RECOMMENDED READING: “The Islamic Movement in Britain”

Damon L. Per­ry, Ph.D. has pub­lished a new and in-depth report into the ide­ol­o­gy, his­to­ry, net­works, and activ­i­ties of the revival­ist “Islam­ic Move­ment” in Britain, essen­tial­ly groups com­pris­ing the Jamaat-i-Isla­mi and the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the coun­try. The report puts its focus on:

(…) a net­work of Mus­lim organ­i­sa­tions and indi­vid­u­als that it refers to as the “Islam­ic Move­ment” in Britain. This name is some­times used by pro­tag­o­nists com­pris­ing the net­work in ref­er­ence to the col­lec­tive, organ­ised effort to “revive” and expand Islam’s role in social and polit­i­cal life, in the West, the for­mer Islam­ic empire, and the world at large. Sheikh Yusuf Al‑Qaradawi, the Egyptian‑born the­olo­gian and host of the Al Jazeera TV pro­gramme, “Shari’a and Life”, for exam­ple, explic­it­ly refers to the “Islam­ic Move­ment” as such. The main pur­pose of this report is to describe this net­work in Britain. (…)

This report seeks to pro­vide a pic­ture of the over­all net­work of the Islam­ic Move­ment in Britain, since although there have been some reports regard­ing spe­cif­ic groups, there are few that seek to map out the net­work as a whole – ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, organ­i­sa­tion­al­ly, and in terms of the work they are engaged in. It admit­ted­ly falls short of being com­pre­hen­sive, since the net­work is evolv­ing and no doubt many con­nec­tions exist beyond what can be viewed in pub­licly source­able mate­r­i­al. Nonethe­less, it is hoped that what fol­lows is an impor­tant step towards under­stand­ing the net­work of the Islam­ic Move­ment in Britain.

The full report can be accessed here.

The report cred­its the GIOR Senior Edi­tor for coin­ing the term “Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood” in 2007.

Damon L. Per­ry, Ph.D. is a researcher and ana­lyst spe­cial­iz­ing in extrem­ism and secu­ri­ty issues at the Inter­na­tion­al Cen­tre for the Study of Rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion and Polit­i­cal Vio­lence (ICSR) at London’s King’s Col­lege. He has also authored a book on the extrem­ism of the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’  pub­lished in 2018.

For more in-depth reports by the ICSR, go here.