PARIS — Academics and representatives from France’s Muslim community are denouncing a leaked government report on the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country and across Europe.
The report, commissioned the French government last year, alleges that the Egypt-based Islamist organization is attempting to influence policymakers as part of the group’s long-held goal of establishing a state governed by Islamic law.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said an official version of the findings would be released to the public by the end of the week after an early version was leaked to members of the media, including POLITICO.
The report puts forward several pieces of purported evidence, though links to the Islamist group are not always clear. However, the document seen by POLITICO and reported on by several outlets appeared not to include particularly sensitive information. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said in an interview with the daily Le Parisien that several items in the report would remain classified for security reasons.
Franck Frégosi, a political scientist specializing in Islam in France whose work was cited in the report itself, spoke to several media outlets to decry what he described as the document’s “alarmist” tone.
In an interview with France Inter, Frégosi argued that the document attributed common behavior by Muslim members of the community — such as choosing to wear a headscarf — as the result of influence by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nadia Fadil, an associate professor at Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven who researches Islam in Europe, argued the findings lumped together diverse groups from across the spectrum of Muslim civil society — a “lazy trope” comparable to tying all left-wing movements from communism to social democracy to Karl Marx.
The French Council of the Muslim Faith — an organization created by then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that was long the state’s primary interlocutor for Muslim affairs until President Emmanuel Macron severed ties with it in 2023 — said it was particularly concerned that the serious allegations leveled against institutions labeled as Muslim Brotherhood allies risked creating a climate of “constant suspicion” around French Muslims.
Several of the groups named in the report as either proxies of the Muslim Brotherhood or ideologically aligned have also pushed back.
The Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO), a European Muslim student umbrella organization tied to the Islamist group in the report, issued a statement rejecting “any attempt to associate [them] with political entities.”
The Federation of French Muslims, described in the report as “the national branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in France,” called the accusations “unfounded.”
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