UAE paid for Nigel Farage trip to Abu Dhabi amid anti-Muslim Brotherhood efforts

The UAE paid for Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK’s right-wing Reform Party, to travel to Abu Dhabi to meet with senior Emirati officials, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

The trip came after Farage pledged in a speech to the Reform UK party conference last September to ban the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK, saying it was a “dangerous organisation with links to terrorism”.

The UAE has long opposed the Muslim Brotherhood and worked against leaders and governments it claims are affiliated with the group across the Middle East and North Africa.

During his trip to the UAE, Farage was given free accommodation by Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and passes to a Formula 1 race car competition.

The total value of the gifts presented to the right-wing leader was approximately £10,000, according to the UK’s register of MP interests.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the biggest Islamist group in the Middle East, with branches in various countries, and generally advocates peaceful political and social engagement.

A Brotherhood member, Mohammed Morsi, won democratic elections in Egypt in 2012 but was overthrown a year later in a military coup led by current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Several Arab governments, including that of the UAE, have designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, but most Western governments have not done so.

Recently, however, the Trump administration in the US said it would work on designating branches of the Brotherhood, as well as the American Muslim advocacy group CAIR, as terrorist groups.

In the UK, the government has said it will keep the issue of the Muslim Brotherhood under “close review” while declining to designate it as a terrorist group.

The UAE said on Thursday that it will cut funding to its citizens who want to study at UK universities, in a move seen as an attempt to put pressure on the UK government to ban the Brotherhood.

A UAE official told The Financial Times that the decision came because Emirati authorities “don’t want their kids to be radicalised on campus”.

On the social media platform X, Farage praised the UAE decision, saying “Decent Muslim countries cannot believe how weak the UK is on extremism”.

The UAE has recently been reaching out to far-right, anti-Islam figures in the UK, hosting prominent anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson in December.

Around the same time as his visit, Robinson posted a bizarre tweet in support of the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a UAE-allied group which wants to create a separate state in southern Yemen.