Mick Hartley

The Muslim Brotherhood is at the heart of modern Islamism, especially as it manifests itelf in the UK. Ben Cobley at UnHerd – The plot for a British caliphate:

The Muslim Brotherhood is many things: a political organisation with global presence; a secretive society, with high-level connections into business and government; a missionary body that seeks to maximise the presence of Islam around the world; an institution-builder, whose members are prolific in setting up organisations, putting its presence at one remove; a movement, stretching way beyond its Arab Muslim origins; and a network of networks that among other things allows Muslim and non-Muslim groups to fight alongside each other. It is associated with Hamas in Palestine and has past ties to Al-Qaeda. Its people put themselves forward as interlocutors, seeking to intercede between governments and their Muslim populations, using their networks as leverage. In some respects it is a state proxy, closely linked to Qatar and the Turkish regime of President Erdoğan. It is a charity promoter, working for the sake of Muslims and Islam worldwide, but especially in Palestine. And, last but not least, it is an ideology, with a commitment to Islamic supremacism and the defeat of the West….

The Muslim Brotherhood was originally founded by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, 1928, which was then nominally independent but dominated by the British. Banna was consumed by the colonisation of his homeland and much of the Muslim world by Western powers and Western modernity. He attributed this partly to non-Muslim strength — but also to Muslim weakness, which he attributed to the abandoning of Islamic principles. Real Islam, he said, was about fighting and defeating non-believers….

As founder of the Brotherhood, Banna had developed an ideology with a simple and effective good-and-evil dichotomy, whereby Islam is “the solution”, the source of good which must triumph. Western modernity, by contrast, is the source of evil, which should — and will, inevitably — be defeated. This framing was attractive for many — and the Brotherhood’s reach grew rapidly in the years following its founding. In the Indian subcontinent, it greatly influenced Abu Al-A’la Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami movement. Two of Jamaat’s members set up the Islamic Foundation, which named one of its halls in Leicester after Banna. Ahtsham Ali of the Prisons Service has spoken there, on the subject of converting prisoners to Islam. The then Prince Charles opened a part of its campus in 2000.

“Banna isn’t talking about a religion in the sense it’s understood in the West,” Shadi Hamid, writes in  Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, “but about a programme to be applied and implemented.” There is no separation between religion and secular politics here like that which emerged out of the Christian tradition. One serves God by maintaining one’s devoutness, but also by winning territory, imposing Islamic law and drawing converts. As Hamid says, the Brotherhood recognised that achieving these things would require patience. “They believed that history — and God — moved with them, and so it was never a question of whether but when they would prevail.” Here we can see the apparent paradox of “Islamo-progressivism”, in which an Islamist movement that appears to be anti-modern is also consumed by “that most modern of assumptions: that history moved with purpose and that progress was inescapable.” As Banna put it, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Depressing stuff, but worth reading in full.