This article was produced in partnership with the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University, where Sergio Altuna is a Senior Research Fellow.
In June 2025, al-Qaeda released a lengthy video calling for jihad over Gaza. But one of the religious authorities it turned to for support was not an al-Qaeda cleric. It was the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a Doha-based scholarly institution closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
IUMS had declared jihad an obligation for Muslim governments and armies, and al-Qaeda seized on the ruling. “Did anyone answer the call?” it asked in the video, released by its media arm, al-Saḥāb. It then took a jab at IUMS itself, describing it as the organization “located next to the American al-Udeid base in Qatar.”
Al-Qaeda did not need IUMS to make the case for jihad. It has spent decades developing its own religious arguments for armed struggle. So why was it turning to scholars associated with another Islamist movement to strengthen its own call?
This was not the first time al-Qaeda had drawn on an IUMS figure to make its case. In al-Qaeda Central’s first statement on the war, published only days after the attacks of October 7, 2023, the terrorist organization explicitly praised a fatwa from Mauritanian scholar Muhammad al-Hassan Ould al-Dedew, who serves as IUMS vice president.
Al-Qaeda introduced al-Dedew as “the distinguished Mauritanian scholar Sheikh Muhammad al-Hassan Ould al-Dedew—may God preserve him.” For a cleric outside the jihadist movement, the language was strikingly warm. It then praised his fatwa and reproduced a substantial portion of it in quotation marks. Al-Dedew argued that the whole Muslim Umma had an obligation to support Gaza and work for the liberation of al-Aqsa.
Al-Qaeda also directed readers to where the ruling had been broadcast: al-Aqsa TV, a television network the U.S. Treasury designated as being financed and controlled by Hamas. The sequence shows how the ruling traveled between the groups. The IUMS vice president issued the fatwa, a Hamas media outlet broadcast it, and al-Qaeda then cited it to support its own call for mobilization.
IUMS matters because it sits at the center of the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational scholarly infrastructure. Created in 2004 under Qaradawi’s leadership, it has developed over the years into one of the most prominent transnational platforms for religious authority associated with the Brotherhood. Its leadership has consistently included prominent Brotherhood figures, while Qaradawi himself spent decades at the center of the movement’s intellectual universe. Qatar has been central to IUMS’ rise.
IUMS has been headquartered in Doha since 2010; former Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani sponsored its creation; and its senior leadership has long maintained deep ties to Qatari universities, financial institutions, and other parts of the country’s religious establishment.
The Brotherhood connection also runs directly through Hamas. Founded in late 1987, Hamas emerged as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—and its relationship with IUMS became especially visible after October 7. IUMS reacted little more than an hour after the attacks, publishing a stream of Gaza-related material that same day. Its secretary general, Ali al-Qaradaghi, prayed for God to “help our mujahideen brothers and grant them victory.”
Within twenty-four hours, IUMS organized an online event in support of “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its assault on Israel. More than a dozen scholars participated, with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh appearing as the guest of honor. Formal fatwas calling for jihad soon followed.
Against that backdrop, al-Qaeda’s June 2025 reference most likely points to a fatwa issued by IUMS just months earlier. The text explicitly declares jihad an individual obligation (fard ‘ayn) for every capable Muslim. It also makes military intervention and the provision of weapons, expertise, and intelligence a binding duty, first on Palestinians and neighboring countries and then on the wider Arab and Muslim world. Muslim governments, the fatwa reads, have an immediate obligation to intervene militarily, economically, and politically. It also declares “financial jihad” obligatory, calls on wealthy Muslims to help equip the mujahidin, and instructs scholars to pressure governments, armies, and institutions to act.
In one of its harshest provisions, the fatwa states that providing certain forms of support to Israel with the intention of weakening “the resistance” amounts to apostasy. When al-Qaeda later summarized IUMS’s position as having made jihad incumbent on armies and governments, it was closely tracking the language and substance of this ruling.
Al-Qaeda’s reliance on these rulings is striking after decades of hostility toward the Brotherhood’s political methods.
The two traditions share important parts of the same intellectual genealogy, but the Brotherhood’s gradualism, electoral politics and approach to governance, among others, have long been targets of jihadist criticism.
Gaza has opened a narrow area of overlap.
On this issue, Brotherhood-linked scholars are producing religious arguments that al-Qaeda can use directly. Hamas sits at the center of both moments. Its attack on October 7 created the immediate context; its television channel transmitted al-Dedew’s ruling; and IUMS provided a stream of religious arguments that presented the fighting as legitimate jihad, made support for it a religious duty, and placed the obligation to act on individual Muslims, governments and armies alike.
Qatar cannot be left out of this picture. IUMS issues these rulings openly within an institutional environment that Qatar helped create and has continued to support. The Union’s calls for jihad, military intervention, financial support to fighters, and pressure on Muslim armies have been public and repeated. These are formal religious rulings issued by a Doha-based institution with longstanding Qatari sponsorship and deep institutional ties to the state. The al-Udeid reference captures the contradiction al-Qaeda wants its audience to see.
So why is al-Qaeda quoting Muslim Brotherhood scholars on Gaza?
Because an al-Qaeda cleric calling for jihad is unlikely to persuade anyone who does not already accept al-Qaeda’s worldview. A fatwa from a prominent scholarly organization with an audience far beyond al-Qaeda is more useful. Al-Qaeda can hold it up and say, in effect, that this is not just our argument. Other Muslim scholars are saying it too.
That does not mean IUMS and al-Qaeda are the same organization, share the same political strategy, or have suddenly become allies. Their differences are real, and al-Qaeda has spent decades attacking the Brotherhood’s approach to politics.
But Gaza has created an area where some of their arguments now overlap. IUMS scholars have called jihad a religious obligation, urged Muslim governments and armies to act, called for financial support for fighters, and placed religious pressure on Muslims to support the war against Israel. Al-Qaeda does not have to invent or reinterpret those arguments. It can quote them.
That is why these fatwas matter beyond IUMS itself. Once published, they do not stay within the audience or political movement that produced them. Al-Qaeda can lift the same religious arguments, place them inside its own propaganda, and use the credibility of scholars outside the jihadist movement to strengthen its message.
The troubling part is not that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood have become the same. They have not. It is that on Gaza, a Brotherhood-linked scholarly institution is producing religious arguments that al-Qaeda finds useful enough to quote.
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