by Ben Cobley, UnHerd
The Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated society
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.
These different aspects don’t always work in tandem. Indeed, the Brotherhood sometimes finds itself on different sides of political conflict. But such ambiguity can work to its advantage, creating leverage to maximise its interests and undermine its real enemies: to turn them against themselves and each other.
After decades of large-scale Muslim immigration, the Brotherhood as a movement, ideology and style is now firmly established within Western countries. Its positions on such things as decolonisation, Islamophobia and Palestine-Israel are now mainstream positions in the West. But the Brotherhood itself, as a body, remains under the radar, clearly present but rarely overt. It operates in the shadows, with assertions about its influence easily written off as conspiracy-mongering.
Yet sometimes this influence becomes visible. In November 2015, former prison governor Ian Acheson wrote to the Ministry of Justice about how a review team he was leading had found numerous examples of Islamist extremist texts in British prison chaplaincies. In evidence to the Commons Justice Committee the following July, Acheson said the books contained “sometimes sectarian, homophobic and incendiary information that was freely available to vulnerable prisoners in many prisons with no obvious control over it”.