Sinan Selen, the head of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, warned in a confidential discussion in the Bundestag that Islamist organizations were trying to exert targeted influence on politics. He explicitly named the Muslim Brotherhood.
Shortly beforehand, a report by Germany’s Federal Court of Audit emerged, criticizing €15m ($16.2m) in Foreign Office payments to Islamic Relief. The organization is suspected of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood network. According to the report, some payments bypassed rules on public grants because the suspicion of extremism was already known when the money was disbursed.
Some of the details that emerged could have come from a bad crime film. In one case in 2015, for example, a suitcase containing €240,000 ($259,000) was reportedly taken to Syria. Nobody knew what had happened to the money. Since the jihadist Nusra Front controlled large parts of the country at the time, the case may have amounted to covert terror financing.
The Federal Court of Audit report was initially kept secret as a classified document not intended for public release. The liberal imam Seyran Ates fought that decision in court for several years and eventually prevailed. Islamic Relief suffered unexpected reputational damage. It had long been regarded as a respectable aid organization and was a member of the charitable alliance Aktion Deutschland Hilft. Senior German politicians, including the federal president, had photographs taken with its officials and used those contacts to present themselves as close to immigrant communities.
Islamism Behind a Charitable Mask
The example is not an isolated case. Representatives of Islamist organizations are invited to university conferences and political receptions, receive integration awards and give talks in schools, where they warn against alleged Islamophobia. Islamist groups hold events in state-owned premises, take part in municipal dialogue platforms, receive public funding for youth work and serve as contacts for the state, churches and trade unions.
Politicians accept invitations to break the fast in Islamist mosques or organize their own iftar events, to which people from the Muslim Brotherhood milieu are also invited. Organizations that conceal their Islamist structures behind a charitable mask are repeatedly given taxpayers’ money.
Islamists have gained a firm foothold especially in the opaque NGO sector by operating in the fashionable field of anti-discrimination. At every level of society, projects are funded in the name of diversity to benefit groups regarded as especially vulnerable to discrimination. Islamist organizations have managed with great skill to place Muslims at the top of this supposed hierarchy of victimhood. They have been so successful that a separate term was created for it: anti-Muslim racism.
The definition of anti-Muslim racism is revealing. It includes any criticism of Islamism, but also the naming of abuses such as clan crime, violence in the name of honor or forced marriages. The aim is to provide training in Islamic sensitivity for media representatives, politicians, education and cultural experts, police officers and lawyers. Anyone who refuses to submit to this program and does not present only the attractive sides of Islam in the media is to face sanctions. The proposals go as far as criminal prosecution.
The Brotherhood’s Strategy for the West
Such measures did not arise organically, as one might assume. They stem from the Muslim Brotherhood’s programmatic strategy. In publications, internal papers and speeches, the Brotherhood has laid out its plans for the spread of Islam and the Islamization of the West.
The late influential preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi said that the Islamic takeover of the West had failed twice: at the Battle of Tours and Poitiers in 732 and at the Battle of Kahlenberg, which ended the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. The third attempt would succeed, he argued, because it would not be carried out by military means, but through proselytization and ideological influence.
There are precise instructions for this third attempt. The first aim was to bring the Brotherhood’s Islam into Muslim diaspora communities, which mostly adhered to the Islam of their countries of origin, often less rigid and more strongly shaped by mystical popular piety.
The Brotherhood’s Islam, by contrast, is based on a literal interpretation of the Koran and on Muhammad, whose deeds and words are elevated into the ultimate model for every Muslim. It is a strict fundamentalist Islam that corresponds to the normative order of seventh-century Arabia and is incompatible with democracy, human rights and individual freedoms.
Where resistance existed, for example from liberal Muslim theologians, denunciation was used and rivals were declared heretics. Because the Brotherhood’s representatives were often well educated, fluent in Arabic and theologically trained, they were able to exert the desired influence without difficulty. A recent study showed that almost half of all German Muslims up to the age of 40 are open to Islamist attitudes or must already be described as Islamists themselves.
But the Brotherhood is not concerned only with the transfer of ideology. It is also concerned with putting that ideology into practice. That means cutting people off from the majority society and building Islamist counterstructures oriented solely toward sharia, which already conduct marriages, divorces and court proceedings.
Politics Learns to Court Islamist Milieus
The second objective was to influence key figures in the Western world. That, too, has proved successful, as the examples already mentioned show. Demography also plays into the hands of Islamists. Western societies have declining birth rates, while Islamists have significantly more children and increase their numbers further through migration.
They already play an important role as voters, which gives politicians another reason to court Islamist milieus. Ramadan lights in pedestrian zones, muezzin calls for Friday prayers and the introduction of halal food in school canteens are intended to show Muslims that politics is acting entirely in their interests.
Left-wing parties prefer to recruit Muslims as party members, who then quickly move into decision-making positions. Even the Christian Democrats do not want to miss the chance to make themselves popular with this fast-growing voter group.
Testing the Limits of Western Societies
In a third phase, Western societies are to be destabilized. Existing norms and values are to be replaced by Islamic ones. For years, Islamists have tested how far Western societies will accept Islamic customs. The headscarf for female teachers is one of the most important battlefields. The headscarf for schoolgirls too young to have legal religious maturity is another.
In the past, Islamist female teachers repeatedly went to court in an attempt to circumvent the neutrality rules imposed on civil servants. More and more children are wearing the headscarf at school. Anyone who points out that secular Muslim girls already face religious bullying, and that the problem would only intensify if their teacher also declared that a God-fearing Muslim woman must cover herself, is accused of anti-Muslim racism.
At universities, Islamist students practice gender segregation at their own events. In schools, Islamist parents demand the separation of girls and boys in sports and swimming lessons and refuse to allow their children to take part in class trips. In some cases, art and music lessons were boycotted because both were considered haram and therefore forbidden under Islam. In others, there were confrontations because pupils rejected biology lessons or did not want to deal with the Holocaust.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy in these areas is clear. It takes one step forward, denounces Islamophobia when it fails to prevail and goes one step further when there is no resistance. It counts on the tolerance and naivety of society, the opportunism of politics and the cowardice of those afraid of being called racists. The calculation is working because so far there is too little awareness of the danger posed by the Brotherhood.
When the State Breaks Its Silence
The problem is compounded by the fact that the Brotherhood’s organizations operate covertly in Europe. Nobody admits to being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and many officials deny that the Brotherhood exists in Germany or Europe at all.
That makes it all the more important that Germany’s domestic intelligence service is now speaking publicly. Nothing in the published reports is new. But the mere fact that the agency is no longer silent offers protection to those who were subjected to repression for years for warning of this extremist danger.