Brotherhood institutions in France: Foundation for extremism and terrorism

Hossam al-Haddad

French police said that three people were killed in a knife attack on a church in Nice, southern France. French media quoted sources familiar with the investigations as saying that the attacker was a twenty-one-year-old Tunisian immigrant, but the authorities did not provide any details.

Nice mayor Christian Estrosi said that there had been a “terrorist attack in the heart of Notre Dame.” He added that one of the elderly victims who had come to pray was partially decapitated, while the suspect was shot and arrested shortly afterwards.

Estrosi spoke of what he described as “Islamic fascism” and said that the suspect “kept repeating ‘God is great.’”

This and other news circulating about terrorism in Europe, especially in Paris, makes us think carefully about who founded this extremism and terrorism, where they come from and what they want. Europe has widely embraced the Brotherhood and provided it with support and safe haven under the pretext of human rights and refugees’ rights, but what is the story of the Brotherhood in France?

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a new institutional breakthrough for the Brotherhood in Europe through the influx of what might be called the second wave of Brotherhood elements traveling to Europe after their clash with Arab regimes. There was a steady increase in the number of European branches of Islamist parties and entities in the Arab world, especially the Brotherhood.

In this context, a group of political refugees and students affiliated with the Brotherhood’s organizational cadres split from the Muslim Students Association in France in 1979 and established the Islamic Group in France, which in 1983 quickly turned into the Federation of Islamic Organizations in France. This organization was taken over by Rached Ghannouchi, who set his own structure and political and ideological strategy, making him one of the foundations of the Brotherhood in France and Europe until the present time.

The beginning of the 1990s witnessed the establishment of the Executive Council of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, with its Salafi and Brotherhood tributaries in France, Germany and a number of European capitals, in addition to the Algerian Brotherhood Association in France, which adopted an ideological approach close to the trends of the Brotherhood.

This coincided with the Brotherhood’s deepening cooperation in Europe with the branches of non-Arab political Islamism, specifically the Turkish branches represented by Milli Gorus, which took Germany as its center. In addition, the Pakistani branch, represented by the Jamaat-e-Islami, has been stationed in Britain since the 1950s. The ideological link between the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Brotherhood was formed during the Second World War by Sayyid Qutb and Abu Al-A’la Al-Mawdudi.

As a result of all these developments, the Brotherhood sought to employ its institutional assets in several European capitals in order to establish a multinational Islamist opposition movement under its leadership in the face of the Arab regimes it had clashed with. For this reason, the political geography of the Brotherhood in Europe has relied on the principle of extremism as a locomotive for Brotherhood advocacy and political work, represented by the unions and associations active in the three main European countries, namely France, Germany and Britain, while the latter was the most formidable starting point in the face of the successive Egyptian regimes.

The Union of Islamic Organizations in France was able to employ the Brotherhood’s Maghreb cadres, especially the Tunisian elements that make up the solid core of the union, allowing it to include more than 250 mosques and Islamic societies under its umbrella, which enabled it to extend its influence over a significant bloc of Muslims in France in a large number of French cities and suburbs. This contributed to the solidifying itself within the Representative Council of the Muslims of France in its successive elections. In addition, the union’s cadres enjoy distinguished relations with the French authorities as a result of the union’s leaders confronting the Salafi current, which made it one of the common denominators in the local and legislative election campaigns in light of its control over a significant percentage of Muslim votes in a number of French cities under its domain.

Also, within the framework of diversifying the Brotherhood’s institutional logic, the Federation of Islamic Organizations in France proceeded to establish a group of schools to produce an Islamist elite, the most famous of which are the al-Kindi, al-Razi and Ibn Rushd schools. The union runs five out of ten Islamic educational institutions in France, according to 2012 statistics. The Brotherhood also has control in France, where there are a number of other educational institutions affiliated with the group’s ideology, such as the European Institute of Human Sciences, which prepares and graduates preachers and imams in Europe, the Center for Islamic Studies and Research, the Institute for Islamic World Studies, the French branch of the UK-based International Institute for Islamic Thought, and the Shatibi Center, in addition to the Ibn Sina Institute in Lille, northern France, which was established in 2006 with Qatari funding. Companies affiliated with leaders of the Union of Islamic Organizations also control the halal meat market in France and monopolize their export to a number of Arab Gulf states.