Feb 15, 2023
«With your democratic laws we will colonize you, and with our koranic laws we will dominate you». This rather bellicose warning for Europeans came from a 2002 speech by Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, one of the key intellectual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). It’s a great insight on what the MB is—a strictly religious and conservative reaction to modernity that was launched in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan El-Banna. It’s also an insight into its modus operandi. The MB works in the shadows and builds its strength slowly through a complex maze of sister organisations to push its narrative and its pawns. Two decades after that speech, a series of controversies around EU institutions funding MB-adjacent organisations have highlighted the MB’s influence in Europe. We tried to stay light on acronyms but we mention FEMYSO a few times: that’s the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisation, which is one of these glossy organisations that get a lot of visibility in Brussels but that have strong ties with the MB’s web of organisations. To cover this issue we have invited Florence Bergeaud Blackler, an anthropologist at the French CNRS who has been working on these issues for a while and just released in French «Le Frérisme et ses réseaux, l’enquête» (The Brotherhood and its networks, an investigation). On the other side of the line we have Tommaso Virgili, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the WZB Social Center in Berlin where he works on modernization movements within Islam in response to the challenge of fundamentalism. He co-authored in 2021 a report for the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) on the MB in Europe entitled «Network of Networks, the MB in Europe».
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