Rejection of secularism, denial of science and conspiracy… Teachers in the national education system find themselves confronted with a challenge not only to the republican model, but also to the Enlightenment, against a backdrop of a general decline in the level of students. Understaffed, teachers do not feel supported by their superiors, who seem to be out of touch with reality.
“The Satanic Verses”, which led to Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death, is a work of fiction. However, the incident evoked in this novel and from which its title is inspired, refers to a proven historical fact, mentioned both in the Koran and in the main books of the Sira, the chronicles of the life and words of the Prophet of Islam.
In his novel, Salman Rushdie devotes to the incident of the ‘‘satanic verses’’ – an indisputable historical fact that the Koran evokes, without detour or ambiguity (Verse 52, Sura 22) – the second chapter of the novel entitled Mahound.
Under the pretext of fighting against compulsory vaccination, gangs have been extorting money from businesses in Guadeloupe. You had to pay not to have your shop or supermarket burnt down. Suddenly, Paris discovered that the French departments of the West Indies are gangrenous with organised crime, and that this type of crime even has the best relations with local elected officials. And this is not the only evil from which these islands suffer. The proof: as soon as you arrive at Pointe-à-Pitre airport in Guadeloupe, posters warn of “violent radicalization” and “jihadist recruitment”.
The July 2018 report by the US Congressional Subcommittee on National Security is the most important and comprehensive official Western document on the global threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood. It sheds unprecedented light on the secret ramifications of the Brotherhood, which is considered to be the mother house of contemporary Islamism, its tentacles in more than 70 countries around the world, and its supremacist dogma, which aims to establish Islamist world domination through a global “Islamic state”.
While the cases analyzed in this book clearly demonstrate common patterns of discontent among the former Western Brotherhood members profiled, one should not draw generalizations. It is difficult to determine if they constitute outliers or if their stories are indicative of a larger phenomenon of dissatisfaction inside the movement. Is the Brotherhood in the West in crisis, as some argue?1 Should the movement’s success or failure be judged by the growth and the stability of its membership? Or, since the Brotherhood is a movement seeking to mobilize the masses but willing to open itself only to few selected members, should success be assessed in another way, such as ability to exert influence within Western Muslim communities and Western elite circles? These questions cannot be answered easily. Moreover, irrespective of the metrics employed in assessing the Brotherhood, the answer is likely to differ from country to country. Yet it is clear that the 2010s have been an earth-shattering decade for the global Muslim Brotherhood movement and, consequently, for the Brotherhood in the West as well. The primary driver of change has been the so-called Arab Spring, with all its complex and still unfolding dynamics, which has had a huge impact on Brotherhood organizations in the East and the West.
A confidential report by a European intelligence agency October 2021 mentions a secret alliance between Qatar and Turkey, sealed during a “coordination meeting” dedicated to strengthening collaboration between the two countries on “support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe”.
We reproduce here large excerpts from this edifying report:
The General Guide is the supreme authority within the Muslim Brotherhood. When pledging allegiance (Bay’a), every member of the Brotherhood must swear loyalty and obedience to the Guide. However, the current Guide’s authority, Ibrahim Mounir, has just been seriously challenged by an attempt at a putsch unseen since the creation of the Brotherhood in 1928.
88 years after its creation in 1933, the women’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood remains very marginalized. The Muslim Sisters are most often confined to the role of auxiliaries in the shadow of the Brothers. Paradoxically, we observe an opposite phenomenon in Europe: the Sisters are deliberately put forward as symbols of openness and modernity. They are thus used as an Islamist Trojan horse to better infiltrate civil society and siphon off subsidies from European bodies!
This report by the Belgian State Security Service was drawn up in the context of the “Ihsane Haouach affair”, named after this veiled community activist who was appointed government commissioner at the Institute for the Equality of Men and Women last May and then forced to resign a few weeks later following the revelation of her “close contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood”.
The report criticises the entryism practised by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to “influence public debate and policy-making (governmental or local)” and warns against the Muslim Brotherhood’s “doctrine of concealment” “by which they allow themselves a certain flexibility with regard to certain orthodox Islamic prescriptions, adapt their discourse to their audience, and conceal their true intentions and convictions”.
He concludes that the Muslim Brotherhood “cultivates a public image of well-integrated, moderate and (relatively) progressive European Muslims”, but “aims in the long term at the progressive Islamisation of European society in all its components”.
