By Yussuf Abdel Hadi
Hardly a week goes by without reports of Islamist attacks. In the French town of Mulhouse, an Algerian subject to deportation attacked visitors at a weekly market with a knife and a screwdriver. A 69-year-old passerby, who tried to stop the attacker, was killed. The assailant’s battle cry: “Allahu Akbar.” In recent years, there have been dozens of similar incidents in France.
In 2020, a Chechen man beheaded a teacher in broad daylight because the teacher had committed the “crime” of leading a classroom discussion on freedom of speech. The attacker called the French president the leader of a nation of infidel hellhounds. The crime was reminiscent of the violence perpetrated by the Islamic State, which the Al-Azhar University—the most influential voice of Sunni Islam—only distanced itself from after a prolonged silence.
Today, just five years later, jihadism is becoming increasingly visible in Germany as well. In Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, an Afghan subject to deportation attacked a two-year-old boy with a kitchen knife. The child succumbed to his injuries, as did the passerby who intervened to protect the kindergarten group from further attacks. In Munich, an Afghan asylum seeker drove a car into a demonstration organized by the Verdi trade union, killing a young mother and her two-year-old daughter and seriously injuring at least 37 others.
In Villach, Austria, a 23-year-old Syrian randomly stabbed people, killing a teenager. Since then, the image of the “laughing perpetrator” has circulated worldwide. He raises his finger in the Tauhid gesture to demonstrate his allegiance to the Islamic State—and his intent to kill more infidels. These are just a few examples from a chronicle of violence spanning only a few months. Yet, Europe remains relatively silent. Many politicians still seem unaware of the threat posed by Islamist ideologies.
Such structures are supported, for instance, in Germany by federal ministries and numerous foundations. The Claim alliance, for example, received a total of 960,000 euros from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs in 2020 and 2021. It collaborates with political scientist Farid Hafez, who, in his writings, portrays the radically antisemitic ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood as democratic thinkers.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s battle cry is well known: Jihad is our way. Their goal is to establish Islamic theocracies in Europe. It is also well documented that they demonize Jews and seek the destruction of Israel, that their ideologues support the death penalty for homosexuals and adulterers, and that they believe apostates from Islam must be executed. And yet, compared to Salafism, the Muslim Brotherhood is considered moderate.
According to a French intelligence report, Islamists control 150 communities in France. A street battle between Chechens and North Africans in Dijon shut down an entire district in June 2020. The police were overwhelmed, and the conflict was mediated by an imam affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
At the same time, the German Minister of the Interior established an “Expert Panel on Anti-Muslim Hatred,” which included apologists and collaborators of reactionary Brotherhood movements. These groups seek to intimidate anyone who criticizes oppression, persecution, and brutality carried out in the name of God by accusing them of Islamophobia.
Reports circulate about the global rise of fundamentalist Islam, financed by petrodollars from Arab states. Politicians in Indonesia are imprisoned for alleged blasphemy. Homosexuals face the death penalty in seven Islamic countries. The Islamic Republic of Iran executes political dissidents who, unlike Alexei Navalny, cannot count on the solidarity of European governments. Schools and churches are burned down in Niger, Chad, and Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of Mauritanians still live in Arab slavery, supposedly in accordance with Allah’s will. Yet, despite all evidence to the contrary, the myth persists that the Western world is gripped by a deep-seated, blind hatred of Islam.
The victims of terror are not only Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics. They also include Muslims who are robbed of their freedom in repressive environments, women who live as masked objects of male desire without rights, and LGBTQ+ individuals who are hunted even in Germany by self-proclaimed “men of honor.” Apostates from Islam face death threats.
Let us remember that the Brussels imam who defended Salman Rushdie paid with his life, that Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered, and that his Norwegian, Italian, and Turkish translators survived assassination attempts that claimed 37 lives. Back in the 1990s, political Islam had only just begun its advance—bolstered by a postcolonial ideology that excuses even the most brutal terror and repression as mere cultural idiosyncrasies.
Religious criticism, when it does not turn into secular self-righteousness, is a noble form of doubt that should be inherent in any serious religion, as it deals by nature with the unknowable. This is not about Hungary’s tactical invocation of a “Christian West.” It is not about condemning Muslims who practice their faith peacefully. Nor is it about glorifying Western individualism as the ultimate ideal. But when the resurgence of religion presents itself as bloody obscurantism, there must be a line that every person refuses to cross.
