Jihad has occupied a prominent position in the worldview, political strategy and foreign policy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which enjoyed a brief taste of power in Egypt from 2012-13. Muhammad Mursi and the Brotherhood had many enemies and detractors at home and abroad. For some, the Brotherhood was an irredeemably radical Islamist group that used elections to seize control of the state, but which would use this power to enforce its ideological vision on Egyptian society and declare a jihad against Israel and the West. Others saw the Brotherhood as having sold out to a US-Israeli agenda in the Middle East and having 'abandoned' jihad. Each of these interpretations misrepresents the way the Muslim Brotherhood has conceptualized jihad throughout its history. In this paper I argue that the Muslim Brotherhood's understanding of jihad has remained relatively consistent over time. Where it has engaged with jihad discourse, it has done so to serve its overall purpose of establishing and consolidating a mass movement in Egypt oriented towards the gradual Islamic reform of state and society. I also argue that, contrary to common perceptions, the discourse of jihad offers a means for Islamist social and political actors to support, rather than overturn, the domestic status quo. This broader perspective evolves from a general examination of the Brotherhood's approach to jihad in the decades prior to the election of Muhammad Mursi before focusing more closely on the Mursi and immediate post-Mursi periods. The paper shows that the Muslim Brotherhood has approached jihad as a mechanism for domestic reform, and as military action conducted under the authority of the state. This conception has related to the Brotherhood's historical desire to build a mass movement for Islamic reform without provoking state repression and has thus also functioned to absorb more radical opposition to the Egyptian regime. In many ways the Brotherhood continued to behave like an opposition movement despite having won both parliamentary and presidential elections. The engagement of the Brotherhood, as well as that of Salafi preachers, with the issue of jihad, reflects this structural continuity. To illustrate the argument the paper scrutinizes Islamist approaches to jihad in political discourse in relation to three key issues: first, Egypt's policy towards Israel; second, the civil strife in Syria and third, the military coup directed against Mursi in July 2013.