The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 14, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #16 ｜ The Muslim Brotherhood's Threat to the West

Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Jamaat-e-Islami Osama Bin Laden Abdullah Azzam Hudhaifa Azzam Firas Maudad Ibrahim Awad Jihadi
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1272 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1274

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

135.42

Word count

1,932

Sentence count

88

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

21

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, and why this is bad news for Muslims in general. I read quotes from the founder of the Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, and explain why the Brotherhood is the most successful political organization in the world.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Good afternoon. Welcome to a new episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Moadad.
00:00:09.880 As a reminder, this is a live episode, so please leave any comments, questions that you might have
00:00:16.460 on the page, wherever you might be watching us from, and I will get to them as soon as I can.
00:00:24.260 Today's episode is about the Muslim Brotherhood and the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the
00:00:28.420 West. And this is a bit of a follow-up for two daily segments that I did. One explaining the
00:00:34.620 permissive nature of Islam and how it allows violence on a random basis, which I think was 1.00
00:00:42.600 last Monday. And the other one was today, where I was covering a little bit about how Muslim
00:00:49.820 organizations in the West are feeling a lot more confident, especially in Britain, and are starting
00:00:55.180 to take on a more prominent political position, and why this is indeed bad news.
00:01:01.720 Now I'm going to read a couple of quotes for you, which, if I say them, I would be accused of hate
00:01:07.860 speech. So I will read them first, and then I'll tell you who actually said them.
00:01:12.800 In reality, Islam is a militant ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order 1.00
00:01:19.480 of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.
00:01:25.860 Muslim is the title of that international militant party organized by Islam to carry into effect
00:01:33.160 its militant program. And jihad refers to that militant struggle and utmost exertion with the
00:01:40.300 Islamic party brings into play to achieve its objectives. Interesting. So it's a militant ideology 1.00
00:01:46.820 that applies to the whole world, and its target isn't limited to a geographical area, but it is
00:01:56.200 in fact global. And a Muslim is, by definition, carrying out a jihad and exertion to bring about 1.00
00:02:05.780 the objectives of Islam. Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the 1.00
00:02:13.860 earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam, regardless of the country or the nation 0.95
00:02:21.280 which rules it. It must be evident to you from this discussion that the objective of Islamic jihad is to 0.90
00:02:29.640 eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system to state rule.
00:02:37.880 Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single state or a few countries.
00:02:45.260 The aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution.
00:02:50.260 These are the words of Abu'l-A'la al-Mawdoodi. He is the founder of the Jama'ati Islami, a sort of parallel organization to the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:02:59.880 And what does the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood say? He says that the noble Qur'an appoints the Muslims as guardians over humanity in its minority and grants them the right of suzerainty and dominion over the world in order to carry out the sublime commission. 0.70
00:03:18.800 Hence it is our concern, not that of the West, and it pertains to Islamic civilization, not to materialistic civilization. 0.90
00:03:27.380 This is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Arab version of the Jama'ati Islami, or to be more accurate, the Jama'ati Islami is the South Asian version of the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:03:39.880 And here he says that the Qur'an commands Muslims to be guardians over all of humanity and gives them the right to rule and dominate the entire world to carry out this sublime mission.
00:03:54.840 And he says that this job of building civilization doesn't belong to the West. It belongs to the Muslim world. 1.00
00:04:04.340 Let me continue.
00:04:05.280 Now you can see from all this how the men of learning, the Islamic men of learning, agree unanimously that jihad is a communal obligation imposed upon the Islamic ummah in order to broadcast the summons to embrace Islam, 0.90
00:04:22.660 Islam, and that it is only an individual obligation to repulse the attack of unbelievers upon it.
00:04:29.600 Today the Muslims, as you know, are compelled to humble themselves before non-Muslims, and are ruled by unbelievers. 1.00
00:04:37.140 Hence it has become an individual obligation, which there is no evading, on every Muslim to prepare his equipment, 0.90
00:04:44.060 to make up his mind, to engage in jihad, and to get ready for it until the time is ripe.
00:04:50.740 These are the words of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:04:55.640 And you can see here very clearly that there is a political program involved, and that political program is one of global domination.
00:05:05.280 It is not one that is particular to any specific country, or that is limited to simply ruling Muslim lands.
00:05:13.940 It's very explicitly the case that the objective of these movements is global.
00:05:20.700 And in Britain today, you have both the Ramati Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood operating throughout Muslim society and in government,
00:05:31.240 with the aim of pushing forward the objectives of Islam.
00:05:35.280 And of making the vision that is shared by Abu'l-A'la al-Mawdoodi and by Hassan al-Banna into a reality.
00:05:45.600 So, this isn't an attack on Muslims.
00:05:49.480 These are the leaders of the two most successful political organizations globally today.
00:05:56.980 And they are saying clearly to all of their followers, and their followers are very numerous in Britain and throughout the West,
00:06:04.520 that the objective is domination.
00:06:08.060 So, let's keep that in mind.
00:06:11.440 And let's remember that the relevance of this doesn't just come from the fact that these organizations are politically successful
00:06:18.320 in the modern world, and especially in the Western world, where they interface with the governments of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Britain, of the United States,
00:06:29.080 where they play a huge role wherever there are Muslims.
00:06:32.740 And they are indeed an organic expression of what the Muslim elites and the Muslim leaders and financiers and religious scholars want.
00:06:41.540 Let's also remember that the majority of terrorist organizations in the world, from Al-Qaeda through Islamic State,
00:06:52.040 have their roots in either Jamaat-e-Islami or the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:06:57.680 So, the fact that these organizations are operating in the West is, I would argue, highly relevant.
00:07:04.060 For example, Abdullah Azzam, one of the founders of Al-Qaeda, alongside Osama bin Laden.
00:07:10.180 He was a Palestinian cleric.
00:07:12.680 And his son, Hudhaifa Azzam, is very active on Twitter.
00:07:16.220 This guy was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:07:21.800 Ibrahim Awad, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, he had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:07:28.940 The first militant jihadi group in the modern world, as we would properly define it, was called Al-Dawah wal-Hijrah, or Jamaat-e-Islami.
00:07:39.840 It emerged in Egypt in the 1960s, at the hands of people who had graduated from the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:07:47.160 It is quite common to say in the Middle East, especially by entities that are hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood,
00:07:55.760 usually the UAE government for the most part, and the Israelis,
00:07:59.880 that, if you will, Islamic State and Al-Qaeda form your PhD in terrorism,
00:08:06.300 but you get your diploma from the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:08:08.900 And it has consistently played this role of a feeder organization that then leads to greater acts of terrorism.
00:08:18.680 So how is the Muslim Brotherhood operating in the West, and how successful has it been?
00:08:23.360 Well, again, I'm going to do a little bit of readings, this time from a document that I'd mentioned earlier on the podcast today.
00:08:29.500 Anyway, this one is a document by one of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood writing about what should be done in North America
00:08:39.360 and giving a whole platform or a whole plan, really, to say what the strategic objectives are for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America.
00:08:53.940 And this is a very good and thorough document, I would argue, from the perspective of the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:09:01.440 And so I want to read to you from it and go a little bit over the details of how successful they've been
00:09:09.480 and what does that mean for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, and what does that mean for the West going forward.
00:09:14.440 First, the author says,
00:09:16.320 The strategic objective is to expand the committed Muslim base, unify the Muslims, and propose Islam as a civilizational alternative
00:09:26.960 to bring about or to support the global state of Islam wherever it was.
00:09:33.280 And the priorities are right now, writing in 1991, to indigenize Islam in North America
00:09:41.440 and to build relations with the rest of the Muslim movements, get them coordinated, working together, planning, and so on.
00:09:52.080 And that this should lead to the enablement of Muslims and to lead to them gaining power in Western societies.
00:10:05.020 He's writing about North America, but it's the same template everywhere, as you will see.
00:10:08.640 So the first step is indigenization, to make Islam a part of the homelands in which it lives. 1.00
00:10:17.040 And that's an interesting wording, because it automatically assumes that these aren't Muslims living genuinely in their homeland.
00:10:26.460 So when Muslims say, you know, I'm just as American as you, or I'm just as British as you, 0.94
00:10:32.820 this isn't really their view, not when they're having honest internal discussions.
00:10:39.840 They don't really accept this.
00:10:43.020 The second step is formation or foundation for Islam to become stable institutions
00:10:51.420 on which the basis of civilization, construction, and witness, that is witness to God, can be built.
00:10:59.260 The third is to make this a stable state, so that Islam wouldn't feel foreign. 0.99
00:11:05.880 The fourth is to make Islam, to give Islam tamkin. 1.00
00:11:10.400 Tamkin is one of those Arabic words that has multiple translations.
00:11:14.040 The closest word would be empowerment or enablement, meaning that they would then have influence over the key levers of state
00:11:23.940 to affect public policy in a way that has a much higher regard for the welfare and interests of Muslims.
00:11:31.600 And the wording here is interesting, to empower Islam over the souls and minds and lives of the country in which it operates.
00:11:44.680 So again, Islam is foreign, because it's operating in a country, it's not indigenous to it. 0.99
00:11:48.840 And then the last and final step is full indigenization, that Islam would be rooted in the soil in which it is operating 1.00
00:12:01.140 and would no longer be foreign to it.
00:12:03.520 That's the final stage.
00:12:05.840 And I want to sort of go over some of that text to explain how close they are to achieving this kind of objective.
00:12:12.780 In this document that I'm reading from, they say that indigenization is a jihadi civilizational operation.
00:12:27.560 Jihadi here doesn't just mean military jihad, it does mean struggle,
00:12:32.020 but it is very evident from the text that the aim of this jihad is a political, temporal, material one.
00:12:45.380 So it's not a spiritual jihad in the way that some will try to present it.
00:12:51.400 It is a political jihad that aims at worldly power.
00:12:56.840 That's the objective, very clearly.
00:12:58.480 The brothers, the Muslim brothers, that is, must understand that their work in America,
00:13:06.680 but that could just as easily apply to anywhere else in the world,
00:13:09.940 is a form of great jihad in removing and destroying, to be precise,
00:13:17.220 in removing and tearing down Western civilization from within
00:13:22.840 and ruining its houses using their own hands and the hands of the believers so that they can be removed, 0.95
00:13:34.780 that is, the unbelievers, and so that the religion of God is victorious over all religion.
00:13:43.300 If they lack this level of understanding, if the Muslim brother lacks this level of understanding, 1.00
00:13:49.900 then we are not up to the challenge and we have not properly prepared ourselves for jihad.
00:13:57.620 It is the destiny of the Muslim to wage jihad and to work wherever he can and wherever he settles until the end days. 1.00
00:14:13.300 Head to our website where you can find more.