At five in the afternoon, Cairo time (36).. France’s Decision Against the Muslim Brotherhood: The Beginning of a New European Phase to Dismantle the Organization (1)

I could not continue publishing the series of articles “The Muslim Brotherhood and America” without briefly pausing to address the decision of the French Parliament yesterday to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, after years of study and public debate inside and outside parliament, in the corridors of political parties, on the pages of major newspapers, and on the screens of leading French television channels.

The Republican Right bloc submitted the proposal, calling for legal recognition by the European Union of the political nature of the separatist ideology adopted by the group and for its classification as terrorism.

After the project was examined by the Committees on European Affairs and Foreign Affairs in the French Parliament, parliament approved the draft resolution yesterday during a plenary session.

The law is scheduled, in its next step, to be referred to the institutions of the European Union to discuss the project and consider its adoption. If approved, it will be applied in all EU member states, a development that places the Brotherhood’s project of infiltrating and settling European societies at the mercy of the winds.

What happened yesterday was not detached from its context. In May 2025, the Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs decided to form an investigative committee into the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in France and the external support they receive from states or international organizations to deepen the idea of separatism.

This investigation was entrusted to the seasoned French diplomat François Gouyette, who previously served as France’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Tunisia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Algeria, as well as to a senior official in the Ministry of the Interior, Pascal Courtade. This took place during the tenure of Bruno Retailleau as Minister of the Interior—now the leader of the Republican Party and one of the components of the right-wing bloc that submitted the draft law approved yesterday.

Earlier, on August 24, 2021, the Law on Respect for and Reinforcement of Republican Values had been issued to rearm France against separatist ideas that the Muslim Brotherhood in France had been advocating and implementing in practice.

Separatism, as described by the aforementioned law, is a theoretical political Brotherhood project characterized by repeated deviations from the principles of the Republic, with the aim of building a counter-society.

The report issued in May 2025 indicated that the Muslim Brotherhood movement plays a major role in spreading this ideological system that calls for separatism and in failing to entrench and reinforce republican values.

When the report was released in May 2025, it caused a major stir in France. We exclusively translated it into Arabic and published it in Al-Bawaba News. It was only natural that the report would be followed by the opening of a public debate on what should be done, after it was established that the Brotherhood organization seeks to deepen separatist values in French society and receives external funding aimed at undermining the European spirit of the French Republic—until we arrived at this point.

The Beginnings

When I set foot in France in March 2017, seeking to establish the Middle East Studies Center in Paris as a specialized center for studies and information on political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood organization was at the height of its presence. Its voice was the loudest, and the funding provided to it by certain Arab states was in full swing.

The battle was like a man wielding his ancestors’ sword against people armed with the latest nuclear weapons.

There was no parity of any kind: dozens of Islamic centers and schools, and billions of euros at the organization’s disposal, versus scant funding for the center. But we possessed willpower and the right.

More than one hundred conferences across Europe (thirty-six of them in France alone). We did not leave a single parliamentary or political body without engaging it in a public discussion about the organization, its ideas, its sources of funding, and its danger to Western values and to the values of the French Republic.

Politicians, deputies, and ministers knew nothing about the Brotherhood except that it was a democratic organization oppressed in Arab countries and removed from power by armed force in Egypt in June 2013.

I recall that during my first visit to the office of Bruno Retailleau—then the leader of the majority in the Senate, head of the campaign of the Republican presidential candidate François Fillon, later French Minister of the Interior who led this orientation, and the leader of the Republican Party that prevailed yesterday in the parliamentary decision to place the Brotherhood on terrorist lists—the man said to me, after a discussion that lasted a full two hours: Why have we not heard before this talk about the Brotherhood’s attempt to undermine the foundations of Western societies?

He took from me several documents containing their fatwas on issues related to women, art, democracy, non-Muslims, and the West. I had translated them into French and titled them: The Dangers of Brotherhood Ideology to the Values of the French Republic.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since then. I publicly confronted the organization’s leaders in Geneva, Paris, Munich, Strasbourg, Amsterdam, and Rome. I left no place unvisited, warning of the danger of what they were planning in Europe.

When I was asked to write for the French website Causeur, and later for Atlantico, the first article was titled:

French Islam Hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood

In it, I explained how the French had, over many decades, attempted to organize what is known as “French Islam” in a manner similar to the organization of the Jewish religion in 1804.

These attempts began in 1999 with the creation of a federation representing Muslims in France, following a proposal by the then French Minister of the Interior, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, which never saw the light of day; continued with Sarkozy’s 2003 project that established the French Council of the Muslim Faith; and culminated in French President Emmanuel Macron’s 2020 speech, in which he declared that Islam was undergoing a global crisis and called for reorganizing its relationship with the state to prevent what he termed separatism.

This provoked the ire of a large number of leaders and thinkers in the Islamic world, as well as Muslims in France.

Those years were interspersed with dozens of attempts that began with analyzing the phenomenon and proposing presumed solutions from different perspectives, each according to its intellectual position on the phenomenon.

Unfortunately, all these projects failed because they did not address the core of the problem afflicting Islam and Muslims in France—namely, that they are “literally” hijacked by the international Muslim Brotherhood organization, which has recently handed over the reins of its movement to plans, strategies, and ambitions of states from outside the European Union.

Europe’s Tragedy

Europe’s real tragedy with Islamism began with the advance of the third generation of Brotherhood battalions into the European continent in the 1980s and 1990s. Until then, Islam or Muslims had not constituted a burden or a problem within French society or the French state.

Ordinary Muslims had been arriving in Europe for more than a century as merchants, scholars, and students—benefiting from and exchanging expertise, transferring it to their home countries, or integrating into these new societies.

The real crisis began to surface gradually with the arrival of a political Islamic group called the Muslim Brotherhood, which believes that a Muslim must strive to establish the Islamic state in any land where he stands or lives, and that he must operate within a framework of secrecy and dissimulation on the path to achieving this mission.

It is a group that considered those European countries as spoils to be converted to Islam, then gradually seized and governed according to Islamic law, instead of repaying the kindness of the societies that sheltered them from fear and fed them in hunger.

After large waves of flight from countries where they were persecuted, they sought to infiltrate those societies and betray them, believing this to be the correct religion, relying on the principles taught to them by the group’s founder, Hassan al-Banna. In the founder’s teachings, a Brotherhood member is commanded to implement the six stages of the call in any country he is in—stages that begin with the Brotherhood individual and end with the Islamic caliphate and the mastery of the world.

The early founders of the Brotherhood—al-Banna, al-Hudaybi, Sayyid Qutb, and Fathi Yakan—instilled these ideas through intensive educational programs into the minds of every sympathizer and every aspirant to the group, not to mention the active member or organizational cadre, until these ideas became a “new Qur’an,” an alternative to the Book of God believed in by ordinary Muslims.

In their ideological schools, the Brotherhood learned that these six stages could be achieved through more than one method. They begin with preaching, then recruitment to form the system of Brotherhood families, followed by a plan to reshape society by toppling its civil or secular pillars—whether associations, unions, professional organizations, or student bodies—so that it becomes imbued with the concepts of the religious state that relies on doctrinal appearances in all its formations.

Not only that, but they also adopt brotherhood of creed as a substitute for brotherhood of الوطن, making discrimination based on religion, then on sect within religion, and then on allegiance to the Brotherhood’s methodology over all other groups that approach Islam in understanding life and politics.

We sensed this orientation yesterday as we discussed the issue of secrecy and openness in the field of preaching in the series “America and the Brotherhood,” raised by Mahdi Akef in his report following his visit to the Brotherhood branch in America in 1991, when he sided with the idea of secrecy as a doctrine of takeover and coup in order to establish a different political and doctrinal system.

What, then, of the concept of democracy and the climate of freedom of opinion and expression that those Western countries provide?

The Brotherhood viewed this principle as a method of selection, not as a way of life based on fundamental pillars, including freedom of opinion and expression and freedom of belief. According to their understanding, it became a bridge to reach power—permitting passage only once to the other bank, after which it is destroyed—and in the West it turned into a means of penetration and entrenchment in the joints of those societies to destroy them from within.

Tomorrow, we continue.

Paris: five o’clock in the evening, Cairo time.