Egypt ambassador asks UK to act on Muslim Brotherhood's significant influence

Tarek Adel says there has been no action on report published five years ago voicing concern about organisation

Tarek Adel, who is received by Queen Elizabeth II, is Egypt's ambassador to the UK. Getty Images

Egypt's ambassador to the UK has called for an "honest conversation" about the relationship between violent extremists and their ideological sympathisers in Britain and elsewhere.

Writing for this news site, Tarek Adel said there was a lack of focus in the UK on the role played by the Muslim Brotherhood in creating the mood for terror attacks.

British newspapers refused to publish a version of the column out of a lack of interest in the subject.

Mr Adel said a report on the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK by the former diplomat Sir John Jenkins was published five years ago.

He said there had been no substantial action on concerns in the report that centred on the Muslim Brotherhood's "highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism".

Mr Jenkins has just launched a programme at Policy Exchange, a think tank, that promises an examination of Islamism in British public life.

"The MB’s international network is a vehicle for the promotion of its distinct ideology, attracting many who are not formally members of the MB," he wrote in a Policy Exchange paper a week ago.

"Indeed, outside of Muslim-majority countries the question of whether there is an extensive, formal membership has remained shrouded in ambiguity.

"They act as privileged gatekeepers, both to a constructed ‘Muslim’ community, which they claim the right to define and represent, and to an Islamic tradition they claim the right to interpret.

"In so doing, they seek to mobilise Muslims behind an agenda of communalism, sustained by a narrative of grievance and victimhood, in the service of an ideology that at its heart contests the legitimate foundations of the modern western state."

The paper said British society could not avoid this essential debate.

"To challenge this phenomenon it is essential to be able to identify it," Mr Jenkins wrote.

"That is why the use of the term ‘Islamism’ and its cognates in reference to the trends I have described is now standard international practice, including among Arab and Muslim scholars writing in English or other European languages.

"The Islamic State called itself that for a purpose: to assert a claim to be the only Islamically legitimate political community on Earth.

"And this points to a central problem in any effort to remove the term ‘Islamist’ from the political lexicon in the UK or elsewhere."