How Britain cultivated Egypts Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s and 1950s

1941: The Muslim Brotherhood also enjoyed the patronage of the pro-British Egyptian monarchy, which had begun to fund the Brotherhood in 1940. King Farouk saw the Brothers as a useful counter to the power of the major political party in the countrythe secular, nationalist Wafd Partyand the communists. A British intelligence report of 1942 noted that the Palace had begun to find the Ikhwan useful and has thrown its aegis over them. During this time, many Islamic societies in Egypt were sponsored by the authorities to oppose rivals or enhance the interests of the British, the Palace or other influential groups (page 40).

1942: Britain had definitely begun to finance the Brotherhood. On May 18, British embassy officials held a meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Amin Osman Pasha, in which relations with the Muslim Brotherhood were discussed and a number of points were agreed upon. One was that subsidies from the Wafd [Party] to the Ikhwani el Muslimin [Muslim Brotherhood] would be discreetly paid by the [Egyptian] government and they would require some financial assistance in this matter from the [British] Embassy. In addition, the Egyptian government would introduce reliable agents into the Ikhwani to keep a close watch on activities and would let us [the British embassy] have the information obtained from such agents. We, for our part, would keep the government in touch with information obtained from British sources (page 45).

1951: Indications from declassified British files show that Brotherhood leaders, despite their public calls for attacks on the British, were perfectly prepared to meet them in private. By this time, the Egyptian government, in coordination with the British authorities, was offering Hodeibi enormous bribes to keep the Brotherhood from engaging in further violence against the regime, according to the Foreign Office.

1953:The files also contain a note of a meeting between British and Brother hood officials on February 7, 1953, in which an individual by the name of Abu Ruqayak told the British embassys oriental counsellor, Trefor Evans, that if Egypt searched throughout the world for a friend she would find none other than Britain. The British embassy in Cairo interpreted this comment as showing the existence of a group within the Brotherhoods leaders who were prepared to cooperate with Britain, even if not with the West (they distrusted American influence). One handwritten note on this part of the embassys memo reads: The deduction seems justified and is surprising. The memo also notes that the willingness to cooperate probably stems from the increasing middle class influence in the Brotherhood, compared with the predominantly popular leadership of the movement in the days of Hassan al-Banna (page 45).

1955: Certainly, British officials were carefully monitoring the anti-regime activities of the Brotherhood, and recognised it as capable of mounting a serious challenge to Nasser. There is also evidence that the British had contacts with the organisation in late 1955, when some Brothers visited King Farouk, then in exile in Italy, to explore cooperation against Nasser. King Husseins regime in Jordan gave Brotherhood leaders diplomatic passports to facilitate their movements to organise against Nasser, while Saudi Arabia provided funding. The CIA also approved Saudi Arabias funding of the Muslim Brotherhood to act against Nasser, according to a former CIA officer, Robert Baer (page 46).

1956: In August, the Egyptian authorities uncovered a British spy ring in the country and arrested four Britons, including James Swinburn, the business manager of the Arab News Agency, the MI6 front based in Cairo. Two British diplomats involved in intelligence gathering were also expelled. They had, as Stephen Dorril notes, apparently been in contact with student elements of a religious inclination with the idea of encouraging fundamentalist riots that could provide an excuse for military intervention to protect European lives (page 58).

By 1956, when Britain invaded Egypt, contacts were developed as part of plans to overthrow Nasser. Indeed, the invasion was undertaken in the knowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood might form the new regime.

After Nasser died in 1970, and the pro-Western President Anwar Sadat secretly sponsored militant Islamist cells to counter nationalists and communists, British officials were still describing the Brotherhood as a potentially handy weapon for the regime(page 63).