Britain’s Middle East minister James Cleverly had previously warned that the Muslim Brotherhood would capitalise on the hardships brought on by Covid-19 to broaden its influence. EPA
Britain’s Middle East minister James Cleverly had previously warned that the Muslim Brotherhood would capitalise on the hardships brought on by Covid-19 to broaden its influence. EPA
Britain’s Middle East minister James Cleverly had previously warned that the Muslim Brotherhood would capitalise on the hardships brought on by Covid-19 to broaden its influence. EPA
Europe has awakened to the challenges posed by networks of political Islamist movements within its social and political institutions. Country after country is moving to address the particular challenges of groups operating within the law but working steadily to challenge the common values underpinning the system.
In doing so, the policy makers are focusing beyond the threat of terrorism that has dominated global security responses for two decades. Instead, there is a wider issue at play. How does the state gain insight about, and ultimately sanction, groups that exert ideological control over segments of the population?
Since many of the people targeted by European groups are immigrants, or from migrant backgrounds, there is a longer-term calculation to make about how society is evolving. No nation wants to deal with a situation in which different communities live largely separate existences.
Yusuf Al Qaradawi is a leading Muslim Brotherhood figurehead based in Qatar. Reuters
The most pressing concerns on the continent surround the Muslim Brotherhood, the Turkish state’s "consular" reach into its diaspora and Iran’s intelligence network there.
Last week the French government relaunched its state of the nation agenda around tackling Islamism. It has promised legislation to target activity directed against the republican traditions of the state. The Austrian government separately launched an observatory that has been tasked with monitoring Islamist activities within the public sphere. This month a committee of Dutch parliamentarians submitted an urgent report calling for an urgent official response to underground Brotherhood networks in the country.
There has been fierce pressure on the Swedish government to intervene to prevent exploitation of public schools and even kindergartens. Known Islamist extremists have been receiving state money to work as head teachers but are not providing recognised and standard Swedish education. Denmark's intelligence and security services have reported their concerns over ideological hostility to the kingdom within certain community organisations.
Last week a report from the Slovakia-based think tank Globsec Policy Institute noted that the Brotherhood's pan-European Federation of Islamic Organisations (FIOE) in Europe has set up a central and eastern Europe division. It echoed the concerns of Britain's Middle East minister James Cleverly, who said that the Brotherhood would capitalise on the hardships brought on by Covid-19 to broaden its influence.
The Brotherhood tops the list of groups that exert this kind of influence. Its mindset is a threat to social integration and cohesion in Europe.
Within Europe, the Doha-based chief ideologue Yusuf Al Qaradawi has directly instructed the chapters not to directly engage in terrorism – but only for the practical reason that he does not think it would prevail. In the eyes of many Europe intelligence agencies, however, the Brotherhood creates a fertile environment for other groups to build on for radicalisation purposes.
According to the researcher Lorenzo Vidino, European governments are defending their constitutional systems from Islamist influence. Getty Images
According to the leading researcher in the field, Lorenzo Vidino, author of the book The Closed Circle – Joining and Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, European governments are increasingly going on the offensive to defend their constitutional systems from Islamist influence.
When the British-based Anas Al Tikriti appeared before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in 2016, he claimed that the UK did not have a Muslim Brotherhood organisation. But Mr Al Tikriti, who runs an advisory group that supposedly aims to "bridge the gap of understanding between the Muslim world and the West”, conceded that the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) did espouse its basic tenets.
Mr Vidino’s book states that there is an extensive European Muslim Brotherhood that makes membership arduous to gain and even more traumatic to leave.
In a 2018 report, the influential French think tank Institut Montaigne profiled the spread of the Brotherhood. It said the programme of expansion was built on a militant logic and its definition of Muslim citizenship to which its adherents belonged. This has allowed activists to focus on issues of identity, education, inclusiveness and their own broadly drawn concepts of Islamophobia.
Anas Al Tikriti has conceded that the Muslim Association of Britain espouses the basic tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood. Getty Images
This has also allowed Brotherhood-controlled groups to have both a subversive agenda and to interpose as an interlocutor between the state and community groups. For this purpose, organisations such as the MAB, FIOE and others have become power brokers that influence politicians and the media. In France there is Union of Islamic Organisations of France and in Italy there is the Union of Islamic Communities and Organisations.
A common trait is the exploitation of charitable status by the organisations to advance their outreach. It was notable, for instance, that Qatar had made substantial contributions to the Italian branch of the Brotherhood as Rome struggled to contain its Covid-19 outbreak.
While it is encouraging that European governments have mobilised themselves to tackle the problem at home, that is only half the story. The Institut Montaigne makes the concluding point that it is also necessary for the European Commission and its member-states to set this policy at the heart of the continent's diplomatic agenda. Without broad recognition that Islamist extremism is a common threat, European foreign policy fails to distinguish between friend and foe in an appropriate way. That is the ultimate dividing line.
Damien McElroy is the London bureau chief of The National
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Favourite place in the UAE: The Stray Dogs Centre in Umm Al Quwain. It sounds predictable, but it honestly is my favourite place to spend time. Surrounded by hundreds of dogs that love you - what could possibly be better than that?
Favourite colour: All the colours that dogs come in
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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From Europe to the Middle East, economic success brings wealth - and lifestyle diseases
A rise in obesity figures and the need for more public spending is a familiar trend in the developing world as western lifestyles are adopted.
One in five deaths around the world is now caused by bad diet, with obesity the fastest growing global risk. A high body mass index is also the top cause of metabolic diseases relating to death and disability in Kuwait, Qatar and Oman – and second on the list in Bahrain.
In Britain, heart disease, lung cancer and Alzheimer’s remain among the leading causes of death, and people there are spending more time suffering from health problems.
The UK is expected to spend $421.4 billion on healthcare by 2040, up from $239.3 billion in 2014.
And development assistance for health is talking about the financial aid given to governments to support social, environmental development of developing countries.
