A recent controversial report from the French Senate on the Muslim Brotherhood notes that the organization has built an extensive ideological infrastructure in France—“not through violence, but through schools, charities, mosques, and soft power.” The report, based on intelligence files, field investigations, and dozens of interviews conducted by two civil servants, finds that the “Brotherhood’s strategy is to install a form of ideological hegemony by infiltrating civil society under the guise of religious and educational activities.” Writing in the Free Press (June 2), Simone Rodan-Benzaquen adds that the report is the most detailed government study to date of the Brotherhood’s presence in Europe, combining months of fieldwork and analysis with input from diplomats, intelligence officials, academics, and religious figures. The report’s conclusions are clearly written within the framework of its “laicite” policy, which seeks to restrict the public expression of religion. Rodan-Benzaquen maintains that the report uncovers a distinctive Brotherhood strategy: “The Brotherhood operates as a political project. Its goal is not sudden revolution, but gradual transformation. Its targets are hearts and minds. Its strength lies not in secrecy, but in strategic ambiguity. And it is not coming just for France. It is coming for all of the West.” The report argues that the Brotherhood seeks to impose Islamic law through gradual, ideological means—primarily via schools, charities, and religious networks.
While it claims to reject violence, the Brotherhood has extremist offshoots such as Hamas, and its influence often blurs the line between nonviolence and radicalization. After being repressed in the Arab world, the Brotherhood has “methodically expanded its presence across the continent—embedding itself in local communities through a network of mosques, charities, educational institutions, and civic associations, all designed to promote its vision of political Islam under the cover of religious outreach.” The Brotherhood’s French network comprises 280 associations, including 139 officially affiliated mosques and 68 more mosques with some links to the group’s ideology, making up 10 percent of the mosques opened since 2010. Every Friday, some 91,000 people attend worship in these spaces. The movement also controls or influences 21 private schools (three of them state-funded) and 815 Quranic schools. More controversially the report claims that anti-Semitism is a core ideological element of the Brotherhood, often laundered through anti-Zionist slogans. “In one mosque near Paris, a speaker recently declared ‘Je suis Hamas’ (“I am Hamas”) to a cheering audience. In others, anti-Israel rhetoric bleeds seamlessly into classic antisemitic tropes.” Rodan-Benzaquen adds that the report emphasizes the movement’s use of “double discourse”—projecting moderation in public while promoting anti-Semitism, gender segregation, and ideological separatism in private.
The report adds that the Brotherhood’s new frontier is digital, where a wave of online influencers trained in Brotherhood institutions appeal to younger audiences on issues such as Islamophobia and present Islamist ideology in therapeutic or entrepreneurial language. Critics of the report charge that it is short on actual documentation and long on suspicion and unsupported conclusions. Political scientist Olivier Roy writes in the French weekly Nouvel Obs (May 23) that the report employs “moral panic rhetoric” that reveals nothing new. He adds that it focuses on an ideological construct of the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat, rather than on concrete facts. Like others before it, it lacks any in-depth analysis of Islamist movements or the political strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood and relies on a “constructed perception of the enemy.” Yet the report’s presentation of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations as hate groups is leading to similar attempts at investigation elsewhere. Sweden is launching its own investigation, while Austria had previously produced assessments, although few have led to action. “Belgium has accommodated Brotherhood-linked networks under the banner of multiculturalism,” Rodan-Benzaquen writes. “And the United States? Here, the conversation barely exists. While several American Muslim organizations have historical or ideological ties to the Brotherhood, public scrutiny is rare, and political discourse tends to avoid the subject entirely.”
