Gareth Browne

speaker

136 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 11 Aug

Gareth Browne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Spring, then fall: a weakened Muslim Brotherhood · 11 Aug 2026 podcast

And really it's hard to believe that just fifteen years ago it was seen by many Arabs across the region as the answer to this fundamental question of Arab dignity and governance.

My sense is that and this is true in the West as well as in the Middle East, that there's this feeling of subversiveness about the Brotherhood and that they're only interested in democracy or playing politics until they get power.

And then they can impose some sort of Islamist governance model.

And people look at the case of how the Brotherhood acted in Egypt and they see evidence of that.

There's this general feeling that the Brotherhood can't be trusted by non brotherhood governments, actors, officials, both in the Middle East but across the region.

That suspicion has undoubtedly

hardened as time has gone on.

And I think President Trump is the best case of that.

Now in the last year or so, he's directed the White House to really go after the Brotherhood.

So we've seen several chapters of the Brotherhood being designated as terrorist organizations.

The last US counterterrorism strategy actually placed the Muslim Brotherhood alongside ISIS and Al-Qaeda as this wellspring for terrorism, for jihadism.

So there's a sharpening of rhetoric and then Washington actually going after various chapters of the Brotherhood very, very severely and that giving encouragement to regional governments to also go after them.

And I think even more interestingly in Syria, where we saw the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, the Brotherhood was weirdly absent from that victory and remains to be strangely

absent from the new system, which undoubtedly has its roots in a sort of Islamist jihadist worldview, and yet the Brotherhood is really nowhere to be seen.

It's struggled to, to be honest.

There's been bickering, particularly in response to the Trump administration's moves.

We've seen Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Turkey saying one thing and the leadership in London saying contradictory things.

So it's not clear that there's this coherent leadership structure to the Brotherhood anymore.

It is under such relentless assault in the Middle East on so many levels, not just at a top-tier leadership level, but all the way down to the grassroots.

I don't think it really has any space to breathe unless its members go into exile in various countries.

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