In February 2011 America's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was asked about the Muslim Brotherhood at a House Intelligence Committee hearing. He declared the Brotherhood to be a "largely secular" organisation with "no overarching agenda". Whatever his title, Mr Clapper is clearly a man of no curiosity or intelligence. Since its founding in 1928 the agenda of the Brotherhood has been absolutely clear. It desires to impose sharia and restore the caliphate. They may not be selling-points which are unique to the Brotherhood but anybody commenting on the Brotherhood's ideology should recognise these aspirations as being at the very top of its agenda. Mr Clapper did not need to reach for the history books.

He could have considered the statement of the organisation's current Deputy Guide, Khairat al-Shater: "The mission is clear: restoring Islam and its all-encompassing conception; subjugating people to God; instituting the religion of God: the Islamisation of life, empowering of God's religion; establishing the Nahda of the Ummah on the basis of Islam." Or he might have listened to Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt who said at a rally in the Nile Delta in 2010: "We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them, for Zionists, for Jews." He went on to explain that the country's children "must feed on hatred. Hatred must continue . . . The hatred must go on for God and as a form of worshipping him." If Mr Clapper happened to have heard all such sayings of Morsi but somehow failed to believe them, then he also ignored the Brotherhood's offshoot in Gaza — Hamas — which teaches exactly such hatred in its schools. If US officials, among others, thought that Morsi and co in Egypt were just talking the talk, they had ignored the entirely bloody attempt at instituting the same ideology which had gone on next door for years.

In Tunisia — whose Brotherhood leaders Britain harboured in exile for years — one of the most progressive Muslim countries in the world has found progress to be little bar to the regressive Islamists. It is not the progressives who now run the country. As in Egypt, so in Libya. All those Libyans who came out onto the streets to thank Nato for overthrowing Gaddafi may keep the kindest thoughts in their hearts. But their country is not ruled by such people. Libya today is a lawless place where Islamists run the show and the country's vast oil reserves can barely be pumped. And that was meant to be the success story.

As politicians in the West began to realise that the only force still capable of kicking out the Islamists were not the much-vaunted  minority "moderates" but the army, one Western commentator observed to me: ‘Basically, when it comes to Islam we are all pessimists now.'

It is true. Or it should be, because for all the great hopes and aspirations which the Arab Spring unleashed, its midwinter season has reminded anyone with a sense of history that we have been here before. For all the peaceable Muslims in the region and around the world, the Islamic authorities and their sources are not on their side. They never have been, in any significant number, and perhaps never will be. Any sensible domestic as well as foreign policy would factor in this grim reality. Instead we run from it.

At home, as much as abroad, we console ourselves with occasional attempts to break through this gloom. There was one attempt before the summer when the former extremist and now anti-extremist Shiraz Maher (also a contributor to this magazine) pointed out in the Jewish Chronicle: "A new face of British Islam is rising." What is more, he informed his audience, "It needs your help." Putting aside whether there is anything that a British Jew can do to help Islam to reform, Maher was able to name only one "new leader" in the British Islam he was heralding. The example he gave was Usama Hasan — formerly an ultra-conservative who fought in Afghanistan as a youth. I know Usama, admire and like him. He has become a learned, thoughtful and deeply humane presence among the small niche of people who want to see a progressive British Islam emerge. And, crucially, he provides serious scholarly authority. But what Maher failed to tell his readers in the JC is that this great hope he presented to them has one other striking thing about him: he cannot preach in a mosque.