atmane tazaghart

In the Arab-Muslim world, Islamists systematically disqualified their secular opponents as “Satan’s minions” (Hizb al-Shaithan); they themselves presented themselves as the Caliphs (heirs) of Allah on earth!

But in the West, people were blind to qualify as “moderates” all those who – even if they paid lip service – said they were opposed to jihadist violence. This was the case, in particular, of the Muslim Brotherhood considered as the spokesman of a “just middle” Islam, whereas all the figures of world jihadism, from Abdellah Azzam and his disciple Osama Bin Laden to Aymen al-Zawahiri and his rival Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had their first “feats of arms” within the Muslim Brotherhood!

This Western blindness was compounded by the victim posture adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood, which presented itself as the supporters of a “political Islamism” persecuted by despotic regimes. And very quickly, Western researchers self-proclaimed as “Islamologists”, for the sole fact of having learned a few bits of Arabic in Cairo or Damascus, invented the calamitous term “political Islam”, to make it an alternative to “radical Islam”.

By amputating the term “political Islam” from the ism originally included in Muslim-brotherly literature – deliberately, as is the case with François Burgat and his colleagues of the “Aix school”, or through ignorance and lack of precision for other “specialists in the field” of Islam – they contributed to trivializing it. For, if it is “political”, this Islamism, relieved of its cumbersome ism, should be tolerated and integrated into the democratic game, both in the West and in the Arab-Muslim world!

We had to wait for the terrifying ISIS attacks, which hit Europe from 2015 onwards, for voices to be raised – finally – against this Islamist “ideological enemy”, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is not only the spearhead, but also the parent organisation.

Thanks to this belated but salutary realisation, we are beginning to understand the nature of the Islamist threat to Europe. For the enemy is not only the one who puts knives or weapons in the hands of young Europeans who have just been re-Islamised. It is also, and above all, the so-called “moderate Islamists” who make these young people receptive to jihadist violence, by inculcating in them communitarianism, living within oneself and hatred of the Other.

With the dissolution of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) and the creation of the French Islam Forum (FORIF), a new level has been reached in the fight against Islamism.

After having failed to bring the supporters of political Islamism to moderation by integrating them into the CFCM in 2003, the public authorities tried, in 2021, to commit them to respecting secular and republican values through a “charter of values”. The failure of this approach sounded the death knell of the CFCM. The doors of the FORIF are now closed to Islamists of all persuasions, be it the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, the Tabligh or the Turkish Millî Görüs.

It remains to be seen what the public authorities will do now to prevent these Islamist organisations (which they have identified and isolated) from continuing their communal and separatist undermining that threatens the foundations of the French republican model?