For several years, radical Islamists have been carrying out deadly raids in northern Mozambique. They sometimes venture into southern Tanzania. Their attacks kill hundreds of people and force tens of thousands to flee the region. Affiliated with the Islamic State, the Shabab managed to occupy the port of Mocimboa da Praia, with its 30,000 inhabitants, for almost a year and the town of Palma (75,000 inhabitants) for a month before being driven out. This move led to the withdrawal of the French group TotalEnergies, which was ready to invest several tens of billions of dollars in a very large gas project near the town of Palma. For a decade, Mozambique has been presented as a future gas Eldorado.
The issue of the organisation of Muslim worship in Europe is not new. It is linked to many aspects, including cultural, national and linguistic ones. Since the end of the 1980s, public authorities in several European countries have been urging Muslim leaders to manage their faith. But the institutions designed to organise the Muslim faith remain unstable and unrepresentative.
Is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about to let go of the Muslim Brotherhood? The AKP of the Turkish Raïs claims the same ideology as the Brotherhood: political Islamism. But the reasons for this renunciation are not ideological. They are linked to the violent economic crisis which is hitting Ankara. And the polls that give the Turkish President losing in the next elections.
Through the word Islamophobia, the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to propagate a victim psychology among young people of Islamic origin in Europe and especially in France. To pit these innocent people, from an early age, against secularism and universal values, by poisoning their minds with the recurrent lie that the French hate Islam, the only true religion. A fictitious hostility against Islam maintained sometimes even by some French elites.
The Islamic fanatics and their “suitcase carriers” fail to see that the peoples of Europe know how to distinguish between the spiritual and the political. These peoples, almost cured of religion, are rightly opposed to behaviours and rites that disturb their modern life and call into question the advances in the field of freedom.
The ambivalence of Dr. Chams-Eddine and Mister Hafiz, capable of moving – in the space of barely three months – from a manifesto against Islamism to an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, finds its explanation in the fact that the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris – like all his predecessors since the creation of this mosque in 1926 – is an official of the Algerian State: the Grand Mosque was erected as a sign of France’s gratitude to the “indigenous Algerian soldiers who died for their country during the Great War”.
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.
The International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a Doha-based organisation linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, has just finalised an ideological coordination agreement with the new Taliban government in Afghanistan.
The terrible images of the abandonment of Kabul, with its groups of desperate Afghans clinging to the cabin of an American military plane ready to take off without them, will never stop haunting us. They confirm, twenty years after 9/11, that no lesson can be drawn from history, contrary to what has been preached on all the airwaves, all the platforms. Faced with Islamism, which, from Nice and Saint-Etienne-du Rouvray to Kunduz and Kandahar, slits the throats of both near and far, the “Never again” preachers, under their false airs of optimism, are nothing but pledges of resignation.
One cannot understand Afghanistan if one does not know its history, written in wars and punctuated by invasions from Alexander the Great, to the Soviets (20th century), via the Mongols (13th century) and, of course, the British in the 19th century. Each occupation obviously provoked a war of liberation until the invaders left. And every liberation of the country has been followed by a civil war. This is the Afghan curse. Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the last 2,500 American soldiers, along with 7,700 NATO and allied troops, may therefore have far-reaching consequences.
The news from Afghanistan are very disturbing. In less than a week, the Taliban seized half of the capitals of the Afghan provinces. They now control most of the country’s northern, western and southern provinces. Kabul, Mazar-e Charif and Jalalabad are the only major Afghan cities that escape, but for how much longer, their regained control over the country.
