Since it was announced by the Prime Minister last April, a lot of rumours have surrounded the Government’s review of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some people have even argued that the delay in the release of its findings was due to a failure to uncover any link to terrorism – a fact that would have thwarted David Cameron’s intention to ban the group.
These politically motivated speculations wildly misrepresent the review’s aims and findings. It was never supposed to be a thinly-veiled attempt simply to outlaw the Brotherhood. The review was in fact a genuine effort to better understand the group and redesign Whitehall’s strategy towards it as the world’s most significant Islamist movement.
In order to do so, the review was divided into two strands. The first analysed the nature of the Brotherhood’s activities worldwide. The group has a presence in some 90 countries and in each has taken slightly different forms. It advocates a bottom-up, gradual Islamisation of society. Yet this process of social engineering, based on education, political activism and the provision of social services, is at times accompanied by the use of violence.
Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups in each country work according to a common vision – but in complete operational independence, making the Brotherhood an informal global movement. It’s what makes designating the whole movement a terrorist organisation virtually impossible in the UK, as authorities knew from the very beginning. But the lack of a ban does not equal an exoneration or an endorsement —hardly the general tone of the review.
The review’s second half looked at Muslim Brotherhood activities inside Britain, which has historically been one of the group’s main hubs in the West. Taking advantage of the country’s generous asylum policies, members of various branches of the Brotherhood have established a presence in the UK over the last 50 years. Tellingly, by the late Nineties the general secretaries of the Syrian, Iraqi and Tunisian branches of the Brotherhood were all living in Britain. And Ibrahim Mounir, the secretary-general of the Brotherhood’s International Organisation, is a long-time London resident.
By the mid-Nineties some Brotherhood members decided to focus a significant part of their energies on British Muslim communities and, more broadly, British society. They created several organisations, the most important of which is the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), whose main aim is to influence the debate about Islam (and Islamism) within British Muslim communities, policy circles and the wider British public.
These efforts have been accompanied by those of the countless entities the British Brotherhood milieu have established over the last 20 years: think tanks, mobilisation platforms, charities and even television channels. These initiatives spread an Islamist take, often refined for a British environment, on global and domestic issues.
For some time, this milieu enjoyed remarkable success. It shaped the thinking of the less developed but bigger British-based organisations close to Jamat-e-Islami, the Brotherhood’s sister movement in the Indian subcontinent, which now adopt its tactics throughout Britain (the recently uncovered infiltration of some schools in Birmingham bears the Brotherhood’s hallmark). And it managed to be seen by many in government as a legitimate representative of British Muslims and an ally in countering violent radicalisation – qualities few attribute to it these days.
Untangling the intricate web of domestic and international players linked to the movement is as difficult as fully understanding its multilayered and constantly evolving ideology. No aspect of the movement can be described in absolutes. Yet it is clear that the Brotherhood has many dark spots, ranging from its ambiguous relationship with violence to its questionable impact on social cohesion in Britain. The review aimed to shed light on these problematic issues, as the British government needs a more systematic and strategic policy approach towards a movement that poses several external and domestic challenges.
