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”
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.
Hamas leader Abdel Rahim Abou Fanah, chairman of the Zakat [Islamic legal alms, one of Hamas’ main channels for fundraising] committee within the Palestinian Islamist organization, ignited Arab social networks: In a video filmed on a mobile phone, by a young man speaking in the Palestinian Arabic dialect, this Hamas cadre appeared naked, in the company of a prostitute, in what appears to be an Israeli hotel, as indicate by signs in Hebrew on the furniture.
Following the revelations of the book “Qatar Papers” on the Qatari funding granted to the Lycée Averroès in Lille, Jean-Michel Blanquer, the french Minister of National Education commissioned two reports. Two years later, these reports intended to determine whether the foreign funding in question is likely to revoke the contract that binds this high school, founded and run by the Muslim Brotherhood, to national education (and therefore to cut public funding). ), have still not been made public …
On January 30, 2019, Tariq Ramadan filed a complaint against our colleague Ian Hamel, for “defamation” and “slander”, following the publication of an article published on November 26, 2018 on the website of the magazine Le Point, entitled “The Geneva government confirms the charges against Tariq Ramadan ”. The text was a synthesis of a report commissioned by the Council of State (the government) of Geneva on the behavior of the preacher when he was a teacher in a college in Switzerland between 1984 and 2004. The report confirmed the accusations against Tariq Ramadan in the Swiss press, namely that he was suspected of having had sexual relations with some of his students. On January 21, 2021, an order for the filing of this complaint was issued by Olivier Jornot, Attorney General of the Canton of Geneva, thus clearing our colleague of the accusations of “defamation” and “slander” made against him by the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
On his website, Tariq Ramadan still recalls today that he is president of the European Muslim Network (EMN) in Brussels, a think tank and action group created in October 2009.
Indicted for four rapes and banned from leaving French territory, the preacher set up a training and research center in October providing courses in ethics, humanism and … feminism. First recruit: Yacob Mahi, sentenced in Belgium in 2019 for “deeds of morality” and given a three-year suspended prison sentence.
