An American imam and a British sheikh on Islam and capitalism; the Brotherhood’s terror designation; mysterious UAE spies in Turkey
Three angles for the week. The conversation on Islam and capitalism, the push to brand Brotherhood branches as terrorists, and the strange case of the Emirati operatives uncovered in Turkey.
I want to share two popular ulema’s take on capitalism since last week we discussed the evolution of Islamism and its comfortable relationship with managerialism and neoliberalism. Both commentaries surfaced after Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York placed the question of capitalism back into Muslim political debate. Living in the two wildest and most brutal capitalist countries in the world, the United States and the United Kingdom, these scholars must find ways to rationalise the lives of their followers in an age when imagining the end of capitalism is harder than imagining the return of dinosaurs. Yet the rise of an openly socialist Muslim who speaks for the oppressed and calls for social justice seems to have prompted two almost simultaneous podcast interventions. For Islamists the protection of property rights remains one of the core impulses of the ideology. There have been brief sojourns into the realm of socialism, usually when the pledge to defend the oppressed appeared to run parallel to Islamic ethics, though these were never sustained.
New breed: Zionist-capitalist Arabs
Imam Tom in the United States speaks in the familiar idiom of ulema shaped by European and American conditions. He addresses Muslims as a minority constituency and blends piety with a tone of caution that tries to remain above the political fray yet never escapes it.
Asrar Rashid, the sheikh from Birmingham approaches the subject from an entirely different angle. He divides capitalism into two species and claims that Western capitalism is Zionist capitalism, ‘a nasty combination’ in his view. He frames the moment as a struggle between Islam and capitalism. He then describes the UAE as an example of Zionist capitalism that has produced a new type of Arab, one defined by the Abraham Accords.
Imam Tom belongs to the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, which Omar Suleiman founded to create an American Muslim institution that joins classical scholarship with the political and social pressures experienced by Muslims in the West. Tom Facchine has become a central figure whose work on socialism, capitalism and Islamic ethics has broadened Yaqeen’s reach. Both men shape the institute’s identity and both attract controversy. Suleiman is criticised by outside groups for his advocacy on Palestine, while some within the Muslim community question what they see as his accommodating posture on LGBTQ issues and progressive politics. Facchine faces another set of accusations. During a 2024 Columbia University webinar he referred to a professor known for his pro-Israel activism and asked how students could get him in trouble and create a situation in which he is in jeopardy, adding that removing one such figure could silence many more. These remarks circulated widely and drew responses from university officials who restated their opposition to targeted rhetoric.
Imam Tom begins with Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders because both occupy the space where American left politics meets Muslim voters who admire their record on Palestine. He frames the debate with a simple question. Is socialism Islamic or anti-Islamic. His answer is neither, and the route he takes is the real content of the episode.
He starts with a long catalogue of capitalism’s injuries that might have been lifted from a nineteenth century labour pamphlet. Wage slavery in the slums of industrial England, the destruction of forests and rivers, the alienation of workers who once built cabinets and now tighten bolts, the fetishism that turns diamonds into symbols, the planned obsolescence that feeds supply chains by breaking its own products. It is capitalism as a self-eating machine that produces waste and then constructs the ideology that justifies the waste, narrated with sincerity as if the indictment had not been written for generations.
The episode then turns to Marx. Historical materialism appears as a blunt instrument that once claimed scientific certainty and eventually fed Stalinist central planning. Imam Tom walks through the internal disputes between revolution and reform, top-down vanguardism and bottom-up democracy, Leninist discipline and the softer socialism of Sanders and Mamdani. Left history becomes a sequence of experiments that hardened into authoritarianism or dissolved into parliamentary caution.
What is striking is what he omits. For Islamists the protection of property rights is foundational. There were moments when Islamic movements flirted with socialist ideas because the language of social justice seemed compatible with their own. Yet he does not touch the major mid-twentieth-century moment when Islamist thinkers themselves were drawn to socialism. There is no reference to Sayyid Qutb’s early fascination with justice before he became the emblem of something else. Nothing on the Brotherhood’s experiments with redistribution, welfare provision and the socialisms of the 1940s and 1950s. No mention of Ali Shariati or the Iranian and Arab thinkers who once folded anti-imperialism and egalitarian thought into their Islamic vocabulary. The omission keeps the episode within American limits and avoids the historical fact that Islamic movements were shaped by global ideological currents in ways that now sit uneasily with contemporary Muslim institutions in the United States.
Only after this long detour does he open the Islamic frame. His conclusion is that capitalism is not Islamic, socialism is not Islamic and communism is not Islamic. The distinction rests on something more elemental than state planning or price controls. Islam begins with the reality of God and the human being who does not own herself. Everything is a trust. Nothing is fully sovereign. From here he widens the scope and speaks to the experience of living within a capitalist world. He makes an inverted argument and says that the question is not whether capitalism is compatible with Islam but how much of capitalism’s conception of the human being Muslims absorb without noticing.
Capitalism assumes the sovereignty of the individual. Islam claims that sovereignty belongs to God. Hence, the tension.
Capitalism treats needs as material. Islam treats needs as spiritual, social and moral. Hence, the tension.
Capitalism normalises accumulation. Islam permits it only within boundaries shaped by obligation. Hence, the tension.
Yani… Whether one lives in capitalism or socialism is not the question. Recognising that neither system provides a neutral background and that Muslims should move through them with awareness of what each ideology demands of the individual. A Muslim can trade, invest and participate in markets, yet should resist letting the market define who she is. That is the question!
The British sheikh Rashid also acknowledges that trade is part of life and even moves into current politics. Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, may sign trade agreements with China and none of that is haram, in his view. Still, he argues that no Muslim should serve as a proxy for anyone. He even claims that the Taliban is better than the Sharaa government because it follows sharia law, while Sharaa’s pragmatism does nothing to restrain Israel.
It is usually worthwhile to follow the various strata of ulema in different parts of the world to observe the divergences and the correlations between state politics, diaspora politics and the sentiments of ordinary Muslims. In the Gulf it is a way to witness the co-optation of religious scholars into dynastic business and, from time to time, to watch the small cracks and the rifts that appear within their ranks. It is also illuminating to see how little self-awareness many ulema possess, how their understanding of success mirrors that of any capitalist, and how their pragmatism and moral vocabulary are shaped by the global and local political trends of their own nation states.
Islamism has long presented itself as a sui generis tradition that stands apart from familiar ideological families even as it draws on them when expedient. This claim of distinctiveness becomes thin each time its scholars speak about capitalism without acknowledging how deeply they have absorbed its assumptions. Similarly, no contemporary Islamist or religious scholar has mounted a sustained critique of economic systems, and their political imaginations remain shaped by the secular ideologies they claim to resist.
The result is a style of reasoning that drifts between inherited moral claims and the pressures of contemporary economic life while never quite confronting the tension at the heart of the project.
A mysterious UAE spy group in Istanbul
After listening to the ulema lecture on capitalism and the rise of a new species of Zionist-capitalist Arabs, one did not expect the UAE to return so quickly in another register, yet it resurfaced in Turkey through a discreet intelligence operation that revealed more than it intended.
A small and rather peculiar spy cell linked to the Emirates emerged there, prompting the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office to launch an investigation in coordination with the counterterrorism branch of the Istanbul police and the national intelligence service, all working to uncover political or military espionage activities that had taken shape with unusual discretion.
The inquiry established that members of the Emirati intelligence service had obtained a Turkish mobile number through a local GSM company and used fabricated online profiles to collect biographical information on individuals employed in defence firms with strategic responsibilities, while also attempting to gather intelligence on a phone line used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on several foreign officials who maintain regular contact with Turkish personnel.
Four people were identified as carrying out the operation, and they had purchased the SIM card, presented it to their handlers as an operational tool and remained in contact with one another as they worked across different channels.
On the 25th of November the police moved against them, detaining three and issuing a warrant for the fourth who appears to have left the country. Yet even this detail became secondary once a shift appeared in the state’s public narrative. An oddity!
The prosecutor’s office (the most controversial office in the system, led by a chief prosecutor who functions as an instrument of the government, spearheads the witch hunt against the main opposition party, and authored the sloppy indictment against the jailed Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, asking for more than 2,352 years of prison time) initially stated that the suspects were acting on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, yet this reference vanished from the revised statement. The name of the state was carefully removed. The link to the original news story containing the UAE reference, published by the main state news agency Anadolu Ajansı, was also killed.
One wonders what pressures or considerations prompted the change, and why.
Does Muslim Brotherhood’s designation as terror group by Trump mean anything?
President Trump’s executive order instructing his foreign policy team to examine whether Brotherhood chapters in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan should be designated as foreign terrorist organisations invites a similar question of timing, since the movement is at its most disorganised and politically absent, its branches scattered and unable to issue even the simplest response to unfolding events, which suggests that the designation reflects less about the Brotherhood’s current state and far more about the sustained lobbying of the United Arab Emirates alongside Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These states have pressed Washington for years to close the remaining political space available to a movement they regard as a threat to their regional order, and the stated justification that certain chapters have encouraged violence against Israel or provided support to Hamas sits beside the unspoken reality that Turkey and Qatar continue to host senior Brotherhood figures and treat their presence as a tool of foreign policy.
The order directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report within forty-five days on which chapters might meet the legal threshold for designation, presenting the approach as a legal necessity derived from the claim that the movement is too fragmented to be treated as a single entity and that only a gradual, chapter-based model can survive judicial scrutiny. This framing offers a procedural sheen that obscures the political calculations beneath it. What remains unsaid is more revealing than the explanation offered, since the order avoids confronting the two centres where the movement’s strategic depth lies. Turkey and Qatar host its senior leadership, finance its operations, preserve its links to Hamas and serve as its command nodes, none of which are touched, and the claim that decentralisation impedes designation contradicts Washington’s own record with groups such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Islamic State, which are all decentralised yet treated as coherent threats.
American legal history provides another reference point. The Holy Land Foundation (a Texas-based charity that provided humanitarian aid in Palestine, it was the largest Muslim charity in the United States until its closure in December 2001) case mapped the Brotherhood’s network in the United States and linked it to foreign leadership structures. The Department of Justice never withdrew that characterisation, yet the executive order focuses on Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, where the movement is already banned, marginal or institutionally exhausted.
What it does is that the order buys bureaucrats time instead of demanding immediate action and quietly honours Doha’s long-standing request to block a global designation. Its effects remain limited because it does not criminalise Brotherhood-linked groups in the United States or touch Istanbul or Doha, where many Brotherhood elites now reside and hold citizenship.
However it is not wholly symbolic either. It heightens legal exposure when an American entity is tied directly to a designated foreign chapter, gives federal agencies room to revive dormant files through subpoenas, audits, warrants and asset freezes, and allows individual states to initiate investigations if they can demonstrate a link to a designated branch, while banks may respond with heightened scrutiny even as the primary political arms of the movement inside the United States continue to operate.
The Brotherhood’s deepening isolation also serves the UAE’s interests in Sudan, where Abu Dhabi has long treated political Islam as a strategic threat and views the remnants of MB-aligned networks as potential instruments of mobilisation against the security order it favours. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and their old Islamist-bureaucratic core remain one of the few organised structures capable of resisting the growing dominance of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and complicating Emirati influence. A United States-led designation erodes that bloc’s external legitimacy and narrows the SAF’s political room for manoeuvre — which, then, leaves the field more open for RSF-linked actors who operate through patronage, militias and commercial networks rather than ideological mobilisation. From Abu Dhabi’s perspective, isolating the Brotherhood becomes a practical instrument for reshaping Sudan’s internal balance and consolidating the regional structure it seeks to build.
I do not believe that this designation represents a transformative policy shift. I would instead read it as an attempt to provide reassurance to certain allies (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt) while avoiding the centres where the Brotherhood’s future is actually being shaped in the back gardens of others (Qatar and Turkey).