Hem English content Extremism in Sweden – part 2

Extremism in Sweden – part 2

2025-12-28

The term “Islamophobe” has been particularly effective in casting suspicion on and demonizing anyone who has pointed out problems such as inequality, honor-based violence, and radicalism within Islam. Exactly when the term was coined is somewhat uncertain. In Alain Quellien’s book La politique musulmane dans l’Afrique occidentale française from 1910, there is a section entitled L’Islamophobie,¹ in which he writes that Western and Christian prejudices against Islam have always existed.

The word Islamophobia is also mentioned in another early book, L’Orient vu de l’Occident, by Étienne Dinet and Sliman Ben Ibrahim from 1925,² which is often cited as the first proper source of the term. Modern usage of the word Islamophobia, however, did not gain real traction until the Muslim think tank the Runnymede Trust in the United Kingdom published the report Islamophobia: A Challenge to Us All in 1997.³

Aje Carlbom, associate professor of social anthropology, argues that they created confusion around the term through a definition that functioned pathologizingly, since anyone who criticizes Islam is considered to suffer from “phobias” regarding the religion. The think tank maintained that all critical ideas about Islam should be “treated” rather than debated—something that makes differing views of the religion impossible, as one party is dismissed as “mentally disturbed” before the debate has even begun.⁴

It is, of course, important to distinguish between criticism of Islam and hatred of Muslims. In a democratic and open society, we must be able to criticize beliefs, ideas, and ideologies, Carlbom explains. We may detest ideas, but not threaten people:

“Satire, questioning, research, reform, or criticism of Islam is not the same thing as hatred of Muslim individuals. This distinction is important to keep in mind if one wishes to avoid serving Islamist political interests. For them, the word Islamophobia functions as a protective shield against criticism directed at their misogynistic and narrow-minded doctrine.”⁵

The Swedish National Council of Adult Education (Folkbildningsrådet) is a non-profit organization that, through the Ministry of Education, distributes grants to study associations, folk high schools, and student organizations. For a long time, it allocated 23 million SEK per year to the study association Ibn Rushd. Informed researchers such as Magnus Ranstorp and Aje Carlbom argue that, in doing so, the Council strengthened a politically oriented group linked to the ideological school of the Muslim Brotherhood.⁶

Ranstorp and Carlbom have pointed out that Ibn Rushd’s main areas of activity have been the Arabic language and worldview education. Their target groups are far removed from mainstream society, and Ranstorp and Carlbom question whether studies in Arabic and Islam contribute to increased participation in a Swedish democratic community. Supporting or working with educational activities that encourage further isolation from the norms and language of the majority society is, after all, directly counterproductive.

Although the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a minority among Muslims, it has long worked to gain influence over religious thinking. Through large financial grants, the National Council of Adult Education supports a network that sees itself as having the mission to spread an interpretation of Islam that many Muslims do not share and that instead divides society. Thus, the Council indirectly contributes to building an Islamic “parallel society” alongside the majority society.

According to Ranstorp and Carlbom, this is made clear by Ibn Rushd’s own terminology, which states that Muslim life should be separated into a “Muslim civil society.”⁷ Ranstorp, Carlbom, and Hyllengren state that at least 60 percent of study association activities may involve fraud—something confirmed by a report from the Swedish National Audit Office in the autumn of 2022.⁸

So who are the Muslim Brotherhood?

The Muslim Brotherhood is a network organization with a political and religious agenda whose ultimate goal is a society based on Sharia law. It operates through Brotherhood front groups and other organizational entities. The Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by the Egyptian teacher Hassan al-Banna, born in the village of Al Mahmoudeya outside Cairo and the son of a local imam.

Al-Banna proclaimed:

“It is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its laws upon all nations and to spread its power over the entire planet.”⁹

The Brotherhood’s motto reads:

“Allah is our goal, the Prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our law, jihad is our way. To die in the path of Allah is our highest hope.”¹⁰

In the late 1930s, through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini—leader of the Palestinian nationalist movement—they received financial and ideological support from Hitler. The Grand Mufti shared al-Banna’s hatred of Jews¹¹ and lived in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, where he became an important part of Nazi Arabic propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East. Al-Husseini’s speeches were broadcast to tens of thousands of listeners via Arabic radio transmissions from the Nazi regime.

The Grand Mufti also helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into the SS¹² and agitated for the harshest possible measures against Jews. After the Second World War, the Brotherhood received assistance from Nazis who had fled to Egypt, and Brotherhood members found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they worked for many years as teachers. In 1946, they established themselves in West Germany with the goal of gaining political and social influence in European countries with Muslim communities.

The Brotherhood claims to seek the creation of its society through political reforms and has developed strategies to establish, enter, and influence educational institutions, social networks, and traditional political parties in the countries where it operates. With ideological legitimacy in cultural, political, and academic environments in the West, organized Islamist groups can freely express contempt for Western society while being financed by taxpayers.

To an outside observer, it is, of course, incomprehensible that our own institutions and tax money actively support groups that despise and combat our democratic way of life. Olivier Roy, one of the foremost scholars in the field, points to what he calls the Left’s “Third World sympathies” (tiermondisme) and argues that these misguided embraces legitimize both antisemitism and anti-Western rhetoric.

According to Roy, the ideology is less about Islam and more about how Arab pro-Palestinian views are expressed. The original theorists for activists or Salafi-jihadists did not receive their political education in mosques or religious schools, but at universities in Europe, where they socialized with militant Marxists. After the failure of communism and the fall of the Wall, Muslims were embraced as the new proletariat. Islamists borrowed Marxist concepts and ideas, which were then infused with terminology from the Qur’an.¹³

While Islam denotes a tradition of religious belief and practice for personal religiosity, Islamism invokes the religious tradition for political action—in other words, religion as a social order. Islamism is a Western and relatively new concept. In academic literature, it appeared in the 1960s, but Muslims rarely use it as a self-designation. A reasonable definition might be “political Islam.”

The majority of the world’s Muslims can be considered peaceful and do not sympathize with extremists. Islamists, on the other hand, despise Western society and its democracy and want society to be governed instead by dogmatic Sharia laws. Islamists generally make no distinction between Islam as textual interpretation and as a way of life. The foundational texts on which Sharia is based—the Qur’an and the Hadith—can, according to Islamists, be understood and applied in only one way.

There is, however, a certain difference between Islamism and Salafism, even though both seek a return to an original form of Islam in which Sharia law governs society. While Islamism is represented by, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood, which claims to operate through reforms, within Salafism one can distinguish three currents: inward-looking purists, politically oriented groups, and violent jihadists.

According to the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO), Salafi-jihadist environments in Sweden have multiplied in recent years,¹⁴ the most extreme of whom are supporters of the Islamic State (IS). Although there are Swedish converts to IS, a report from the Swedish Defence University shows that 66 percent of those who traveled from Sweden to fight with IS were born abroad,¹⁵ with at least one foreign-born parent.

In other European countries as well, those who joined IS primarily have non-European immigrant backgrounds.

Alongside Belgium and Germany, Sweden was one of the countries with the highest number of individuals who traveled to Syria to fight.¹⁶ As if that were not bad enough, at least 45 people who joined IS lived on Swedish welfare benefits while in Syria, according to a major investigation by GT.¹⁷ In addition, IS terrorists managed to apply for more benefits while in Syria when their travel funds ran out.¹⁸ Altogether, this amounted to several million kronor. One reason was that Swedish authorities did not have the right to share information with one another, which facilitated the fraud.

In addition to the Social Insurance Agency, the Public Employment Service, unemployment insurance funds, CSN (student aid), and social services continued to pay out money after IS supporters had left the country.¹⁹

In several cases, SÄPO knew that Swedes had traveled to Syria without the authorities’ knowledge. “Ethnic cleansing, beheadings, and sex slavery—taxpayers have thus, via child benefits, student aid, and parental benefits, financed perhaps the most severe human rights violations of our time,”²⁰ noted Expressen editorial writer Patrik Kronqvist.

Is there any democratic country in the world that would allow something like this?

In cooperation with Doku, a politically and religiously independent foundation engaged in investigative journalism and the dissemination of knowledge about violent and radical Islamist environments in Sweden, Expressen revealed in 2019 that the Vetenskap School in Gothenburg employed four IS returnees, two of them as teachers.²¹ In 2020, SÄPO announced that around ten schools and preschools were run by individuals with ties to violent extremism.²²

In an interview with Svenska Dagbladet in 1998, then–Prime Minister Göran Persson spoke negatively about independent schools. At the same time, the Social Democrats’ affiliated organization, the Brotherhood Movement, helped establish Islamic schools through political representatives. Sameh Egyptson, an Islamologist and doctor of theology at Lund University, found in his research meeting notes in the Labour Movement Archives from a meeting held on August 26, 1998, between representatives of the Brotherhood Movement and the Swedish Muslim Council.²³

Also present at the meeting were Mahmoud Aldebe, then chairman of the Swedish Muslim Council, and Ahmed Ghanem, then chairman of the Islamic Association. In an open letter in 2006, Aldebe demanded special legislation for Muslims. At the time, he was employed at the Social Democratic Party’s headquarters on Sveavägen and later became CEO and imam of the Gothenburg Mosque. “The Swedish Muslim Council threatened to end its cooperation with the Social Democrats if the party continued to criticize independent schools,”²⁴ Egyptson explains.

The notes from the discussions between the Brotherhood Movement and the Swedish Muslim Council state that “SMR has become more certain about what it wants. Internally, there is relatively more criticism of cooperation with social democracy than with Christians.”²⁵ The Brotherhood Movement explains in the notes how important the support of the Swedish Muslim Council was during the election campaign, and this became decisive for the establishment of the Römosseskolan, Egyptson recounts.

The Schools Inspectorate trusts what the leadership of Islamic schools writes in official reports to authorities, but in the Swedish Muslim Council’s internal reports—often in Arabic—the tone is entirely different, Egyptson explains. He refers, among other things, to a report from 2001 in which Islamic schools are described as a salvation from Swedish society, which is portrayed as “a rotten environment.”²⁶

And then we wonder why integration in Sweden does not work?

To be continued…

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Extremism in Sweden – part 2

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