Tamkeen: The Muslim Brotherhood Way Of Conquest

American  Thinker 

Muslim immigration is unlike anything we’ve experienced in the past. The current best estimates are that Islamic fundamentalists (those advocating for sharia law) make up between 20 and 30 percent of immigrating Muslims. Between 1991 and today, over 2 million Muslims arrived.

Using the 20-30 percent figure, that would suggest that there are 200,000 to 400,000 Muslims here who do not intend to assimilate and, in fact, are here to spread traditional Islamists views, including Tamkeen (more on this term later) and Sharia Law, sometimes violently. That’s not just a problem; it’s a threat. This level of radicalism can lead to violence, as was seen in Israel with the October 7th attack, and with the destruction of America’s traditional political and social institutions.

For anyone who believes that Islamists are not a threat to ordinary Americans, consider that, since 2000, Islamist-inspired attacks in the United States have killed roughly 3,100 Americans (almost all from 9/11) and injured several thousand more. Outside of 9/11, fatalities from Islamist-linked incidents number in the low hundreds, with injuries in the hundreds to low thousands.

President Trump recognizes this, for he has designated certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. This begs the question: Why is the seemingly non-violent Muslim Brotherhood a threat?

The Muslim Brotherhood has long eschewed jihadist violence, opting instead for something more insidious: Tamkeen (Arabic for “empowerment” or “entrenchment”), which is the Muslim Brotherhood’s primary strategy designed to overcome Western culture and obtain dominance. It’s methods include:

• Institutional penetration: Establishing presence in civil society organizations, education systems, legal advocacy, and cultural institutions.
• Community consolidation: Building authority within Muslim communities through religious leadership, social services, and grassroots networks.
• Discourse normalization: Shaping public narratives to align with Islamist values, often through media, academia, and religious platforms.

This approach, often described as nonviolent strategic entryism, aims for long-term transformation rather than short-term upheaval. Entryism itself is a sub-strategy that sees members of one group join another—usually a larger or more influential one—to change its policies, leadership, or ideology from within. It often involves infiltration, sometimes covert, to steer the host organization toward the entryists’ agenda.

You may recognize what happened to the Democrat party, as radical leftists entered it and took over. But that’s another subject, though the new Democrat party is often a Muslim Brotherhood ally.

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) has extensively documented Tamkeen as a staged political process aimed at constructing Islamic governance in non-Muslim societies. It is seen as a theological innovation that adapts classical empowerment concepts to modern institutional contexts.

• Analysts describe Tamkeen as part of a “settlement strategy” in which Brotherhood-affiliated actors embed themselves in Western institutions to reshape public discourse and policy over time.
• This strategy exploits democratic freedoms to advance ideological goals that conflict with liberal democratic norms.

Things to keep in mind and be aware of:

• Tamkeen is not universally accepted or practiced by all Islamist groups, and interpretations vary across regions and factions.
• The concept should not be conflated with Islam itself. It is a political strategy rooted in specific ideological frameworks.
• While Tamkeen is a threat to liberal democracy, its proponents argue that its nonviolent nature makes it a legitimate form of political participation.

So, how pervasive is the Brotherhood and how focused is it on exporting its version of Islam to the Western world?

The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Sunni Islamist movement. It initially focused on religious revival, social services, and anti-colonial activism, but later evolved into a powerful political force with branches worldwide.

The Brotherhood has more than 500,000 adherents operating in dozens of countries, including the U.S. and Europe. Given those numbers, who are a few more things to know about it:

• It advocates for Islamic governance under sharia law and, in its most ambitious vision, a caliphate.
• It’s influenced by thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, who radicalized parts of the movement toward violent jihad. This includes Pan-Islamism, religious conservatism, anti-Zionism, anti-imperialism, and anti-communism.
• It’s designated as a terrorist organization by Muslim countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Russia, and Syria.
• In the past, it was not designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. or EU, although Donald Trump is finally trying to change that.
• Notably, it includes Hamas (founded as the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood in 1987).

To understand how the Muslim Brotherhood operates, it’s worthwhile to focus on CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), which presents itself as just another civil rights organization. However, it has roots in Brotherhood-linked networks, and employs similar institutional embedding tactics in the U.S.

Thus, it actively courts political officials and directs other institutions and individuals to contribute almost exclusively to Muslim leaning candidates. CAIR’s influence in U.S. politics comes far more from lobbying, advocacy, and community mobilization than from traceable financial contributions. It’s pure Tamkeen, and we ignore it at our peril.

God Bless America!