It’s time to ban the Brotherhood

For too long, Britain has ducked the Muslim Brotherhood problem.

Instead, we have focused on the loudest forms of Islamism: the bomb plot, the radical preacher, the proscribed terror group, the returning jihadist. Those threats are real. But they are not the whole picture.

The most sophisticated vehicle for Islamism in the West is the Muslim Brotherhood, and it rarely advertises itself through spectacular violence. It advances more patiently than that, accumulating influence through institutions, respectability, ambiguity and time.

That is why the Henry Jackson Society has launched the “Ban the Brotherhood” UK campaign.

The starting point is an uncomfortable one. The last formal UK assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood was Sir John Jenkins’s 2015 review. That review concluded that aspects of the Brotherhood’s ideology and behaviour were “contrary to British values, national interests and national security”. And yet, more than a decade later, the organisation remains legal, the questions raised by that review remain unresolved, and the British state is still relying on an assessment produced over a decade ago. This is no longer tenable.

A renewed review is necessary, not because nothing is known, but because the stakes are too high to ignore. The 2015 review came before the 7 October Hamas attacks (Hamas, by the way, identifies itself as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood). It came before the discovery of Hamas weapons caches across the European continent. It came before a series of Britain’s closest allies hardened their positions against the Brotherhood. And it came before one of those allies, the UAE, cut scholarships for its students to study at British universities due to concerns over the “Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on UK campuses”.

In short: the threat picture has evolved, but British policy has not. That failure has helped to make Britain a permissive operating environment: a country more comfortable discussing the finished product of Islamist radicalism than the ecosystem that incubates it, launders it, legitimises it, funds it or gives it institutional cover.

To be clear, the Muslim Brotherhood is not merely a religious tendency within Islam. It is a political project. Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, it sought from the outset to reorder society and the state according to sharia. In the West, that project rarely appears in the form of a single organisation with “Muslim Brotherhood” on the letterhead. It is more adaptable than that: it operates through webs of charities, educational bodies, advocacy platforms, and community groups, often under different names and local banners.

That operational strategy is deliberate. As Mohamed Ali, former Conservative Party Vice Chairman and author of the foreword to our launch report, puts it, the Brotherhood’s strength lies in a “strategy of patience”: incremental, respectable, institution-minded, and all the more effective because it presents itself as harmless community activism. That is precisely why Britain struggles to deal with it. We are still not comfortable confronting entryism when it arrives in a suit, speaks the language of inclusion, and wraps itself in the vocabulary of civil society.

At present, Britain has drifted into the worst of all worlds

At present, Britain has drifted into the worst of all worlds. The state has acknowledged the problem, but never fully acted on it; the public senses there is something serious here, but has never been given a proper updated accounting; and the result is a vacuum filled by denial, groyperism, and bad faith.

Our campaign intends to end that drift. That means more than just calling for a renewed classified and public review (though we are doing that). We will also expose the Brotherhood’s networks in Britain — both the explicit and the underground, the public-facing and the concealed. We will identify the ecosystem through which Brotherhood influence is exercised in the UK, map the links that are too often waved away as coincidence, and force into the open the structures that have benefited for too long from opacity, deference and institutional cowardice. 

None of this is “Islamophobic”, however lazily that charge will no doubt be deployed. In fact, one of the strongest arguments for confronting the Muslim Brotherhood is that Islamist radicalisation overwhelmingly harms Muslims first, especially young Muslims. The Brotherhood’s worldview is not one of integration, pluralism or confident participation in British society. It is one of ideological separatism. Through its fronts, proxies and fellow travellers, it seeks to present itself as the authentic voice of British Muslims while advancing a sectarian agenda that damages British Muslims as surely as it damages Britain.

A serious democracy should be capable of defending religious freedom while also defending itself. It should be capable of protecting loyal citizens while scrutinising ideological movements that seek to manipulate religion for power. And it should be capable of revisiting an outdated assessment when the world around it has changed so profoundly.

This is no longer a question of whether Britain acts — but whether it is willing to face what it already knows.