The Muslim Brotherhood, a threat difficult to identify

Muslim Brothers. Two words at the heart of media debates for several weeks. Presented as a brotherhood working in the shadow to the Islamization of France, the organization was the subject of a report by the Ministry of the Interior presented on May 21 in the Defense Council. Four years after the “law against separatism”, the President of the Republic wants to go further: facilitate the freezing of assets and sanctions targeting associations deemed communitarian or Islamists, of which the Muslim Brotherhood are the window. A bill is expected by the end of the summer.

Why this particular interest in the “brothers”? The movement was born in Egypt in the 1920s. As British troops still occupy the territory, the teacher Hassan Al Banna scraps to establish Islamic power. It gives birth to the inletism which then extends to other Muslim countries. In Europe, members, established in the 1960s, gathered under the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, which became Muslims in France in 2017. In 2025, 139 places of worship – or 7 % of mosques and prayer rooms – are affiliated to them. The movement, estimated between 400 and 1,000 members, remains numerically marginal, but some warn against a form of entrism.

Increasing conservatism

“Their influence extends to universities, sport, prison or hospitals chaplains, magistracy …”, says Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, anthropologist threatened with death after the publication of his work Inheritory and its networks, the investigation (Ed. Odile Jacob, 416 p .; 24.90 €). According to the report of the Ministry of the Interior, the Frériste movement particularly invests the educational, cultural and associative sectors in order to disseminate its ideology, having the Koranic law on the law of the Republic and professing the inferiorization of women, as well as an anti -Zionism which can go as far as anti -Semitism. At the local level, some fear an influence in certain municipalities within ten years. “A third of the worship places in my department are under Islamist influence -including the Muslim Brotherhood -or targeted to be checked,” says Alexandre Brugère, prefect of Hauts -de -Seine. The senior official recently closed a language institute where “faceless adult posters” were hung.

“The Muslim Brotherhood was also active in the fight against radicalization and condemned terrorist attacks,” objected Vincent Geisser, sociologist and political scientist. Right may even inaugurated mosques with them. It was their institutionalization that has generated a perverse effect. According to this researcher, the organization is in decline and struggles to renew itself. Fifteen years ago, their annual congress at Le Bourget brought together 100,000 people. From the pandemic, it has not been relaunched.

If it is difficult to decide on the real influence of the brothers, it is however proven that other forms of conservative Islam are gaining ground. “In the past, the Saudis came to promote their books. Now everything is on social networks, ”says the manager of an Islamic bookstore in Île-de-France.

The state on a crest line

Many rigorist preachers, often from Salafism – a current of Sunni Islam advocating a literal reading of the Koran – found, on the Internet, with youth in search of landmarks. “They appear as life guides and make Muslim identity the primary identity,” analyzes the essayist Hakim El Karoui, author of Islam, a French religion (Ed. Gallimard, 304 p .; 24 €). They do not claim a political project, but promote a pious lifestyle, to blame the “new fashionable sails”, revealing earrings for example. “There is a conservative tropism in Islam today, and these preachers manage to touch audiences that do not go to the mosque,” says political scientist Haoues Seniguer.

How to identify in these rigorous speeches, but not reprehensible in the eyes of the law, which possibly falls under Islamist entrism? This is all the difficulty for the State, which must watch out for discriminatory remarks, calls for hatred or violence, to act. In 2022, the Moroccan imam Hassan Iquioussen, close to the Muslim Brotherhood, was thus expelled for his statements against the Jews, women and non-Muslims. He had notably said that the man should not let his wife leave alone from the home …