Conflicted S4 E12: The Muslim Brotherhood: What do they want?

Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean

Thomas: Welcome back to Conflicted dear listeners, you are here with me, Thomas Small and my co-host, Aimen Dean, for the second part of our deep dive into the Muslim Brotherhood.

Aimen, I want to start off today with a quote. Let's see if you recognize it. Here it goes: “God is our objective. The prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of God is our highest hope. Islam is the solution.” What am I quoting?

Aimen: Of course, you are quoting Hassan al-Banna, and you are quoting the mantra and the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Thomas: The slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islam is the solution. Aimen, you're a Muslim. Isn't Islam the solution? You're always telling me I should become a Muslim. Surely, you're telling me that because it's the solution.

Aimen: Yeah. Solution to what exactly?

Thomas: To everything.

Aimen: Yeah, to everything in what sense? You see, every time someone says to me Islam is a solution, and I will say, first, what problem are you trying to fix? And second, which Islam are you talking about?

Thomas: What problem are you trying to fix, and which Islam are you talking about? That's a great way of bringing up the question of the ideology that underpins the Muslim Brotherhood. I think for most listeners, the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology will feel pretty radical, pretty aggressive, pretty expansionist.

But I left the last episode raising the possibility that the Muslim brotherhood's ideology is a moderate and indeed rational response to the challenges that the Muslim world has been facing for the last hundred years or so.

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This is what we're going to explore in this episode of Conflicted. What is the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology, and can it sit alongside the multidimensional nature of politics in the modern world? Let's find out.

In the last episode, Aimen, we framed the question, are the Muslim brotherhood radical or not? Are they radical or moderate? And to reestablish that question, let's discuss an interesting recent episode in the history of Saudi Arabia.

Last time you told us about Hassan al-Banna's trip to Saudi Arabia in the 30s, where he asked the King Abdulaziz if he could establish a national branch of the Muslim Brotherhood there. And King Abdulaziz answered, “But we're all Muslim brothers here, aren't we, Sheikh Hassan?” Meaning we don't need your organisation. Thanks very much.

Aimen: Indeed.

Thomas: Despite that fact, as we've said before on Conflicted, as the Muslim Brotherhood Organization was subject to repression in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, Muslim brothers would often find refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they over time infiltrated, if you want to use that word, infiltrated the education system, the university system, the legal system, and other such institutions and such networks within Saudi Arabia to spread their ideology.

So, the Muslim Brotherhood organisation did not exist in any formal sense in Saudi Arabia, but the Muslim Brotherhood ideology did through the presence there of many, many thousands of Muslim brothers.

How would you characterise Aimen, let's say across the 90s, the noughties and the early teens? How would you characterise the role that Muslim brothers and their acolytes in Saudi Arabia played in the kingdom's politics?

Aimen: First of all, Thomas, it wasn't just only the repression that they were subjected to in Egypt and Syria, which drove many of the Muslim Brotherhood professionals to migrate to the oil rich Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and UAE and Qatar.

But also, the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood championed among their members the virtue and value of education. So, many of them graduated as engineers, teachers, lawyers, writers, and therefore they were able to find work in the new markets of the rich countries of the GCC.

Now, the fact that they were there also enabled them to immediately have great access to infiltrate the education system, the legal system, the health system, and enable them to reach people of power.

And through their idea of what Shura is in Islam, they were able to whisper into the ears of many people within power, not just only in Saudi Arabia, but even in neighbouring countries such as-

Thomas: I just want to point out, there's nothing essentially nefarious about this. This is how politics happens in a country like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a traditional patrimonial monarchy where power is invested wholly in the monarch, and then through a series of subsidiary princes and bodies ultimately answerable to the monarch that power diffuses downwards.

But ordinary people, non-royal people, do have power and influence in a country like the Kingdom by becoming close to those with power. This is the classic monarchical way of doing business.

If you're ambitious, but you're not royal, well, you've got to get close to a royal. And many Muslim Brotherhood members or influenced people did get close to many Saudi royals in the 90s, the noughties and the teens.

Aimen: Indeed. And that enabled them to lobby, to advocate their cause and to advocate for a cooperative relationship between the Saudi state and the Muslim Brotherhood. And it was a bit attractive for the Saudi state at that time because communism was on the rise. These Muslim Brotherhood were anti-communist.

Thomas: The Iranian revolution had occurred, which was threatening to the Saudi state's own self-understanding as a powerful Islamist or Islamic polity.

Aimen: Indeed. And already the Muslim brotherhood globally were divided over the Iranian Revolution, whether they support it or not, despite the sectarian differences.

And also, at the same time, there were the issue of the Afghan-Jihad and whether to support it or not. And of course, the Muslim Brotherhood in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the chapters there, especially the Afghan one led by none other than Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was a Muslim Brotherhood himself.

Thomas: The great lion of the Tajiks. He was himself a Muslim brother?

Aimen: Yes, he was. In fact, he, and his mentor Burhanuddin Rabbani, who would become the president of Afghanistan later were among the first to start the mujahedeen movement. Gobadin Hekmachar himself was also a Muslim Brotherhood. So, many of the Afghan-Jihad leaders were Muslim Brotherhood. And this is why Abdullah Azzam himself-

Thomas: The Palestinian genius who conceived of the great Afghan-Jihad.

Aimen: Indeed, was a Muslim brotherhood from Jordan and Palestine went there to fight the jihad. So, actually there was an alliance there between not only Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood, but also the White House of Reagan and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Thomas: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Now this is getting us down that terrible rabbit hole of 1980s international politics, but back to Saudi Arabia.

The fact remains that Saudi Arabia, the king of which is the custodian of the two holy mosques, and who, especially in the 80s and 90s, was projecting itself as the foremost Islamic state of the world that was there to defend the interests of Muslims globally tended to adopt a cooperative, sometimes a bit thorny, but a cooperative relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it believed to be more or less a moderate alternative to radical Islamist groups like Al-Qaeda.

And together Saudi with the Muslim Brotherhood, inflected kind of voices could continue to develop the kingdom and the Muslim world in a modern direction that remained true to the principles of Islam. That was the governing consensus of Saudi Arabia. Am I right?

Aimen: Yes. However, not everyone in the Saudi royal family agreed with this assessment. In fact, the majority, so that the Muslim Brotherhood are snakes who would change their skin whenever that suit them.

Thomas: And as we've said before on Conflicted, the context for this is the Arab Spring, during which the Muslim Brotherhood tended to back and advocate the more radical revolutionary Islamist actors in those different national revolutionary theatres, which was very threatening and worrying for Saudi Arabia.

And so, more and more voices inside the kingdom were turning against the Muslim Brotherhood. And as the Arab Spring unfolded and attitudes towards the Muslim Brotherhood were beginning to shift amongst certain power centres in Saudi Arabia with the accession of the new King in 2015, King Salman, the current king, the tensions within the royal family and the governing bodies that rule the kingdom.

The tensions between voices that sought to continue to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood and louder voices that were saying, no, we must cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, came out in the open quite dramatically.

Aimen: Do you remember, dear listener, that we talked about a man called Saad Aljabri in the last episode where we described him as someone who joined the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood through a organisation called al Jewala, which is the Boy Scouts when he was at King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals.

This man would rise in the ranks of the Ministry of Interior until he not only became Assistant Minister of Interior to the new Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who was also the Minister of Interior responsible for security and counterterrorism, but also, he became a minister on his own within the cabinet responsible for security affairs in the kingdom.

Thomas: This is a Muslim brother now in the cabinet of Saudi Arabia.

Aimen: Absolutely. And from the beginning, neither the king nor his son the future Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man in charge right now in Saudi Arabia, would trust Saad Aljabri because they believe that his counter-terrorism policy in Saudi Arabia relied heavily on empowering the so-called non-violent extremists in order to take on the violent extremists.

So, using a more cooperative wolf pack to chase away the more troublesome wolf packs.

Thomas: So, you see right there, the question is hanging in the air around the cabinet of the Saudi kingdom is the Muslim Brotherhood, radical or moderate.

Aimen: Indeed. And in the end, by 2016/2017, the answer came very sharp. No, they are not moderate, they are absolutely radical. They were even designated as a terrorist organisation. And that minister Saad Aljabri fled the country into exile with some clouds hanging over him, that he stole some billions of dollars. But that's neither here or there.

Thomas: Yes. And then Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef was removed from his position and replaced by the current Crown Prince MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, who runs the country.

So, there is an example of a debate occurring right at the heart of Saudi Power is the Muslim Brotherhood radical or moderate? And the government there said it is radical, and they totally cut off any cooperative ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, ties that they had maintained for decades, really in a way since that conversation in 1936 between Hassan al-Banna and King Abdulaziz.

So, in recent years, the Muslim Brotherhood has been increasingly seen by powerful actors as radical, although the book I read in preparation for these episodes, Joas Wagemakers, The Muslim Brotherhood: Ideology, History, Descendants, which I recommend everyone read for a sweeping survey of the history and ideological underpinnings of the movement.

That book Wagemaker himself clearly is arguing that this is not fair, that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a radical organisation, that it is unfairly tarnished with the brush of radicalism that attaches to groups like Al-Qaeda, Islamic jihad and others, ISIS of course.

So, scholars, thinkers, activists are divided about this question, and this is what we want to explore. And that question really came into the open, as we said during the Arab Spring because it was during the Arab Spring that the Muslim Brotherhood saw for the first time in a long time, a real opportunity to achieve its political goals because so many Islamic or Arab states were being destabilised by the protests rocking those countries.

And in 2012, this came to a head when after elections, a political party attached to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt came to power there. And a Muslim brother, Mohammed Morsi, was declared president of the country.

Almost immediately, Aimen, the Morsi administration were being accused of pursuing a secret Islamist and totalitarian objective, hiding behind a commitment to pluralist democratic politics. Immediately people were like, we can't trust this guy and his political party. Right?

Aimen: I remember I used to work for a global bank at the time, and I was asked to put together a report talking about the first a hundred days of Morsi's government and the first a hundred days of the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt. The first time they have been in power in their birth nation ever since they were established 90 years prior.

So, I put together a report, and I still remember some of the sentences I used there. I said, it seems to me after observing the first hundred days of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, that they are struggling to move from being a clandestine organisation into a governing responsible party.

The secretive nature of their meetings, the secretive nature of their communications, the fact of the matter that they are keeping the institutions of the Egyptian state in the dark about what they want to implement and what plans that they have. Even for things that don't need to be secret about what foreign investments they want to bring, the negotiations with the IMF and many other aspects.

They were deliberately keeping stuff from the Civil Service in the dark above them. And this used to infuriate both the Army and the Civil Service.

So, what the accusation that the Muslim Brotherhood had against the Civil Service, oh, you are the deep state, and you are conspiring to undermine us. And the Civil Service replied back and saying, well, how can we govern if you don't tell us what you want to do and how you want to do it?

So, this is why I said in that report, talking about the first a hundred days of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, that they are struggling to move from being a clandestine organisation into a responsible governing party.

Thomas: But of course, it might just be in their DNA. I mean, we talked about in the previous episode the problem that Arab monarchs have with the Muslim Brotherhood because any Muslim brother that swears allegiance to the Monarch has also sweared allegiance to the murshid al am in Cairo, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Well, that was also true within Egypt itself, when Mohammad Morsi became president because Egyptians knew that he was not the head of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Aimen: Exactly.

Thomas: He had sworn allegiance to someone else who was above him. And the Army especially must have been like, well, what the hell are we supposed to do about this? Because we are the protectors of the Egyptian state. We are meant to intervene when we feel that there's any seditious activity going on that's going to overthrow the state.

And here we have as president of the state, a man who has sworn allegiance to the leader of a global organisation that actually seeks to undermine the underpinnings of the secular state of Egypt.

So, what are they supposed to do? Especially then at the same time, they felt that the Morsi government and the Muslim Brotherhood in general were seeking to replace within the intelligence and security apparatus of Egypt, replace sitting members of that apparatus with Muslim Brotherhood members.

So, this was going to end in a clash and a mighty clash it did end, indeed. I mean, really a slaughter.

Aimen: Well, it came in the end to a terrible clash between the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood. President Morsi was deposed in July of 2013, put under house arrested and arrested and charged with treason.

And of course, the Muslim Brotherhood supporters did not take it lightly. They went to the streets, they protested. They were angry at what the army did. The army waited for a month, but then of course, the army moved in with a mighty crackdown that resulted in anywhere between 800 and 2,000 fatalities. Not to mention those injured, those who were imprisoned.

So again, another chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to reach power in Egypt, ended up in a blood bath for them.

Thomas: Poor Muslim Brotherhood, honestly, they're always at the receiving end of a fist in Egypt.

Aimen: Yes. And in Syria, and other places. But nonetheless, I'm always confronted by this question by friends and by people when they tell me, do you support what happened in Rabaa? The square where the massacre happened?

And the answer is definitely not. And no sane person could ever advocate such oppression that would lead to fatalities on such grand scale. I wouldn't advocate that whatsoever.

Someone would say, okay, but how do you break up the protest? Well, there are other methods to break up a protest without having to kill people. The fact of the matter is that this show of force by the army would stain its reputation for decades to come.

And Rabaa is still a symbol of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood story of perpetual martyrdom on the altar of so-called democratic rights. But in fact, we have to ask ourselves, were they really fighting for democracy or Islamic supremacy?

Thomas: We do have to ask ourselves that. That's what we're asking. Is the Muslim Brotherhood radical or moderate?

Now we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, I think it'll be worth drilling into that a little further by looking closer at how that radical, moderate dichotomy is transposed onto the term Islamism itself, especially in the context of the Muslim Brotherhood and their ideology. We'll be right back.

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We are back. We're finishing our exploration of the Muslim Brotherhood. And at the end of the first half, I restated our main question, is the Muslim Brotherhood radical or moderate?

The question actually goes beyond the Muslim Brotherhood itself and extends to the question of Islamism more generally. We use the word Islamism a lot on this podcast. The word Islamism is used a lot in the world, especially in the world of security, counterterrorism, intelligence, all that stuff.

Islamism, what is Islamism? It's so hard to define. The Muslim brothers themselves refer to themselves as Islamyun, which is the word Islamist in Arabic.

So, the Muslim brothers are happy to call themselves Islamists, but what does it mean? Wagemaker, the writer of this book on the Muslim Brotherhood that I read, he wrote this, “The term Islamism refers to the idea that Islam, apart from being a religion of rituals, beliefs, and texts, is also a politically and societally relevant ideology that forms the basis for political activism.

In practice this is expressed in the idea that Islam should not just be applied in the religious sphere, but also in the political and societal spheres, mostly by implementing the Sharia. So, whereas Islam can be limited to the private sphere, Islamism is something that is by definition also related to the public sphere.”

Now Aimen, frankly, I find that definition of Islamism ridiculous. Because Islam is not ever relegated simply to the private sphere. How is Islamism different from Islam? Can we just reach a consensus on this? 

Because sometimes I think Islamism is a woolly word that modern liberally inclined people use to disguise the fact that their real problem is that Islam is simply illiberal. It cannot be anything but illiberal.

Aimen: I would say I'm one of those people who feel sad that the term Islamism has been hijacked by political activists and politically ambitious people in order to cloak their political ambition with religion in order to attract as much support for their cause as possible.

Thomas: So, you're saying that much that goes by the name of Islamist isn't religious at all?

Aimen: It is religious, but we come back to the fact that Islam as a whole is a way of life. And therefore, by any stretch of the imagination, if you have a Muslim country, by definition, the state is Muslim and the people lead their lives according to the broad spectrum of Islamic principles, manners, guidance, and laws and regulations, whether it is in penal code, whether it is in the dressing code, whether it is in the dietary code, marriage, inheritance, all of that.

I mean, even in secular nations in Egypt and Iraq and Pakistan even, because even Pakistan is a secular country, yet the marriages and divorces and inheritance, all the family laws is based on Islamic law.

So, the reality is that for me, when someone says Islamist, I believe that someone want to impose their version of how a Muslim state in a modern time should look like. That is a bastardised version, that is a hybrid between communist superstate structure and flavoured with Islamist phraseology and terminologies.

This is why I'm opposed to the idea of Islamists, because they have hijacked the term in order to advance their power grabbing ambitions.

Thomas: So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that Islamists are those who seek political power in order to impose their view of what correct Islam is on all of society.

Aimen: Yes.

Thomas: But are you saying then that there is no way to determine what correct Islam is? I don't think you believe that you are to some extent a Salafi. You describe yourself as a Salafi. Salafism in its very essence is about saying this is what Islam truly is. And much that has passed under the name of Islam throughout history is not Islam. So, what's the difference?

Aimen: I will repeat again what I have said. That is my conviction, and this is what I hold dear to my heart, that Islam is divided into two distinct aspects. The acts of worship and transactions, the acts of worship, mandatory, the acts of transactions are voluntary.

And dear listener, the biggest lie ever perpetrated in the 20th and the 21st centuries on Muslims by Islamists, was the idea that establishing the caliphate was a mandatory obligation. And that if the Muslims don't do it, then they are sinners.

Thomas: Aimen, I love it when you get excited. And I'm glad you bring this up because that was Hassan al-Banna's view. So, Hassan al-Banna, Aimen, believed that the Muslim world's problems stemmed from having deviated from true Islam.

And in the Muslim Brotherhood's minds to this day, true Islam is identical with the Muslim Brotherhood. Is that a fair assessment of the situation?

Aimen: From his point of view, yes, of course, for him, Hassan al-Banna in his message to the fifth conference of the Muslim Brotherhood, what he defined Islam, he defined Islam as a creed, worship, a homeland, a nationality, a faith, a state, spirituality, activism, a Qur’an and a sword.

Thomas: That's a very expansive definition of Islam.

Aimen: But that was his definition.

Thomas: But we spent several weeks discussing the founding thinkers of the Salafi Jihadist movement in general, Hanbalis and Sayyid Qutb. And I think there are echoes of Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s sensibility in Hassan al-Banna's definition.

Certainly, the idea that something had gone very wrong, that Muslims had deviated from true Islam, that he knew what true Islam was. That that true Islam is co-terminus with his movement, his Dawah, the Najdi mission.

So, there's something similar there. And that's not surprising since Hassan al-Banna's ideas come out of that late 19th century, early 20th century anti-colonial, anti-modern foment that transfixed the Islamic world at the time, especially someone like Rashid Rida, for example. The Lebanese ideologue, a Salafi who had studied Ibn Taymiyyah very deeply, had also been inspired by non-Salafi reformers like Muhammad Abduh, for example, from Egypt.

Aimen: And Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.

Thomas: Yes, who stressed Muslim unity. All Muslims are one, and that must be reflected politically who then would gravitate towards that Wahhabi tradition of Saudi Arabia. So, grafting that onto his worldview.

And then after the caliphate was abolished in 1924, he began openly discussing how Muslims should respond to this, the lack of the caliphate, and began advocating for its reestablishment.

So, Hassan al-Banna is growing up in the same world, and he's listening to these voices. I mean, he didn't make this up. He's responding to the conditions of his time in this way that we've always had a caliphate. We need to have a caliphate. We must have a caliphate.

Aimen: Exactly. But did anyone, did really anyone study history objectively? This is the problem with ideologues is that their understanding of history is romantic. They look at history through rosy spectacles, that our history is so noble that we were always the righteous against the hordes of the evil devils who try to corrupt and destroy Islam.

But the reality was far from that, we were never united as a political entity for almost 1200 years.

Thomas: It's not only though that they have a romantic notion of history, their very orientation is that what has been passing itself off as Islam has not been Islam.

So, one problem that let's say traditional, moderate, “Muslims” have when combating Islamists, is that the Muslims will say like yourself, in fact, Aimen. You'll like say, well, according to this line of jurisprudence, X, Y, and Z are true. The jurists said that this is the case.

Well, the Islamists say, and the Salafists to some extent say, but we don't care what the jurists said. They had deviated from Islam. We reject Islamic jurisprudence, we go back to the sources, we decide what Islam is.

So, it's not only that they have a rosy view of history. They have, and as a Christian, I can say this, a kind of Protestant view of history, which is that at some point, true Islam was extinguished, and we must bring it back.

Aimen: And I come back again to the deep question of the division in Islam between worship and transactions. You see the Muslim societies that existed throughout history, based on their interpretation of Islam right now would be sinners.

Would be sinners, because none of them were part of a caliphate, most of them basically lived separate from a caliph. They were always different entities. They had the caliphate in Cairo, they had the caliphate in Baghdad, and they had the caliphate in Cordoba and Lucia. So, which caliphate do you want to choose?

Thomas: But it's true Aimen, that many Salafists do believe that most Muslims have only been Muslims in name and not in reality. That is part of the Salafi movement. It's just a problem. It's right there at the heart.

And you're right, Hassan al-Banna was one of those voices. He believed that the caliphate understood, not just ideally, but really like as a real political institution that really governed directly every Muslim on earth. The caliphate was an obligation, a duty for all Muslims to pursue that. Lacking a caliphate rendered all Muslims somehow guilty, and they had a duty to establish it.

Wagemaker quotes another early Muslim brotherhood thinker, Abd al-Qadir 'Auda, who says, “Islam is not just a religion. On the contrary, it is a religion and a state, and it is in the nature of Islam that it has a state, an Islamic state,” that that is what Islam is. Islam is an Islamic state.

Aimen: I remember I was listening to a lecture by none other than the master of Ahl-i-Hadith in the 20th century, Nasiruddin al-Albani, an Albanian scholar who lived all his life in Damascus, in Syria, and lived in Jordan in Saudi Arabia. But he is considered to be the master of all Ahl-i-Hadith when we talked about them before in Ahmad bin Hanbal-

Thomas: These are the successors, really, of Ahmad bin Hanbal's way of approaching the Hadith. You memorised the Hadith, you make the Hadith the centre of your spirituality, and all of your reflection on God's law and what God expects of you comes from the Hadith.

Aimen: Exactly. So, I remember, I heard he was in Jordan, and I heard in that lecture in the cassette, someone is asking him, and he was in his 80s, he was an old man, and someone asked him, “But sheikh how do we establish an Islamic state?” Because of course, he was saying, “Jihad against the rulers is forbidden. And there is no such thing as a jihad against the rulers.”

Because of course, he was being confronted with Sayyid Qutb's idea of a jihad to remove the obstacles, meaning the leaders of the Arab and Muslim people to establish Islam as a sovereign ideology.

So, he said, “First, establish the Islamic state in your hearts, and it'll become reality in your world. But if you are not following the right path in your heart, it'll never be a reality in your world.

And remember, brothers, God did not ask us to worship him through the establishment of his governance on earth. God made it very clear in the Qur’an that sovereignty is to God, and he gives it to whoever he wills.

He never said, go and seek power and seek sovereignty. It is a conditional sentence in the Qur’an, those who if we ground them power on earth, they will establish prayers and spread charity.” That's it.

Thomas: A more Christian word has never been uttered, Aimen. This is the thing. Christians think that Islam is all about establishing one totalitarian state.

This is what Christians, they say, unlike us, they say, we who focus on the God in our hearts and becoming receptacles of his divine grace, et cetera, and we are otherworldly, and we don't pursue power, and we turn the other cheek and stuff.

Muslims are obsessed with political power. That's their religion. They just want to create a state to dominate the world. And Islamists play into that Christian narrative by saying, oh, that's true. That's what we are.

Aimen: Exactly. But you see, again, even the Qur’an never asked us as Muslims to go and establish God's kingdom. God's kingdom is given by him to those who he wills.

And the idea is that kings in Islam, and by the way, the first King, funny enough, was a caliph. Muʿāwiyah, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, when he was given the allegiance after the previous five caliphs before him, Abū Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali and al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī.

After he was given the allegiance, he said, “Ana 'awal almuluk.” I am the first of the kings. Because he realised that he's not one of the rightist caliphs, but at least he is a king because he is founding a dynasty.

And do you know what happened when a king is dead in Saudi Arabia or in Jordan or Morocco or any of the Muslim world before? They never said the king is dead, long live the king. For example, when Abdulaziz became king, they were shouting that kingdom is God's and to Abdulaziz.

So, this is how a kingdom is announced. First of all, we admit that God is sovereign, but someone has to act on behalf of God on earth in order to impose God's laws, but without basically making it into a funk killing, kill joy in a cesspool of radicals. Sorry, I didn't mean to preach.

Thomas: No. Well, the Muslim Brotherhood disagrees with you, Aimen. They want to erect a caliphate. That's what they want. They want to pursue through moderate or immoderate means. And this is where we come down to are they radical or are they moderate?

And I would say the Muslim Brotherhood is an organisation that pursues radical ends through moderate means. They are more patient than Al-Qaeda and certainly than ISIS. They are more sensible. Their strategy is more and likelier to succeed than someone like ISIS's strategy.

But their goal is a radical one to create a totalitarian caliphate that spans the globe. I mean, Hassan al-Banna stated it very clearly in 1948 in a speech he gave to the assembly of Muslim youths. Is that what it was called?

Aimen: Yes.

Thomas: And well, he stated this, and I paraphrase, we can't go into it in detail, “Nowadays,” he says, “The disturbed world is in a state of confusion and all its own organisational systems have failed to resolve its problems.” Adolf Hitler probably said the same thing.

“The only cure is Islam. We need to redeem the Islamic individual. We need to establish the Islamic family. We need to establish the Islamic nation. We need to establish the Islamic government that leads this nation to the mosque.

We need to regain every part of our Islamic nation that has been usurped by western nations policies. We seek to make the banner of Islam rise high and wave over those lands.

And finally, we want to make our call to Islam, reach to the whole world, propagate it to all nations, spread it to the remotest parts of the earth, and subjugate every unjust ruler to its command.” I mean, that's pretty radical.

Aimen: Finally, finally, you are convinced. Finally.

Thomas: It's a bit like hyper liberalism too, if you asked me.

Aimen: Indeed, yes.

Thomas: Which is turning out to be more radical than either of us believed.

Aimen: Indeed.

Thomas: Well, dear listener, you really put up with a lot of rambling from us, don't you. I hope you enjoyed this two-part series on the Muslim Brotherhood.

As I said at the outset, we didn't do it justice. We were never going to do it justice. It's too big, it's too complex, and it's too secretive because in the end, it is a radical, revolutionary organisation bent on world domination.

And with that in mind, we can set up our next couple of episodes, which are going to be about a man who currently governs a very powerful and strategically important country, not just of the Muslim world, but of the entire world.

A man whose ties with the Muslim Brotherhood have also been suspect and open throughout time. A man who has been considered by some, an agent by others upon of the Muslim Brotherhood whose own past in the Muslim Brotherhood, is shrouded in secretive mystery, giving rise to endless conspiracy theories and conjecture.

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The truth about that is hard to determine, but what is clear to everyone is that this man is a force to be reckoned with on the world stage. And I'm talking about President Erdogan of Turkey. He will be our topic in the next couple of episodes of Conflicted. Stay tuned.

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.