by Jim Chimirie on X
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. Its stated aim has never changed. The establishment of a state governed by sharia law under a caliphate. Islam is the solution is not a slogan. It is a programme. And the countries that know it best have drawn their conclusions.
Egypt banned it. Saudi Arabia banned it. The UAE banned it. Bahrain banned it. Austria banned it. Jordan banned it in April 2025 after uncovering a sabotage plot linked to its members. These are not fringe states acting on prejudice. They are countries with direct experience of what the Brotherhood does when it embeds itself in civil society. They watched it build parallel social structures, challenge state authority, channel electoral pressure toward Islamist ends and provide the ideological conveyor belt that has carried individuals toward violence. They acted. Britain has not.
The 2015 Cameron review found that the Brotherhood’s ideology was a possible indicator of extremism. It found that individuals closely associated with the Brotherhood in Britain had supported suicide bombings by Hamas, an organisation that describes itself as the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood and whose military wing has been proscribed in Britain since 2001. It described the Brotherhood as deliberately opaque and habitually secretive, operating with a dual discourse, moderate in public, radical in private. It stopped short of proscription. That report is eleven years old. The Brotherhood has spent eleven years continuing to embed itself in British civil society while the government keeps the matter under close review.
Manchester knows what that embedding looks like. Salman Abedi, who murdered 22 people at the Manchester Arena in 2017, attended Didsbury Mosque, whose leadership had documented links to the International Union of Muslim Scholars, founded by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who publicly endorsed suicide bombings. The mosque’s trustees were linked to charities associated with Hamas. The sectarianism now visible on Manchester’s streets, men on horseback charging anti-regime Iranian protesters while police stood back, does not emerge from nowhere. It is cultivated over years in institutions the state has chosen not to examine too closely.