The Muslim Brotherhood (19 page)

However, Ikhwani unwillingness to come forward and be frank about their origins and their relationships only serves to increase suspicions about the movement and its true objectives within Europe. Some commentators have even suggested that the Ikhwan seeks to extend Sharia law throughout Europe and the US.
²
Such suggestions smack somewhat of scaremongering. In any case the Ikhwani are realistic enough to understand that this is far beyond their capabilities. They are more interested in furthering the rights of their own communities through the small steps that they can achieve. Moreover, due to the fact that many Ikhwan-oriented organisations are still dominated by first-generation immigrants, their preoccupations are in many cases still centred on the Arab world. Ikhwani organisations in Europe have remained mostly the domain of Arab communities; despite their desire to represent European Muslims, they are still unable to reach out beyond their own ethnic groups.

Whilst it is incorrect to read the evolution of the various Ikhwani-oriented organisations in Europe as the evolution of the Ikhwan
per se
, the links between these groups and the Brotherhood are too strong to be ignored. Ikhwani in the Middle East, in Cairo especially, refer to these organisations as ‘our brothers in France’ or ‘our brothers in the UK’. Similarly, others within the Islamic community in Europe refer to them as the Ikhwani and are frustrated at their unwillingness to admit to their relationship to the movement. However, the Ikhwan’s main strategy in Europe appears to have been to find a way to make itself more acceptable to Western governments as a means of bolstering its political influence.

The main Islamic organisation in France is the
Union des Organisations Islamiques de France
(UOIF), widely regarded as the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, although the union itself rejects this affiliation. It is perhaps the most important and established national Islamic organisation in Europe. Although it was formally established in 1983, the history of Ikhwani activity in France goes back to the 1960s at least and the UOIF has its roots in other Islamic groups that were active at the time. These include the
Association des Étudiants Islamiques en France
(AEIF), a student body that was set up in 1963 by Indian Professor Muhammad Hamidullah who was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood through his ties to Said Ramadan and to Syrian Ikhwani Issam al-Attar, who was to have a major influence over the AEIF’s teachings and ideology. The AEIF was predominantly an elitist organisation composed mostly of activist students from the Arab world. It was small but managed to establish branches in the main French university cities. During the 1960s and 1970s it focused its efforts on encouraging the Islamic renaissance and fighting the left-wing currents of the day and became one of the most established Islamic organisations in France.

The other key group that would go on to form the core of the UOIF was the
Groupement Islamique de France
(GIF), which was founded in 1979 in Valenciennes in northeast France, not far from the city of Lille. It was set up by a group of Tunisian students, led by Ahmed Jaballah, who were linked to the Tunisian opposition,
Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique
(MTI), which would later become An-Nahda. The MTI, led by Rashid al-Ghannouchi, was generally considered to be the Tunisian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, whilst al-Ghannouchi was heavily influenced by the Ikhwan and by key Ikhwani scholars, by the early 1980s the MTI had begun to move away from the rigidity of the Brotherhood’s approach. The GIF was intended
to act as the French branch of this Tunisian opposition movement and as such much of its early activities were focused on the situation in Tunisia.
³
Unlike the AEIF, the GIF sought to appeal more to workers and to the grass roots rather than just to the intellectual elite, so began giving Friday sermons at the hostels for foreign workers that housed many North African immigrants with the aim of re-Islamicising those who had deviated from the straight path. They also engaged in typical Ikhwani community work: running summer camps, organising pilgrimages, visiting hospitals and prisons, holding conferences and organising demonstrations about issues related to the Islamic world.
⁴

Although the GIF was the domain of the Tunisians, the driving force behind the organisation was actually Lebanese scholar Faisal al-Mawlawi, who the group chose as its spiritual guide. (Al-Mawlawi was a committed brother who was close to the Guidance Office in Cairo and who lived in France from 1980 to 1985.) This prompted a rather curious situation whereby whilst the vast majority of the Muslim population in France came from or had their origins in North Africa, it was left to the Lebanese al-Mawlawi and the Syrian al-Attar to lead and act as spiritual guides for these communities.

By August 1983 these Islamist groups decided to pool their efforts and come together under a new umbrella group called the
Union des Organisations Islamiques de France
(UOIF). A number of issues had prompted the establishment of this new union in particular. Firstly, the election of the socialist Mitterand government in 1981 liberalised legislation on the establishment of foreign associations in France. More importantly, the early 1980s were a time of immense optimism among Muslim communities all over the world. The Iranian revolution of 1979 had brought new hope that an Islamic alternative was possible, and the spirit of brotherly support incited by the project to liberate Afghanistan from communist rule had ushered in a new Islamic awareness and consciousness that these organisations were keen to capitalise on. It was also a time when the Ikhwan itself had
renewed vigour and when Mustafa Mashour was trying to activate his international
tanzeem
in Europe in particular.

The main figures driving this new union in France were two students, the Tunisian Abdallah Ben Mansour and the Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahmoud Zouheir, who were both based in Meurthe-et-Moselle in northeast France. In spite of the Iraqi presence through Zouheir and the continued influence of al-Mawlawi, who remained the group’s spiritual guide, the main group of activists in the new union were the Tunisians who had formed the core of the GIF. Their primary aim at this time was to forge an Islamic consciousness among Muslim communities in France. There was little real sense of the need to integrate into the host society at this point, and key figures within the Islamic movement were explicit in their aspirations to establish an Islamic state. In 1984 al-Mawlawi gave a lecture in a mosque on how to be a Muslim in France whilst at the same time pursuing one’s own jihad in order to bring down impious powers and establish an Islamic state.
⁵

There was also a distinct effort to encourage ‘wayward’ Muslims to turn away from the ‘dangers’ of corrupting French society and return to their faith. The association produced a magazine called
Al-Haqq
that carried articles and quizzes aimed at young Muslims in France. One such quiz, dated 2 April 1985, carried the question, ‘Define a
kafir
[heathen].’ The answer, which appeared in a later edition, was as follows: ‘There are three sorts of
kafirs
. 1. Those who are Christian, Jewish, Atheist, Buddhist. 2. Those who are part of an organisation other than Islam. 3. Those who do not accept Mohamed our Prophet as God’s messenger.’
⁶
Clearly these Islamists were deeply anxious about their own communities being ‘corrupted’ by the hedonistic attractions of French life and they were content to promote a divisive message aimed at promoting separation from the host community.

However, in spite of all its efforts to bring Muslims back to the straight path, until the end of the 1980s the UOIF was relatively marginal in the field of French Islam and had a very limited public
voice. In particular it struggled to compete with the official Paris mosque, which was linked to the Algerian state and that dominated all alliances with the French government. However, one affair was to catapult the UOIF into the French limelight and allow it to garner grass roots support while the Paris mosque came to look like the staid voice of the establishment. This was the hijab (veil) affair of 1989.

In October 1989 three schoolgirls were refused entry to their secondary school in Creil because they were wearing the hijab. The issue was soon settled when a local Tunisian association leader stepped in to mediate: it was agreed that the girls could wear the hijab in the corridors and during playtime but that they would have to remove their veils during lessons. Yet by this time the increasingly assertive UOIF had seen a golden opportunity to raise its profile and it waded into the debate. Abdallah Ben Mansour and Mokhtar Jaballah, a leader of the UOIF’s Paris branch, made a very public visit to the school to explain that Islam stipulated that women should be veiled. After this visit the girls broke their previous agreement and continued wearing the hijab in school, which prompted them to be excluded again. The UOIF’s intervention had essentially radicalised the whole affair; it was not long before demonstrations were taking place in the streets of Paris. In the eyes of many within the Muslim community, the UOIF with its public activism had outshone the mosque of Paris, which had deplored the demonstrations. On 21 November the temperature was raised even higher when the UOIF’s President, Ahmed Jaballah, wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister challenging the state and declaring that the Qur’an was explicit that it was the duty of all women to wear the veil.
⁷

The affair had allowed the UOIF to act as the defenders of the Muslim community on an issue that touched many immigrants and families of North African descent, who were struggling to come to terms with their identities as a minority community in an avowedly secular state. Indeed, the UOIF’s siding with the girls meant that ‘the
organisation won both in terms of its social and media visibility. From this event the union experienced an exceptional growth.’
⁸

The veil affair marked a new consciousness in the UOIF of the role that they could play in shaping Islam within the French context rather than focusing their energies on struggles in their home countries. This was partly driven by the failure of the Tunisian Islamist opposition, which by the end of the 1990s had been stamped out by the Tunisian regime. Those running the UOIF were coming to understand that their main constituency was the young second- and third-generation immigrants, who required a different approach from the first-generation migrants who were less rooted in French society.

At the annual UOIF congress in 1989 Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannouchi declared that France should no longer be considered as
Dar al-Ahd
(land of covenant) but instead as
Dar al-Islam
(land of Islam).
⁹
This was a clear recognition of the fact that France was home to Muslims who were fully settled on French soil. These ideas had already been mooted by Faisal al-Mawlawi, who told a UOIF conference in 1986 that Western territories should be considered as
Dar al-Dawa
(land of
dawa
) and that the divisions between
Dar al-Harb
(land of war) and
Dar al-Islam
had no canonical basis but were simply an interpretation by Islamic scholars.
¹⁰
However, al-Ghannouchi’s comments encapsulated a new way of thinking that asserted that Muslims must ‘overcome prejudices whilst maintaining the principles of Islam and trying to establish a sincere dialogue in order to achieve a sincere integration’.
¹¹
Within this same vein, in 1990 the UOIF changed its name to better reflect this reality, becoming the Union of Islamic Organisations
of
France rather than the Union of Islamic Organisations
in
France. In the same year they focused their annual Le Bourget gathering on ‘Muslims and Integration’.

The UOIF began to focus its attentions on the student population and on the elite who could raise the banner of Islam inside France. This bid to appeal to the middle classes was typical of the Brotherhood,
which had always drawn most of its support from this sector of society. Shortly afterwards the movement underwent another shift, as the more militant Tunisian leadership was edged out and a group of Moroccans took over stewardship of the organisation.

The new leaders were Lhaj Thami Breeze, who became the President, and Fouad Alaoui, who became Secretary General. Both men had studied at Bordeaux, Breeze reading political science and Alaoui neuropsychology, and neither had any theological training. These two men, who still run the organisation today, took the UOIF down a decidedly moderate path, giving it a softer, more accommodationist image.

According to some accounts, one of the reasons for this change in leadership was that at the time Tunisians involved in Islamist activism found it more difficult to obtain French nationality than their Moroccan counterparts.
¹²
Yet whilst this factor may have played into the change of leadership, the takeover by the Moroccan group was more likely to be a reflection of the nationalistic in-fighting that has traditionally characterised such organisations.

It is interesting to note that the UOIF has always been dominated by Tunisians and Moroccans despite the fact that the Algerians represent the most populous Muslim community in France. That is not to say that Algerians have not been involved in the UOIF or made up some of its grass roots organisations, but they have always had a limited impact on the organisation’s leadership. It is not entirely clear why this is the case, but it would seem to be linked to the fact that the Algerians became increasingly tied into the unfolding civil war inside Algeria during the 1990s. As such the Algerians were attracted to organisations such as the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) and the Fraternité Algérienne en France (FAF), which was essentially the French branch of the FIS who were fully engaged in events in the homeland. As UOIF representative in Marseille Mohsen N’Gazou explained, ‘The Algerian community saw some kind of hope in the
FIS. We saw the opposite … The Algerians tried to build up a good picture of the FIS in the Union.’
¹³
Indeed, as the 1990s developed and parts of the FIS became involved in violence against the Algerian state, there was a fear within the UOIF that it might be accused of supporting the FIS or of being linked to it in some way. However, in its bid to present itself as a broad-based movement the UOIF has had to make it look as though it is not purposefully excluding the Algerians. As a former French Interior Ministry official noted, ‘It is important for the UOIF to say there are Algerians in the organisation. So they put some Algerians in the office.’
¹⁴