion but as a comprehensive political order. Both developed disciplined cadres, invested heavily in education and social welfare, and treated participation in democratic institutions as an instrument for the gradual Islamisation of the state. For Arab communities, the reference point was often Hassan al-Banna and the Brotherhood. For Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and other South Asian Muslims, it was more frequently Maududi and Jamaat-e-Islami. The ethnic constituencies and organisational names were different; the political grammar was remarkably similar. Pakistan demonstrates where that grammar can lead when it is absorbed into the machinery of the state. Jamaat-e-Islami has never governed Pakistan nationally and performs modestly in most elections. Its influence, however, cannot be measured in parliamentary seats. Its student wing built a formidable presence on university campuses, while Jamaat’s concepts entered debates over the constitution, education, blasphemy and the definition of citizenship. Pakistan’s military rulers, especially General Zia-ul-Haq, converted much of this ideological programme into state policy. The result was not a Jamaat government but something more durable: a state trained to distinguish between Islamists who could be used and Islamists who had become inconvenient. Groups supporting the army’s objectives in Afghanistan or Kashmir were tolerated, protected or reinvented under new names. Those turning their weapons against the Pakistani state were declared terrorists. The ideology was rarely the problem; disobedience was. That lesson matters for Australia. Islamist influence does not necessarily arrive through an organisation openly announcing itself as the local office of the Muslim Brotherhood. It can travel through literature, clerical networks, campus activism, overseas funding and organisations describing themselves exclusively in the language of welfare, human rights or community representation. None of those activities proves criminal intent. Nor does ideological affinity establish operational control. But refusing to examine the connections because no formal affiliation exists is equally unserious. The Bangladeshi case makes the Australian contradiction sharper. Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami originated in the same movement that opposed the country’s independence in 1971 and collaborated with the Pakistani side during the liberation war. After years of political exclusion, it returned to public life following the fall of Sheikh Hasina and began presenting itself as a respectable movement of welfare, clean government and democratic renewal. Australia did not treat it as beyond the pale. Australian representatives held meetings with Jamaat leaders as part of their engagement with Bangladesh’s political parties. In January 2026, an Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade delegation held a virtual meeting with Jamaat chief Shafiqur Rahman. According to Jamaat’s own account, the discussion covered elections, bilateral trade, economic cooperation and possible Australian assistance for skills-development programmes. Diplomatic contact is not endorsement. Governments routinely speak to influential political forces whose history or ideology they find objectionable. But Canberra cannot credibly announce a campaign against the Brotherhood’s international ecosystem while declining to acknowledge the parallel ecosystem created by Jamaat-e-Islami. In Bangladesh, Jamaat is treated as a legitimate political interlocutor. In Australia, organisations influenced by the same intellectual tradition may appear simply as community or religious associations. The inconsistency lies in policing Arabic terminology while granting South Asian Islamism the benefit of cultural translation.

It would be equally dishonest to connect the Bondi massacre directly to the Muslim Brotherhood without evidence. Australian police said the two attackers appeared to have acted without membership of an organised militant cell; Islamic State material was found, but no operational Brotherhood connection was established. Using every Islamist attack to justify action against whichever organisation is politically under discussion may produce headlines, but it weakens the case for serious investigation. The correct question is not whether the Brotherhood ordered a particular atrocity. It is whether organisations operating in Australia promote a political doctrine that divides citizens into believers and enemies, legitimises collective hostility towards Jews or other minorities, excuses violence abroad, or uses charitable and educational structures to build an anti-democratic movement while remaining fractionally below the criminal threshold. Australia’s new prohibited-hate-group mechanism offers a more precise instrument than a sweeping declaration. It requires ASIO to assess conduct and the risk of violence before ministers can act. Hizb ut-Tahrir became the first Islamist organisation listed under the new powers; the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network followed. The same standards should apply to any Brotherhood- or Jamaat-influenced organisation: evidence, financing, leadership, publications, overseas relationships and actual behaviour. Family First is right that the network deserves investigation. It is wrong if it imagines that the investigation can stop with the words “Muslim Brotherhood”. In Australia’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, the more revealing name may be Jamaat-e-Islami—or no recognisable name at all. The most successful Islamist organisations learned long ago that flags, membership cards and declarations of allegiance attract unwanted attention. Institutions, respectable intermediaries and carefully moderated language travel much more easily. If Australia wants to confront the problem rather than merely ban its best-known Arabic brand, it will have to investigate the architecture of political Islam, not just the sign above the door.