Inspired by the overthrow of the autocrat Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia in late 2010, Egyptians took to the streets in protest against the Mubarak regime in January 2011. After hesitating briefly, the Muslim Brotherhood’s senior leadership endorsed the movement and called on its members to participate in the demonstrations. The protests soon forced Mubarak to step down as president in February, clearing the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s open participation in Egyptian politics. Brotherhood leaders outlined a cautious political strategy for the group, stating that they would not seek a majority in the legislature or nominate a candidate for president. In May a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, announced his intention to run for president and was subsequently expelled from the organization.

After a court dissolved the National Democratic Party (NDP), Mubarak’s political party, in April 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood was left as Egypt’s only major organized political faction. Later that month the organization founded the Freedom and Justice Party, gaining official status after stating that the party’s policies would be grounded in Islamic principles but that the party, whose members included women and Christians, would be nonconfessional. When parliamentary elections were held between November 2011 and January 2012, no faction could compete with the political organization of the Freedom and Justice Party, which won about 47 percent of seats in the lower house of the Egyptian parliament. The ultraconservative Islamist Nūr Party came in second with around 30 percent of the seats, allowing Islamists to dominate the selection process for the Constituent Assembly, a body tasked with writing a new constitution. Relegated to the margins, secular parties, Christians, and senior Islamic authorities announced that they would boycott participation in the drafting of a new constitution.

Despite already having a commanding lead in the legislature, the Muslim Brotherhood reversed its earlier position on fielding a candidate in the May 2012 presidential election and ran Mohamed Morsi as the Freedom and Justice Party candidate. Facing a polarizing runoff in June against Mubarak’s former prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, Morsi won. The runoff took place just after the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court ruled that the Islamist-led lower house of parliament be dissolved, citing procedural issues that took place during the elections. But the ruling left the Constituent Assembly intact, and a draft constitution, written without secular or Christian input, was put to referendum in December. Voters approved the draft, and it took effect later that month.

With so many Egyptians excluded from the political process, Morsi’s administration faced increasingly vocal opposition in 2013, led by activists who accused the government of inaction regarding Egypt’s weak economy, failing public services, and deteriorating security situation. A massive protest calling for Morsi’s resignation was held on June 30, 2013, the first anniversary of his inauguration. On July 1 the head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, issued an ultimatum declaring that the military would intervene if Morsi was unable to placate the protesters, and on July 3 the military suspended the constitution, removed Morsi from the presidency, and appointed a new transitional administration. Morsi and several other Muslim Brotherhood figures were placed under arrest, and television stations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood were shut down.

Return to suppression

While Morsi’s opponents celebrated, enraged supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood took to the streets to denounce the removal of a democratically elected leader. Its leaders likewise boycotted the transitional political process, citing it as illegitimate. Tensions erupted into violence on July 8, 2013, when Egyptian security forces opened fire on a crowd of Muslim Brotherhood supporters outside a military base in Cairo, killing at least 50 people and wounding hundreds more. Facing continued opposition, Sisi asked Egyptians to take to the streets on July 26 to support a military effort “to confront violence and terrorism.” On July 26 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians heeded his call. An attack from security forces the next day killed nearly 100 protesters rallying in support of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The government implemented a broad crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization. Aside from continued arrests of its leaders and members, which had begun with Morsi’s own detention at his ouster, its media outlets were shut down. Violence escalated on August 14 when Egyptian security forces launched raids to clear Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo, including outside the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque, killing more than 1,000 over a period of several days. In the aftermath, Egyptian authorities declared a state of emergency, an action widely perceived as a return to policies of the Mubarak era. In September 2013 a Cairo court formally restored the Mubarak-era ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, freezing the activities of the group and all its affiliated organizations.

Throughout the crackdown, people accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood were rounded up and convicted for a variety of crimes in the aftermath of Morsi’s removal, often in mass trials. In one such mass trial in the spring of 2014, 683 death sentences were passed, including against persons tried in absentia. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood also received life sentences in multiple trials. Morsi, who remained in prison under harsh conditions, collapsed during a court hearing in 2019 and was pronounced dead shortly after.

In the wake of the Arab Spring—which not only challenged the legitimacy of Arab governments but also led to ongoing instability in the region and civil war in several of the affected countries—movements across the Middle East associated with the Muslim Brotherhood came under fire. Egypt became the first Arab country to designate it a terrorist group, in December 2013 following a suicide bombing outside a police station. (The Muslim Brotherhood denied any involvement in the attack, and a group affiliated with al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.) Months later the monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates followed suit and embarked on a years-long pressure campaign on Qatar, which supported both the Arab Spring protests and the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2025 Jordan, where the government faced a surge in opposition over its reserved response to Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, banned the organization after alleging that 16 of the Brotherhood’s members tried to import explosives and other arms. The effect on the Brotherhood-associated Islamic Action Front, Jordan’s main opposition party, was not immediately clear.