“contemporary hard polling data reveal the corrosive impact of our era’s bellicose and bigoted normative Islam, both the Brotherhood’s and Al-Azhar’s/al-Tayeb’s…Mr. Kennedy and the likeminded policymakers who stress as he does the “toxic ideology” and “dark strain of fundamentalism” they attribute to the Brotherhood would do well to read and digest these pellucid observations from 1978 by Charles Wendell, Hasan al-Banna scholar par excellence”
In a personal “X” account posting 10/30/26, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr.) criticized “Islamism” as an alleged “toxic ideology” that he averred was a “violent corruption of mainstream Islam.” RFK Jr. invoked current Al-Azhar University Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb as an authoritative avatar of mainstream Islam to bolster his contention about “Islamism” as being somehow distinct from normative Islam:
“Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as ‘false Islam’ and a ‘perversion of the Islamic religion’ and accused it of ‘barbaric crimes.’”
Notwithstanding RFK Jr.’s assumptions, the invocation of Al-Azhar Grand Imam al-Tayeb completely undermines his false premise of “toxic Islamism” versus his imaginary Islam as an historical bastion of “reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom.”
Grand Imam al-Tayeb and Al-Azhar University in fact represent all the liberty-crushing totalitarianism, jihad bellicosity, and Sharia-bigotry of mainstream, authoritative Islam that RFK Jr. errantly decries as uniquely attributable to “Islamism,” and embodied by the bogeymen of the “Muslim Brotherhood.” The unbowdlerized public record of al-Tayeb, and Al-Azhar University reveals plainly his and Al-Azhar’s rejection of freedom of conscience and expression, sanctioning of traditional jihad war, and virulent, even annihilationist Islamic Jew-hatred.
During a 2016 interview, al-Tayeb reiterated his endorsement of the traditional Sharia-based rejection of freedom of conscience by sanctioning the killing of “apostates” from Islam because they were considered a “danger” to an Islamic society:
“The four schools of law all concur that apostasy is a crime, that an apostate should be asked to repent, and that if he does not, he should be killed… According to the more reliable of the two (hadith or traditions on apostasy), a Muslim can only be killed in one of three cases, one of which is abandoning his religion and leaving the community…All the early jurisprudents understood that this applies to someone who leaves his religion, regardless of whether he left and opposed his community or not. All the early jurisprudents said that such a person should be killed…”
On October 1, 2020, Al-Tayeb issued a statement angrily denouncing the use of the term “Islamic terrorism,” as an offense to Islam and its votaries in disregard of Islam’s putatively “tolerant Sharia,” while simultaneously—and in violation of true freedom of speech—demanding criminalization of that expression!
Late August 2026, al-Tayeb reiterated—and validated—the classical bellicose doctrine of aggressive jihad war, As summarized aptly by Coptic Solidarity, this boiled down to “Islam, a peace treaty, or fighting.” Invoking the authoritative Maliki and Hanafi schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, al-Tayeb maintained Muslims are required to wait three days after inviting the non-Muslim enemy to embrace Islam and not begin the confrontation before the fourth day, hoping that the enemy will accept Islam or agree to a treaty of submission.
Ignoring the inherent belligerence and aggression of this sanctioning of jihad, Coptic Solidarity observed caustically,
“Al-Tayeb presented these rules as an unparalleled example of justice, fairness and respect for the rights of the other—even an enemy engaged in fighting.”
Unfortunately, al-Tayeb also has a very ugly record of over two decades of virulent Islamic Jew-hatred which includes sanctioning mass Muslim violence against Jews.
Al-Tayeb has sanctioned homicide bombing murder of Israeli Jews, including non-combatants, and twice publicly condemned Jews, eternally, while invoking Qur’an 5:82—a central Antisemitic verse—for causing “Muslim distress…since the inception of Islam 1400 years ago.” He has also accused “Global Zionism” (Jews) of midwifing the Islamic State (ISIS) jihad terror organization, and related jihad terror groups, to “destroy the Middle East,” and claimed the “Zionist entity,” i.e., Israel, was plotting to “march on the Kaaba (in Mecca) and on the Prophet’s Mosque (in Medina). This is on their minds and in their hearts.” Nonetheless, he also stated in 2018, “the issue of antisemitism is a lie that continues to deceive nations to this day.” November 29, 2024, representing Al-Azhar, on the 77th anniversary of the 11/29/1947 United Nations Partition Plan, al-Tayeb re-affirmed Al-Azhar’s rejection of that early iteration of “The Two-State Solution.” And on 12/10/24, following the collapse of Syria into a jihadist morass, al-Tayeb denounced “Zionists/Zionism” (whom/which he routinely conflates with all Jews/Judaism) as a “cancer” that must be prevented from “spread” into “the Arab Muslim body…limb by limb.”
Beginning mere hours after the October 7, 2023 attacks, Al-Azhar University—its Grand Imam al-Tayeb, leading ancillary clerics, and formal “Fatwa (religious edict) Committee”—sanctioned and celebrated Hamas’ jihad carnage, on Al-Azhar’s social media platforms. During October 7th itself, ignoring Hamas’ precipitating murderous atrocities, which were not mentioned at all, and well before the Israel Defense Forces’ counter-offensive in Gaza, Al-Azhar, with al-Tayeb’s imprimatur, declared officially:
“Al-Azhar salutes with utmost pride the resistance efforts of the proud Palestinian people…Al-Azhar supports the hearts and hands of the proud Palestinian people who have imbued us with spirit and faith and restored us to life, after we thought that would never happen, and prays that Allah grant them steadfastness, peace of mind and strength.”
October 18-19, 2023, Al-Azhar’s “Global Center for Online Fatwas” issued a formal religious ruling declaring that all Israelis, including non-combatants, were legitimate targets of jihad terror. Specifically, it claimed, “the term ‘civilians’ does not apply to the Zionist settlers of the occupied land.”
Returning to RFK Jr.’s 10/30/26 X post, he perseverates on the oft-repeated “Muslim Brotherhood Bogeymen” narrative without considering the normative nature of the “Brotherhood’s Islam,” which comports with “al-Tayeb’s and Al-Azhar’s Islam.” Mr. Kennedy and the likeminded policymakers who stress as he does the “toxic ideology” and “dark strain of fundamentalism” they attribute to the Brotherhood would do well to read and digest these pellucid observations from 1978 by Charles Wendell, Hasan al-Banna scholar par excellence:
“Hasan al-Banna’s fundamental conviction that Islam does not accept, or even tolerate, a separation of “church” and state, or of either from society, is as thoroughly Islamic as it can be. Any attempt to translate his movement into terms reducible to social, political, or religious factors exclusively simply misses the boat. The “totality” created by the Prophet Muhammad in the Medinese state, the first Islamic state, was Hasan’s unwavering ideal, and the ideal of all Muslim thinkers before him, including the idle dreamers in the mosque. His ideology then, before it was Egyptian or Arab or whatever, was Islamic to the core. Since it embraced all aspects of human life and thought, it was at least as much religious as anything else. Practically all of his arguments are shored up by frequent quotations from the Qur’an and the Traditions, quite in the style of his medieval forbears. If one considers the public to whom his writings were addressed, it becomes instantly apparent that such arguments must still be the most compelling for the vast bulk of the Muslim populations of today. The nagging feeling that Islam must, and very quickly at that, catch up with the West, had even by his time filtered down from above to the masses after having been the watchword of the modernizing intellectual for almost a century. There was also the notion that all these Western sciences and techniques were originally adopted from Islamic culture, and were therefore merely ‘coming home’… To this [Islamic] revivalist mentality, nothing could be more hateful than further diminution of the lands traditionally dominated by Islam. I believe that much of the fury and unconcealed hatred of the Zionist state which is expressed by the majority of Arabs will become more comprehensible in light of what the Islamic domain as a concept really means to the Muslims, seen through the lens of Hasan’s exposition. Fascists were unable to endow their acts or beliefs with a religious dimension, except for the embarrassing juvenility of the Teutonic shrines reputedly raised in Germany. In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, however, they had, on the basis of indisputable historical facts and clear religious traditions, a ready-made program for a world crusade that required only actors and a leader. Islam had from the beginning been a proselytizing faith. The error of the Islamic peoples, (as Al-Afghani had pointed out forty years before), had been to cease their inexorable forward march, to abnegate their God-ordained destiny”…
Finally, these contemporary hard polling data reveal the corrosive impact of our era’s bellicose and bigoted normative Islam, both the Brotherhood’s and Al-Azhar’s/al-Tayeb’s. Seventy percent of a representative sample of Muslims from Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia favored recreating an Islamic Caliphate, while 65% supported the strict application of Sharia within this transnational entity. Moreover, confirming the pandemic of disproportionate extreme Muslim antisemitism, the 19 most antisemitic countries in the world are all Muslim societies whose population prevalences of extreme antisemitism range from 64% to 97%!
Andrew Bostom
Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism " (Prometheus, November, 2008) You can contact Dr. Bostom at @andrewbostom.net
