Gulf politics, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the limits of Western naïvety

When monarchies fear the monsters they made

It is one of the stranger turns of recent history that some of the loudest opponents of Islamist movements are now the very monarchies that helped midwife them. Saudi Arabia spent decades exporting a hard-line Wahhabi vision of Islam through mosques, schools and clerics, only to outlaw one of the main Islamist currents – the Muslim Brotherhood – as a terrorist organisation in 2014.

The United Arab Emirates followed suit, issuing a long list of “terrorist” groups that explicitly included the Brotherhood and local affiliates. Egypt banned it outright after the 2013 coup.Russia has done the same.

Meanwhile Qatar, a tiny gas-rich emirate with a very large chequebook, has kept the Brotherhood close. It has backed Brotherhood-aligned movements during the Arab Spring, hosted exiled leaders, amplified their narratives through Al Jazeera, and poured very large sums into Western universities and institutions. A recent series of reports argues that Qatar has directed tens of billions into American and other Western campuses as part of a long-term soft-power strategy aligned with Brotherhood objectives.

So on one side: monarchies trying to stuff the Islamist genie back into the bottle. On the other: a monarchy still happily rubbing the lamp. And in the middle, Western elites telling themselves reassuring stories about “education”, “dialogue” and “shared spaces”, while quietly banking the cheques.

An integral reading asks: what is actually going on in this field?

The Brotherhood in one sentence

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is a transnational Sunni Islamist movement that blends religion with politics. It wants societies governed “by Islam” in a relatively modern key: parties, parliaments, elections – but all ordered around sharia as the ultimate reference.

That makes it different from the more openly jihadist outfits like al-Qaeda or ISIS, but hardly liberal. It has:

  • built vast social and charitable networks;

  • inspired parties and movements across the Arab world;

  • moved between political participation and clandestine activism;

  • been repeatedly accused of maintaining a dual discourse – moderate in public, harder in internal texts.

Western governments have never quite known what to do with it. Some see it as a “moderate” alternative to outright terrorism; others as a conveyor belt towards it.

Gulf monarchies, however, see something else: a rival myth.

Monarchies vs movements: when myth collides with myth

On paper, Wahhabi-coloured Saudi conservatism and Brotherhood Islamism look like cousins. Both are Sunni. Both want sharia to shape public life. Both are socially restrictive in ways that land very hard on women.

The crucial difference is not theological but political:

  • The Gulf monarchies embody a palace myth: legitimate rule flows downwards from a dynasty, sanctioned by religion, cemented by patronage.

  • The Brotherhood embodies a movement myth: an organised vanguard of believers can reshape society from below, using mass mobilisation and modern political tools.

For a regime like Saudi Arabia or the UAE, that is existential. A movement that tells ordinary citizens “you, not the royal family, are the true agents of God’s will in history” is intolerable.

So even as Riyadh and Abu Dhabi spent decades funding conservative Islam abroad, they have always been wary of movements that can turn that piety into organised political opposition at home. When Brotherhood-linked parties started actually winning elections after the Arab Spring, the threat stopped being hypothetical.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain and others moved to crush, ban, proscribe. In the UAE, mass trials of alleged Brotherhood members and sympathisers have led to life sentences for dozens of dissidents, drawing fierce criticism from human rights groups.

This is not liberal pluralism. It is one authoritarian myth suppressing another, to protect its own foundations.

Qatar’s double life

Qatar plays a different game. Small, fabulously wealthy and geographically vulnerable, it has pursued a strategy of maximum entanglement: be indispensable to everyone.

  • Host US military bases – and maintain good ties with Iran.

  • Back Brotherhood-aligned groups in Egypt, Gaza and elsewhere – and present yourself as a mediator.

  • Launch Al Jazeera, giving a platform to Islamists and dissidents – and then insist you’re just supporting free media.

  • Spend lavishly on Western universities, think tanks, museums and sports events – and let the prestige do its quiet work.

Research from ISGAP and others claims that Qatari-linked entities have directed around $20 billion into American schools and universities alone, often via opaque arrangements, with an ideological edge that maps closely to Brotherhood narratives. Other reports highlight Qatari donations to British universities, schools and community centres, again with minimal public scrutiny.

Whether one accepts the full “100-year plan” framing or not, the pattern is clear enough:

  • Qatar has chosen political Islam – particularly Brotherhood-coloured currents – as one of its main soft-power levers.

  • It uses Western institutions as amplifiers and legitimisers of that project, while Western elites tell themselves that it is simply philanthropy.

Qatar is not some mystical embodiment of Islamism; it is a monarchy using Islamist networks, money and media as tools of statecraft. But those tools have their own momentum and mythic charge.

Western naïvety: the deficient mental at work

Against this backdrop, the response of many Western institutions has been strikingly flat-footed.

Successive governments and universities have behaved as if:

  • Money is neutral, and foreign funding is just a budget line.

  • Education is automatically civilising, so that whatever ideological baggage arrives with the donor will somehow melt away once it enters the hallowed halls of the university.

  • Dialogue fixes everything: as long as people are talking about “shared values” in well-catered conference rooms, no deeper conflict exists.

From a Gebserian perspective, this is the deficient mental structure in full view:

  • It believes that ideas and “rational exchange” sit on top of everything and can dissolve older structures through information and argument.

  • It refuses to see how mythic allegiance (to ummah, to caliphate, to movement) can sit beneath a very slick mental surface (medical degree, law PhD, policy role) and override it under pressure.

  • It treats money and institutions as fundamentally technical, not symbolic – ignoring the way endowments, chairs and partnerships can subtly reshape what is sayable and what is not.

The British state’s own review of the Brotherhood concluded that it has “selectively used violence and sometimes terror in pursuit of their institutional goals”. Yet the organisation is not proscribed in the UK, even as allies like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Russia treat it as terrorist.

One can disagree with those regimes’ methods while still noticing the oddity: the people who have lived with the Brotherhood longest are least impressed by the fantasy of it as a “moderate partner”. British officialdom, by contrast, remains trapped between its fear of Islamophobia accusations and its attachment to a purely procedural view of politics.

Women’s bodies as the fault line

All of this can sound rather abstract until one remembers where Islamist projects most reliably show their hand: on the bodies of women and girls.

Whether it is:

  • enforcement of strict dress codes,

  • restrictions on movement, work and education,

  • control of sexuality and marriage,

  • or in some regions the continuation of practices such as FGM justified under a religious veneer,

the pattern is brutally consistent. When Islamism moves from rhetoric to social power, women’s autonomy is one of the first casualties.

This is one of the reasons why some Gulf elites have begun to flinch. The monsters they cultivated in the 1980s and 90s – channelling zeal into Afghanistan, exporting hard-line preachers – did not stay neatly “over there”. Jihadist currents and Islamist movements looped back into their own societies. The instability that followed tended to land hardest, first, on other Muslims – including women.

So there is self-interest here, and a belated recognition: you can’t stimulate a wave of absolutist mythic energy and expect it to behave politely.

An integral reading of the field

Seen through an integral lens, the picture shifts from “good moderates vs bad extremists” to something more layered.

Multiple structures in collision

The Gulf monarchies operate through a mix of mythic (sacral monarchy, divine sanction, tribal loyalty) and mental (state bureaucracy, global finance, PR campaigns) structures.

The Brotherhood and related movements are a form of politicised mythic: sacred story plus mass organisation, using some mental tools but anchored in a binary moral universe.

Western institutions are largely deficient mental: technocratic, economically dependent, unable to articulate a thick sense of purpose, and therefore very open to capture.

Mythic vs mythic, with mental as a mask

The Saudi / UAE crackdown on the Brotherhood is, in many ways, one mythic project suppressing another, while both drape themselves in rational language: “counter-terrorism”, “modernisation”, “stability”. Qatar’s dance is likewise mythic at depth (“protector of the ummah”, “champion of the oppressed”) with mental tools on the surface (global media, soft power, education funding).

The West’s structural weakness

Western elites turn up to these games with spreadsheets and branding decks. They treat ideology as an embarrassing relic and therefore routinely underestimate movements and regimes for whom sacred narrative and collective honour are still live wires.

Where Gulf strategists think in decades, even generations, Western institutions are often thinking in election cycles, annual reports and this quarter’s donations.

Towards a less naïve response

An integral stance does not call for a civilisational holy war. But it does demand an end to the childishness.

At a minimum, it would mean:

  • Radical transparency on foreign funding of universities, schools, think tanks, NGOs and religious institutions. No more “don’t ask, don’t tell” about where the cheques come from and what is expected in return.

  • A firm civic floor: clear, enforced norms that apply to everyone – no parallel justice, no soft-pedalling on incitement to violence, no special pleading for “community sensitivities” when basic rights (especially for women and minorities) are at stake.

  • Support for internal dissidents, not just for whichever power bloc is currently useful. Gulf monarchies’ crackdown on the Brotherhood often sweeps up non-violent critics and human rights activists; the fact that they dislike Islamism does not make them natural allies of pluralism.

  • An honest reassessment of “engagement” strategies: moving beyond the tick-box interfaith panels and campus initiatives that pretend depth can be reached through carefully moderated conversation without touching questions of power, money and ultimate loyalty.

Above all, it would require Western societies to recover some sense of their own story that is more than “procedural liberalism + GDP”. A merely economic or technocratic narrative will always be weak against movements that offer transcendence, sacrifice and belonging – however distorted.

The crack in the wall

The fact that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and others have now drawn a hard line on the Muslim Brotherhood does not make them champions of enlightenment. It does, however, show that Islamism is not an unstoppable tide; it can be resisted, constrained and sometimes even rolled back – often most forcefully by those who know it from the inside and have been burned by it.

Qatar’s continued patronage of Brotherhood-coloured projects, including its deep entanglement with Western academia, means the story is far from over. The “100-year plan” language may be dramatic, but the underlying point stands: some actors in this field are playing a long game; others are not.

From an integral perspective, the task is not to choose a camp in that intra-Islamist struggle, but to:

  • see clearly the structures at play;

  • stop pretending that money and myth don’t matter;

  • hold a line on basic civic norms, especially around women’s bodies and lives;

  • and begin to articulate a different, deeper story of human flourishing that neither capitulates to authoritarian myth nor dissolves into fragmented, exhausted mentalism.

The monarchies are afraid of the monsters they made. Western institutions should be at least as alert – and a good deal less naïve.