We must know our enemy if we are to one day fight our enemy:
To understand the Muslim Brotherhood, and to assess its role today in a shifting Middle East, it is necessary to first examine the forces that led to the organization's birth. And that takes us back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
The Ottoman Empire had been, before World War I, the strongest and most visible face of Islam in the world. At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, it controlled a vast swath of territory that extended from southeastern Europe into Asia and northern Africa. Its territory was greatly diminished by the 20th century, but it was the empire's alliance with Germany in the war that led to its final destruction.
In the aftermath of the war, the remains of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned by the victors, which gave the Western powers far more influence in the Middle East and created enormous tension in Islamic populations.
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