Islam: Tenets

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, has performed a useful function in introducing this sensitive and delicate subject so that we can, at any rate, discuss it. I want to focus my remarks on political Islam and its links with the many jihadist organisations that, as we have heard, inflict terror on other Muslims and on the non-Muslim world.

I have learned a lot from a lecture given on 15 November in New Haven by Sir John Jenkins. I hope that the Minister has read it and I certainly recommend it to other noble Lords. Sir John, an accomplished Arabist and British diplomat, was consul-general in Jerusalem and subsequently Her Majesty’s ambassador in Syria, in Iraq and finally in Saudi Arabia until 2015. He took an active part in the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry. In March 2014, he was appointed by the then Prime Minister Cameron to lead a policy review into the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism. Sir John was assisted by Charles Farr, who since December 2015 has been the chair of the JIC—the Joint Intelligence Committee—in the Cabinet.

The review was completed in July 2014 but the report was never published. Only a summary appeared, and that was in December 2015, 18 months later. However, that summary concluded with a damning statement:

“Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security”.


Astonishingly, Prime Minister Cameron merely made a Written Statement to the House of Commons, in which he said that the Government would,

“keep under review whether the views and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood meet the legal test for proscription”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/12/15; col. 418WS.]

The text of the Jenkins lecture is indeed illuminating to somebody from outside, like me, and I found it disturbing. First, Jenkins dismisses as “almost worthless” any attempt to place the Islamists,

“on some scale of relative extremism or moderation”.

I certainly do not intend to speak of the religion of Islam. Any analysis of its kaleidoscopic complexity and didactic variations is well beyond me. The Sufi version of Sunni Islam seems to me to be closer to what Christians could recognise as a monotheistic religion of peace and love. In the atrocity of 24 November this year in Egypt, for which Daesh has claimed responsibility, 305 Sufi Muslims—including 28 children—were shot while praying in a mosque in north Sinai.

Last Friday, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, the most ancient mosque in Cairo, and himself a Sunni, condemned this attack. This is an important step forward. Hitherto, due to the intimidation to which they are subject, very few of that great majority of the Muslim clerics who abhor the violent and cruel terrorism of political Islam as much as we do have spoken out against it.

Political Islam and the various Islamist terrorist bodies affiliated with it can no more claim religious justification for their horrific acts than could the IRA for its acts of murder during the Troubles. On 29 September 1979, Pope John Paul II, who was visiting Ireland, appealed to,

“the moral sense and Christian conviction”,

of the Irish, at his mass in Drogheda, with the words:

“Nobody may ever call murder by any other name than murder … On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence”.


That it took so long for peace to return did not mean that the Roman Catholic Church ever endorsed, justified or excused murders committed by the IRA.

I have long seen the relationship of the Muslim Brotherhood to the military wings of the Salafist Wahhabi creed, such as al-Qaeda and Daesh, as rather similar to the relationship that once existed between Sinn Fein and the IRA. The Muslim Brotherhood, originally partly based on the theories of Italian fascism, was founded in 1928 in Egypt by al-Banna, who promoted ultimate martyrdom through death in conflict. Its final aim, proclaimed by the Islamic State in April 2014, is the installation of a worldwide theocratic state, or caliphate, under Sharia law.

Theocracy is, by definition, the antithesis of democracy because, once in place, it cannot be removed by the electorate. This conflict can be most clearly observed in Iran, where a supreme leader—in this case, Shia—with the revolutionary guard as enforcers, keeps a careful check on the semi-democratically elected Government of President Rouhani. Jenkins points out:

“Links between the Brotherhood and the Khomeinist trend in Iran go back as far as the 1950s”.


The Muslim Brotherhood operates with much tactical skill. It assassinated President Sadat in October 1981 after he had made peace with Israel. It achieved full power in Egypt through the ballot box in January 2012, only to be ejected by popular protest, supported by the army, in July 2013 following economic chaos. Jenkins concludes that,

“if Egypt had fallen to the Brotherhood, the whole of North Africa would have eventually become a bastion of political Islamism”.

It is said that in 2005, after the 7/7 attack on London transport in which 56 people died, the Brotherhood claimed to be working to prevent further attacks on Britain. That is perhaps why HMG have left them alone. It should be noted that the European leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ibrahim Munir, has lived in London for many years. I understand that he is likely soon to become the group’s world leader.

The Anderson report on terrorism, published on Monday, makes extensive reference to the background of the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, but fails to refer to the fact that his father, Ramadan Abedi, was part of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood and a former al-Qaeda operative in Libya. Last week, 33 members of the US Congress wrote to Secretary of State Tillerson urging him to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organisation. I believe that the time may have come for us to do the same here.