The European Union has no designated capital, but everyone in Europe knows the EU’s unofficial headquarters is in Brussels, home to the EU’s bureaucracy and parliament. Not everyone knows that Brussels is the unofficial headquarters of three of the Muslim Brotherhood’s six pan-European organizations.
The Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations, the European Forum of Muslim Women, and the European Muslim Network are all located among the lobbyists in the Belgian capital. So, too, are Brotherhood-aligned satellite organizations such as the League of Muslims in Belgium, founded in 2005, the female-led All Equal in Work and at Schools, founded in 2010, and the Collective for Inclusion and Against Islamophobia in Belgium, founded in 2014.
The 20th century was the century of popular revolutions, fueled, sparked, and exploited by radical parties. The fascists are gone, leaving a slime trail of adolescent fascination and an all-purpose adjective of opprobrium. The communists nominally still rule China, but most of the committed communists these days are in Western universities. Only one of the 20th century’s revolutionary internationals is still going and still thriving: the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood, known colloquially as al Ikhwan (“the Brothers”), was founded by the Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al Banna in Cairo in 1928 as an anti-imperialist Salafist (Muslim revival) movement. Its ideology intensified in the 1950s, courtesy of its most famous ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, who was notoriously disturbed by the sight of mixed dancing when he visited the United States.
Brotherhood ideology is a radical mixture of imperial arrogance and colonial humiliation, a fellow traveler on the road of postcolonial grievance with Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, with Qutb’s notion of “defensive jihad” justifying the subversion and, ultimately, replacement of non-Muslim power. The Brotherhood seeks to extend the goal of a personal Islamic revival to its total fulfilment in the social and political ideal: a caliphate governed by sharia law. An amorphous and secretive organization, it now has affiliates in over 70 countries. Its multivarious front groups and members have been repeatedly involved in promoting Islamist violence and intimidation. They include Hamas, whose founding charter identifies it as the Palestinian chapter of the Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood finally attained power in al Banna’s native Egypt in 2011, when the Arab Spring carried Mohamed Morsi to power, with the approval of the Obama administration. Morsi was overthrown by the army in 2013. His overthrower, Abdel El Sisi, restored the emergency powers passed after a Brotherhood-linked group assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1980 and banned the Brotherhood as a terrorist group. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates followed suit in 2014. A Jordanian court ordered the Brotherhood’s dissolution in 2020. In April, Jordan banned the Brotherhood after 16 people were arrested on suspicion of planning rocket and drone attacks. However, the Brotherhood’s political arm, the Islamic Action Front, remains the leading opposition group in Jordan’s parliament. Brotherhood-affiliated parties are also prominent in the parliaments of Tunisia and Morocco.
The Brotherhood is cellular, like most Western terrorist groups, though more loosely structured and more international than most. Like many Western terrorist groups, it combines terrorism, the “propaganda of the deed,” with a creeping exploitation of the institutional and legislative system it hopes to overthrow. This is not unlike the division of labor during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. While the Celtic Maoists of the Irish Republican Army murdered civilians and soldiers and developed a lucrative hidden economy of drug-dealing, protection rackets, and money laundering, the “terrorists in suits” of Sinn Fein tag-teamed the British state at the political level. The result was a long-term, coordinated campaign of carrot-and-stick social engineering.
Like the communist revolutionaries, the Islamists speak of a bottom-up revolution while working to control the top-down institutions of society. Unlike the communists, the Brotherhood has often achieved popular support: Morsi was elected to Egypt’s presidency. In the fragmented Muslim immigrant communities that developed in Western European cities from the 1950s onward, the Brotherhood simultaneously offered piety as an antidote to assimilation and the kind of institutional connections that opened up access to welfare services and, eventually, bloc voting and political influence.
In the absence of coherent alternatives, and as a reward of its patient work, Brotherhood-aligned groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain have been able to position themselves in the West as intermediaries between governments and their new Muslim minorities. In 2009, MCB’s apologia for terrorism caused the Conservative-led British government to initiate a program of “non-engagement” with the MCB. The British government still lacks an intermediary manager of relations with Britain’s fastest-growing and most fractious minority.
The communists used to describe “entryism” as a strategy. The Brotherhood, which likes to describe itself as a charity and prefers not to describe its activities and membership at all, is an entryist organization. As in Jordan, and in charitable institutions, mosques, universities, and political parties from Brussels to Berkeley, the Brotherhood’s “Islamists in suits” are able to operate freely in the West — apart from in Austria.
In 2021, Austria, the only European state to have granted official status to Islam, became the first and so far only European state to ban the Muslim Brotherhood on its territory. As part of a package of anti-terrorism laws, the possession and dissemination of Brotherhood materials was prohibited as a “religiously motivated crime.”
Jean-Paul Garraud, a French member of the European Parliament whose Popular Right movement is part of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, asked the European Commission whether it would now invoke its legal right to add any organization listed as a terrorist group by a member state to a Europe-wide list. The reply was: “The Council has not discussed the issue raised by the Honorable Member.”
On June 10, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced legislation to designate the Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization in the United States. Meanwhile, the European Council has still not discussed the Brotherhood’s status. Apart from in Austria, it still operates freely everywhere else in Europe. Its members and institutions are increasingly embedded at the core of Europe’s civic and political life.
Belgian waffle
The Collective for Inclusion and Against Islamophobia, with its headquarters at 35 Boulevard du Neuvième du Ligne, Brussels, is part of the Brussels-based European Network Against Racism. This pan-European network of “anti-racist” nongovernmental organizations is largely funded by the European Commission, with further donations from the Open Society Foundations, created by George Soros, and Britain’s Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. ENAR describes its mission as ending “structural racism and discrimination across Europe.” ENAR believes that it is “not a coincidence or a geophysical accident that racialized communities are amongst the hardest hit by the climate crisis.” This is a result of “interactions between climatic changes and structural racism.”
ENAR’s “top priority” in Europe’s immigration crisis is the fight against “hate speech” and “the fight against racism.” This includes the contentious category of Islamophobia, which, despite Islam being a religion, not a race or national group, ENAR calls a “form of racism.” In 2023, the “small and medium anti-racist organizations” that received grants from ENAR’s Empowerment and Resilience Fund included Dokustelle in Austria (“building the grassroots volunteer network” in Austrian Muslim communities); Alliance Citoyenne (“empowering hijabi women”) and Lallab (“equality, justice and power for Muslim women”) in France; and Apna Haq (“Combating Islamophobia through nonviolent ways”) in Britain despite Britain’s departure from the EU.
In late April, an investigation by the Belgian intelligence service, the SGRS, concluded that the Collective for Inclusion and Against Islamophobia was a “Muslim Brotherhood-leaning pressure group.” Confidential documents obtained by the newspaper La Dernière Heure tied the Brotherhood to the collective’s “historical antecedents, the occasional support it receives and the narrative it propagates.” This narrative “tends to promote the idea of an inherent hostility in European societies and states towards Islam and Muslims.”
The collective, the report said, manipulated the concept of Islamophobia to discredit critics and defend the veiling of women and mobilized veiled women against mandatory sex education programs in Belgium’s schools. It exploited “anti-racist” coalitions for funding and support and advanced its members and sympathizers into civil institutions. It used these platforms to shape public discourse and policy and present itself as the voice of Belgian Muslims in their dealings with the government.
The collective, it turned out, had a Brotherhood member among its founders and was supported by Brotherhood-linked organizations such as the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations. It operated as the Belgian branch of another ENAR member, the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, which was dissolved by the French government in 2020 as an “enemy of the republic” for its part in a social media campaign against Samuel Paty, a French history teacher who had showed his students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class on free speech. In October 2020, a Russian-born Chechen teenager who had immigrated to France as a child traveled 60 miles to behead Paty at his school gates.
The SGRS report confirmed long-standing suspicions about the motives of the collective and its related organizations. In 2015, following a series of articles identifying Belgium as the Brotherhood’s European hub, Frédérique Ries, a Belgian liberal member of the European Parliament, requested clarification from the European Commission on the nature of its support for a “hidden but highly influential network” whose scale and reach were unknown but whose values, Ries said, were “largely at odds with democratic principles.”
The commission replied that the press reports were “discrediting civil society organisations” whose common objective was “combating racism, xenophobia, discrimination and other related intolerance” and that all recipients of grants were carefully vetted. In 2012, for example, ENAR received 1,081,164 euros, or about $1.25 million. The Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations received 70,871 euros, or just over $80,000, for its new Islamophobia Monitoring and Action Network.
“It’s unthinkable and unacceptable that a single euro of European public money should finance organizations, associations, and actors that are hostile to our values, linked to hatred, antisemitism, or even Islamism,” Benjamin Haddad, France’s minister for Europe, said on May 19. Haddad demanded that the EU “reinforce the checks” on its funding so that it is not supporting groups “linked to antisemitism or Islamism.”
Two days later, on May 21, the French government released its own report on the Muslim Brotherhood’s “entryism” into France’s institutions. The report called the Brotherhood a “menace to national cohesion” due to its building of Islamism “from below,” at the municipal level. The Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations, which the report named as a Brotherhood group, denied that any of its 32 organizations in 20 European states were “political entities” and accused the French government of using “Islamophobic tropes.”
French President Emmanuel Macron had ordered that a shortened version of the report be made public, but someone, possibly one of his ministers, released the whole thing, minus several items that the Interior Ministry redacted on security grounds. Bruno Retailleau, Macron’s interior minister and the leader of the rival Les Républicains party, called the Brotherhood, the ultimate goal of which is the application of sharia law over French law, a “clear threat to the Republic.”
Brothers in arms
France has arrived at the choice Britain faced in 2015 and the U.S. in 2018. The Brotherhood is a “clear threat” to the French way of life. It is implicated in terrorism, deliberately obstructs integration on the state’s terms, and aspires to replace the state and its laws. Should it be banned?
After the overthrow of Morsi’s government in 2013, Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist group. They then pressured the British government to do the same. David Cameron, the Conservative leader of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, ordered an inquiry into the Brotherhood’s activities in Britain. Publication was delayed by what the BBC called “internal Whitehall wrangling over what findings should be made public and whether a potential ban would be enforceable or simply counter-productive.”
The report finally came out in 2015. It noted the “complex” subject matter and its “significant domestic and foreign policy implications” and concluded that “aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security.”
In his statement to the House of Commons, Cameron described Brotherhood ideology and networks as a “rite of passage” for “violence and terrorism.” It had influenced groups that “claimed to represent ordinary Muslim communities in talks with government,” while characterizing the British state as anti-Islamic. Individuals closely associated with the Brotherhood in Britain had endorsed suicide bombings by Hamas. Membership of the Brotherhood indicated “a possible indicator of extremism.”
Aspects of the Brotherhood’s “ideology and activities,” Cameron said, ran “counter to British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, equality and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.” His government was determined to “reject intolerance” and “counter not just violent Islamist extremism, but also to tackle those who create the conditions for it to flourish.”
Cameron chose not to ban the Brotherhood in Britain. No official reasoning has been given. Perhaps Cameron and his advisers were aware of the dilemma that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) described when chairing the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security in 2018.
DeSantis’s opening remarks described a campaign of subversion across three continents, including the promotion of terrorism in the U.S. and the abuse of American charity laws to raise funds for Hamas. But democratically elected parties that fell “within the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella” were “a significant voting bloc in the parliaments and governing coalitions of some of our key counterterrorism allies in the Middle East and North Africa.”
“A wholesale designation,” DeSantis warned, “would severely complicate our relationship with the regional security partners, including Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, and Kuwait, where the Muslim Brotherhood functions within mainstream government and society.” It would be “counterintuitive” to lump together “political actors, nonviolent, nonterrorist” with “groups that we wish to designate for their violent and terrorist activities.”
BANNING THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
The Brotherhood, DeSantis admitted, was so involved in the civilian politics of key Arab allies that attacking the Brotherhood might destabilize those states. He did not mention that if the U.S. proscribed the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, that would raise the question of whether its current backers should be listed as state sponsors of terrorism. The Brotherhood’s key sources of funds and diplomatic support are Turkey, a longtime NATO member; Kuwait, for whose integrity the U.S. fought the first Iraq War in 1990; and Qatar, designated a major non-NATO ally by the Biden administration in 2022.
The Brotherhood’s long march through the institutions of Europe replicates this dilemma inside European states. The internal stability of European societies depends on managing the unpopular effects of mass immigration and Islamist violence. The Brotherhood has turned itself from interlocutor to partner to administrator. So far, only Austria’s government has dared to risk the backlash of banning it. Despite the fears of the British government, the Austrian ban turned out to be enforceable. There was no “counterproductive” backlash in Austria, either.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.