The decision of the British government this week to launch an investigation into the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood is a major victory for Saudi Arabia, which has been arguing since the 9/11 attacks that it is the Brotherhood’s brand of “political Islam” that is the source of jihadist violence and extremism, not Saudi Wahhabism. “What I think is important about the Muslim Brotherhood is that we understand what this organisation is, what it stands for, what its beliefs are in terms of the path of extremism and violent extremism, what its connections are with other groups, what its presence is here in the United Kingdom,” Cameron said. Privately, officials said there had been months of Saudi pressure, complementing Saudi anger over the West’s shift on Iran since November.

The events of September 11, 2001 were disastrous for the prestige of Al Saud not only because 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudi but because the ideology of Al-Qa’ida was widely viewed as having its origins in the puritanical Wahhabism sponsored by the Saudi state – indeed, the alliance between the Saudi ruling family and the Wahhabi religious establishment is the main pillar of the Saudi state. The attacks plunged US-Saudi relations into a state of crisis, which King Abdullah, then crown prince, deftly fixed via his Arab-Israeli peace initiative, support for the US invasion of Iraq, and sponsorship of a new discourse of reform.

But an often-forgotten element of the Saudi response was to direct blame at the Egyptian mother organization of transnational Arab Islamism. “The Muslim Brotherhood is the source of all of our problems in the Arab world,” the late interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz said in 2002. In the years of reform that followed, Saudi Arabia behaved more as if it was the Brotherhood that required reform than its Wahhabi institutions and thought promotion. The ministry of education made efforts to purge schools of Brotherhood influence, removing many books by or about Brotherhood ideologue Sayed Qutb, executed by Nasser’s regime in 1966. At the same time, the government dragged its feet on the material that troubled its American partner regarding Wahhabism’s othering of both Muslims and non-Muslims, to the extent that this remains an issue to this day.

It’s certainly true that Qutbist thought has been immensely influential in modern jihadism. Qutb and a band of like-minded Brotherhood figures developed radical thinking while in jail that framed the system of rule and those responsible for it as not just non-Muslim but inimical to the interests of the pious, moral society that God mandated for Muslims. Whereas the Brotherhood had directed its focus before Nasser towards a colonial power, Britain, who could be held responsible for the ills of Muslims in Egypt, after the Free Officers took over Muslims had taken their destiny into their own hands. If this regime was inflicting such suffering on its opponents, it could only be deemed infidel. After Qutb’s death numerous movements emerged in the context of 1970s Egypt inspired by his ideas, some preferring to withdraw from society, others seeing a need to challenge its leadership head on via acts of coup or assassination. al-Qa’ida’s leader in Afghanistan Osama bin Laden was influenced by this thinking.

However, the Brotherhood developed in an entirely different direction in the 1970s under the leadership of Omar al-Tilmisani. Tilmisani pioneered a seminal new approach that began a process of reconciliation with the basic framework of modern democracy, and the result was a Brotherhood onslaught in Egyptian public life from the 1980s onwards, taking part in parliamentary elections, syndicate politics and student campuses. Charity work for sure continued as a basic focus on Brotherhood activity, but the movement’s new modus operandi became the election. And it is to the innovation of the popular election we have to look to understand the growing anxiety, now bordering on outright panic that Gulf ruling elites have displayed towards the Brotherhood over the past decade and more specifically in the past three years since the Arab uprisings. For Saudi Arabia, which brands itself as the true Sharia state, the Brotherhood and the plethora of movements like it are a challenge in their populist message and use of an Islamic frame of reference at the level of political ideology. Based on these elements, one can chart the demise in Saudi relations with the Brotherhood since the 1970s when the movement’s cadres were welcomed, before the group’s political epiphany: Tilmisani’s shift to democratic politics, the Brotherhood’s successes in Egypt’s 1984 election in an alliance with the Wafd party, the Brotherhood’s opposition to the US military mobilization to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait (using Saudi territory), Mubarak’s admonitions from 1994 that the Brotherhood was the ideological source of Islamist violence in Egypt, and the Brotherhood’s entry into a liberated political arena in Egypt post-uprising.

The other key element is the position of the United States. In 2005 Washington instigated a clear shift in its position towards the Brotherhood, which to that point had been associated with anti-Westernism, Hamas and Palestinian activism, the Iranian revolution, and a generalized media discourse of the Islamist bogeyman. Under pressure from the Bush administration’s post-Iraq project for democracy in the “greater Middle East”, the Mubarak regime eased up on vote-rigging in the first round of parliamentary elections that year, leading to an impressive result for Brotherhood candidates – so impressive that rigging was quickly reinstituted for the second and third rounds. But for the United States, a new potential interlocutor had emerged in the Arab world, one that involved a network of like-minded movements across the region who appeared to command the political centre and have a sense of the anti-secular religiously conservative Arab Zeitgeist. This belief was encouraged by Qatar, which some suspect had been pushing this line quietly with the State Department since the 1990s (thus Brotherhood ideologue Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi was an early star of Qatar’s pan-Arab channel Al-Jazeera).

So 2011 was a concatenation of circumstances for regimes like that of Al Saud: political Islam uses electoral politics to beat a path to government, inspiring the Islamist centre – an unquestionable majority – at home, and all with American blessing. The effort to roll it back has produced great results so far, however. The Egyptian military removed the Brotherhood’s president and government from power last year. Since then the struggle has moved to pressuring Western governments to return to their default position or worse on the Brotherhood – thus Cameron’s move this week is an important victory in the Saudi campaign. London has long been a space where Arab dissidents can take refuge and operate; Egypt made representations against non-Brotherhood Islamists in the 1990s and Saudi Arabia had slightly better luck against Mohammed al-Mas’ari, who successfully challenged a government effort to deport him in 1996. Saudi efforts led to a US Treasury Department blacklisting for Saad al-Fagih in 2004, who the Saudi government accused of being associated with al-Qa’ida. Both are Islamist laymen in fact associated with the Sahwa movement led by Brotherhood-influenced Saudi clerics in the early 1990s and Fagih attempted to organize street protests from his London base in 2003-4.

The question now is will Western, and European, positions on the Brotherhood shift due to Saudi and other Arab pressure? Thus far there is no indication that Washington or the EU intend to move ground. None have supported Egyptian assertions that the Brotherhood is behind deadly attacks on army and security targets, including apparent suicide bombings (claimed by jihadi groups), and both publicly exhort the government to engage in dialogue with its Islamist opposition. But cracks have appeared. Paris quickly made common cause with Riyadh following the Brotherhood’s downfall, the location of several high-level trysts with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal during which Saudi support for the military regime in Egypt and US military action against Syria were made clear in news conferences. Egyptian military officials were present in Riyadh last week for King Abdullah’s meetings with Barak Obama in an effort to push Washington to end suspensions of arms supplies to Egypt. Now the UK has launched an inquiry that could see the Brotherhood proscribed there.

Facing intense internal repression, foreign exile locations have risen in importance for the movement. They include Doha, Istanbul and London, where Brotherhood figures from the United Arab Emirates have also sought refuge amid a crackdown that has seen over 100 people jailed and convicted of seeking to overthrow the system of government and allegations of torture amid an ongoing campaign of arrests. The National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, an Islamist-led coalition formed after Mohammed Morsi was ousted last year and that organizes nightly protests in Egypt, chose Istanbul for a news conference last month to denounce a government report whitewashing the uber-violence used to break-up Brotherhood sit-ins last summer. The Brotherhood has set up an office in Cricklewood, North West London, and as for Doha… well, Doha is Doha.

At home, the Saudi campaign has involved designating the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, including it in a list of banned groups Saudis must not join or propagate, and coordinating a mass ambassador withdrawal from Doha with the UAE and Bahrain. It has also involved a return to the effort to brand the Brotherhood and not Wahhabism as the source of Islamic violence. Jamal Khashoggi, manager of Alarab TV, recently wrote that it was Egyptian jihadists who had polluted the minds of Bin Laden and Saudi jihadists in Afghanistan, and Abdel-Rahman al-Rashed, manager of Al Arabiya TV, wrote that Salafi jihadist groups in Syria were an invention of Syria and Iran (rather than a product of Saudi thinking, funding and politicking). It is remarkable that barely a decade after 9/11 the Saudi regime can find a willing audience for such claims in the West.