At the end of the 1950s, Saïd Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) fled Egypt and chose Geneva to set out to conquer the West. His son Hani has headed the Islamic Centre of Geneva (ICG) since 1995. His brother Tariq was the best-known French-speaking Muslim on the planet, before vice scandals toppled him in 2017. Even today, the city of Calvin is still largely under the thumb of the Ramadan family. But there was a dramatic turn of events on September 10, 2024. While Tariq Ramadan had been acquitted in May 2023 at first instance, he was sentenced on appeal to three years in prison, including one year in prison, for rape and sexual coercion.
The Qatari-Egyptian Youssef al-Qaradawi, presented as the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, died on 26 September at the age of 96, but was in fact only a courtier who adapted his preaching to what his Qatari protectors wanted to hear. For he owes his immense popularity to the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera where, for years, he was able to distil his retrograde version of Islam in his programme “Sharia and Life”. Thus, a woman who wears a tight-fitting garment will not only not enter paradise, but she “will not even smell it”. A Muslim woman’s clothing “must not resemble that worn especially by the unbelievers, the Jews, the Christians and the idolaters”, he warned. As for men, their private parts “are between the navel and the knees”. This means that they must not allow women to rave about their thighs… and cast “hungry and greedy” glances at them, which Youssef Qaradawi, father of modesty, called “fornication of the eye”
In her latest book “Islamophobia, My Eye!”, Djemila Benhabib borrows a formula from Salman Rushdie that sums up the extent of the deadly fraud orchestrated by the proponents of political Islam, which the secular and feminist activist of Algerian origin intends to denounce through this lucid and poignant work, halfway between a political essay and an autobiographical testimony: “A new word had been invented to allow the blind to remain blind: Islamophobia”, says the author of “The Satanic Verses” who knows better than anyone the intellectual deceptions of the Islamist inquisition.
In the photo illustrating her latest book, Djemila Benhabib has a sparkling eye, the eye of challenge. In fact, it is in the title: “Islamophobia, my eye” (Kennes Editions). A lucid look at this political scam that forbids free criticism of Islam. The essayist has herself paid the price, being dragged before the courts in Quebec on several occasions for her courageous interventions against obscurantism. Djemila, who is named after a beautiful site in Algeria, dear to Albert Camus (“The Wind at Djemila”), grew up in this beautiful and bloody country until she was exiled to France in 1994 after being sentenced to death by the GIA, the armed Islamic groups. She was barely 22 years old. Since then, she has been fighting, leading her life “Against the Koran”, the title of the book that has earned her the most admiration and hatred.
For four decades, European governments have welcomed hundreds of Islamic leaders into their countries. Some do so for political and strategic reasons, others are motivated by the defence of human rights. One thing is certain, however: the intentions of these “unusual” arrivals have nothing to do with the expectations and motivations of European authorities. These Islamists slyly take advantage of the freedom of conscience guaranteed by the Western democracies that they viscerally detest. Worse still, they have no qualms about spreading a separatist discourse among Muslims living in the West, encouraging them to demand the application of specific rights. And ultimately aim at the application of Sharia law in their communities.
It is well known that ridicule does not kill – unfortunately. Faced with certain aberrations, we would like him to do so. If only once, for the sake of example! Thus, in response to the revelations of Global Watch Analysis (see Screen Watch n°17, December 2021) and our colleagues from Marianne, concerning the excesses of “consular Islam” which led the “moderate” rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chams Eddine Hafiz, to seal an unholy alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to remove the control of the National Council of Imams (CNI) from the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), against a background of Algerian-Moroccan diplomatic animosity; The French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, “French Muslims” (MdF), issued a strange communiqué entitled “stop the slander”, claiming to have no link with the Islamist Brotherhood!
Founded in 1933 by Hassan Al-Banna in Egypt, the female branch of the Brotherhood remains marginalised. It still does not have access to the organisation’s hierarchy. Reference works on the Muslim Brotherhood, such as The Society of the Muslim Brothers by the American Richard Mitchell, The Muslim Brotherhood from its origins to the present day, by the Egyptian Amr Elshobaki, A modern history of the Ismalic World, by the German Reinhard Schulze. Or Le Projet, by Alexandre Del Val and Emmanuel Razavi, devote only a few lines to the Muslim Sisters. Yet they play a significant role in the morale of the troops.
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!
In quick succession, disappointments have followed one another for the Muslim Brotherhood in the Maghreb, since the spring of 2021. From the Algerian legislative elections, in April, to the Moroccan general elections, in September, through the institutional coup de force of President Kaïs Saïed in Tunisia , in July, the Maghreb countries turned – each in their own way – the page of Islamist governments that had come (or associated) to power a decade earlier in the wake of the “Arab Spring”.
At the end of several weeks of popular discontent, caused by a serious deterioration in the economic and health situation, which reached its peak on July 25 – the anniversary of the establishment of the Republic in Tunisia – with a day of protest calling for dismissal of the government and the dissolution of parliament, marked by the sacking of several headquarters of Ennahda, the Islamist party in power, especially in poor towns in the south of the country; President Kaïs Saïed has decided to deliver a radical “halt” to the political and social crisis shaking Tunisia.
