In early January, as Emirati students were scrolling through the new list of approved foreign universities, they found that every British institution was missing.
The explanation reportedly offered by unnamed officials was “extremism”: the spectre of the Muslim Brotherhood allegedly stalking British lecture halls. Families who had spent years preparing children for a British degree suddenly discovered that their government would no longer pay for it, and might not even recognise it.
Barely a month later, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage warned that Islamists were now “embedded” in Britain’s politics, schools and even its police.
Indeed, the Islamist bogeyman of the “Muslim Brotherhood” is back. It has returned not as a serious response to a concrete, organised threat, but as a catch-all scarecrow wielded by networks fuelled by the UAE and Israel in a kind of McCarthyism for the age of populism.
What began as a regional counter-revolutionary story after the Arab Spring has mutated into Russian- and Chinese-grade information warfare aimed at western publics: polarising electorates, boosting far-right politicians, and bending debate towards an Emirati and Israeli worldview.
This is not about Islam. It is about a threat to liberal democracy, careless enough to let an authoritarian ally ghost-write its fears.
To see that, it helps to recall how thoroughly the Brotherhood has already been dismantled. In Egypt, its birthplace and ideological anchor, the 2013 coup and subsequent crackdown smashed the movement’s formal structures.
Across the region, governments from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi declared it a terrorist organisation. Internal splits, generational rifts and exile finished much of the rest. Whatever one thinks of the Brotherhood’s programme, the idea of a disciplined, transnational network pulling strings from Cairo is now more fantasy than fact.
Familiar myths
Yet in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv, the Brotherhood survives as a meta-narrative slapped as a label on an ever-widening circle of critics: Islamists who reject violence, secular activists who oppose normalisation with Israel, Saudis who baulk at Emirati overreach.
When you challenge Emiratis on the gap between fact and narrative, they tell a story of a secret web of “Brothers” burrowing into parliaments, NGOs, universities and newsrooms. It is hard to miss the resemblance to earlier myths about shadowy elders running the world.
For Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed’s inner circle, this narrative legitimises their regional statecraft. Abu Dhabi’s strategic story rests on three pillars: secularism, the containment of civil society, and the supremacy of an unaccountable elite as the only alternative to “pluralistic chaos”. Within that frame, the Brotherhood bogeyman does several jobs at once.
At home, it justifies mass trials and state control over speech and mosques. Regionally, it underpins the Emirati “axis of secessionists”: a loose coalition of regimes and militias, from President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s Egypt to warlords in Libya and Sudan, who carve out enclaves of control under the pretext of crushing Islamists and revolutionaries alike. Globally, it is exported as a ready-made explanation for everything from Gaza to campus protests.
In the Emirati and Israeli telling, the mosque itself becomes a suspect institution unless firmly controlled by the state. Muslim charities are cast as Trojan horses. Student societies and academic departments are portrayed as incubators of extremism.
The decision to cut UK scholarships is revealing. The Abu Dhabi government appears so fearful of campus debate, free speech and multicultural classrooms that it would rather punish its own young people than tolerate their exposure to them.
British universities, for all their imperfections, stand for a model of open inquiry that sits uneasily with an Emirati system built on deference and censorship. Dressing that discomfort up as “anti-extremism” reveals a profound sense of insecurity in the Emirates.
More troubling still is how this narrative is now being weaponised offensively in western politics. Over the past decade, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Abu Dhabi alike have quietly invested in Europe’s far right: loans to Marine Le Pen’s party through Emirati-linked banks, and growing proximity to movements whose stock-in-trade is Islamophobia.
Poland-linked platforms like Visegrad24, and their Middle East spinoffs, push an aggressive diet of pro-Israel, pro-UAE content, alongside anti-migrant sentiment and lurid warnings about “Islamist infiltration”. The same talking point is pushed: the West is under siege – and only strongmen at home and in the Gulf can save it.
Weaponised narratives
This is where the concept of subversion comes in: the weaponisation of narratives with the intent to trigger audiences to voluntarily make the choices the storyteller desires. What Russia did with Brexit and the US far right, and what China attempts through amplifying pro-Russian narratives in Ukraine and against the West and on campus by using their students to make complaints about any criticism of China, the UAE is now doing in a subtler register: exploiting existing grievances, amplifying fears of terrorism and cultural loss, and nudging voters towards parties whose worldview mirrors Abu Dhabi’s.
When a British party leader, fresh from two visits to the Emirates, stands up in London and declares that Islamists have embedded themselves across the establishment – without offering a shred of evidence – he might or might not be grifting. Yet the overlap with Emirati talking points is cunning.
Defenders of this emerging alignment will offer a straightforward rejoinder. The Brotherhood, they will say, is not an innocent charity; some of its offshoots have embraced violence or undermined democratic norms. The UAE and Israel are not malign puppet-masters, but embattled partners on the front line against terrorism and Iranian expansion.
If far-right parties in Europe share their alarm about Islamism and offer tougher border controls and stronger support for Israel, why should western governments not welcome the convergence? In a dangerous world, the argument runs, one cannot be overly precious about the company one keeps.
But the record suggests that the bogeyman now in circulation bears little resemblance to the fractured, diminished reality of the Brotherhood movement on the ground. Whole communities – not just militants – are being tarred with the same brush. Legitimate criticism of Emirati arms shipments to Sudan or Israeli conduct in Gaza is dismissed as Brotherhood propaganda.
And by embracing Islamophobes and conspiracy theorists as allies, Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv are not strengthening the liberal order; they are hollowing it out from within.
Emirati and Israeli influence campaigns should be subjected to the same scrutiny as Moscow and Beijing. That means full transparency for foreign funding of think tanks and parties, serious enforcement of lobbying rules, and a clear firewall between domestic security policy and the talking points of overseas partners.
This is not just about rejecting the conspiracy of British Muslims being a fifth column. It’s also about recognising that this is a foreign information campaign attacking not only Muslims, but British civil society at large. It is a dangerous attempt to shape discourse, influence attitudes, polarise constituencies, and ultimately subvert policymaking – something the UK government vehemently and rightfully oppose when the information warrior is from Russia or China.
The UAE is a Machiavellian power always in pursuit of its own interests, often at the expense of someone else – in this case, at the expense of British values and interests. It is therefore imperative to reject the imported bogeyman and insist that the defence of liberal democracy cannot be outsourced, least of all to those who fear it most.