Ayman Ahmed
The UAE regime has increasingly promoted a bizarre narrative that the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) represents an existential or strategic threat to Europe and that the movement is engaged in a long-term project to penetrate and ultimately transform western societies.
This narrative has been amplified through political, media and lobbying networks in Europe and North America, often presenting the Muslim Brotherhood not simply as one among several political currents in the Muslim world, but as a shadowy transnational force posing a fundamental threat to western civilization.
Such claims deserve to be examined not merely as questions of political analysis, but as an exercise in understanding how propaganda and geopolitical interests operate. The central question is not simply whether the Muslim Brotherhood has flaws and whether particular organizations associated with it should be scrutinized.
The more basic question is why the UAE regime has invested so heavily in portraying the Ikhwan as the ultimate threat to Europe when the empirical and historical evidence provides no basis for such a sweeping claim. The answer lies primarily in the UAE’s own strategic calculations.
For the rulers of Abu Dhabi, the Muslim Brotherhood is arguably the most important socio-political force threatening their illegitimate foreign imposed regime.
The Muslim Brotherhood and circles influenced by its political thought have historically enjoyed significant support among Sunni Muslim Arab constituencies, particularly in countries such as Egypt and Jordan.
Unlike the UAE’s ruling structure, which rests upon a small population and an authoritarian political system with virtually no meaningful mechanism for popular political participation, the Ikhwan emerged as a mass socio-political movement with extensive networks, institutions and popular constituencies.
This does not mean that the Brotherhood is invincible, nor does it mean that its political programme is to be blindly adopted.
Indeed, its history is filled with serious mistakes that deserve examination.
But precisely because it has historically represented a significant political constituency, it has been viewed by western-backed authoritarian regimes in the region as a potential challenge to their political order.
The UAE’s confrontation with the Brotherhood is, therefore, fundamentally rooted in a regional struggle over political legitimacy, popular mobilization and the future political configuration of the Arab world.
The UAE’s problem is that it cannot easily win this confrontation on its own. It is a small state with limited demographic weight and an archaic political system.
Despite its weaknesses, the Brotherhood has historically possessed something the UAE regime lacks: a broad ideological and social constituency extending across Arab and Muslim societies.
The logical response, from Abu Dhabi’s perspective, is, therefore, to internationalize the conflict to transform a regional struggle against a particular political movement into a supposedly universal struggle against an existential threat to the west.
This is the essence of the UAE’s propaganda strategy.
The Muslim Brotherhood is presented as though it were preparing to capture Europe, subvert democratic institutions and impose an Islamic order on European societies.
Western regimes are being encouraged to see the UAE’s struggle against the Brotherhood as in their own strategic interest.
The regime is no longer merely asking western powers to assist it in suppressing a regional political adversary; it is presenting itself as a partner in the supposed defence of Europe against an Islamic menace.
Yet even elementary examination of the Brotherhood’s history exposes the extraordinary weakness of this argument.
The movement’s principal historical socio-political base in the Arab world has been Egypt, where it was founded and developed its deepest organizational roots.
For decades, it faced severe repression yet it attracted millions of supporters and established extensive social networks.
Even in Egypt, a predominantly Muslim and Arab country, the Brotherhood was unable to establish lasting political control.
Its brief experience in government following the 2011 uprising ended with the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
This raises an elementary question for anyone seriously advancing the theory of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Europe: if the Brotherhood could not establish durable political dominance in Egypt despite decades of organization, millions of supporters and deep social roots, how is it supposedly going to take political power in Europe?
The demographic and political realities make the proposition even more implausible.
Muslims constitute minorities in European countries, and European Muslim communities are themselves highly diverse in their political outlook, religious interpretation, national origin and ideological orientation.
A significant number of European Muslims have little or no meaningful relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and may have limited knowledge of the organization altogether.
Even among those familiar with it, there is no basis for assuming automatic political support.
Consequently, the “Brotherhood takeover” thesis requires several assumptions for which its promoters rarely provide evidence.
It requires us to believe that a movement unable to consolidate power in the heartland of its historical constituency possesses the capacity to take over political systems in countries where Muslims are a minority, where electoral politics is highly rigged, and where most Muslims do not support the Brotherhood.
This is not serious geopolitical analysis.
It is fearmongering dressed up as strategic assessment.
This is where the UAE narrative also intersects with broader zionist and Israeli strategic interests.
Israeli political discourse has repeatedly portrayed the growth of Muslim political and demographic influence in Europe as a significant concern, and figures such as Benjamin Mileikowsky (Netanyahu) have explicitly emphasized the supposed dangers associated with Muslim presence in Europe.
The promotion of a conspiratorial image of the Muslim Brotherhood can, therefore, reinforce a broader ideological framework in which Muslim communities are viewed through the prism of security, subversion and demographic threat.
Once a political organization with no real impact on the EU is portrayed as a vast clandestine network operating throughout Europe, ordinary Muslim political participation is placed under suspicion.
Muslim civil society organizations, activists and community are described as components of a hidden Islamic infrastructure without any serious evidence.
The result is the normalization of anti-Muslim suspicion.
This serves important political interests of Israel and the UAE.
For the UAE, it provides western backing for its campaign against the Ikhwan and against broader currents of Islamic activism.
For Israeli hardliners and other political actors who benefit from portraying Muslim political presence as inherently threatening, it reinforces a wider narrative of Islam and Muslims as a security problem.
These interests need not be identical to converge politically.
The result is a mutually reinforcing propaganda environment in which a regional struggle is repackaged as a European security imperative.
However, serious policy should be based on evidence and should distinguish between Muslim activists and violent extremists.
The deliberate collapsing of these categories is a mischievous political project.
How, then, can this propaganda narrative be confronted?
The first requirement is intellectual resistance.
People who promote the claim that the Muslim Brotherhood is preparing to “take over Europe” should be challenged with basic questions.
What is the Brotherhood’s actual organizational presence?
How many European Muslims support it?
What evidence demonstrates that it possesses the capacity to capture European political institutions?
What is its record in Egypt?
Which works of the Ikhwani intellectuals has the person actually read?
Mention names of prominent Islamic leaders and see if the person has elementary information about them.
Does he know the difference between Muslim Brotherhood, Jama‘at-e Islami, Tabliqhi-Jama‘at and Sufi tareeqas?
These are not complicated questions.
They are basic questions of history, political sociology and geopolitics.
Anyone making extraordinary claims about an alleged transnational conspiracy should be expected to answer them.
The promoters of this narrative must, therefore, be exposed when they demonstrate ignorance of elementary facts.
They should not be permitted to substitute repetition for evidence, slogans for analysis, or intelligence-sounding terminology for actual knowledge of the Muslim world.
Ultimately, the issue is larger than the Brotherhood itself.
It concerns the production of an artificial threat narrative designed to manipulate western perceptions of Muslims and to mobilize western power behind the interests of a despotic regional regime.
The appropriate response is not to defend every action of the Brotherhood, but to reject the intellectually dishonest premise that a relatively limited political movement is secretly preparing to conquer Europe.
The antidote to such propaganda is straightforward: historical knowledge, empirical evidence and political clarity.
Once the basic facts are placed before the public, the mythology of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Europe begins to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
All parts of the Islamic movement should learn from the experiences and mistakes of the Ikhwan al-Muslimoon in Egypt.
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