Earlier this month, the UAE announced it was sanctioning 11 individuals and eight rather obscure organisations for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The UAE proscribed the MB as a terrorist group in 2014, so you might be forgiven for thinking this was routine. But it wasn’t. All eight organisations were based in the UK. Normally this works the other way round: the UK bans or sanctions entities elsewhere. Having an Arab country – especially one we claim as a friend – do that in reverse should set alarm bells ringing. There was a brief flurry of press interest, then silence.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the mothership of all modern Islamisms
In early 2014 David Cameron commissioned me to deliver a policy review of the Muslim Brotherhood. There was an outpouring of scorn on social media and in the press. Academics, self-designated experts and (so it seemed) the entire liberal commentariat agreed that the idea was absurd. The MB were not a problem. We should be focusing on promoting democracy and social justice instead.
Many claimed Cameron succumbed to pressure from the UAE. They were wrong. They were also wrong about the importance of the issue. Many other governments since 2014 have commissioned similar reviews, most recently France. And the issue of what used quaintly to be called Political Islam but is now generally known as Islamism (until such time as the government bans the term to appease critics) has only increased in complexity and importance.
This is partly to do with the nature of the terrorist threat facing western and – even more so – Muslim-majority countries. Last October, Ken McCallum, the Director of MI5, said that 75 per cent of the agency’s counter terrorism work arose from Islamist extremism. That figure has been pretty constant over the last two decades. It was a factor in the recommendations of the Shawcross Review of Prevent published in February 2023. You can find similar judgements in the regular reports of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – the German domestic security agency – and its counterparts in Austria, the Netherlands and across Scandinavia.
One of the reasons that the UAE takes Islamism so seriously is that the threat is not simply about ticking bombs. It is transnational, it is ideological and it arises from a spectrum of different groups, all of whom have a belief that physical force is justified in bringing about the desired end: a truly Islamic state under Islamic law and adhering to the prophetic model of the earliest Muslims. What we think is subject to secular law and politics, they believe is a matter of revelation. They may differ tactically on when violence is useful. But none of them – not even the MB – have decisively renounced it as a tool to achieve their ends.
The MB is the mothership of all modern Islamisms. It was the first significant mass Islamist movement to be launched – in Egypt in 1928. All subsequent Islamist groups derive their beliefs in some sense from its foundational doctrines, even when they denounce the MB for being wishy-washy. Abdullah Azzam, Abu Mus’ab al Suri and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi – three of the foundational figures of modern jihadi violence – all had roots in the MB. So did the Shia radicals of the Da’wa movement in Iraq. Ayatollah Khamenei translated Sayyid Qutb – the most influential Islamist theorist of the past century, who advocated overthrowing ungodly regimes – into Persian.
The UAE takes all this very seriously. This is not some recent whim. My very first diplomatic posting was to Abu Dhabi in 1983. The MB had a strong presence both at Al Ain university – the only one in the country then – and through its socially activist wing, Al Islah, which regularly published incendiary articles about the West, Jews and non-Muslims in general and had a particularly strong presence in the northern emirates, which resented Abu Dhabi’s dominance within the federation.
The leaders of the UAE came to see this as a threat to the country’s cohesion. And they were right. They lived – and live – in a region where religion can be dangerous, as it used to be in Europe. As we have seen repeatedly in that region for decades, security is the precondition of prosperity, prosperity needs nurturing and stability is fragile. All three are very rare. If you have something good, protect it. Given that the UAE is a place that regularly figures as the most attractive model for a majority of young Arabs, its success is worth preserving.
And because those leaders are Muslim themselves, they find it easier to deal with seditious versions of Islam – which seek to overthrow them – than we do in the West, where the first response of politicians seems to be to evade the issue entirely.
Islam is no longer something that only matters in Islamic countries. It has a global reach and therefore global influence. That has been the case for decades, though we have tried to pretend otherwise. Most Muslims are perfectly at ease in the West. But Islamists by definition see our societies as corrupt and decadent and our political systems as illegitimate. Revelation, not rationally discovered secular law, should determine how we live and are governed.
Given the symbolic power for Muslims of Islam – which Islamists seek to harness for their own ends – and the growing numbers of Muslims in Europe, that is a challenge to the liberal order of a magnitude we haven’t experienced since the Cold War. So when the UAE decides to proscribe organisations and individuals which they claim are linked to the MB, and some of those are resident or registered in the UK, we should pay attention. This is not necessarily because we know that the UAE are right or – if they are right – that we should take legal action ourselves. The MB is not a proscribed organisation here – though Hamas, which arose out of the Palestinian MB certainly is. The issue is rather different. Successive British governments have seemed to believe that if only we ignore Islamism or pay attention only when a bomb goes off on the Tube or someone is horribly murdered on Westminster Bridge, at Borough Market or on a street in Woolwich, then everyone will get along nicely and everything will be fine. It won’t.
The Islamist challenge to the foundational norms of western societies is clear enough in the current debate over Islamophobia. We have seen the results in Batley, in Wakefield and in Birmingham, where there has been a sustained effort to pretend that the so-called Trojan Horse affair never happened (Policy Exchange, the think tank where I work, has begged to differ). The French see this with Cartesian clarity: its interior minister spoke about the threat from Brotherhood-inflected Islamism on 6 January. So do politicians in Austria, Germany and Sweden. They continue to have difficulty formulating a coherent and collective response. But acknowledging you have a problem is the first step to resolving it. British governments continue to be reluctant to do even that. So reviews like the MBR or those by Shawcross and Sara Khan come and go. Whitehall is repeatedly urged to set up proper structures, to develop proper expertise and use that to shape policies designed at the very least to resist Islamist efforts to create parallel structures or separate societies, promote dependency, disguise funding flows, dismantle the connection between rights and the individual and constrain criticism by restrictions on free speech. The response under the Tories was feeble: they were admittedly distracted. But the response of the current government seems likely to be more regulation, more legal constraints and perhaps the adoption of an expansive and unnecessary Islamophobia definition. That isn’t the answer. The UAE shows what can be done if you know what you’re talking about and have the confidence of your convictions. Perhaps we should try learning from them?
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