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.

• New breed: Zionist-capitalist Arabs

• A mysterious UAE spy group in Istanbul

• Does Muslim Brotherhood’s designation as terror group by Trump mean anything?

Scholars of al-Azhar in the early twentieth century, carrying a lineage that still shadows today’s debates on capitalism and justice, often without offering the tools those debates now require.

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…