Ed Husain

They go and... How convenient.

So they don't believe in borders or nation states.

So the whole world at some point must come under the control of this caliphate or of this Islamic state.

The first priority is to reconquer Spain, Sicily, India, parts of China that were once Muslim.

But you don't ultimately stop there.

You continue to expand to bring the whole domain under what they call the domain of peace or the domain of Islam.

Now, here's the problem with this worldview.

This is a worldview that was advocated first and foremost by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.

And it's then spread on to Hamas and Al-Qaeda and others.

But the problem with that worldview is the problem that Hassan al-Banna found in the 1920s, that most Muslims rejected him and reject the Brotherhood.

And if you read classical Islamic literature, there is no reference to the Islamic system.

This was taken from Hegelian thought.

This was taken from later German Nazi thought that we must create a system.

We must create a Reich.

We must be against the Jews.

We must be against the West.

We must reconquer land.

This was the mood music of the 1920s and 30s that the Muslim Brotherhood embraces, absorbs, and continues.

to protect, there was a very, very high level prominent Muslim scholar called Ali Abd al-Raziq in 1926, wrote a book called, you know, Islam and Governance.

And in it, he very, in detailed fashion, drawing on Muslim jurisprudence for 1400 years says, there is no system of governance within Muslim cultures, plural.