From France, A Fresh Warning About Islamism | Opinion

Not all that long ago, warnings about a creeping Islamist infiltration in Europe were widely ridiculed as conspiracy theories or, worse, “Islamophobia.” In previous years, when politicians like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands and Britain’s Michael Gove, or authors like France’s Michel Houellebecq raised alarms about the growing prevalence of political Islam on the Continent, they were routinely dismissed as cranks, alarmists, or simply as racists.

These days, though, such concerns are getting harder to refute. Just ask the French.

Last month, a new government report caused a national firestorm when it concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamist movement, is trying to penetrate the country and subvert its institutions. The 73-page study, excerpts from which were published in the prestigious Le Figaro, makes the case that the country’s branch of the Brotherhood, known as the Federation of Muslims of France (FMF), is “involved in republican infrastructure … in order to change it from the inside.”

The study details that the FMF now controls or influences nearly 10 percent of the mosques in the country, as well as running nearly 300 sports, educational, or charity organizations and close to two-dozen schools. Its objective is to establish “ecosystems at a local level” that gradually impose strict Islamic norms on society at-large.

The warning is a stark one. France has long prided itself on laïcité, a foundational principle of the country’s political order that provides freedom of, and from, religion for its citizens. The FMF’s efforts are a direct challenge to that norm. Or, as Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has put it, France is now facing “below-the-radar Islamism trying to infiltrate institutions, whose ultimate aim is to tip the whole of French society under sharia law.”

Predictably, the conclusions were greeted with the usual outrage. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for instance, proclaimed on social media that the report was “fueling Islamophobia” and full of “delusional theories” aligned with the country’s far right.

Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who himself had belatedly ordered the production of the study last fall, after years of turning a blind eye to the problem, fretted about stigmatizing all Muslims and criticized the lack of ready solutions. He has ordered “new proposals” to address the issue in time for the next meeting of the country’s Defense Council in early June—although there are real doubts, given his low popularity and battered public image, that Macron will be in a position to do anything meaningful. Voices on the country’s political right, meanwhile, have grumbled that the study is too little, and far too late.

The French case, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. A 2023 report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism noted that, over the past several years, assorted security services throughout Europe have mapped out what amounts to “an extensive and sophisticated network linked to the Brotherhood operates covertly in Europe, both at the national and pan-European level.” Moreover, it stresses, the continent’s security officials are unified in their conviction that “Brotherhood networks in Europe … have views and goals that are problematic, subversive, undemocratic, and incompatible with basic human rights and Western society.”

Some European societies, at least, are starting to wake up to this reality. In Austria, successive governments have attempted to mitigate the perceived danger over the past decade by instituting reforms to the national Islam Law, shuttering mosques and deporting extremist imams, and establishing a Documentation Centre to research and monitor political Islam in the country.

Germany has also been comparatively activist, and has begun domestic training for imams, stepped up its monitoring of “legalist Islamism,” and started a parliamentary debate on a Muslim Brotherhood ban. Other places in Europe, though, have done far less of substance.

Meanwhile, even these steps, and others like them (such as the 10-point anti-migration plan recently unveiled by Wilder’s ruling Party for Freedom) suffer from a common failing. That is, they view political Islam as an overwhelmingly foreign phenomenon—one that can be addressed through hardened national borders, curbs on immigrants, and stepped-up policing.

But as the new French report lays out, the danger is different. “The reality of this threat, even if it is long term and does not involve violent action, poses a risk of damage to the fabric of society and republican institutions (…) and, more broadly, to national cohesion,” it states. In other words, entrenched Islamist groups within Europe are actively trying to reshape Western societies in their own image.

Now that this uncomfortable reality is finally out in the open, though, the operative question becomes: what is Macron’s France, and the rest of Europe, actually prepared to do about it?

Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.