Ed Husain is one of the world’s most revered experts on the topic of Islamism. Not only because he’s read more on the subject than almost any other, but because he’s seen it for himself.
At age 16, Ed - raised in Britain by moderate parents - became passionately involved in Islamist fundamentalism, even going as far as to join Hizb ut-Tahrir. 5 years later, he disavowed it, and dedicated his life to educating the world about the reality of the extremist mindset.
In 2008, Ed, alongside activist and radio presenter Maajid Nawaz, founded the Quilliam Foundation, a British think tank with stated goals of combating Islamism in the Western world.
Elsewhere, Ed is a professor at Georgetown University’s School Of Foreign Service, Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As a writer, he has been published in the Spectator, the Telegraph, the New York Times, and has been short-listed for the George Orwell Prize.
Why did we invite him on?
Ed’s story is fascinating, but if it weren’t for his remarkable insights, he wouldn’t be such a tremendous guest. Just shy of two years ago, Ed joined us for an interview and predicted, with alarming accuracy, Israel’s attacks on Iran.
How did he get it so right?
We wanted to know, so we invited him back. It turns out the story is much more complex than we initially believed.
This time, Ed is here to guide us through the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, how it infiltrated major Western instutions, and what we can expect in the future.
What did we learn?
Before we can even begin exploring the subject at hand, we need to know how. The phrase “Muslim Brotherhood” is thrown around so liberally, sometimes to mean an organised force and other times to describe Muslims as a bloc. Where does the truth lie?
The Muslim Brotherhood, officially speaking, is a Sunni organisation. Ed, however, thinks this framing is, conveniently for them, ineffective.
”The best way to approach the Brotherhood is to see it as an ideology. Just shutting down their bank accounts is putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. You have to confront it as a battle of ideas … This isn’t a case of finding a postcode and banning the organisation from there. It’s a wider movement. It creates a mood music.”
And what is that ‘mood music?’ What is the Brotherhood, where does it come from, and what do they want?
”The Muslim Brotherhood was founded [in 1928] by an Egyptian schoolteacher [Hassan al-Banna] … He primarily took issue with three things. Firstly, he opposed the abolishment of the caliphate in Turkey in 1924. He wanted a Muslim-led empire that confronted the West and the Soviet Union. Second, he disliked American evanglicals preaching in Egypt, a Muslim majority country, and felt it was a strike against the Muslim manhood. The third thing that really offended him was seeing Egyptian men and women dancing, drinking alcohol, becoming Westernised.”
From there, Ed guides us through the unusual birth and unlikely ascent of this peculiar organisation. And unlikely is the operative word; as Ed describes, the Brotherhood’s aims and demands run contrary to the vast majority of Muslims. In fact, their central desire is the core divide through the heart of the Islamic world.
”The fundamental divider is between those who believed in nation-states and those who believe in the Caliphate. [The latter] want the Middle East to be under the control of a single, central Islamic theocracy.”
It’s hard to see a meaningful difference. After all, aren’t most countries under the rule of single central government? Wouldn’t it make sense that they, in Muslim countries, they were Islamically informed anyway?
”The hallmarks are that it must have one leader, and it must have not borders, but ‘frontiers’. Frontiers are not fixed; they are amorphous and can be expanded. … It’s not just a state - it’s an expansionist state, like the Soviet Union or the Ottoman Empire.”
Expanding into where? Is it merely focused on the countries that were historically Islamic, or the rest of the world too?
”The first priority is to reconquer Spain, Siciliy, India, parts of China - areas that were once Muslim. But you don’t stop there. You keep expanding to bring the whole world under the control of the theocracy.”
Fundamentally, the Muslim Brotherhood is an imperialist enterprise. Islam is not a private belief, or even a national ideology - it’s a global faith, and one that must be instigated by force if necessary. The great irony is that the least Islamic countries are least equipped to resist it; many Muslim majority countries do a better job of containing the spread of the Brotherhood than the West.
”It’s the ordinary Muslims who oppose them. There are two billion Muslims, vs. what I would generously estimate is five million members of the Brotherhood … However, an organised minority can control a disorganised majority. And that’s what this is - a highly organised minority.”
Ed explains how the Brotherhood are able to operate in plain sight. Their tactics adapt to the lay of the land. In the West, they align themselves with left-wing political groups, creating the oft-discussed “red-green alliance”. It’s a perfect example of horseshoe theory; operatives who would be considered far-right in countries to the right of the British status quo, holding hands with our most far-left agitators.
But it’s not exclusively a union of fringe activists; our government is in on it too. The Labour government does less to tackle the troubling behaviour of Islamists in Britain than the leaders in Bahrain and the UAE do. It naturally leads one to ask: why?
Why would a supposedly secular-if-not-Christian country welcome in extremists from a different faith? Why would they allow these extremists to recruit new members and rall ysupport for their cause? What’s in it for them?
Here, Ed claims something extraordinary.
