The Muslim Brotherhood compete for influence in the UK and the EU
Islamic radicalism has recently gained new ground, advocating its ideology with new hearts and minds – often within young people, playing a politics of deprivation and identity to indoctrinate new demographics, thereby strengthening its thinkers’ bases not only in the UK, but across the EU. “The center of this movement sits the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that remains deliberately opaque and habitually secretive.
The institutional complex structure of the Muslim Brotherhood makes it particularly difficult for government to legislate over, never mind counteract at a grassroot level, especially since it acts as an umbrella for various iterations of the radical Islamic thought.
A transnational network, with links in the UK, and national organizations within and outside the Muslim world, the group has undergone decades, even more so in the last few years, dramatic structural and ideological changes, with different factions within the movement competing for control.
The founding texts of the Muslim Brotherhood call for the gradual moral cleansing and eventual political unification of Muslim individuals and communities in a caliphate under Sharia (Islamic law). To this day, the Muslim Brotherhood describes Western societies and liberal Muslims as depraved and immoral – a narrative that has fueled calls for violence and given credence to the idea that Muslims in the West should exist in denial and rejection of Western society.
Historically the Muslim Brotherhood has entertained a highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism. For example, Individuals closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK have supported suicide bombing and other attacks in Israel by Hamas, an organisation whose military wing has been proscribed in the UK since 2001 as a terrorist organisation, and which describes itself as the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Moreover, Muslim Brotherhood-associated and influenced groups in the UK have at times had a significant influence on national organisations which have claimed to represent Muslim communities (and on that basis have had a dialogue with government), charities and some mosques. But they have also sometimes characterised the UK as fundamentally hostile to Muslim faith and identity; and expressed support for terrorist attacks conducted by Hamas.
Recent efforts by both Turkey and Qatar to side-lined elements of the Muslim Brotherhood have largely translated in the movement’s efforts to establish new bases in the UK, and the EU – playing cultural division and claims of Islamophobia to better rally communities to their views.
The recent violence in Leicester against the Hindu community is a case in point.
Moreover, the efforts of organizations closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood were accused this week of undermining the UK’s efforts to counter extremism. The Union of Islamic Student Societies (FOSIS) – created around 1963 by the man who also founded the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq – organizes lectures at universities across the country, calling for the abolition of the Brevent Program for politics, thereby undermining Britain’s commitment to freedom of religion and multiculturalism.
Such a push for influence in the UK warrants our close attention.
