Emma Schubart is a Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, where she focuses on Islamism, counter-extremism, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities and influence in the UK.
Today, at last, the Government has proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation. It is a decision that is unquestionably right. It is also, in a very real sense, years too late.
Since 2022, MI5 has disrupted more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots on British soil, a rate the Director-General has described as unprecedented outside wartime. Britons have been recruited, via criminal middlemen, to conduct surveillance and plan assassinations against Iranian journalists and dissidents living under the protection of the Crown. Pouria Zeraati, a presenter for Iran International, was stabbed outside his London home. Two of his colleagues were the targets of a plot the security services nicknamed “the Wedding“.
And in recent months, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, an Islamist group with links to Tehran, claimed responsibility for torching Hatzola community ambulances in north London showing that IRGC’s proxies do not confine themselves to killing Iranians.
This is what the Government has finally acted against: a sustained campaign of intimidation, kidnapping plots and attempted murder carried out on the streets of our own cities. Britain should never have waited until nearly four dozen other countries had already proscribed the IRGC before taking action.
To understand why it has been urgently necessary that the UK fully proscribe the IRGC, it helps to understand where its ideology comes from. The Corps was founded in 1979 not just as Iran’s Shia praetorian guard, but also as the armed vanguard of a revolutionary Islamist project explicitly committed, under Article 154 of Iran’s constitution, to exporting the Iranian Islamist revolution beyond its borders.
That project’s intellectual roots drew on the ideas of the Fada’iyan-e Islam, a militant, fundamentalist Shia group founded in Iran in 1945 by Navvab Safavi. This group sought to purify Iranian society by eliminating perceived “corrupting individuals” through targeted assassinations and enforcing strict sharia law.
Safavi met Sayyid Qutb, the leading Muslim Brotherhood theorist, and other Muslim Brotherhood figures in Cairo in the early 1950s. Qutb himself later had Khomeini’s writings translated into Arabic. The Iranian revolution, itself a Shia movement, offered political Islamists across the Sunni world proof of concept: that a mass Islamist movement could topple a Western-backed state and seize power. Sectarian rivalry between Tehran and the Brotherhood’s Sunni actors remains, but the shared inheritance a totalising, transnational Islamism willing to use terror as statecraft, has never disappeared. The IRGC is, in this sense, the armed expression of an ideological family that includes the Muslim Brotherhood as much as it does Twelver Shi’ism.
That ideological affinity has been visible on British campuses. The Henry Jackson Society has documented Ahlul-Bayt and affiliated Islamic student societies at more than two dozen universities publicly mourning the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describing his killing as “martyrdom“, cancelling events “in honour of our beloved Shuhada [martyr]”, and, at UCL, comparing the leader of a regime responsible for exporting terrorism to Britain’s own streets with the Pope.
Leeds University’s Ahlulbayt Islamic Society sent “heartfelt condolences…on the martyrdom of the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran“. These were public, coordinated endorsements of a man who ran a state security apparatus now formally recognised by our own Government as a terrorist organisation.
That recognition must change what happens next. Proscription will mean little if it is treated as a rhetorical flourish rather than a legal weapon. Ministers must now use the Terrorism Act powers this designation unlocks to dismantle IRGC networks operating through criminal proxies in the UK, to properly protect the journalists, dissidents and British Jews whom the regime has targeted, and to prosecute those who act, however indirectly, on the IRGC’s behalf.
That must include British universities. Vice-chancellors and the Office for Students cannot continue to wave this away as “faith-based expression“. Where individuals or societies glorify a proscribed organisation or its leadership, that conduct must trigger disciplinary consequences, and in the most serious cases, referral to the police under the very terrorism laws the Government has just strengthened.
The IRGC’s proscription is a victory, for the dissidents it has hunted, the journalists it has stabbed, and the British Jews it has stalked. But the law is only as strong as its enforcement. Having finally found the courage to name the IRGC as what it is, ministers must now find the courage to act on every consequence that follows, on our streets, and on our campuses.
Emma Schubart is a Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, where she focuses on Islamism, counter-extremism, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities and influence in the UK.
Today, at last, the Government has proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation. It is a decision that is unquestionably right. It is also, in a very real sense, years too late.
Since 2022, MI5 has disrupted more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots on British soil, a rate the Director-General has described as unprecedented outside wartime. Britons have been recruited, via criminal middlemen, to conduct surveillance and plan assassinations against Iranian journalists and dissidents living under the protection of the Crown. Pouria Zeraati, a presenter for Iran International, was stabbed outside his London home. Two of his colleagues were the targets of a plot the security services nicknamed “the Wedding“.
And in recent months, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, an Islamist group with links to Tehran, claimed responsibility for torching Hatzola community ambulances in north London showing that IRGC’s proxies do not confine themselves to killing Iranians.
This is what the Government has finally acted against: a sustained campaign of intimidation, kidnapping plots and attempted murder carried out on the streets of our own cities. Britain should never have waited until nearly four dozen other countries had already proscribed the IRGC before taking action.
To understand why it has been urgently necessary that the UK fully proscribe the IRGC, it helps to understand where its ideology comes from. The Corps was founded in 1979 not just as Iran’s Shia praetorian guard, but also as the armed vanguard of a revolutionary Islamist project explicitly committed, under Article 154 of Iran’s constitution, to exporting the Iranian Islamist revolution beyond its borders.
That project’s intellectual roots drew on the ideas of the Fada’iyan-e Islam, a militant, fundamentalist Shia group founded in Iran in 1945 by Navvab Safavi. This group sought to purify Iranian society by eliminating perceived “corrupting individuals” through targeted assassinations and enforcing strict sharia law.
Safavi met Sayyid Qutb, the leading Muslim Brotherhood theorist, and other Muslim Brotherhood figures in Cairo in the early 1950s. Qutb himself later had Khomeini’s writings translated into Arabic. The Iranian revolution, itself a Shia movement, offered political Islamists across the Sunni world proof of concept: that a mass Islamist movement could topple a Western-backed state and seize power. Sectarian rivalry between Tehran and the Brotherhood’s Sunni actors remains, but the shared inheritance a totalising, transnational Islamism willing to use terror as statecraft, has never disappeared. The IRGC is, in this sense, the armed expression of an ideological family that includes the Muslim Brotherhood as much as it does Twelver Shi’ism.
That ideological affinity has been visible on British campuses. The Henry Jackson Society has documented Ahlul-Bayt and affiliated Islamic student societies at more than two dozen universities publicly mourning the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describing his killing as “martyrdom“, cancelling events “in honour of our beloved Shuhada [martyr]”, and, at UCL, comparing the leader of a regime responsible for exporting terrorism to Britain’s own streets with the Pope.
Leeds University’s Ahlulbayt Islamic Society sent “heartfelt condolences…on the martyrdom of the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran“. These were public, coordinated endorsements of a man who ran a state security apparatus now formally recognised by our own Government as a terrorist organisation.
That recognition must change what happens next. Proscription will mean little if it is treated as a rhetorical flourish rather than a legal weapon. Ministers must now use the Terrorism Act powers this designation unlocks to dismantle IRGC networks operating through criminal proxies in the UK, to properly protect the journalists, dissidents and British Jews whom the regime has targeted, and to prosecute those who act, however indirectly, on the IRGC’s behalf.
That must include British universities. Vice-chancellors and the Office for Students cannot continue to wave this away as “faith-based expression“. Where individuals or societies glorify a proscribed organisation or its leadership, that conduct must trigger disciplinary consequences, and in the most serious cases, referral to the police under the very terrorism laws the Government has just strengthened.
The IRGC’s proscription is a victory, for the dissidents it has hunted, the journalists it has stabbed, and the British Jews it has stalked. But the law is only as strong as its enforcement. Having finally found the courage to name the IRGC as what it is, ministers must now find the courage to act on every consequence that follows, on our streets, and on our campuses.