TRIGGERnometry - Where Islamist Terrorism Really Comes From - Ed Husain

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

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You're saying something I think is quite extraordinary, which is that the government of Britain and the intelligence services of Britain are fostering and allowing this extremism to flourish in Britain because it gives them leverage in their dealings with Arab countries. country? Yes. Yes. Well, that's extraordinarily irresponsible and dangerous, isn't it? That's a statement of fact. Isn't that suicidal? That's how the strategy started in the 1980s. It's suicidal because they thought they could contain it. If it admits what you've just asked them Francis to admit, it means A, they're responsible and B, they must do something about it.

This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode, go check out the incredible online courses, which are absolutely free. at hillstale.edu slash trigger. Ed Hussein, welcome back to Trigonometry. Constantine, Francis, thank you for having me. Oh, it's great to have you on. We want to talk to you really about two things, both of which we've covered in previous interviews,

but not in the level of detail that we want to go into. One of them is effectively the seed of all extremist Islamist organizations in the world, which is the Muslim Brotherhood. And I was just confessing to you that it was only when you talked about it on our show last time that we came to the realization that actually this is where all of this stuff springs from.

And if we don't know that, I would imagine lots of other people don't know that. And so we want to talk about that. And the second thing we want to talk about it, as you're probably aware, there is a kind of raging debate in countries that have large Muslim populations now, particularly in Europe, about is there such a thing as Islamism? Or is all Islam potentially something that becomes extreme? Yeah. And you are literally the best place person in the world to talk to about that. So let's start with the Muslim Brotherhood and just tell everybody what it is, where it comes from,

and why it's so important to understand for the modern context. Great question. And thank you to both of you for having such an interesting or an interested approach to this global issue because it's relevant in almost every country and it's going to become even more relevant in the years ahead. But as you rightly identify Constantine, we've got to go back and we have to go back to 1928 when the movement started. And it is a movement and not an organization. And I think too often too many of our political leaders make the mistake of thinking, where is the organization, where is its postcode and how do we ban it? It's a wider movement. It plays a certain mood music and it started in 1928 in Egypt for the following reasons. The founder, or the founder,

was a primary school teacher, nothing against you, Francis. He was a primary school teacher in Egypt, and he had several issues with the wider world. The first issue was he opposed the abolishing of the caliphate in Turkey in 1924, which had just happened four years previously. He wanted a kind of Muslim presence and Muslim dominance, a Muslim-led empire that confronted the West and confronted what was then Russia's strong.

Soviet Union. So he had that kind of confrontational bug within him, practicing Muslim, observant Muslim. The second issue that he had was he complained in his letters about the presence of American evangelicals across the country that why are these evangelicals preaching in Egypt, which is a majority of Muslim country, and why do we allow this to happen? Where is our Muslim sense of manhood that we let these Americans in? And the third point that really offended him were seeing Egyptian men, Egyptian women, dancing, drinking alcohol, spending time on the cruises, and Egypt becoming so westernized to the point that he, as someone from the Egyptian countryside, felt that this westernization, globalization disturbed him.

So those three issues, the destruction of the Turkish caliphate, the presence of the Americans and the Brits and the evangelical movements, and third, the westernization of Egyptian suburb. society in Cairo led him to then go to various Egyptian religious institutions, the al-Azhar, which is a prominent university in Egypt, a religious institution. It's been there since the 1950s, so our Oxford, if you like, since before Oxford, Azhar, the greatest prominent Sunni institution. He goes there and says, you're a religious institution, you have thought leadership over, you know,

a Muslim Sunni country, you should do something about this problem. And al-Azhar say, we're going to approach this in our own, wise, nuanced, complicated way, give us time. And he says, no, we must set up a movement, we must confront this problem head on. So Azhar turning him away. It goes to a group of Muslim mystics. Egypt has this huge mystical orders, Sufi Turuk, we call them. And the mystics also turn him away and say, you know, you're going to be dangerous, you're too politicized. That is not the way of the Prophet Muhammad. You've got to be calmer. You've got to accept reality of what it is and change yourself first and then change follows. And it's not our business to confront America and to confront the Soviet Union.

So they disagree with him. And this is the issue that he's a breakaway from mainstream Islamic norms, that he decides to take it up on himself. He rejects Al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old Muslim institution that's still there. He rejects the Muslim mystics that are dated from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, old orders. And he says, I will create my own movement. and I will work towards recreating the caliphate,

bringing back Sharia at state law, and thereby confronting the West, correcting the misdemeanus that I see. So the bug of the Islamic state, whether it's ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, and it's also connected to Iran, by the way, or Hamas, started there in Egypt in the Suez Canal area called Ismailia in 1928.

So you were just saying earlier, Francis, we're going to be facing the hundred-year moment in a couple of years time, but the organization still sticks with us and hasn't left us. But there are other points that he then absorbed, those were the three kind of starting points that motivated him, but then he developed an entire ideology. And I'll say this, Constantine, that the best way to approach the Muslim Brotherhood is to see it as an ideology. So if we talk about something called the MBI, Muslim Brotherhood ideology, and then we're onto something, then we're fighting the true battle of ideas, just saying we're going to shut down their bank accounts,

although helpful, is really putting a band-aid, as they say here in America, or a plaster back home in England, with the bleeding problems that the Muslim Brotherhood have sought to create across the world. And just coming back to the ideological inspirations of it, I mean, the issue of the Caliphate, I think, is something that's worth exploring, because the Caliphate effectively is, It's kind of been explained to us by four other guests in the past that the central fight within the Muslim world is between the people who believe in nation states and the people who don't want nation states, they want the entire area of the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere to be controlled by one theocratic worldview. And that's essentially the main theme that's driving these people. Is that right? Correct. Correct. And it's correct because if you take away the argument for creating what they call an Islamic state, then you end up in accepting the status quo, modernity, multiple nation states,

and working within these sovereign jurisdictions where you have the rule of law, as the late great Roger Scrutian used to put it, the rule of law has jurisdiction, and that jurisdiction is the nation state. That's why some of us have reservations about something called international law. Well, who's going to enforce it? So that's the way of the modern world. Now, those who believe in the Islamic State believe ultimately, creating some kind of Islamist empire.

And while they call it an Islamic state, what they mean is their state, their interpretation of Sharia, their form of law, and they or their allocated leaders are in charge for this supranational state. And it's a confrontational state. It's an expansionist state. So it's much like, say, I know, the Soviet Union or at its heyday, the, uh, you know, the Ottoman Empire. The Chinese weren't really expansionist in those days. But so, so the question is, what is a caliphate or what is an Islamic state, right?

The hallmark of their understanding of the Islamic State is that it must have one leader, and it must have frontiers and not borders. In other words, what's the difference? Frontiers are temporary and they can expand. They go and how convenient. So they don't believe in borders or nation states. So the whole world at some point must come under the control of this caliphate or of this Islamic state. The whole world or just the areas that have been historically populated and controlled by Muslims? The first priority is to reconquer Spain, Sicily, India, parts of China that were once Muslim.

But you don't ultimately stop there. You continue to expand to bring the whole domain under what they call the domain of peace or the domain of Islam. Now here's the problem with this worldview. This is a worldview that was advocated first and foremost by Hasna al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s. And it's then spread to Hamas and Al-Qaida and others. But the problem with that worldview is the problem that Hassan al-Banna found in the 1920s, that most Muslims rejected him and reject the brotherhood.

And most, if you look, if you read classical Islamic literature, there is no reference to the Islamic system. This was taken from Hegelian thought, this was taken from later German Nazi thought, that we must create a system, we must create a Reich, we must be against the Jews, we must be against the West, we must reconquer land. This was the mood music of the 1920s and 30s that the Muslim Brotherhood embraces, absorbs and continues to protect. There was a very, very high-level prominent Muslim scholar called Ali Abdarazek in 1926. wrote a book called, you know, Islam and governance.

And in it, he's very, in detailed fashion, drawing on Muslim jurisprudence for 1400 years, says there is no system of governance within Muslim cultures, plural. And we know that when the Prophet Muhammad passed away, he doesn't allocate a particular caliph. He doesn't say there's going to be a caliphate. He doesn't say you must all be united under this one ruler,

because even in his time, there were Muslims living in Abyssinia, there were Muslims who were living in Mecca, and subsequent to him, there was an Umayyad caliphate out of Damascus, and there was another caliphate out of Mecca. And even in the days of the Muslim Brotherhood when they were founded, there were Muslims living in Indonesia, in Morocco, that did not come under Ottoman or Turkish rule.

So the argument is nothing other than propaganda, the argument is nothing other than their theorizing, of creating a thousand-year Reich, or in their context, a thousand-year caliphate, to try and control the rest of us. And if I may just say one other thing, their biggest enemies are not the Israelis, the biggest enemies are not really the Western countries,

it's fellow Muslims, because it's other Muslims that opposed them, and they went, and as we will go through some of the subsequent decades, they killed, they assassinated Egyptian prime ministers, Egyptian judges, and then they go and assassinate Jordanian politicians, Saudi politicians. And Al-Qaeda, as we've seen, leads that assassination culture into this great city here in New York, and 9-11 was a result of that. So, you know, their enemies, yes, ultimately become the West and ultimately what they call the small Satan Israel,

but it's really ordinary Muslims that oppose them and reject them. And the best evidence for that is, you know, we have two billion Muslims roughly. The Muslim Brotherhoods membership maximum, if we include this global following, is probably no more than five million, and I'm being very generous. So it's a small, I mean, I think it was Gramsci who said an organized minority can control a disorganized majority. So that's where we are. It's a very organized, coherent minority.

And very well motivated. I remember reading a book called Milestones. I remind me who it's by, he's very closely connected to it. Say it's Qatub, yeah. Yes. Yeah. And the thing is, I think part of the problem and why we don't understand these things very well is we've been conditioned.

I don't know whether it's Hollywood or whether it's just human brains or whether it's World War II or whatever, but we have this vision that the people who want to fight us or kill us or they do so because they're evil, they're motivated by evil. But when you read milestones, you go, oh, this makes a lot of sense. because they actually believe that Islam is good and it's the light and it must be brought to everybody because everybody will benefit. And therefore, you know, if you have to kill some people, and that's basically every evil, everyone who's done evil in history has been motivated by something like this, right? Yes. Hannah Arndt writes about this after she observes the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the 1960s trying to understand the Nazis. They never saw themselves as bad people or as evil people. most Nazis just said we were doing our jobs, you know.

And that's the danger when you abandon your own conscience and you think you're just doing your job. And the problem with lots of religious people is they think we're just doing God's command. And there's a real danger there that you can end up following, say, for example, in the case of Iran, the Ayatollah, by abandoning your own sense of what's right, what's wrong, what sits well in your heart.

So we have these two dangers that I'm just doing my job in a secular sense and I'm doing God's command in the religious sense. And again, Voltaire was very critical of that mindset. But between, you know, those two extremes, I think that there's an important truth that you're referring to, Constantine. It's that, yes, Sayyat Qutub came out of America, by the way. You know, he spent two years in Colorado and Washington, D.C. He too was a schoolteacher.

What is it with you, boys, man? This is what children do to you. You see, it's not Islamism, that's the problem. It's you like. No, it's the kids. That's how they drive the nuts. It's the next generation. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, and then the Egyptian government sends him here to get training to become a school's inspector.

And what's really interesting that he leaves America worse than he'd arrived. And then he goes, obviously, and writes this famous book, you know, Ma'alim Votroko, milestones, as you rightly put it. I was going to say, when Douglas Murray was a friend, he used to talk about the fact that someone wanted to translate Milestone as pebbles along the way, giving a sense of warmth and journey and who hates pebbles. But anyhow, so Milestones is this kind of critical text. Saeed Qutub leaves America, I think, in 1951 with several big problems.

We talk about incels now, right? I mean, I think he was the OG in cell because he refuses to get married, refuses to have relationships with women. And when he was in hospital here, he writes in his book about what I saw in America, you know, America that I write it to her. He says how women are voluptuous, and women, you know, want to dance with him,

and women are showing his thighs to him. In other words, he opposes the entire freedom of women to dress however they wish to dress here. That disturbs him deeply. And he goes back and he writes against the strength of women, the presence of women, the charisma of women. So that's the first thing he takes from America, a real hatred for American women.

I think we'd call that misogyny in our day and age, but that's the first thing he takes away. The second thing he writes about after leaving America is something called social justice in Islam, which is really weird for most of us who grew up reading Islamic, classical Islamic literature.

We don't have a thing called social justice. In the Aristotelian sense, we have justice. And in the Quranic sense, we have Aadal again and again, just justice, because justice is unful. to people of all backgrounds, it's unfair to whether you're women or to men or whether you're black or white, but he comes up with this social justice, which was then a big movement here in America. So he Americanizes Islam and writes about social justice. And the third thing he takes

away from America and then he takes that into the prisons of Egypt, which produces milestones, is a deep, deep venom towards African Americans. And he calls them the N-word. It refers to them as having this primal instincts and therefore producing jazz music to which monkeys and others can dance. And so he leaves America with this deep sense of deep hatred towards some of the most important things in America. You know, freedom, the justice system, which he manipulates. And then obviously, you know, the racial equality movement that was coming to force, you know, under the leadership of Martin Luther King and others. He then goes back to Egypt and this is the strangeness of the man. He says the Egyptian government is not a Muslim government.

He says most Egyptians are not Muslims. He makes what we call takfir or excommunicates them from Islam. And he says only a small vanguard of him and people around him are true believers and they're the ones who are in prison being tortured. Now, in an attempt to be fair to the man, he's had a hard time in America. He goes to Egypt, gets put into prison. and the Egyptian government tortures him, and his contention is, how can a Muslim government torture me for trying to be a better Muslim, trying to bring about an Islamic state?

It's your point earlier, Constantine, that I'm only being a good Muslim, why am I being tortured? But the Egyptian government's point was he and his organization had supported the assassination of the Egyptian Prime Minister, several Egyptian judges, and they had found 150 cases of ammunition contained by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the question from the authorities is what's this for and they said oh it's to blow up the Zionists in neighboring Palestine but the government was convinced that this was going to be used in Egypt so they saw them at the terrorist organization and Milestones his author Qutob is put into prison and that's when

he comes out and he writes the milestones and commentaries on the Quran that justify the assassination of the Egyptian president again Gamal Abduh al-Nasar and calls every Muslim government in the world non-Muslim. In other words, you are a legitimate target for us. It's not just the Israelis, by then only a three-year-old state, and it's not just the Americans,

which had then supported Israel, so they now turn against America more viciously, and it's not just the British imperialist or the European colonizers. It's every Muslim government, and you too must go, and your supporters, which means ordinary Muslims,

which takes us back to the original point that, you know, Islam and ordinary Muslims are the biggest threat to the milestones led worldview. You mentioned milestone, and I should say something else, because in around 1966, Sayyat Qutub was hanged by the Egyptian government for writing milestones. We should also remember that his brother, Muhammad Qutub, then begs the Saudis for asylum, and they, being generous Arabians in the Gulf, if you visited, you'll see the hospitality,

the warmth, the kindness of the people, they take him in. And his thank you to them is to help create Osama bin Laden. So as a teacher, sorry, again now as a professor at a university, and I'm guilty of this too. He radicalizes an entire generation of Saudis. So from milestones to his younger brother, Muhammad Qasub, goes to Saudi Arabia, and he physically teaches Osama bin Laden

in the university in Jada and a whole cohort of young Saudis who were mostly Salafis mostly focused on their own salvation and upkeeping rituals and are politicized from this Egyptian bug that comes out of Sayat Khadrothop. So the book your reference is really important, Constantine, because it gets exported into Saudi Arabia and through Egypt and Saudi Arabia around the rest of the Muslim world. Most of the useful information I get in a week doesn't come from reading.

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and they're listening to what you're saying and they're thinking to themselves, well, why do these ideas resonate? There must be something there for it to resonate as much as it does and for it to have a brotherhood of 5 million people. Excellent question. It resonates because this organised minority of 5 million, again being generous, are able to message to a disorganized, disparate, decentralized, decentralized, because we don't have a Pope. We're much more kind of live and let live, much more individualistic, to point to our concerns and say, Here's a problem, here's the solution.

So the Muslim Brotherhood is renowned for saying, al-Islam, who al-Hal, which is Islam is the solution. Again, in a thousand-plus years of Muslim history, no one said Islam was the solution. Islam with a small eye always means a state of mind. It's supposed to encourage peace and submission to God rather than being a solution for a problem. Very few problems have solutions.

It's supposed to be healing. So they've created this new slogan, that Islam is the solution, al-Islam-Hal. And then so you pick a problem, Francis. You find Muslims being killed, say, in Kashmir. Well, they're not being killed because they're Muslims. They're being killed because they're caught between India and Pakistan and a geopolitical conflict over borders.

The Muslim Brotherhood will say, no, no, no, they're being killed because they're Muslims and the solution is what we said in the 1920s. Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution. That's their slogan. our greatest desire is jihad and our pathway is martyrdom. And they have this entire slogan, which mobilizes and allows ordinary people to think,

oh, right, we actually have a solution that meets violence with violence. So in the West, they will say there's massive Islamophobia, a term that they helped create, by the way. So Islamophobia is their term. And now if there's homophobia and if there's Islamophobia too. So if the Jewish people are complaining about anti-Semitism, where we're going to complain and become victims of Islamophobia.

And the way you confront that is by making Islam the solution, but focusing on your Muslim identity, believing in jihad, and seeing the Quran as a constitution. So that's why they succeed because their messaging is compelling, and it's a negative messaging. We're against all of these governments, remove all of these 56 Muslim nation states, remove Israel, remove America,

and what will have a much better state, because we will give you Islam as a solution, and ultimately we'll try and create paradise on earth. Now again, here's the other problem. For 1,400 years, open up any classical Muslim text. There's no reference to the Quran as the Constitution because that denigrates and demeans holy texts. It's scripture, it's the word of God.

It's not a political document. But that's what they've made it to be, and therefore it resonates with ordinary Muslims, most of whom sadly can't distinguish between Islam the faith and then this new thing that emerges and calls itself, Islam too. So there's this blur between the faith and the political

ideology that emerges under Marxist and Nazi influences, and that's why it resonates. It also resonates because it's very modern. If you meet some of the elder Muslims in, say, Bukhara, you were talking about your visits to Central Asia. You know, they're wispy-bearded, long,

cap-wearing, mystical, loving, sure, they're socially conservative, but they're not going to blow you up. well, they never used to. But the Muslim Brotherhood types, you know, they wear suits, they wear ties, they're often clean-shaven, they're thoroughly modern, and they have this cancer of deep, you know, hatred for the Western fellow Muslims. You want to say something else? No, no, I find it very interesting because when you're talking about this, it triggered something in me, which is the Muslim brother, not the Muslim Brotherhood. What's the one that

Muhammad Ali was a part of? Nation of Islam. Nation of Islam. So, the Muslim, so, the Muslim, when you're talking, it triggered something in me about, is the nation of Islam very similar to the Muslim Brotherhood? Is it based on their text? That's a great question. It's a great question because the nation of Islam, while not based on their texts, drew inspiration from this movement in Africa,

i.e. Egypt, that is separatist, that is confrontational. But, and they were obviously focused here in America, but the nation of Islam took other positions They believed that Elijah Muhammad was a prophet, and therefore the prophet Muhammad was not the final prophet of God. So in creedal terms, they found themselves much further on the outside of global Muslim identity, but they did look at Egypt.

But what I would hold up, I think, as a thought for us to all think about is, Nation of Islam produces someone like Malcolm X, you know, a household name in America to this day. All of my students look up to him, talk about him. But Malcolm X, finds himself not only just in disagreement with the nation of Islam, but he goes to a Mecca, and there is where he finds white people, black people, brown people side by side. And I think

it's worth remembering that the radicalization agenda of both the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the nation of Islam, to your question, Francis, doesn't resonate in the deepest Islamic old places such as Mecca, because Malcolm X thinks white people with blonde eyes and with so blonde hair and blue eyes are literally the devil, and he wrote extensively about it, that they represent the devil and demonic impulses. He goes to Mecca and suddenly finds himself praying beside Bosnians, between Russian Muslims, Palestinian Muslims, many of whom are, you know, in his world white, and he can't make sense of it.

How is it the devil is present? So he goes to this de-radicalization process, and it comes out of Mecca and returns here, and has it, you know, talks in Martin Luther. the king's terms that forgive your white brothers and sisters and work more closely with them, which is what the woke culture today won't allow us to embrace, because we've all got the original sin of being born white and straight. So Malcolm X is deregicalized. And I think just as the nation of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood are rejected in Mecca, and there's a strong message, I think, for all of us in the West, if Mecca, the UAE, Egypt, and other Muslim countries

can reject them and de-radicalize their population, what stops us in the West from saying we too will reject what came out of Nazism and Marxism here in the West? And just talk about that part of it. By the way, what you're saying is something I've been banging on about since you've informed and since my own travels and experiences with people from those countries, which is like, all I want is for Europe and America to treat this problem the way Muslim countries do. And I think we have a lot fewer problems. And I think it's an easy sell as well, right?

Because so many people are afraid of like being bigoted or prejudiced, but if we all I ever say is why don't we just act towards this problem the way Muslim countries do. You know, I think it's a reasonable request. Yeah, but that's such a powerful request. Yeah. And it's a realistic request. And it also shows up the European far left for basically being in bed with the worst elements of the far right and Muslim countries in this case. the Muslim Brotherhood, you were talking earlier about the red-green alliance, you know, which helped the Iranian government today's come into power, which helped Hamas come into power.

So let me come back to something else, which is you've repeatedly referenced influence from Nazism and Marxism. And I think this is a good opportunity to go back to the historical storytelling. 1928, it's founded. How do you get from that to then, where we've got to today? Because it's a great question because it links to your earlier question. By 1966, the Egyptian government, and you can fault the Egyptian government for a whole range of things, but you can't say they didn't understand the Muslim Brotherhood. Because Gamal Abdu Nasser, who was then the president, was part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And War Sadat, who they killed, was in regular conversations with both Hassan al-Banna and Sayat Qutub. So they knew the beast they were dealing with. they were part of it. They turned against it and they both took, Sadat especially, literally a bullet from members and affiliates of the wider affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Sadat's case, we're making peace with Israel. But in it is in the 60s when the Egyptians finally say we've had enough of this movement, in the name of charity, in the name of education, in the name of religion, they basically want to turn Egyptian Muslims against each other and against their own government.

We're going to ban them. At that point, large numbers of these newly urbanized doctors and engineers start to move out of Egypt, some expelled, some welcomed out of hospitality and kindness of the Arabian Peninsula countries. And they go to the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and to some extent, small numbers of them also go to Bahrain. And there they begin to radicalize a new generation of native peoples. But many of these Egyptians who are rejected from institutions, especially universities in Egypt, surprise, surprise, want to come to universities in the UK and in the US.

So they end up because they're now political refugees and they're persecuted, some of the best institutions in the US and in the UK welcome the Muslim Brotherhood and say, you know, here's a funding mechanism. you know, please set up whatever institutions you want to set up here, but you're now American citizens and British citizens. Meanwhile, from the Arab countries, both the Egyptians, but more recently, and I think more directly and consistently and strategically, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the President of the United Arab Emirates, and Deputy Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, both have been consistently raising this agenda

from Barack Obama here as the president in those days, to David Cameron, to Boris Johnson, to Theresa May, to Liz Truss, and now with the current British Prime Minister, whose name escapes me. Kirstama. Kirstama. So here in New York is just so irrelevant. You just don't think about it.

I mean, he's very charismatic. Yes. Somehow that has been lost in the rest of the world. But so with Kier Stama and his cohort, Yvette, Cooper and others. And the response is always twofold. One, they're not a terrorist organization. And two, we know better. To which the Emirates and the Saudis and the Egyptians feel offended

and refer to this long history that these guys start off, as they did, by the way, in Gaza, which is an excellent example. Ahmed Yassin goes to Gaza and in 1971 starts a charity. So why would the Israelis oppose a charity? Why would the Brits oppose various charitable organizations functioning in the UK? Similarly in the US, same model. They run charities. So Ahmadiyazin throughout the 70s runs charities.

And then he expands into running a few mosques and a few schools, a few universities. And he's just like a provider of welfare where the state has failed. Why would you be opposed to him? But within 15 years, he had created an entire net. network of teachers, doctors, medical practitioners, and dependent families on him, ranging in the hundreds of thousands, and then boom, in the late 80s, Hamas. Now you have a paramilitary wing, which is something the Muslim Brotherhood has, a paramilitary wing, much like the Waffen SS, the Nazis had. So he now has a paramilitary, that was Hamas. That's how it was born in the late

80s. We are seeing the same thing across the west. So this is where the UAE and Bahrain and to some extent now the Jordanians, the Kuwaitis, the Egyptians, have been lobbying Western governments, government to government, saying, what you're all saying is a charitable organization. The model is that in Gaza, they've then become terrorists. In Egypt, they became terrorists. In our countries, they did exactly the same thing. So, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed and others went to universities with these extremist Muslim Brotherhood people. And they've seen, we've seen this movie before, and we're warning you, this is what's going on in the West. So you've got to shut this operation down because from here you are giving them platforms, media platforms, social media platforms

with which they're radicalizing our populations against us and the wider Muslim world. And yes, they're anti-Semitic too, and yes, they support Hamas and terrorism too, to which the intelligence agencies, and I've got to be blunt, and I can do that because I'm here, and we're here in America where we don't have to fear a knock on the door, that our intelligence agency is basically quietly message, and this is MI6. and others that this is the chatter inside government that having these guys here, the Muslim Brotherhood and its various supporters, gives us leverage against Arab governments, because we can say to them, if you do A, B, and C, we will unleash these dogs with greater amplification here against

you. So do you want the barking of the Brotherhood dogs to increase, or if you want us to work, you know, on a range of sensitive issues, let's kind of balance it out. So it's very similar Well, hold on it. Sorry to jump in. You're saying something what I think is quite extraordinary, which is that the government of Britain and the intelligence services of Britain are fostering and allowing this extremism to flourish in Britain because it gives them leverage in their dealings with Arab countries? Yes. Yes. That's extraordinarily irresponsible and dangerous, isn't it? That's a statement of fact. And the first individual to highlight this was, and she's no friend of mine,

but we've got to be honest, and highlight her scholarship on this was Melanie Phillips in her book, Londonistan. She highlights this danger. Subsequently, Michael Goves highlighted it. Subsequently, several recent ministers in the Home Office who left their posts after the last general election have confirmed this in private conversations. But all of this is backed up by our intelligence agencies

by basically saying, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, We don't think the Muslim Brotherhood and the various Arab opposition parties inside these countries are terrorist and we can't ban them because they're not terrorist organizations yet. So we don't have the evidence. And nor, by the way, do we have the resources

to go and find out what they're really after because we've got 40,000 plus al-Qaeda supporting terrorists, real terrorists. We can't go further down and investigate what is basically an intelligence asset for us. Having these groups here, the Bahraini opposition,

the Emirati opposition, opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt. They're all Muslim Brotherhood people. They call themselves human rights activists, but they're all Muslim Brotherhood people that are an intelligence asset for the British government to leverage against our allies in the Arabian Peninsula. It's a complicated and dirty game, I'm afraid, but that's where we are. You know how at the beginning of every year, people say, this is a year things change. Then by February, everything looks the same. If you've been seeing on a business idea for months or even years. 2026 is your line in the sand. The most common thing that separates people who talk about

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That's Shopify.com. .uk.uk slash trigger. So basically, the British, our government have allowed an existential threat to be on our soil so that we can foster and we can have an advantage over our, allies in the Middle East. I mean, that's, isn't that suicidal, Ed? That's how the strategy started in the 1980s. It's suicidal because they thought they could contain

it. Our government thought it would be just, you know, a group of guys sat in North London, smoking in Edgware Road. But what happened, and you're absolutely right, it's suicidal, because these guys didn't just stick around in Edgware Road. They went out onto campuses and started radicalizing and recruiting a new generation of British, born and raised Muslims, and now we're on generation three, whereas the intelligence agencies thought that they would be just nice local assets they could use to bully the Emirates,

bully the Saudis, bully the Jordanians, bully the Kuwaitis, bully the Bahrainis. But now this beast is out of control, exactly as those countries have told us that they've seen this movie before. You start with charity and schools and mosques, and it becomes a suicide mission, and that's what's happened.

7-7 was a direct outcome of that, that these guys then think, guess what? We're going to, we're going to, you know, we're going to now take hostage the British government and its foreign policy. We're now going to take hostage Kiyah Stama and his foreign policy in relation to Iran and what we're seeing play out in the Middle East. So what the British government and the intelligence agencies thought was an asset against Arab governments and disregarded our government's advice has now turned on the British government itself. How can they be so naive? Did they not see the way that this was started, the way it's

spread through the Muslim world, the chaos and misery that they created, the terrorism. When was the last time we met the average British civil servant? No disrespect intended. But these are simple folk. They come out of the shires. They want to have a respectable life. They pursue what's called lines of least resistance, you know, where there's no controversy. They don't go into government to be accused of being racist, Islamophobic.

So what we're discussing, I like to think we're all free people in the free country, freely exploring ideas. They can't have this conversation. They're terrified of saying what you've just said that this is suicidal because it would be seen as questioning the policies of their older bosses that brought them into this job and now potentially appearing in Islamophobic to their Muslim colleagues and worse having to admit that the government has made mistakes and therefore do something about this problem, which is to start identifying the Muslim Brotherhood. influence on now almost two million plus Muslims, some of whom, a Muslim Brotherhood, ideologues, are now in the government, are now in the House of Lords, are in the House of Commons,

are in the British media space, and this cancer is spreading. But the government, if it admits what you've just asked them, Francis, to admit, that this is a disastrous policy, it means, A, they're responsible and B, they must do something about it. Safer to say, this is complicated. But there must be a point where, look, eventually you've got to address what's actually happened. This is why I disagree with you, and this is the point I was going to make. You say there must come a point, but the point has come the other way. I mean, we saw this in some ways the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was actually very helpful,

because one of the things that happened is Peter Mandelson, who was implicated in a weird relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. That caused West Streeting, the health secretary, to, for some reason, release his private communications with Peter Mandelson, in which we saw that they talk openly in private about the fact that they can't get elected in certain seats without pandering to the Muslim vote. So what you have now, actually, is a set of incentives

that actually drive them in the opposite direction, as exactly you're saying. They've created a problem that now determines how they behave politically, and far from having an incentive to admit what the problem, is, on the contrary, they will pander more as this problem gets worse. And I would just want to, but surely, there's not a human element, Ed, where you look at the bombings of the Ari, and the Arianna Grande concert in 2017, and you see the bodies of little girls getting carried out. Is there not a part of you that just goes, no more?

Is there not simple human decency? That's where you deploy MI5, and you put greater results. in monitoring the terrorist or the physical violence threat, and that would be their response. We've allocated more resources, we've put the prevent program into place, and that's where the human element comes in. But the biggest strategic piece is that you've intentionally fostered and fed this beast, and now you've radicalized Muslim populations

in at least 45 to 50 constituencies in northern parts of England, And, you know, I tried to do this in my last book among the mosques, warn what's going on inside these communities. And the feedback was a negative media campaigning attacks from major Islamist organizations in the UK. Labour MPs very reluctant to have this conversation. And now what we're seeing is that the human response is, you know, again, in the spirit of being free and not censored, the human response seems to be political parties that are breaking, away from the Tory party reform and several others that are saying enough is enough, which is a dangerous response because it means maybe on the left we will see what you call the red-green

alliance, the far-left greens with the far-right Islamists coming together to combat what's going on on the right of the Tory party, which is not what you want in the country, but all of this comes from that Egyptian moment in the 1920s, is the spiraling effect, the snowball effect. of the power of ideas and the nature of identity and the moment in which we find ourselves. And that's, you know, it's not complicated to say we've got to go back to that pluralist space of classical liberalism where we live and let live,

but we are loyal to our nation states and a set of ideals that allowed all of us, all three of us, to come together here as free people in a free country. And coming back a little bit to the history, what is the nature of the links between German Nazism and the Muslim Brotherhood? Yeah, again, see, that's a fantastic question,

and most people won't ask that because they don't want to go into their thought space which says, all right, the Muslim Brotherhood has connections to Nazism, and it does. The connections are as follows. Hassan al-Bannas, the founder, his brother was called Abdharahmahn al-Banna.

And Abder-Rhaman was in regular contact with Haj Amina al-Husaini, who was then the Mufti of Jerusalem, And Haji Amina al-Husaini, as the Mufty of Jerusalem, went and met Adolf Hitler, supported the Nazi movement, disseminated Mime Kampf, and made sure that he made several broadcasts through prominent Arab platforms to ensure that Arabs were supporting the German Nazis and against the Brits and the French for colonial reasons. But it goes worse and it goes further than that. At this point, you could say, you know what, they made the wrong call. there was a war against Britain, they were British imperial or colonized subjects and they wanted to be against it and they backed the wrong horse, the Germans. But it's actually more sinister, it's

actually more sinister and deeper than that. And it's to do with the following that, Hajamina al-Husani supports the Nazis anti-Jewish platform. And he argues that Jewish people have no right to settle in Jerusalem. So he is behind the Holocaust and supportive of the Holocaust. And I've met his grand family, grand family, grandchildren in New York, sorry, in Jerusalem and we've had this conversation. So what I'm saying isn't just concocted, it's historically proven, and it's known in the family that the mistake was made to support the Holocaust. So that connection to the Palestinian radical Mufti via the brother of Hassan al-Banna

then leads to them inviting him to come and settle in Egypt, but worse, a leading Nazi Von Ellis is also then invited, whom name became Omar Amin, in Arabic, to convert and come and settle in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood's protection. Those are two direct connections of the Muslim Brotherhood to living physical Nazi supporters and the entire movement supporting the Nazis. But the real connection is ideological and geographical. In other words, what was going on in in neighboring Palestine at the time, they openly support the expulsion of Jewish people and Jewish people settling in Palestine.

And then the Muslim Brotherhood declared jihad on the state of Israel, and they go and fight in that jihad against the state of Israel because of their earlier Nazi leanings that we cannot have Jews settling in Israel. We must remove them. We must complete the job that Adolf Hitler had started. The second point, which is the more ideological point,

is just as the Nazis believed in a supremacy, they believe in a supremacy of just their type of Muslim Islamists. Just as the Nazis said, we want to create a thousand-year Reich for Germans and for Europe, led out of Germany, they believe in a thousand-year caliphate, led out of Egypt, led by Egyptians, not the Meccans, the original Muslims, but the Egyptians. And just as the Nazis believed in using violence and being expansionists, they believe in the same thing.

And we've already mentioned the Jew hatred, you know, on which they have the supremacist standing. But here is the real issue, I think, that we've got to bear in mind so we don't kind of make mistakes as we're thinking about this, that just as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was sympathizing with the Nazis, aligning with the Nazis, becoming under Nazi influences, and giving protection to Nazis inside Egypt, you had in Mecca, in the Arabian Peninsula, And that's why I'm obsessed with the Arabian Peninsula, because it is the home of Islam. It's where it was born.

And I find Muslims there are much more interesting than Muslims in other parts of the world for a whole range of reasons. But just there, the Sharif of Mecca, who's a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, who's governing Mecca, at the same time, the true Arab, the real Arab in Mecca, in the Arabian Peninsula,

is in discussions with Chaim Weizmann, the head of the world Zionist organization, saying to him, Jewish people are welcome to come back to the region. You were from this region, and you know, and to Minna or Fina as Arabs say, you know, you're from us, you're among us, come back, and let's build the civilization together.

And that was going on at the same time as the Nazism in Egypt, but the Arabian Peninsula, which didn't come under occupation and had a kind of freer, more authentic expression of Islam, welcomes the Jewish people back. You can see the correspondence between whitesmen and the sheriff of Mecca.

What then happens in 1919 with the peace agreement in France, complicates matters, and then, you know, there's a turn against Zionism. But before we get to that point, we have to accept and admit that there are two narratives here. There's the Muslim Brotherhood narrative

of being Nazi sympathizers, and there's the Arabian narrative of the Shariq of Mecca that is welcoming Jewish people back to the region. And I think where we're seeing the Abraham Accords and what's going on in the UA is that narrative being amplified, that these are people from us,

they're welcome back to the region. And what we have to find is a way how Palestinians and Israelis learn to live side by side together. But that is not what the Muslim Brotherhood's Nazis wanted. They wanted the German agenda of obliteration, of killings, and therefore the participating in the 1947 War, led by the Muslim Brotherhood,

where they cross borders and go and fight the Jewish population that's trying to settle in then Palestine, now Israel. And one of the connections I can see between Nazism and the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology, It's a victimhood ideology. Correct. Correct. It's going back to a glorious past when things were greater.

You know, when there was a great German identity than the Germans were great. Hitler's project was that. We are victims of the economic crisis. We're victims of the migrants controlling everything. We're victims of Americanization. Muslim brothers say the same thing. You know, we're victims. We've got to go back to the glorious days, as they imagine.

them to be. And you have the solution and you have the final solution. Yeah, that's a great point. I hadn't thought about that. The solution. Yeah, that's a great point. The final solutions, what the Nazis called it, the Muslim Brotherhood calls it, Al-Islam, is the solution. Al-Hal, the solution, the only solution. One of the beauties I find about the Quran is that doesn't talk in this total terms. For example, the Quran always says, you know, nahdiaka, al-sirata-mustakim, we guide you to a straight path. Again and again, you know, it's, the indefinite article, A straight path. The Muslim Brotherhood goes for the path, the solution.

That's totalitarian, maximalist. It's a great point. The solution and the final solution. Because there will be a lot of people who are listening to this, Ed, who in the UK mainly or in other countries as well, and they'll be like, Ed, you're making great points. But why is it a lot of Muslim people in the UK don't come out and openly criticize and condemn?

this ideology. Because the moment they do, you will have members of the House of Lords now, at least eight members of Parliament now, large sections of the British media, as well as people in mosques condemn that the potential of someone coming up and taking a voice against the Muslim Brotherhood's ideologues in Britain. You'll be attacked as being a sellout, you'll be attacked as being, you know, all kinds of racial terms are used. And then, and, you know, I speak from personal experience. They, they sue you, they come after your assets, they target your family members. You become a pariah. And, you know, inside mosques, you're lumpooned as being against the community, again, the Muslim community, which I just think is total nonsense. Because, you know,

why should I be, you know, and again, from personal experience, why do I feel much more at home now, you know, among Muslims here in America, or among Muslims in today's Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Turkey, Kuwait, you know, countries I visit, totally at home because of this position against the Muslim Brotherhood. But the moment I'm in the UK, and I criticize the Muslim Brotherhood, suddenly, you know, online and physically I have fingers pointing at me saying, you're a sellout. I mean, what am I selling out to? UK is my country, the West is my inheritance, and our Arab friends, are both family and allies of us and Islam is our inheritance. And what am I selling out to?

Because the political ideology is so deeply ingrained. It's also the victimhood point you made earlier, Francis, that we can only vote labor or green. And to be totally blunt, it's a racism of low expectations. This is your place, know your place, and stick to it. You, you, this is who you vote for, this is your narrative, this is what we expect you to say, this is who you must protest against, these are the riots that you must participate. And if you defy any of that, how dare you?

We will call you a sellout and we will call you a government stooge. And that's the kind of pathetic, ugly, low, shambolic, flawed language that's thrown around rather than dealing with ideas and the consequences of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, both in the UK and further afield. But I'd go further than that, and I'd say that the ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of whom dominate Muslim discourse in the UK, don't want to see a Britain that is free,

don't want to see that a Britain that upholds this classical liberal inheritance, want to see a Britain that is weak, and, you know, Kiyos Darmus Britain, they are happier with the Britain that will not take positions on Iran's nuclear program. They are happier with the Britain that will not. that will not condemn Hamas

and will not participate in attempts to obliterate Hamas, they are happier with the Britain that is at odds with the United States of America and at odds with other powers that are taking a different direction. So I just think it's a, you know, people may not articulate it in such terms,

but that's the impulse. And that's the feeling. Choosing to spend an hour or two listening to a serious conversation rather than scrolling a feed of Hort takes says something about how a person thinks. It says they would rather try to understand something properly than have a quick opinion about it.

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Worth knowing is that Hillsdale is releasing a full course on Homer's Odyssey this July. Great Books 101 is a natural place to start before that lands. Go to Hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll. It's totally free. That's Hillsdale.org. Slash trigger. And you yourself are obviously an example of something that I think anyone is paying attention and will see, which is, you know, your book Among the Mosques,

you went around mosques around Britain and you reported effectively what you heard and saw there. And many of the things you saw were positive, and you also reported on the things that you saw were negative. And now you live in America. And this seems to happen to basically. anyone who says anything critical about this issue, they end up moving to another country. Because you feel yourself out of place. You feel yourself that you no longer welcome Constantine. And I remember a journalist from the BBC phoning me saying, you know, that they read among the mosques and they want to discuss it. Would I come on? And I said, sure, anything to amplify where

Britain is heading because I'm genuinely worried about partitions. I'm worried about entire areas saying, oh, this is only a Muslim area, you know, you who are not Muslim can't enter. And I'm genuinely worried about the prospects of this becoming an armed conflict in parts. I mean, 15, 20 years from now, that's where we're heading. So that was the conclusion.

And yet among the mosques as a book could not be discussed on the BBC because a very prominent Muslim broadcaster vetoed the interview saying, I won't interview him because what he's going to be saying, brings harm to the Muslim community. And so I find that approach to be troubling. You put the community above your country.

And that's not the way of being Muslim. Your loyalties to your nation-state, and you put the country first, and then you put whatever community you belong to, and we belong to multiple communities, plural. You know, as a professor here at Georgetown and Columbia, I have my kind of academic community, but I have other book communities,

and sure, my faith community is central to that. but it's not my first line of public defense. So that's why I think, you know, what's going on in Britain is really worrying that you can't take a position on this without being cast as an outsider in your own so-called community, which bolsters the problem. And I think you say it bolsters the problem. I also think it bolsters the response, too, because what you end up having is, I think the truth is nobody wants to say out loud. But much of the anti-immigration sentiment in Europe is not actually about immigration at all. I mean, no one complains about Ukrainians. No one complains about Hong Kongers.

No one really seems to care about that. There is a hardening against Islam in Europe. I mean, there's undeniable, I think. And I think it's probably partly because people who articulate the point of view that you articulate can't exist and be heard there. And so what we hear from are the people who have a Muslim Brotherhood style extremist world view. Yeah, and therefore there's a response to that. The response is, yeah, the ordinary people are sick and tired across the UK of being told that your kids in a school full of Muslims can't draw, you know, human images because it's somehow forbidden that, you know, that in parts of the NHS that you've got to cover your your arms. And if you're a nurse, you can't show parts because it's, frowned upon that the postman is a Muslim postman. The bank is dominated by Muslim clerks,

that the Uber drivers are all Muslims. And parts of Dewsbury and Oldham and Manchester and Keithley and East London and Luton, and these are prominent parts of the UK. They've changed. They've changed beyond recognition. My ancestors came, you know, originally from Yemen to India, from India, my father came to the UK

in 1953. He didn't want to come and see a UK changed. He came to the UK for what it was and he wanted to see the UK retain its own identity with its pluralism and its beautiful countryside. My friends now, both family in Yemen, family in Saudi Arabia, family in the UAE, are all terrified of coming to those parts of the UK and terrified of going to London because they no longer feel safe. So this concern about immigration, both legal and illegal that then consolidates Islamism isn't just a concern shared by ordinary British folk in in pubs and where else it's just lots of Muslims and others are feeling the same problem that this is not the country that we we want for our children and someone showed the image of the Prophet

Muhammad from Charlie Ebdo magazine as an illustration as a teaching point and that poor teacher has been in hiding for the last five years and how is that possible that showing a news agenda, a news item leads to a, you know, a pupil talking about it at home in passing, and then their parents organise mass demonstrations. The problem now is worse than it is in Pakistan. So I was just going to say, and one of the interesting things about that, the school is called Batley Grammar School, for those people who want to research it, is the education union refused to support him or get involved in any way,

which just demonstrates the culture of fear. That's tens of thousands of members represented by this union, and that will just spread further and further in the years to come. But I don't mean to be monococausal, but this is an effect, and the cause here is the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology of separatism, of confrontation, of supremacism, of not wanting to integrate, of not wanting to be loyal to the nation states, and interpreting the Sharia to be different from, for example, you know, one of the greatest Muslim scholars of our age, two come to mind, you know, One is Sheikh Abdullah bin Biyah, who's the Mufti of the United Arab Emirates, who's a prominent French-speaking philosophically inclined jurist.

And then there is a younger Muslim scholar called Dr. Muhammad bin Abd al-Qaim al-Isa, leader of the Muslim World League, heads up 57 Muslim countries out of Mecca. Now, Shah Abba al-Iraim al-Isa has again and again talked about the importance of respecting Auschwitz. He's been to Auschwitz. He's talked about the importance of Muslims recognizing the Holocaust and moving away from the extremism that the Muslim Brotherhood enforces on us. If more Muslim schools and Muslims were to embrace

the worldview of, you know, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul-Karima al-Isa or Sheikh bin Baya, who talks about the Sharia in the following terms, he says that wherever the sharia there's basically freedom of conscience, freedom to worship, freedom to own property, that you're physically secure. And you know who your family members are. You know, they call it Nassab in Arabic.

That's Sharia. By that definition, we already have Sharia in England. We don't need to be wanting to change laws and wanting to change the customs. The Arabs have a beautiful approach. We call it Urf, you know, the customs of a country. You don't change it. You maintain the customs and traditions and culture of a country, which is Urr. You don't drink alcohol. Okay, go and have an orange juice in the pub. But however hard it must be for some Muslims to accept, we have to recognize the, the, the, the, you know, the flexibility within Islam, that there was, you know, a Muslim interpretation that drinking, you know, Ibn Sina famously a great Muslim medical practitioner and philosopher used to drink. And some of the Muslims said that as even even seen as position. I'm not saying we should go and drink, but I'm just saying that flexibility exists. The Ottomans were famous on spirits. To this day, you go to Turkey, even at the highest levels of the so-called Islamist government, you know, people are drinking spirits. so there's a beer-drinking culture in mainstream Turkey to this day.

So why do British Muslims have to snigger and dismiss either Ibn Sina or the Turks or a more flexible approach to Islam from Sheikh bin Bayer or Shah Abdul Qadim al-Isa and other big luminaries in the Muslim world and say, we are going to do what's been working in the villages of Pakistan and we're going to impose the villages of Pakistan on the rest of the country. And with that, we're going to bring the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and further radicalize our younger generation. And that's the worst combination you've got there,

you know, the remotest parts of Pakistan combined with the extremism of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Well, that's a very interesting point because as I'm listening to you talk, Ed, the ideology obviously is the main part, but it's also we need to discuss the cultural element of this. For instance, we saw with grooming gangs, it's predominantly a cultural phenomenon.

So how much of this is ideology and how much of this is, is cultures that we've imported from places like Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. Yeah, so I, the grooming gang thing just beggars belief, and I, to be, I just don't understand it. I really don't. But I'll say two things. When I was in some of those towns in the north in Rotherham and parts of Manchester, and I met, you know, well-meaning, you know, white working class people that had seen their young daughters, nieces, taken away in groomed and then used as sex objects, they would raise that with me.

And I put it in the book because my job isn't to filter. My job is to actually tell what I saw up there. My publishers said, we can't put this in the book because it's too explosive, it's too dangerous, it'll be interpreted as racist. So that was taken out of among the mosques because the publishing elite in London thought that was just too insensitive. although that's what was discussed by people I met in some of those towns. The second point is, and again, I know viewers in London will have,

or the UK more widely will have a kind of instinctive bad feeling me saying this, but we have to be true to what's true. When I raised this with imams in mosques, there was one particular imam at a mosque in Bradford who said to me the local police officer had asked him to raise this issue in the congregation and say, if you, you know, taxi drivers or Uber drivers, if you are giving a lift to a young girl, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, late at night after she's drunk, you know, don't make a move on her, don't disrespect her, let, you know, take her home, treat her as a child,

you know, and asking the amount to say all of that. said, I can't say that. And then the police's request was, well, why not? Because it's kind of safety and health issue and child protection issues. He said, because, you know, most of my congregation who are drivers and security guards have repeatedly said to me that these girls are hitting on them, that these girls wear miniskirts, that these girls are drunk, and these girls want the companionship of these men late at night. And therefore, if I'm seen to be siding with the girls against my congregation, my own job is at risk. And I just thought that was, you know,

sure it's weak, sure it's flawed, sure it's irrational, sure it's illogical, but the fact that he couldn't say it, nor could the authorities protect him for saying it, and the fear that he had from his drivers, but also the justification from the drivers. They're asking for it. Those are my only two observations. I mean, I just don't understand that culture enough

to be able to say how you could, as a father of two daughters, you know, how can you get yourself into that, sick position, you know, I have students, you know, who are now 18 to 21, 25, you just see them as daughters and children, you know, you just don't, so I can't get into that head, I'm afraid to be able to answer that question. Well, what it does raise is the issue we've been tiptoeing around this entire time, which is the big debate that I outlined at the beginning, and it's raging in the Muslim world

as much as in Europe and increasingly United States, which is, Is there a difference between Islam and Islamism? And you've laid out the case that the difference is vast, actually, and the overwhelming majority of Muslims don't subscribe to this view, there's been huge battles. And one of the things people always say, kind of from a woke perspective is, well, it's not a Muslim problem, because look, most of the victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslim.

And you explain why, because they're actually resisting this ideology. There are also other people who will say, well, Dad's had is a good example, for example. He's a former guest of the show, and he's a very smart man who will say, well, was, and I think Douglas, who you referred to as a former friend,

I hope that that relationship isn't entirely seven, but you know, we won't get into that, who will say, well, was Muhammad, in Islamist, was he a moderate Muslim? You know, he was a warlord, he took slaves, he married the wives of the people that he killed, et cetera. And so is someone following his example and some of the verses in the Quran that advocate for violence, that advocate for these things?

Is he a true Muslim or is he perverting the faith of Islam? And that seems to me the really central part of this discussion because obviously if you take that view, then in a country with a large Muslim population, what do you do? Likewise, if you take the view that you're advocating for, then it immediately creates a whole different set of policy prescriptions. So what do you say to people who say, well, someone who follows the example and the words of the Prophet Muhammad is not going to end up in your position, they're going to end up in the Muslim Brotherhood position. Yeah.

That's a great question. And if I made it the liberty of saying next time we meet, I should have a book out on this very subject. Look forward to it. Because it, my next book is focused on the life of the prophet. and tackling these very, very important and consequential questions that you put forth. So allow us to leave the details of tackling this head-on.

I'm not shying away from it because I think it's very, very important, and we've got to understand that in its time, in its context, and make our own decisions. But I say this, there's nothing that all of the scholarly references I gave you, whether it's Sheikh Mohammed bin Al-Qar al-Isa or Sheikh bin Bayer,

or Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE, or Shah Abdullah bin Zayed of the UAE who's pioneered in recent years this debate in diplomatic and public intellectual circles, or indeed the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Notice how they're all called Muhammad. And I go by Ed, but that's short for Muhammad too. So I like to think that all of us and most Muslims around the world, our life and my defense of classical liberalism and pluralism

is motivated entirely by the life of the Prophet Muhammad. There's nothing I say or I believe or I do takes away from my allegiance to understanding him and his loyalty to understanding Moses, Jesus and so on. But again, as I say, we should discuss this at greater depth and greater detail once the next book comes out, which is focused on this crux. And we will, but can you give us a little bit here?

Because, I mean, like I say, the Prophet Muhammad was a warlord. Was that fair? I take issue with the term. I think he was fighting defensive wars. I think he took the Jesus approach for 10 years of his life in Mecca. He was persecuted. His followers were killed.

He was tortured. His family members were expelled into Abyssinia. And he didn't respond. And then he moved to Medina. Again, he's not violent. And then the tribes in Mecca, and there were 14 major Jewish tribes, of which two Jewish tribes turn against him, ally themselves with the pagans of Mecca. And they mount an attack, an attempt to assassinate him, to kill him. And by then he'd survived 12 different assassination attempts.

So forgive me if I justify the fact that he then said, we're going to fight back. You know, after years of not fighting back, we're not a passive people. If we're attacked, we fight back, and that was his response. He said, we will fight back. And when he fights back, he warns those people, don't poison a whale, don't kill women, don't kill children, don't take down palm trees, fight those who fight you. And that's the verse in the Quran, you know, uctuluhum haithuma taqvthum of them, fight them wherever you find them attacking you.

Don't attack innocent. So there are rules of engagement. So I just don't think calling him a warlord or Gad Saad's argument are actually, you know, fully reflective of the truth. And for people like Gad Saad, I say that these are people who don't take their Judaism or their Shabbat seriously. They have a problem with their Judaism, and I think there's some projection going on there, that, you know, Judaism, Zionism, you know, Jewishness, Shabbat, it's all the same. So we'll just apply this mangled, mixed up approach to other faiths and say, they're just behaving like Moses and they're just

wrong. I just, I disagree with that worldview. And it's going to get complicated and we might have a very big disagreement on this issue, but I think we've got to discuss this. So every condition that the Prophet Muhammad gave for whether it's fighting or whether it's marrying. And I, you know, I also don't think he married Ayesha and she wasn't seven, she wasn't nine. The evidence suggests that she was much older. And I go through all of this and I'm researching this as we as we speak. So I just don't think that those caricatures against the prophet and therefore by extension saying two billion Muslims are somehow supporters of that kind of figure who is described in the Quran's the

rhamathletal il an an anewan as mercy unto mankind he goes i mean his wife is jewish sophia one of his wife is jewish so he has a son called ibrahim named after abraham and so there are hundreds of examples to the contrary um so you don't have to agree with me but you can say that there is another interpretation and the there is another way of being, and I think that's hard to refute. And for people like Gad Saad and Douglas Murray, if they want to conflate Islam and Islamism, that's their prerogative. But, and in a free world, they're able to do that. But the danger in that is you end up making two billion innocent Muslims, your enemies.

We make the threat much bigger than it actually is, and we take on 57 Muslim nation states and say, you're all part of the problem. Whereas, as we discussed during this conversation, it's actually the Emirates and others who are the spearhead to saying the West has a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood, I've got to deal with the problem of what it is, Islamism, Muslim Brotherhood ideology from Al-Qaeda to Hamas, and the Brotherhood included, and not ordinary Muslims that include,

you take a pick of ordinary Muslims, I know, Nadia Hussein, the household, Baker, to prominent football players Mo Salah, yeah, and others. So I just think, you know, it's up to us to be sensible about this. Yeah, I think it's really important. And I'm only asking this question for the same reason that you articulated earlier, which is we have to be true about what's true, right?

And I'm putting to you, I am very much actually on your side. I grew up in Uzbekistan for part of my life. And, you know, Soviet Muslim countries are a little bit different, but, you know, you go there and you see the extremism isn't tolerated there. And so they don't have a problem. Now, I mean, the advantage a lot of Muslim countries have is they are authoritative. authoritarian regimes, so they can be pretty hard line about things like freedom of speech. For example, they don't have freedom of speech.

If you want to preach extremism in a mosque, you're not going to be allowed to do that. We've tried democracy in Gaza, in Iran, Tunisia, even in Kuwait. The result was always the Muslim Brotherhood. And that's why I think countries such as the UAE and others that, A, I wouldn't classify as authoritarian, but B, that want to open up their countries more to a classically liberal place, want to see the Muslim Brotherhood problem gone. Germany could not hold its elections for as long as there was an active Nazi party. That party had to be banned, and now we have free and fair elections in Germany.

I think the same applies. We've got to remove the Muslim Brotherhood threat, which is being encouraged in the West. And they then say to Arab and Muslim countries, well, why don't you have elections and why don't you have the centralists? I'm not saying the UAE needs to become a democracy tomorrow. What I'm saying is that this issue is easier to deal with. in a non-democratic country. But the problem for us in the West is we now have a significant population of Islamists. Yes.

And we are democracies. Yes. And that makes us uniquely vulnerable to this problem because we cannot take, by our standards, fairly drastic measures that seem to be required to deal with this problem. Do you see what I'm saying? I do and I don't. I do in European countries. And I think it's, I agree it's going to be tough. but if we don't deal with it now, it's going to be tougher.

Right. Impossible, some might say. Yeah, if it's impossible, then Europe's finished. Yes. To save Europe, we've got to deal with this. And I don't agree with you because I see here in the US a greater willingness to address this problem. Whatever misgivings we may have about the Trump administration, it's actively gone out, studied the problems,

consulted experts, and identified the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization is now in multiple jurisdictions. in Sudan and elsewhere, but it will also target the Muslim Brotherhood and its operations in Texas and in Florida, and it may move to other parts of the country. So what's the difference between the US and the UAE or sorry, the US and the UK, is one of political will? No. Go ahead. It's population size, yeah, amount of land, the types of Muslims that you have here are different. You have a much more middle class Muslim population. I can agree with that, sure. But I'm not. I can agree with that, sure.

Okay, that's fair. That's fair. So all these things really, really matter. That's fair. And even so, as we sit here recording this, this episode will go out sometime after we've recorded. In the time that we've been here on this trip, there have been a significant number of Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States. They're not being covered by the national media in the way that I certainly think they should be. But the point I'm trying to make to you is you have a much better environment for dealing with this issue.

And nonetheless, you have a giant problem. and it will grow. It may know, I hope it won't grow. Why wouldn't it grow? Because I think to part of your point, American Muslims are much more integrated. They're much more patriotic. It's easier to be loyal to the constitution.

I mean, in the UK, what are we supposed to be loyal to? Yes, this is a huge problem. The Englishness problem, which you write about in your book. You know, so there is this, you know, how do you become English? What are British values anyway? You've dealt with this, right? The Englishness versus Britishness debate that keeps coming up. Whereas here it's actually easier, you know.

So that I think is a massive bonus on the side of this country. I also think, and I say this as someone who loves England, I just think there's a cynicism in the UK when it comes to liberty or freedom or defence of the realm or the greatness of British history or the potential for what the country can become again. And you see that written all over Kea Stama's face, right, face, right, he's just never quite sure as to what to say and just like a rabbit

caught in the headlines constantly. That doesn't exist here. There's an openness. And, you know, so I don't want to give, you know, examples of individuals that talked about this, but the point is that there is an optimism and an openness and a willingness to accept others. You know, for those of us who are English speakers by birth, we're at home here. You know, I hope you both feel like that when you're on the streets of New York or further afield. But in a way, we just don't in the parts of our own country because of this cynicism and division. So I just think the U.S. isn't, let's not name him, but a prominent UK left-leaning media commentator came to America too. And he went to pray at the houses of Congress.

And while he was on Friday press, he met American Muslims who were in the sea. CIA and who are in the Pentagon. And as a leftist person born and raised in the UK, he just couldn't make sense of that. How is it, you're in the CIA and you're in the Pentagon, you serve this country, and how could you be Muslim? Because for this leftist guy from England, being Muslim was a political identity that I've got to be anti-American and I've got to fight American soldiers and I can't possibly be in the CIA because that's my arch enemy.

But hundreds of Muslims are in the CIA and thousands serve the armed forces here. And I think that's the success story, and you know, thousands are in the FBI and elsewhere, which we just don't have in the UK to be able to point to. And I think the Americans, you know, the non-establishment of religion calls makes it, the Islamist project just doesn't take off because you're never going to establish your Islamism in this country. They just don't want religion at state level. They want it at individual level. And I also think, to your point, Americans are stronger in dealing with this.

You know, they will kill you. they will take out guns. They will fight you in a way that I just think in England we're much more reluctant. So here's a question. Let's say Keir Starma calls you up tomorrow and goes, Ed, I want you to be the Tsar to tackle this problem. What policies would you implement that would actually help deal with this? Real world solutions. Okay, firstly, Keir Starma won't do that.

It's a thought experiment. We're in the realm of fantasy. You're allowed three dragons to deal with that problem as well. But to return to the realm of reality where the problem is growing, if we're looking at three issues, then the first would be to map the mosques because on current trajectories, about 20% of British and mosques are controlled by Islamists.

If we're defining Islamists, as I did now, kind of based on their interpretation of Sharia, and their definition for a state and their separatism. 20% of mosques. So you map the mosques and you remove the leadership, you confiscate the property, you put in place up from other mosques that are much more moderate, control of those mosques,

which sends a serious signal to Muslims in the UK, as happened in Germany, as happened in Austria. So we have precedent that just because you're a charitable organization doesn't mean we can't confiscate property because it's advocating Nazism, Jew hatred, removal of the British government and supporting terrorism abroad, right? So that should not be complicated. That's the first thing we should be doing the mosques.

Secondly, there are 50% of the existing mosques that support blasphemy laws. In other words, you can't insult the Prophet Muhammad. In the way that you just asked me a question, now I might have had an internal reaction that was uncomfortable because that's not how I see my prophet, but you're free and at total liberty to ask that question, however you wish to, and I am at liberty to defend defend it, you know. And that's the limit, right? You know, you can't ask for my killing,

I can't ask for your killing. That's the liberal consensus that we have. But in 50% of the mosques, there is this attitude of you can't insult the profit. If we do, we will kill you. And that's why this teacher in battle is under hiding. Those mosques, whether we impose higher taxes, or whether we remove the imams, or whether we prosecute the leaders of those mosques, have got to be confronted as though this is not the attitude in 15, of our mosques in the UK that we will tolerate. And these are not Islamist mosques, but this is a wider creeping problem that also leads to terrorism.

And if I said this in the UK, I would have physical attacks on my well-being for just even highlighting this threat because I'll be betraying community secrets. But my interest is in the country and in the civilizations and not in small. And the third and the final one, which we've been touching on repeatedly, is that Muslim Brotherhood offshoots, banks, there are two banks associated with them, not major banks, but more localized banks, charity organizations, schools, television platforms, individuals have all got to be identified, prosecuted, shut down, banned, the bank accounts suspended, the charitable status removed, make life hard enough so that a younger, and this

is going to take 10 to 15 years, the younger Muslim see, that is not our pathway. Now, we don't want to be on the receiving end of being up against our own country, our own civilization, the lands that have given us birth and protected us. Right now, if you're a Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, and if you're in those categories of the mosque leaders that I mentioned, you're a hero. You're organizing weekly protests. You're part of a global network. You have a message against America, message against Israel, message against your own government. And guess what? You've got the far left with you on the protests every weekend. You're not paying a price. and as long as those sectors are not paying a price,

the problem continues to increase. Ed, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. This has been a really important conversation. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? In my head, I've been thinking about this

just because I've been reading lots of Nietzsche, hence that point on willpower, having the political will. Nietzsche touches on this. Hegel is obsessed with this, and the Germans try to identify, but we in the kind of more empirical way of looking at the world don't, which is understanding the spirit, understanding souls, and why is there a spirit-led impulse to this arrogance?

Why is there a spirit, that says we must be superior, we must be better, we must confront, and why is there a spirit, or a temperament that's much more conciliatory, that much, that's much more peaceful, which I think was the prophet spirit, which is much more given to coexistence versus. So that's that part, call it psychology, call it the psyche, you know, we don't touch on because we just don't, you know, we're not comfortable discussing it and there's no way of us measuring it, so we don't go there. But I think behind everything we're discussing is a certain spirit of how are we to be, is a certain psyche. And I see this in Arabia, you know, with some of the Shu or the leaders of the Arabian countries. You see that, they're not just

looking at you as an individual. They're actually a lot. assessing your psychological state of being, and they're able to x-ray us as individuals and what's going on in our minds in a way that when we talk to one another, we don't, we're kind of judging each other by what we're saying and what we're doing rather than what we're feeling and what we're being. And I think that's something we don't talk about often. How do we elevate our sense of, the closest, I think, is empathy, and it's a weak closeness, but as an attempt to answering your tough question, Francis. Ed, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Make sure to join us on Substack where we carry on the conversation, and you get to ask Ed your questions. Do you think that the Muslim Brotherhood has already infiltrated government? Without doubt, two individuals come to my mind right now. And how do you know that, Ed, that they're connected to the Muslim Brotherhood?

Because the two individuals I'm referencing I knew them when I was with the Muslim Brotherhood. Wow.