The Global Muslim Brotherhood in Britain

Non-Violent Islamist Extremism and the Battle of Ideas

Damon L. Perry, Damon Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351347907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since 2011, with the British Government's counter-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, non-violent Islamist groups have been considered a security risk for spreading a divisive ideology that can lead to radicalisation and violence. More recently, the Government has expressed concerns about their impact on social cohesion, entryism, and women's rights. The key protagonists of non-violent Islamist 'extremism' allegedly include groups and individuals associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama'at-i-Islami. They have been described as part of the 'global Muslim Brotherhood', but do they constitute a singular phenomenon, a social movement?

This book shows that such groups and individuals do indeed comprise a movement in Britain, one dedicated to an Islamic 'revival'. It shows how they are networked organisationally, bonded through ideological and cultural kinship, and united in a conflict of values with the British society and state. Using original interviews with prominent revivalist leaders, as well as primary sources, the book also shows how the movement is not so much 'Islamist' in aspiring for an Islamic state, but concerned with institutionalising an Islamic worldview and moral framework throughout society. The conflict between the Government and the global Muslim Brotherhood is apparent in a number of different fields, including education, governance, law, and counterterrorism. But this does not simply concern the direction of Government policy or the control of state institutions. It most fundamentally concerns the symbolic authority to legitimise a way of seeing, thinking and living.

By assessing this multifaceted conflict, the book presents an exhaustive and up-to-date analysis of the political and cultural fault lines between Islamic revivalists and the British authorities. It will be useful for anyone studying Islam in the West, government counter-terrorism and counter-extremism policy, multiculturalism and social cohesion.

1 Introducing the global Muslim Brotherhood

Subversives or reformists?

This chapter introduces the global Muslim Brotherhood network in Britain. It describes who the key players in this network are and some of the ways in which they have been conceived and classified (by themselves and other observers). The chapter provides the platform from which the rest of the book follows, since it identifies the book’s main protagonists, provides the historical context of the emergence of the network that they form, and presents the key debate in which they have been framed: Whereas some analysts view these individuals and groups as non-violent but subversive ‘Islamists’, more sympathetic commentators see them as a progressive force for Muslim activism in the process of reforming their Islamist heritage. Most observers take either one of these stances. As the following chapters will make clear, the global Muslim Brotherhood is neither simply Islamist in striving for an Islamic state nor progressive, but it does have as its goal a society based upon values emanating from an alternative source of authority.

The global Muslim Brotherhood in the West

The ‘global Muslim Brotherhood’ in the title of this book refers to a transnational network of organisations and individuals associated with al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (The Society of the Muslim Brothers), established in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, and Jama’at-i-Islami (The Party of Islam) established in colonial India in 1941 by Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi. From the 1960s, activists linked to the Ikhwan and Jama’at began to settle in Europe and North America. Free from the particular challenges and historical contexts of their points of origin and acknowledging that their presence in the West is long-term, these individuals have since established numerous organisations dedicated to pursuing their cultural and political ambitions in the Muslim-minority West.

Revivalist visionaries: al-Banna and Mawdudi

Hasan al-Banna, a schoolteacher, established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to address what he saw as the corruption of Islam in his native Egypt. Al-Banna diagnosed the poor predicament of Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere not just as a result of the abolition of the caliphate or of Western colonialism. More fundamentally, he claimed, its demise was owed to the abandonment of Islamic values, and governance based upon those values, after the period of the first four caliphs (632–661).¹ These four ‘rightly guided rulers’ (al-khulafa al-rashidun) were considered by al-Banna as guardians of the true faith.² This is because they were all companions of Muhammad who, due to their direct intimacy with him and his teachings, were able to implement Islamic precepts faithfully while combining both political and religious authority.³

Al-Banna declared the ultimate goal of the Brotherhood as the re-creation of a global Islamic order based on the shar’ia.⁴ He also believed firmly in, and taught, the importance of jihad, in line with the predominant classical (and juridical) conception of warfare for the hegemony of Islam.⁵ Jihad, asserted al-Banna, is a duty incumbent upon all Muslims for Islam to reach its zenith. He also extolled the rewards of martyrdom in the path of jihad, as expressed in a pamphlet he wrote in the late 1930s.⁶ Al-Banna believed the basis for Islamic supremacy, and jihad as its means, was ‘supported in Qur’anic texts, the Traditions [hadiths], and the four schools of [Islamic] law’.⁷

Al-Banna’s exaltation of jihad was not an empty formula. One of the few constants in the structure of the organisation, according to Richard Mitchell, was ‘the enrolment of members in various kinds of armed formations trained to perform espionage and to commit violence’.⁸ The Brotherhood initiated attacks against Egypt’s Jews and Copts; bombed secular cinema theatres and restaurants; and assassinated judges, businessmen, intellectuals and government officials, including the Egyptian Prime Minister, Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi.⁹ Amir Taheri notes that al-Banna’s ‘campaign of terror was to become a model for future fundamentalist movements’.¹⁰ These include Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian Territories; al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad in Egypt; Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines; as well as the Armed Islamic Group and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in Algeria.¹¹ Perhaps most importantly, Brotherhood members also played a key role in the birth of al-Qaeda.¹² Osama bin Laden was a member of the Ikhwan and his ideas were influenced by it. In his diaries, found after the American raid on his holdout in Abbottobad, Pakistan, he writes, ‘I was committed with the Muslim Brotherhood’.¹³

Despite its history of violence, the most important aspect of the Brotherhood’s work was, and remains, its commitment to the gradual Islamisation of society from below using non-violent means. At the organisation’s fifth conference in 1939, al-Banna stated that the official focus of the Ikhwan was ‘the reform of society’, since before they could be ready for political power, ‘there must be a period during which the principles of the Brothers are spread’.¹⁴ The guiding thought was that ‘when the people have been Islamized, a truly Muslim nation will naturally evolve’.¹⁵ To this end, al-Banna introduced a seven-stage strategy comprised of upwardly cascading goals:

The first step is to educate and ‘form’ the Muslim person. From there the Muslim person would spread Islam and help ‘form’ a Muslim family. Muslim families would group together to form a Muslim society that would establish a Muslim government. The government would then transform the state into an Islamic one governed by Shari’ah, as voted by the Muslim society. This Islamic state would then work to free ‘occupied’ Muslim lands [from apostate Muslim regimes] and unify them together under one banner, from which Islam could be spread all over the world.¹⁶

Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi also advocated a bottom-up approach to the achievement of an Islamic society in the Indian subcontinent. His political life, as with al-Banna’s, began with a struggle against British colonial rule. He was a member of the pan-Islamic Khilafah movement, which combined support for the Ottoman caliphate with anti-colonial agitation.¹⁷ But like al-Banna, Mawdudi’s anti-colonialism was hitched to a higher purpose, the revival of Islam and its eventual global supremacy. In his early work, Mawdudi expressed his vision of an Islamic revival in strident revolutionary terms. In his first book, Jihad Fi Sabillilah (Jihad in Islam), written in the late 1920s, he wrote:

Islam requires the earth – not just a portion, but the whole planet … because the entire mankind should benefit from … ‘Islam’ which is the programme of well-being for all humanity … Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single state or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution.¹⁸

The achievement of the Islamic world system, he stated, requires Muslims to ‘press into service all [the] forces which can bring about a revolution … [The] composite term for the use of all these forces,’ he asserted, ‘is “Jihad”’.¹⁹ These forces include ‘the power of the sword’, physical exertion, the expenditure of one’s wealth, and also the potency of speech and writing. Mawdudi viewed the ‘ideological’ jihad as the means to change people’s outlooks culminating in ‘a mental revolution’ that would signify Islam’s triumph over non-Islamic values, concepts and ideas. Such a triumph is especially pertinent given Mawdudi’s concept of the Islamic state as ‘an ideological state’, as opposed to a nation state.²⁰ The ideological state, for Mawdudi, is defined by its acceptance of the shari’a, whose sphere of activity is not restricted to politics, or even law, but ‘coexistent with the whole of human life’.²¹

In 1941, Mawdudi established Jama’at-i-Islami to realise his vision of an Islamic state on the Indian subcontinent as a prelude to an Islamic world order. Through Jama’at, he sought to produce a cadre of

Muslim administrators, Muslim managers, Muslim scientists, Muslim philosophers, Muslim economists, Muslim bankers, and jurists … [that would] act as the vanguard of the movement for the reconstruction of modern thought … [leading] the struggle against the prevailing secular ideologies and power structures.²²

As Mumtaz Ahmad observes, although Mawdudi described the goal of an Islamic world order in revolutionary terms, the bottom-up means he advocated were rather more ‘evolutionary’.²³

After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, which Mawdudi opposed, he became more pragmatic in approach and under his leadership Jama’at embraced Pakistani electoral politics. This reflected similar developments in the Ikhwan in Egypt, where some of its leaders, such as Umar al-Tilmisani, began to publicly eschew violence and adopt an accommodationist position regarding secular politics.²⁴ From the 1960s, thousands of party activists and sympathisers were appointed in the civil service and educational institutions, exerting a mild influence on the Pakistani government and, under General Zia ul-Haq, its programme to Islamise the state and so uslims and Zia’s decree, ten years later, prohibiting the Ahmadis from describing themselves ciety.²⁵ This included the 1974 state declaration of the Ahmadi sect as non-M as Muslim and chanting the call to prayer.²⁶

Both the Ikhwan and Jama’at-i-Islami have failed to make inroads in their respective countries as their founders had hoped for. Since President Nasser’s clampdown on the Ikhwan in the mid-1950s, the group has suffered state repression for decades. After the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, the Ikhwan’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Organisations’ acronyms
• Introduction: the global Muslim Brotherhood and ‘non-violent Islamist extremism’ in Britain
• 1. Introducing the global Muslim Brotherhood: Subversives or reformists?
• 2. Organisation and leadership: Informal networks and formal bodies
• 3. Cultural solidarity: Communal classifications and missionary concepts
• 4. Social and political orientations: Shari’a, jihad and the Islamic state
• 5. Politics and governance: A conflict of vision and values with the state
• 6. Education and arbitration: A clash of values within Muslim communities
• Conclusion: Islamism, ‘non-violent extremism’ and the ‘battle of ideas’ in Britain
• Index