For years, France has been a reluctant laboratory in which the Muslim Brotherhood has refined its methods for reshaping Western societies from within.
While public attention is often consumed by the latest terrorist atrocity or immigration row, something far more enduring has been underway: the patient construction of a sprawling social, cultural and religious infrastructure designed to reorient Muslim communities away from integration and towards ideological separatism.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s advocates insist they shun violence. In truth, they have grasped that the long game of cultural subversion is more effective than the short blast of militant confrontation. Their ultimate aim, if unstopped, could be the birth of an Islamic Europe — and one in which no space will remain for rival beliefs or values.
The French state’s response has been halting at best. For decades, successive governments tolerated or even subsidised Brotherhood-linked organisations on the naïve assumption that they represented a bulwark against extremism. Yet these groups were the ideological seedbeds from which much extremism sprouted. Mosques, schools, charities and youth associations tied to the Brotherhood have spread across the country. Many operate behind an opaque lattice of local associations and innocuous-sounding cultural groups, giving the appearance of grassroots civic life while quietly inculcating a rigid worldview.
What makes the Brotherhood distinct from ordinary religious communities is its political ambition. This is not about piety; it is about power. From its origins in Egypt in the 1920s, the Brotherhood has sought to Islamise society from the ground up, embedding its networks in education, welfare and the family, while ultimately seeking the capture of the state.
That vision has not mellowed. The French intelligence services have documented how Brotherhood-linked imams and preachers promote a theology of separation, warning Muslims not to mix socially or spiritually with “infidels” and portraying secular democracy as a temporary compromise to be tolerated only until Muslims are strong enough to reshape it.
Here lies the paradox. The Brotherhood thrives under Western freedoms, yet dreams of replacing them. It exploits liberalism to hollow out liberalism. Every new mosque, every after-school religious class, every “cultural centre” it controls becomes another anchor of ideological influence. What looks to outsiders like community service is in reality a form of soft colonisation.
Critically, the Brotherhood’s approach is designed to make its project appear benign — at least for now. Whilst the Brotherhood in France does not seek open conflict, it is preparing the architecture for a future in which Islam is the dominant organising principle of society. This is not idle speculation. We need only glance at nations such as Iran or Pakistan to see what happens when political Islam captures the state. Iran was once a cosmopolitan society; now, under theocratic rule, dissent is crushed, women are veiled by force, and religious minorities are second-class citizens.
Pakistan’s founding vision of religious tolerance has long since curdled into a climate where blasphemy laws hang over Christians and Ahmadis like a guillotine. There is no reason to assume an Islamic Europe would be any more pluralistic. More likely, other religions would be marginalised, then pushed aside entirely.
The Brotherhood does not require majority support to achieve its aims — only a critical mass of disciplined cadres embedded in key institutions. Demographic trends assist them. France’s Muslim population, already approaching 10 per cent, is youthful and growing, while the secular majority is ageing and shrinking.
Into this vacuum, the Brotherhood pours its ideology, training a new generation of Muslim youth to view themselves not as French citizens who happen to be Muslim, but as members of a transnational Islamic nation whose loyalty to the ummah supersedes allegiance to the Republic. That is a direct challenge to the principle of laïcité — the secular bedrock on which modern France stands.
The French state has begun to wake up. President Emmanuel Macron’s government has spoken of combating “Islamist separatism” and introduced new measures to monitor foreign funding of mosques and to dissolve extremist associations. A few Brotherhood-linked groups have been shuttered. Yet the state remains reactive, forever chasing after groups only once their influence becomes undeniable.
This is firefighting, not strategy. The Brotherhood simply shifts its activities into new shell organisations, rebrands under different names, and carries on. France’s legalistic, bureaucratic approach is ill-suited to countering a movement whose strength lies in decentralised informality.
Worse, France is far from alone. Brotherhood networks operate in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain, often coordinating through European umbrella bodies like the Brussels based Federation of Islamic Organisations, founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1989.
These groups present themselves as civil society actors, yet they push the same doctrine of cultural separatism, subtly eroding the social contract on which Europe depends. A European policy response has been almost non-existent. Brussels has shown no appetite to confront the Brotherhood; indeed, the EU has funded some of its front groups under the guise of “anti-discrimination” initiatives. The blindness is staggering.
One reason for this complacency is fear — fear of being accused of Islamophobia. Western elites tie themselves in knots to avoid the charge, preferring to believe that Islamist activism is an unfortunate side effect of social exclusion. That analysis is precisely backwards. The Brotherhood does not arise from poverty or alienation; it recruits from the educated middle classes and consciously cultivates grievance to create psychological separation. Treating it as a welfare issue misses its ideological core. This is not a problem of integration gone wrong, but of integration being deliberately rejected.
If Europe fails to grasp this, the trajectory is grimly predictable. The Brotherhood’s enclaves will harden into parallel societies, governed not by the laws of the Republic but by informal sharia norms. As their numbers grow, their leaders will demand legal recognition of these norms, first in family law and education, then in criminal justice. Once that beachhead is established, secular democracy will wither. It is a slow-motion revolution — almost invisible, until it is irreversible.
Some may dismiss this as alarmism. Yet France itself provides evidence. In dozens of banlieues, police enter only in force, teachers are intimidated, and girls who refuse the veil are harassed. These are not isolated incidents but the early contours of an alternative civilisation germinating within the Republic. To pretend otherwise is to abandon the very communities the Brotherhood seeks to control. Muslim parents who want their children to be French citizens first are left undefended, while the radicals tighten their grip.
France — and Europe — must decide what they stand for. If the answer is secular democracy, then that principle must be defended with confidence rather than apology. Funding for Brotherhood-linked groups must be cut off. Foreign influence from Turkey, Qatar and elsewhere must be monitored and, where necessary, banned. Religious schools must be subjected to rigorous inspection, and those promoting separatism closed. Above all, the ideological battle must be fought openly: Europe should affirm, without embarrassment, that liberal democracy is superior to the theocratic order the Brotherhood dreams of.
History shows that civilisations fall less often to invasion than to internal corrosion. The Brotherhood understands this. It does not need to topple the Republic by force if it can persuade millions of its young citizens that the Republic is not worth defending. Unless France rouses itself from complacency, it may one day awaken to find the future quietly stolen, its once secular heartland transformed into something far closer to Tehran than to Paris — and for those who cherish Europe’s pluralist heritage, there will be no place left to stand.
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