Ahmed Akkari was born in Lebanon in 1978, the son of a cultured family from Tripoli’s upper middle class.1 The civil war that entangled Lebanon in the 1980s led the Akkaris to leave the country and ask for political asylum in Denmark in 1985. After a few happy years in the Scandinavian country, the Akkaris decided to return to Lebanon, thinking that the end of the war would lead to the return of the good life that had characterized the “Switzerland of the Middle East,” as Lebanon was sometimes called in the 1970s. Faced with the harsh reality of continuous civil strife, Syrian occupation, and economic malaise, the Akkaris returned to Denmark after just one year, settling in a small town in Jutland, in the country’s bucolic North.
Ahmed does not remember being particularly affected by splitting his childhood between two very different countries; to the contrary, he juggled the cultures well. His parents were largely secular, and he grew up without much of a connection to his faith. But when he was fourteen, a family friend began taking him to a mosque in Aalborg, the largest town in the vicinity. Ahmed found the environment at the Masjid Al-Furqaan in Aalborg’s Danmarksgade appealing. “Everybody was nice and smiling,” he recalls. “Nobody talked to me about politics, but just about God, the meaning of life and salvation.”
Enthusiastic and intellectually gifted, Ahmed attracted the attention of Abdul Karim Amin, a Kurdish Iraqi who was a regular attendee of the mosque; he had just received asylum in Denmark and, according to Ahmed, “was affiliated to the Brotherhood.” Abdul Karim began spending substantial amounts of time with Ahmed, slowly introducing him to an increasingly more activist interpretation of Islam. “It was no longer just about salvation,” says Ahmed. “It was about the importance of Islam as a mission, not just as a personal belief.” Riveted, Ahmed became absorbed in the Islamic literature Abdul Karim was supplying to him.
Ahmed attended Danish public high school with profit. Abdul Karim encouraged Ahmed to do well in school since, as Ahmed explains, “he thought education was important for the sake of building an Islamic society.” Yet during those formative years his “identity changed gradually.” He had many friends, both Muslim and Christian, but he increasingly identified with conservative Muslim values, something that also put him at odds with his family. “I was a seeking young man,” Ahmed notes. That quest for knowledge and identity led Ahmed to engage with activists from various Islamist organizations that revolved around the Danmarksgade mosque. For some time, he explored the world of the Tabligh, which he described as a group of “nice people but simplistic.”2 He also connected with Salafists adhering to various strands of the movement, from those embracing the Saudi current to those with jihadist leanings. The latter reportedly tried to recruit Ahmed, who refused because of his discomfort with violence.
Ahmed’s intellectual nature, along with Abdul Karim’s influence, guided his quest in the direction of the Muslim Brotherhood. “He was my guru,” he says of Abdul Karim, “and he guided me through the jungle of Islamist groups.” Abdul Karim taught Ahmed that most other Islamist groups meant well and had been influenced by the Brotherhood but relied on incorrect and ineffective approaches. “Abdul Karim told me that dawa is peaceful,” he recounts, “and that we should keep out of confrontation; jihad was right only in some cases, like Palestine, but not everywhere; the right approach is a gradualist and patient one that takes into consideration the circumstances of the place.” He adds, “I loved this about the Brotherhood: it’s intellectual, it’s complex, it’s sophisticated. But its heart is in the mission.”
By 1998 Ahmed had started to regularly attend an “open circle,” a study group that read “very general Islamic texts and pamphlets, with small doses of Brotherhood literature.” The bookish Ahmed dove in headfirst, devouring the texts of Mohammed Said Ramadan Al-Bouti, Faysal Mawlawi, Said Hawwa, Sayyid and his brother Mohammed Qutb, Yusuf al Qaradawi, and various Islamist scholars from the Arab Gulf. The open circle was not “openly Brotherhood,” but it became increasingly clear to Ahmed that the Brothers had a major intellectual influence on it and that some people in Ahmed’s orbit were Brothers. Yet the open circle, insists Ahmed, “is not indoctrination, it’s very free, you discuss democratically, [it is] much more religion than politics, it focuses on the idea of changing your lifestyle to mold it around what you are learning, Islam.”
As his involvement in the open circle led by Abdul Karim increased, Ahmed understood that his mentor was progressively and continuously testing him. These small challenges were intended to test his intellect but, even more, his obedience and loyalty. “It’s about building strong, enduring personalities,” he explains. Ahmed also had the constant feeling of being under evaluation, though he was never told he was. But that pressure stimulated him: “It was exciting, I love competition, I wanted to pass his exams, I want to impress Abdul Karim.” After years of diligent behavior, Ahmed was promoted from the open circles to more selective “closed circles,” a privilege bestowed on only the best students of Abdul Karim and other selected individuals in Denmark. In the closed circle, explains Ahmed, the literature is more focused on Brotherhood-related authors; yet the pedagogic approach is not “indoctrination, read, and repeat, but more indirect,” with the naqib leading an open conversation. The closed circle introduced Ahmed to a concept that has crucial importance for the Brotherhood: silence. “Abdul Karim told me not to speak to other people about the circles and that it was important to protect the unit,” he explains. “I started to understand that there is danger in what we did and found that extremely exciting. I also kept it secret from my family because I learned [from senior Brothers] that most Muslims don’t understand the call [the Brotherhood’s mission].”
Even though he had only some inklings of it, Ahmed was getting closer to the inner circles of the Muslim Brotherhood’s milieu in Denmark. One night Abdul Karim told Ahmed he was taking him to an Arab cultural evening in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. Held at a local community center, the event included prayers, speeches, and a communal meal. Ahmed understood that many of the roughly twenty attendees to the invitation-only event were Brothers, even though he was smart enough not to ask many questions. “But I felt the honor of being there, the sense of exclusiveness,” he explains, “like a Rotary club, if you will. I was very excited.” That evening Ahmed met, among others, two key players of the Danish Brotherhood milieu: Abu Bashar (Mohamad Al Khaled Samha), the Syrian-born imam of the Islamic Society in Denmark (Islamisk Trossamfund) in the city of Odense, and Mohammad Fouad al Barazi, a fellow Syrian based in Copenhagen. Both men would eventually play a key role in Ahmed’s time inside the Brotherhood.
That evening in Aarhus was only a foray into the Brothers’ world, but Ahmed’s actual induction came soon thereafter, in 2002. Ahmed recounts that it took place in Barazi’s Copenhagen home, as at the time the Syrian was the head of Denmark’s “closed movement,” as Ahmed calls the secret structure of the Brotherhood. Ahmed describes the moment as not particularly formal, even though his excitement at finally joining a group he had studied and heard so much about was uncontainable.
While it made official his membership in the Brotherhood, the baya did not represent a major change for Ahmed. “I was already in a closed circle,” he notes. “I already had access to Barazi, Abu Bashar, and other local Brotherhood leaders; it was just a natural progression.” At the same time, being inducted enabled Ahmed to progressively discover more information on the Brotherhood’s inner workings. He realized, for example, that there were some one hundred Brotherhood members in Denmark. Some were fairly well known as such in Muslim circles and beyond, but others—the “unsuspectables”—were not. “The movement always wanted to have people who were unknown,” he explains, “who can run it if all gets exposed, people who stay behind the scenes.” He also realized that some inducted Brothers who no longer involved themselves in the group’s activities but had not formally left the group had their membership frozen.
The structure of the Brotherhood in Denmark became clearer to him as well. According to Ahmed, a murshid, elected by members at the national level, supervises the group’s functioning in the whole country. Senior members oversee the various areas in which the organization has divided the country—Ahmed, for example, became active in the Aarhus region, as he attended university there. And a naqib is put in charge of individual usras, to which all Brothers are assigned. “The usra meets weekly, secretly, without even family members knowing what’s going on” explains Ahmed, “and the usras in the same region come together once a month, and there is a meeting for the whole country once a year.” The movement’s women, most of them wives and daughters of the members, are involved in various supporting activities and have their own usras.
Life inside the Brotherhood allowed Ahmed to spend time focusing on what attracted him to the group in the first place: its complex ideology. Ahmed claims that the tarbiya curriculum for all Brothers had been set by Barazi, who was the regional murshid of the Danish Brotherhood milieu at the time, based on that of the Egyptian branch but with slight variations—“We don’t have to follow it as closely as they do in the Arab world.” He dug deeper into texts written by some of the main thinkers of the global Brotherhood movement and other Islamists, a number of whom he had already discovered while attending the open circle and some of whom were new to him: the former murshid Mustapha Mashour, the American Brotherhood thinker Taha Awlani, the Saudi clerics behind the Sahwa movement, the Lebanese cleric Fathi Yakan, the Kurdish cleric Ali al Qaradaghi, the Egyptian scholar Said Sabiq, and many others. He also translated one of Mawlawi’s books and various letters by al Banna from Arabic into Danish.
These intellectual endeavors led him to immerse himself in the big questions discussed within the highest echelons of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement at the time: Is the Muslim world still in a state of jahiliya, or pre-Islamic ignorance, as Qutb wrote? Is democracy compatible with Islam? What should the role of the Brotherhood in the West be? Ahmed was also fascinated by debates on whether the Brotherhood should be a more open, popular movement, as Fathi Yakan advocated, or should remain highly selective and focus on recruiting a limited number of people with key qualities, as others thought.
Through reading the books, moreover, Ahmed immersed himself in the nuances of principles he saw applied in the day-to-day work of the Brotherhood milieu. He was particularly fascinated by the flexibility employed by Qaradawi in fiqh (jurisprudence), which Ahmed contrasted with the rigidity of the Salafists. According to Ahmed, “It allows you to work within the system, be flexible, work in society, and then, at the end, the truth will prevail; you are bringing about change, just with a different tactic, a more flexible approach.”
While ideas were important, money, Ahmed came to soon understand, was an equally crucial part of life inside the Brotherhood. Every member, he says, had to pay a fee corresponding to 2.5 percent of his income—a percentage similar to what is customary to give as zakat, the almsgiving mandatory in Islam. The system is relatively flexible, and Brothers, argues Ahmed, are allowed to pay less or asked to pay more, depending on their financial circumstances. There is also an informal system of internal financial solidarity, particularly among members of the same usra, through which Brothers in need are helped. But he points out that the Brothers have many other funding sources, ranging from donations raised in mosques to private businesses, from funding they manage to receive from various governmental agencies for some of their endeavors to the financial support they receive from foreign countries. “There is no independent control of these flows; it’s all about trust,” he states. And he adds that he frequently “carried bags full of cash,” without asking questions about origin and destination.
Ahmed realized that specialization was one of the Brotherhood’s key features. “There are those who do dawa,” he says, “those who know how to deal with politicians, and those who work money.” While he never concerned himself much with the financial aspects of the organization, he is aware that others, who often occupied less visible positions, did. A case in point is the now dissolved Islamic Bank International of Denmark, which was set up in the early 1980s in Copenhagen by key Brotherhood figures as one of Europe’s first banks regulated by the principles of Islamic banking. Its board included key Brotherhood activists such as Gamal Attia, the Luxembourg-based financier and Yussuf Nada’s close friend; Hassan Abuelela, the late head of the Islamic Center of Stuttgart and a board member of the Islamic Society of Germany; Mahmoud Abu Saud, the U.S.-based godfather of Islamic banking (about whom more later); and various high-ranking government officials from several Arab Gulf states.3
Ahmed slowly came to understand the dynamics of the Brothers’ transnational networks. Regarding several aspects of the Brotherhood, says Ahmed, “nobody tells you how it works—you find out in bits and pieces; only the leadership has the full picture, only the top discusses the big secrets.” According to his understanding, the global movement of the Brotherhood works informally, as the Egyptian branch no longer has the same control over the others that it did before the leadership of the Egyptian murshid Umar al Tilmisani (1972–1986). During those years the Egyptian Brotherhood, struggling for its own survival because of the pressure put on it by the Egyptian regime, allowed the other branches to operate more freely, independently choosing their tactics and priorities, but “still kept together by the structure that binds them across countries.”
“When it comes to Europe,” argues Ahmed, “the Brotherhood has indicated the main guidelines, the general course of action in books, in seminars, and in meetings with European Brothers; but they do not control things in detail.” Moreover, according to Ahmed, the branch in each region (a division that can but does not always correspond to a country) has its own structure, which replicates that of the mother group but can somewhat differ from it. The Scandinavian region, for example, was reportedly divided in two: one containing Sweden, Norway, and Finland and overseen by the Swedish Brotherhood milieu, and the other encompassing Denmark. “I had to obey the leadership of the Brotherhood in Denmark,” explains Ahmed, “and only the leaders of the Danish Brotherhood milieu interacted with their peers in Sweden.”
Despite these clear geographical and hierarchical divisions, he maintains, the Brothers are a transnational family, an informal milieu built on personal, organizational, financial, and ideological connections. “You travel around the world,” says Ahmed, “and there is the same spirit. When you knock on the door there is common trust, help.” Being an inducted Brother enables one individual to be able to count on a support network wherever he travels by simply demonstrating his membership. “Let’s say I want to go fund-raise in Qatar for some project,” explains Ahmed, “and one of the big leaders of my local branch supports me: he writes a letter of recommendation or makes a phone call, vouches for me, and then I go to the Gulf and have my fund-raising meetings based on that. That’s how it’s done.” According to Ahmed, this informal network, rooted in a sense of common purpose and long-standing personal interactions, extends beyond the Arab-based Brotherhood to apply as well to its two sister movements: the South Asian Jamaat-e-Islami and the Turkish Islamist movement founded by Erbakan, which sees in Millî Görüş its main Western representative.
Ahmed’s activities inside the Brotherhood were diverse, from the mandatory participation in the usra to traveling to conferences (“where I met the big stars of the Brotherhood”). But his main job, which he undertook with enormous passion and devotion, was dawa. “I didn’t like the administrative part of it [of being a Brotherhood member],” he explains, “but more the message and ‘the ideals.’ ” A skilled orator with ample knowledge of Islamic texts and an outgoing personality, Ahmed was perfect for traveling around Denmark to give speeches to Muslim communities. “There is open dawa and closed dawa: open dawa is about Islam and closed dawa is when you influence people with a Brotherhood mind-set,” he says, adding, “I focused mostly on open dawa.” In substance, Ahmed would deliver speeches to small and large congregations in mosques, public events, and private gatherings, introducing the audiences to a conservative interpretation of Islam but with only “a sprinkling, nothing too overt” of Brotherhood ideology.
That does not mean, Ahmed makes clear, that “the concept of recruitment [for the Brotherhood] was lost on me.” “Open dawa,” speaking to groups of Muslims, served the dual purpose of further introducing them to a conservative and politically aware form of Islam and, at the same time, identifying potential new members. But he admits to being better at the former (“I was a big speaker”) than the latter. He recalls a fellow Danish Brother, a Tunisian named Asad, as being much better at recruiting new talent: “He studied people, always proceeded quietly, knew when to push and when not.” The two figures complemented each other: while Ahmed was “the bridge between the first and the second generation,” because of his perfect fluency in Danish and his upbringing in the country, Asad was better at zeroing in on and cultivating the best potential recruits attracted by Ahmed’s rhetoric and charisma.
Ahmed’s incessant dawa activities often brought him in contact with other Islamist groups active in Denmark. While loyal to the Brotherhood, he always appreciated various aspects of other Islamist tendencies and did not look at them with the same suspicion or sense of superiority exhibited by many of his fellow Brothers. “I preached or came in contact with many different places not associated with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he explains. “This is something not many can understand. Especially in Denmark, people think it’s not easy to be in contact with various groups from across the Islamist spectrum; but I did go between the Salafists, the Sufis, the traditionalists, and others, including short dialogues with some of the jihadi persons attending mosques.”
He frequently interacted with Millî Görüş milieus and with the Somali variation of the Brotherhood and became close to various Danish Salafist leaders. Most prominent among them were the late Ahmed Abu Laban, a Palestinian who had settled in Copenhagen in 1983 after being expelled from both Egypt and Kuwait for his involvement in the Muslim Brotherhood and who later embraced the Sururi school of thought,4 and Raed Hlayhel, a Lebanese graduate of the University of Medina who had become an imam in Aarhus’s most conservative mosque. Ahmed remembers his frustration at hearing the negative comments about other Islamists from Abdul Karim and the other Brotherhood elders, who would at best see individuals like Abu Laban and Hlayhel as fellow travelers with whom to occasionally partner. “In my mind they were all doing a good thing,” explains Ahmed. “It was just frustrating how they [the Brothers] were competing with and shutting down the others.”
Aside from this vexation, Ahmed was enthusiastically engaged in the activities of the Danish Brotherhood milieu, in which he quickly reached a mid-tier level, throughout the first years of the twenty-first century. He readily admits that his drive was motivated by what in hindsight feels to him like a naïve belief in the pure ideological nature of the Brothers, devoid of personal interests and jealousies. Yet this image of perfect Muslims, “marching together in unison for the advancement of the ummah and al Banna’s vision” without any interest in achieving power and money for themselves individually, was shattered by several episodes that shocked Ahmed and eventually led him to leave the group.
The first took place in 2004, when a personal feud erupted between Mohammad al Barazi, then head of the Brotherhood and in whose house Ahmed had sworn baya, and the late Jehad al Farra (also known as Abu Abdel-Alim), a respected orthopedic surgeon of Syrian decent and a high-ranking member of the Danish Brotherhood.5 Ahmed reports that the dispute arose as the Danish Brothers had managed to raise a substantial amount of funds to support a new umbrella organization they had created “to show Danish society they represent all Muslims.” As this new, ambitious project was coming to fruition, claims Ahmed, the members of the Danish Brotherhood milieu were scheduled to hold their internal elections—technically elections for the “public organization,” but in reality, according to Ahmed, for the Brotherhood’s secret structure. Barazi, “not wanting to lose power, changed the elections’ rules so that he could keep his position”—a move that upset Farra, who thought he would have won the elections by a large margin.
In response to Barazi’s decision, Farra began resorting to the help of various Brothers in Denmark and throughout Europe, trying to “wrestle the leadership from Barazi.” When his efforts did not come to fruition, Farra started his own organization, the Danish Islamic Council (Dansk Islamisk Råd), creating a schism within the Danish Brotherhood milieu. Most Danish Brothers reportedly sided with him, while Barazi found himself, according to Ahmed, “isolated” but technically still in charge of the Danish Brothers’ main organization. To diffuse this fitna, the term often used to indicate strife within the Muslim community, the Danish Brotherhood decided, as Ahmed puts it, “to solve it Brotherly”: that is, through an intra-Brotherhood dispute resolution process.
At first the process was informal and entailed simply a visit by senior figures of the Brotherhood from other countries, including Kamal Helbawy, who set up meetings with all relevant parties to try to bring them to an agreement.6 Once that failed, according to Ahmed, Farra requested that a formal Brotherhood panel adjudicated the matter. To summon that panel, asserts Ahmed, Farra wrote a letter to the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe leadership. FIOE is the Brussels-based umbrella organization created by the Brotherhood milieus of individual European countries. The fact that FIOE was involved in sorting out internal Brotherhood members in an individual country is a claim that, if confirmed, would represent solid evidence of the organization’s links to the Brotherhood, something FIOE leaders have often denied.7
According to Ahmed, FIOE created a three-member panel, headed by Mawlawi, that heard evidence from the parties and various witnesses and eventually made a judgment in favor of Farra. “They didn’t say that [Farra’s] Danish Islamic Council represented the Brotherhood. They simply stated that his organization is the one that belongs to FIOE in Denmark; but people in the milieu understand what that means.” In substance, according to Ahmed, FIOE’s decision to view the Danish Islamic Council as its official affiliate in Denmark made clear that Farra’s organization represented the Brotherhood in the country. “From that day,” he adds, “we all kept away from Barazi.”
According to Ahmed, the Barazi–Farra feud led some in the Danish Brotherhood milieu to leave the organization. “It shocked me,” he explains, “because I had learned [that] you should never seek power.” He remained actively involved in the organization, but doubts about its true nature—or at least that of many of its members—began to form in his mind. The growth of Ahmed’s negative perception of the Brotherhood was accelerated by an infamous incident that took place two years later and gave him instant global notoriety: the Danish cartoons controversy of 2006.
What months later would become the most significant foreign policy crisis in Danish history since World War II began in September 2005, when Jutland’s main newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published twelve cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Jyllands-Posten’s culture editor, Flemming Rose, explained that the idea of running such cartoons came to him “in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.”8 In the aftermath of the assassination of Theo van Gogh, ritually butchered in central Amsterdam by a jihadist militant who had been offended by the Dutch filmmaker’s anti-Islam movie Submission, Rose was disturbed by several episodes in which European artists and publishers refused to display art or perform plays that could expose them to similar threats. Having learned that a Danish author writing a book on Mohammed was having problems finding illustrators, Rose contacted forty illustrators and asked them to draw cartoons on the subject, curious to see what their responses would be. Only twelve cartoonists responded. Most of the cartoons were harmless, but a few were offensive, and two depicted the Prophet negatively: one drew him with a bomb-shaped turban and another drew him as an assassin.
Their publication triggered a chain of events—in which Ahmed was one of the main catalysts—that rocked Denmark. The day that the cartoons were published, Ahmed recalls receiving phone calls from various Islamist leaders in Aarhus, the city where he lived at the time and where the headquarters of Jyllands-Posten are located. That very night he met with one of his closest mentors in the Brotherhood and with Raed Hlayhel, the imam of the local Salafist mosque, who seemed hell-bent on “doing something” against the newspaper. Their first action was making rounds of calls to invite Denmark’s Islamist and conservative leaders to an emergency meeting, which they set in Copenhagen on October 3.
“Raed [Hlayhel] started calling Salafist organizations,” recounts Ahmed, “and I called leaders of Pakistani, Turkish, and Somali organizations, the people I knew through my dawa activities.” Sixteen leaders attended the meeting, which was hosted by Abu Laban, and they produced an eleven-point action plan intended to obtain an apology from Jyllands-Posten. To Ahmed’s surprise, the one Danish Islamist milieu that responded lukewarmly to the call was his own, the Brotherhood. “Abu Bashar came as a freelancer,” Ahmed says. “Barazi and Farra sent letters of support but did not attend.”
For weeks, Ahmed’s attempt to mobilize the leadership of the Danish Brotherhood against what he perceived as an unacceptable offense against Islam fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, the other Islamist leaders took various actions to try to rally Danish Muslims and make their voices heard but to no avail, as Jyllands-Posten refused to budge and apologize. With their efforts going nowhere, the group contacted the ambassadors to Denmark of various Muslim countries to seek their assistance in convincing the Danish government to force Jyllands-Posten to apologize. Eleven of the diplomats, led by Egypt’s ambassador Mona Omar Attia, sought a meeting with the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to discuss the issue. Rasmussen refused. “This is a matter of principle. I won’t meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so,” the prime minister declared. “As prime minister, I have no power whatsoever to limit the press—nor do I want such a power.”9
The refusal by Jyllands-Posten and the Danish government to apologize or even engage in a conversation with the group led by Abu Laban has been the subject of much debate in Denmark. Some have argued that it was a strategic mistake, as a much broader controversy could have been avoided by simply negotiating with them and issuing an apology. But while the newspaper was determined not to cave in on the right to freedom of expression and satire—the very reason the cartoons had been published in the first place—the Danish government was motivated to take a hardline stance in large part by its refusal to acknowledge a group of self-appointed leaders with well-known extremist tendencies as the legitimate representatives of the Danish Muslim community. And, according to Ahmed, it was this very point that infuriated the men. “It became a matter of principle,” he explains. “You don’t want to acknowledge my role as leader of the Muslim community? Then I’ll keep going.”
By the end of November Abu Laban’s group decided that the only way forward was, in his words, to “internationalize this issue so that the Danish government would realize that the cartoons were not only insulting to Muslims in Denmark but also to Muslims worldwide.”10 According to Ahmed, Hlayhel began calling on his international connections in the Salafist movement, starting with celebrities like the Saudi scholar Salman al Awda. Various ambassadors to Denmark from Muslim countries mobilized their governments. As a result, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held an extraordinary session on December 7–8 to condemn the publication of the cartoons, which led to extensive coverage of the issue throughout the Muslim world. Yet Danish Brotherhood leaders stayed on the sidelines while Abu Laban’s group took these actions. Ahmed, who had recently moved to Copenhagen and was teaching at a school linked to the organization, was the liaison between the two, serving as Abu Laban’s group media spokesperson and keeping the Brothers informed about relevant developments. But to Ahmed’s frustration, the elder Brothers refused to play any active role.
Abu Laban’s “internationalization strategy” included sending delegations of Danish Muslims to the Middle East to mobilize support for their cause. The first delegation, which included Abu Bashar and the Danish leader of Millî Görüş, traveled to Egypt. It was during this trip that, infamously, the delegation showed its audience a booklet purportedly containing the cartoons that included additional and significantly more offensive images of the prophet Mohammed that had never appeared in Jyllands-Posten—an action that, whether taken because of sloppiness, as the Muslim leaders claimed, or with an intent to deceive, as many Danes believed, caused an uproar in Denmark.
Aside from the booklet controversy, the trip to Egypt was important because it triggered the interest of the Mubarak regime. In early December Egypt was holding parliamentary elections; according to Ahmed, the regime, feeling electoral pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood, tried to outdo the group on its own turf by “portraying itself as defenders of the honor of the Prophet and of Muslims.” In what he views as an opportunistic move dictated purely by domestic politics, the Egyptian government began an aggressive messaging campaign against the cartoons in order to present itself as pious and chip away conservative support of the Brotherhood.
It was at that point, Ahmed argues, that both the global Muslim Brotherhood network and its Danish milieu decided to get actively involved. Sensing that the controversy was escalating and assessing that staying out of it would have caused them to cede ground to competing Muslim and Islamist leaders both within and outside of Denmark, they began to participate in the anticartoon activities. “Farra,” explains Ahmed, “who had barely come to our [Abu Laban’s group’s] meetings, all of a sudden showed up all the time.” In hindsight, Ahmed today describes this attitude as “typical Brotherhood modus operandi: stay behind, see where it goes.” It is an approach that he compares to that of the leadership of the Egyptian Brotherhood in the early days of the Arab Spring, when the appeals of the young Brothers to join the antiregime protests in Tahrir Square were not heeded by the more risk-averse and calculating elder generation. Only when it became apparent that the anti-Mubarak protests were likely to achieve their goal of overthrowing the regime did the Brotherhood leadership sanction the group’s involvement in them.11
But to Ahmed’s surprise, the Brothers’ involvement in the cartoon crisis was not just belated but (in his view) halfhearted if not outright begrudging. When a second delegation of Danish Muslims left for Lebanon and Syria, Farra reportedly put Ahmed, who this time was part of the group, in touch with Mawlawi, the head of the Lebanese Brotherhood. The late Mawlawi was “the way to get to Qaradawi and to mobilize the entire global network of the Brotherhood,” explains Ahmed. Through his interactions with Mawlawi and other Brotherhood leaders in both the Middle East and Denmark, it became clear to Ahmed that the group’s leadership “was not ‘let’s get angry about the Prophet’ but rather ‘what can we gain from this situation?’ ”
In effect, Ahmed felt that the leadership of the global Muslim Brotherhood had initially made a calculation that they would have benefited more by not raising a major fuss about the cartoons, as they were engaged in various conversations with Western interlocutors and felt the need to display an image of moderation: their priority was, as Ahmed puts it, on “not disturbing the political waters in Europe for the movement.” Yet once it became clear that various actors in the Muslim world, from Salafists to secularists, had seized on the crisis, the Brothers felt outflanked and realized they could no longer “sit it out.”
Under pressure, by late January the Brotherhood finally came out with an aggressive campaign against Denmark. Most famously, Qaradawi and the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), the Brotherhood-dominated jurisprudential body he presides over, called for a worldwide “Day of Anger.” A statement from IUMS read: “Let us make Friday, February 3, a day for worldwide Muslim protests over the insulting campaigns against Allah and His Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), all messengers and religious sanctities. Let all Muslim scholars and preachers in all mosques make their sermons focus on the issue.”12
Many Muslims throughout the world heeded the call. During the first days of February, hundreds of protests took place in many Muslim-majority countries and in the West. Many of them, often organized by local regimes or opposition movements and intertwined with larger political issues, turned violent—it is estimated that some two hundred people died worldwide.13 Danish embassies (and, in some cases, those of other Western countries) were attacked in a number of countries. Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups began issuing threats against Denmark. The fact that the placid Scandinavian country was suddenly at the center of a global political storm due to cartoons published six months earlier by a privately owned newspaper is a testament to the instrumentalization and mobilization powers of various actors in the Middle East, certainly including the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Day of Anger was followed in March by a large conference held in Bahrain, where some of the most prominent religious leaders of the Muslim world discussed the next steps in the controversy and, more broadly, the issue of blasphemy and insults toward Islam. Ahmed, like the other leaders who had sparked the controversy in Denmark, attended the event. “It was held in a luxurious hotel, Gulf-style,” he reminisces, “and all the big leaders of the Islamic movement were there: Qaradawi, Mawlawi, [Sudanese Brotherhood leader] Issam al Bashir, [prominent Saudi Salafist scholar] Aid al Qarni, all the others.”
Ahmed should have felt proud to see what he had achieved. A campaign that started with a conversation between him and a handful of local Muslim leaders in a small apartment in Aarhus had triggered a worldwide campaign, and he was now rubbing elbows with the “stars of the Islamic movement,” the people whose books and sermons he had devoured and translated for years. Yet his feelings were the opposite. “I saw Mawlawi sitting on a golden chair and I approached him,” he recalls. “He asked me, in a sarcastic tone: ‘Are you satisfied now?’ It was clear that he was annoyed.”
Ahmed argues that it became evident to him that the leaders of the global Muslim Brotherhood had only reluctantly embraced the cartoon-related outrage, which they deemed to be, in Brotherhood parlance, an “untimely action.” “Untimely actions,” explains Ahmed, “are those that the Brothers argue the jihadists often fall prey to because of their constant haste but that are ultimately counterproductive.” Mobilizing against the cartoons was a necessary action for the Brothers, as they could not afford to be outflanked, but it was untimely. “But there was no genuine outrage, nothing of the rage I genuinely felt at seeing the Prophet made fun of,” according to Ahmed. “It was just political calculation.”
“It was there,” continues Ahmed, “that something started crashing inside me.” He says, “In Bahrain, I saw politicians in clerics’ clothing, a lot of backstabbing, of grandstanding, personal jealousies. My picture of Islamic unity collapsed. All in that superfancy hotel and speaking about poor people. Lots of hypocrisy. I’m relatively naïve and a believer in the cause, and there I saw people who really liked to be powerful and politicians. It also exposed me to the Machiavellian political thinking of the Brotherhood.” This experience led Ahmed to ask himself questions about his own role: “Am I part of a political organization hidden in religious clothes? Am I steering Muslims in the wrong direction?”
Disturbed by these questions, he returned to Denmark. As he pondered his past actions and future with the Brotherhood, he saw that his contract with the Brotherhood-affiliated school in Copenhagen in which he was teaching had been rescinded. Jobless, he took his severance pay and decided to spend some time in his native Lebanon to reflect. “I kept in contact with some Brothers in Lebanon,” he recounts, “but I was jaded; I no longer had much interest in being part of the movement.”
The slow process of introspection and of detachment from the Brotherhood culminated in 2010, when Ahmed formally disengaged from the organization. “I resigned by letter, which I hand-delivered to a leader of the movement in the north [of Lebanon] and to a man I respected a lot, sheikh Mawlawi,” says Ahmed. Ahmed had met Mawlawi on other occasions, including in Bahrain, where he was taken aback by his “Are you satisfied now?” comment. Despite that incident, which had revealed to Ahmed the Brotherhood’s “Machiavellian politics,” he admired (and still today admires) the late Mawlawi both as a scholar and as a man. “I told him about my frustrations,” explains Ahmed, “and he responded in a good way. He was a good man.”
It is noteworthy that Ahmed resigned from the Brotherhood in Lebanon. Even though he was of Lebanese descent, he had grown up and joined the Brotherhood in Denmark. His entire experience within the Brotherhood—his baya, his usra, his dawa—had taken place exclusively in Denmark, with no connection to Lebanon. Yet when he wanted to “have my name deleted from the system,” Ahmed, finding himself temporarily living in Lebanon, could do so there, suggesting a high level of interconnectivity between branches of the Brotherhood worldwide. While it might be true that each branch operates with considerable independence, the ability of an individual to leave the organization that he has joined in one country by communicating his resignation to the branch of another country indicates how the movement operates as one on many issues. And that seems to apply not just on the ideological but also on the operational level, down to the bureaucratic nitty-gritty, such as holding a register of individual memberships.
Ahmed felt liberated upon resigning from the group, but the period that followed was one of intense personal turmoil. While some Brothers tried to persuade him to rejoin the group, even suggesting he could hold more senior positions inside it, others went after him, maligning and ostracizing him. It is no coincidence that Ahmed and his wife divorced during that time. Part of his existential crisis involved a deep rethinking of his religious commitment. At first, leaving the Brotherhood did not affect his piety, and he remained a committed and practicing Muslim. But gradually that changed as well. “I began reading about philosophy, seeing Islam in a different way,” he explains, “less dogmatic, more humanistic, putting things in a different perspective.” He slowly became less observant and vividly remembers the moment he decided to break from orthodoxy: one day in Tripoli, Lebanon, he ordered a milkshake in the middle of the day during Friday prayer. He calls that moment “my quiet revolution.”
In deep need of time to reflect about his life, Ahmed made another dramatic decision. Holding a master’s degree in education, he applied for and obtained a teaching position in Narsaq, a town of 1,500 people in the southern part of Greenland. Reachable only by boats zigzagging around icebergs year-round and surrounded by the unforgiving yet beautiful arctic landscape, Narsaq is the definition of remote. Ahmed found it the perfect place to be at that juncture of his life. He took up various education-related projects with the local municipality and quickly became beloved by the small and hospitable local community. “Here you quickly become part of the local,” he explains, “being appreciated. I also feel a sense of duty and giving back some good.”
The ample downtime granted to him by life in quiet Narsaq (and, later, Qaqortoq, the slightly larger Greenlandic town to which he moved in 2015) enabled Ahmed to dedicate himself to his lifelong passion: devouring books. While from his teen years onward he had read almost exclusively books on Islam written by Islamists, he now read works by liberal Muslim authors, ancient Greek and Western philosophers, contemporary politicians, and, “in a gesture of utmost rebellion,” Marvel comics.
These readings led him to dovetail his own experience with broader issues related to Islam, politics, personal leadership, immigration in the West, and the future of democratic societies. “I began reflecting about how I got into Islamism,” he explains, “and about how people are influenced by charismatic people, take up the orders, and then perhaps never look back. Al Banna’s words, life, and tragic death made a huge impact on me, and he seemed fatherly and wholeheartedly dedicated to his cause.” “I like clever leaders,” continues Ahmed, “who use it [their charisma and ideas] for the benefit of others. These leaders may have of the best of intentions, like the Communist forefathers Marx or Engels had a vision of changing oppression, but I became aware to look for the structure and the ideology they left behind.”
The idea of charismatic leaders swaying naïve followers is one that recurs frequently in Ahmed’s mind, as he sees himself as having been duped by the Brothers when he was a well-meaning adolescent intending to work for his religion:
Most Muslims have no idea what’s going on [the activities or even the existence of the Brotherhood] and only see Allah and the mosques as the way to Mohammed’s grace. And here come the Brothers, a small number [of people] trying to ride the saddle of representation of Muslims. I hate that very much, and today I understand the hidden mechanism of power (simply the elite Machiavellianism as in any other society) the Brotherhood leaders are working to achieve. So much more reason for disgust, using God to obtain power for themselves. Underneath all that there is the deception of the many Muslims who really believe in a better state under the Islamic rule—exactly like Stalinism twisted communism and Nazism twisted nationalism. The Brothers do not depend on numbers but on resourceful members and on thought. As proved by my experience during the cartoon crisis, they (we at that time) used the Muslim masses.
Ahmed has come to see the Brothers, in their quest for power, as using religion to manipulate fellow Muslims. “I tell you so, because it is what I felt at the time, and what I was pursuing,” he says, emphatically. “It gives such an enormous strength and determination, that no prison or deprivation can shake.” That “lust for power” is both collective and individual. As a group, the Brotherhood seeks power for itself, and is willing to employ all tools and bend all rules, including interpreting Islamic law in extremely flexible ways, to obtain it. But, Ahmed argues, the same also applies to individual Brothers. In his view, most senior Brothers have outsized personal ambitions and thirst for power, not necessarily wishing for money but seeking to be showered with respect and able to lead large cadres at will. He decries the cult of personality that exists within the movement, as senior figures are revered as virtually untouchable and infallible.
In their quest for power, Ahmed argues, the Brothers have been extremely clever at theorizing and then implementing a series of principles on the ground. While some are common to all branches worldwide, others apply specifically to the West and the particular condition of being a minority in non-Muslim-majority societies. Foremost among them are the principles of gradualism and patience. The Brothers, Ahmed claims, perceive themselves as the forefathers of all Islamist movements and look down on the others as “naïve hotheads.” They perceive themselves as pursuing a goal that is similar to that of other Islamists but seek to avoid confrontation while doing so, and in some cases pursue cooperation with others while aiming to “steer clear of their aggressive ways because they will make them run into trouble.”
Ahmed maintains that the Brothers have long understood, particularly after having suffered crushing repression in Egypt and Syria, that violence is a tool to be used only when necessary and that the approach used by jihadist groups is “understandable, but naïve and ultimately losing.” It is an argument that he sees reiterated throughout Brotherhood’s literature.14 Indeed, among the many sources confirming this position, particularly important because of their authoritativeness and completeness of analysis, are the writings of Yusuf al Qaradawi. His 1987 book, translated into English by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) as Islamic Awakening Between Rejection and Extremism, has often been touted as a seminal text that proves the Brotherhood’s moderation.15 Indeed, extensive sections of the book are devoted to the condemnation of religious extremism and violence, phenomena that, according to Qaradawi, plague some of today’s Muslim youth. Qaradawi criticizes young Muslims for being too liberal with the practice of takfir (declaring fellow Muslims to be unbelievers) and for their excessive dogmatism, arguing that moderation, tolerance, and flexibility are crucial features for good Muslims to possess.
Yet in other sections, Qaradawi has softer words for the “extremist youth,” arguing that they have “good intentions and sincerity” toward Allah. The blame for their violent actions has to be found elsewhere. “What we actually need,” states the cleric, “is the unflinching courage to admit that our youth have been forced to what we call ‘religious extremism’ through our own misdeeds.” According to Qaradawi, the “misdeed” that leads young Muslims to violence is the older generation’s inability to establish an Islamic state. Those who use violence have good souls, and they are aiming for the right goals. Their only mistake, caused by their youth, is that of being too impatient and choosing the wrong tactics. Had the older generation established an Islamic state, no such problem would exist. And while the movement has its faults, the blame for such failures ultimately lies with a foreign conspiracy. “The problem can basically be attributed to the imposition on Muslim societies of secularism—an alien trend which is at odds with all that is Islamic,” argues Qaradawi. He states that “contemporary crusaders” have infiltrated the Muslim world to spread Marxism and secularism in order to prevent the spread of Islamic ideals and keep Muslims subjugated. “Muslim youth are also aware that all of these negative attitudes towards Islamic causes—locally and internationally—are initiated by foreign forces, and carried out by some Muslim rulers who act as mere puppets manipulated by Zionist, Christian, or atheist powers.”16
While in Islamic Awakening Qaradawi provides a veiled justification for violence, in his book Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase (2000) he is more explicit about the purely tactical nature of his rejection of violence against the West and secular Muslim rulers.17 Here Qaradawi criticizes Sayyid Qutb and other jihadist theorists who seek to violently confront those who oppose the creation of an Islamic state and, more generally, the Islamic movement. But Qaradawi’s criticism is based on the argument not that the Qutbist approach is un-Islamic but rather that it is ineffective. “How can we talk of launching offensives to subject the whole world to our Message,” he asks, “when the only weapons we can muster are those given us by them [those against whom we want to launch our offensive jihad] and when the only arms we can carry are those they agree to sell us?”18
Qaradawi rejects violent confrontation not because it is wrong, immoral, or contrary to his interpretation of Islamic texts but simply because at present it will not get the movement anywhere. Indeed, it is a moral duty in places where Muslims are under direct attack, according to Qaradawi’s interpretation of events, such as in Palestine, Kashmir, and Iraq. Here his endorsement of jihad is open and constant, urging fellow Muslims all over the world to aid their coreligionists. In other places, such as nations with secular Muslim rulers, jihad is ineffective and gives to powerful foreign forces an excuse to intervene. The Islamic movement, argues Qaradawi, should be more strategic and forgo the use of violence against secular Muslims rulers and the West until its strength matches that of its enemies.
The principles of gradualism, patience, and self-restraint apply not just to violence but to every course of action. “The Brothers don’t say: ‘Now we change Denmark!,’ ” explains Ahmed. “Rather, they work on small goals: building a school, making a connection with a political party, getting the right law passed. You strengthen the Islamic identity, build your movement, infiltrate the system, and do all things that give you influence: that eventually brings change. But all in due course, with time and patience.”
Another feature of the Western Brothers’ brand of activism that Ahmed finds particularly important is their skill at leveraging external resources to compensate for the limited human capital available to them. In all Western countries, the local Brotherhood milieu has outsized ambitions but can count on only a small number of inducted members (in Denmark, as noted above, around one hundred by Ahmed’s count). “But the Brothers are great free riders,” he says, “very capable of using people who are simply motivated by religious fervor, exploiting them to achieve their own goals.” In agreement with other former members, Ahmed argues that the Brothers have a remarkable ability to find all sorts of fellow travelers who help them pursue their goals, thereby enabling them to operate on a much larger scale than their small membership numbers would otherwise permit.
The flexible nature of the Brotherhood is epitomized, according to Ahmed, by its ability to redefine Muslims’, Islam’s, and its own presence in the non-Muslim-majority countries of the West. “The Brothers,” he claims, “see the West as a special dawa region, unlike the oriental, with its own conditions and challenges, and thus, the adaptation is necessary.” Yet, Ahmed argues, this flexibility in approach and in interpretation of sharia, which many observers praise as a sign of moderation, simply indicates pragmatism and levelheadedness in the pursuit of goals that are hardly moderate. He sees the long-term relationship with the West as the quintessential example of this dynamic. “Within Brotherhood circles,” he explains, “the hadith that forecasts the fall of Rome, claiming that the city will fall at the shouts of Allahu akbar, is quoted all the time; but what is also said [in the hadith] is that Rome will fall from within, without spilling one drop of blood. The lesson we [Brothers] used to take from it is that that’s the vision, that the West will fall from within, will be tipped the democratic way, when Muslims will be strong enough, big enough, then people will understand that Islam is the truth and Rome will be Islamic.” Ahmed argues that the Brothers constantly use and interpret in terms of civilizational clash readings from various Islamic texts (for example, the Quran’s sura al Rum) that speak about Rome and Christianity, using them to reinforce their us-versus-them narrative.
While the Brothers use this “civilizational interpretation” of selected Islamic texts as a general framework to support their belief that they will ultimately conquer the West—an objective that they believe will be achieved because it has been promised by God—they also elaborate more mundane analyses on how that goal will be achieved. Violence, argues Ahmed, is never discussed as a tactic. Rather, the “conquest” the Brothers foresee entails a combination of various factors: a gradual infiltration of Western political establishments; a steady surge of the Muslim population, which the Brothers envision adopting their interpretation of Islam; and a progressive loss of faith of European population in the effectiveness of their current forms of governments and societal models.
Ahmed argues that the Brothers believe that this process might take centuries but will eventually succeed. And indeed there is ample evidence of the concept of “conquest” of the West by Islam in Brotherhood literature and in statements from its leaders. In 2004, for example, the then Egyptian Brotherhood murshid Mohammed Akef declared his “complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.” He added, “Europeans and the Americans will come into the bosom of Islam out of conviction.”19 Qaradawi has repeatedly expressed the same view. In a 1995 speech at a conference in Toledo, Ohio, he stated: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through dawa.”20 And in a fatwa posted on Islamonline.net in 2002 he reiterated the claim. “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice,” Qaradawi asserted. “I maintain that the conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology.”21
These are hardly one-off comments, taken out of context. To the contrary, one can find extensive treatises, albeit many of them dating back some twenty or thirty years, written by prominent Brothers in the East and the West that outline methods, challenges, and the final outcome of this process.22 Many Brothers and some of those who hold a positive opinion of them argue that these positions are not representative of the current thinking among Western Brothers. In doing so they rely on the many statements in which Western Brothers have expressed their desire to live harmoniously with people of other faiths and have limited their aims to maintaining the Islamic identity of Western Muslims. Pessimists argue that, to the contrary, they reveal the genuine long-term aims of the movement.23
Understanding that such discourses can make many Westerners uncomfortable and that loudly enunciating their long-term hopes would lead to the unnecessary scrutiny and confrontations they seek to avoid, the Western Brothers work on implementing their short- and midterm goals. “If the ideal Islamic society remains an objective that most members recognize can never be implemented in Europe,” writes Brigitte Maréchal, “others still feel confident that their efforts will bear fruit: they are betting on the demographic rate of increase of the number of Muslims, and on the re-spiritualization of Islam in Europe, in hoping that their ambitions will be realized in a more or less distant future.”24 Members of a quintessentially pragmatic movement, the Western Brothers see no point in attracting undesired attention by publicly expressing a vision whose attainment, even in the most optimistic of views, lies far in the future. But in the Western Brothers’ internal discourse the idea that Islam will become dominant, not through an arcane conspiracy or violence but rather with time and patient work that entails dawa and cozying up to Western elites, is a constant.
Ahmed claims that the Brothers perceive the real Achilles’ heel of the West—the weakness that will eventually lead to its downfall—to be its “materialistic nature, its willingness to negotiate on everything, including its foundational values, based on interest.” He notes that, as usual, the Brothers use religious references to demonstrate this point. They often refer, for example, to the claim that Muslim armies managed to conquer Christian Constantinople in 1453 by bribing some guards who left the city’s gates unlocked for them. “To us [Brothers],” says Ahmed, “it was a sign that we can bend the will of the West by offering some of them short-term enticements.” Ahmed argues that discussions about the ways in which Western leaders or entire societies can be bought off or tricked in order to achieve tactical victories that are stepping-stones toward achieving the movement’s long-term goal of peaceful conquest occupy a substantial amount of the Brothers’ time.
“We understood that the West is short-sighted,” Ahmed elaborates, “and that it basically wants three things from us: money, votes, and not being Bin Laden.” He argues that the Brothers believe that Western policy makers and elites are willing to turn a blind eye toward and even support the Brotherhood’s activities in the West as long as the group provides them with financial or electoral advantages and does not engage in violence (“not being Bin Laden”) or, even better, makes gestures aimed at preventing jihadist violence. It is a quid pro quo that provides mutual advantages in the short term but that, argues Ahmed, the Brothers embrace with aims whose generational time frame is completely lost on their Western partners.
According to Ahmed, electoral incentives are the main weapons the Western Brothers use to attract Western policy makers to enter into partnerships with them. “The Brothers love to show politicians that they speak in front of five hundred men in a mosque,” he says, “and those are five hundred votes which are in turn multiplied for all their family members; politicians know that and the outreach is constant.” Similarly, the Brothers’ proximity to various wealthy governments or investors in various Muslim-majority countries represents a major attraction for Western governments, policy makers, journalists, academic institutions, and other actors, who are willing to work with the Brothers in order to receive financial benefits from their sponsors.
Third in Ahmed’s list of arrows in the Brothers’ quiver to attract Western partners is the movement’s ability to exploit the West’s fear of jihadist terrorism and portray itself as the antidote to violent radicalization. “I hate how they [the Brothers] managed to convince authorities, including intelligence agencies, to use them to control jihadists,” says Ahmed. “By doing so you empower a very resourceful group, and once you empower them it’s difficult to take that power back.”
Ahmed’s description suggests that the Brothers seek to benefit from what in social movement theory is known as “positive radical flank effect”—the improvement in bargaining position enjoyed by more moderate wings of a political movement when a more radical fringe emerges.25 In the case of Islamism, the positive radical flank effect would explain why the emergence of jihadist radicalization has led Western governments to see the Brothers more as more benign actors and even flirt with the idea of establishing forms of partnership with them. The Western Brothers have seized this unprecedented opportunity by presenting themselves as sworn enemies of the jihadists and loyal partners of the state in stemming violent extremism. But according to critics like Ahmed and many others, the Brothers’ real aim is to use the financial support and political legitimacy obtained by convincing Western governments that they are the moderate alternative simply to further their own agenda.
Critics of this approach argue that even assuming that engagement with the Brothers can produce some positive short-term results against jihadists, in the long term the movement’s goals are incompatible with those of the state. But a partnership with them for short-term security needs risks helping the Brothers expand their reach well beyond what they might have been able to achieve on their own in spreading their views to the larger Muslim community. In the words of Alain Chouet, the former head of the General Directorate for External Security (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure, DGSE), the now dissolved French external intelligence agency: “Al-Qaeda is only a brief episode and an expedient instrument in the century-old existence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The true danger is in the expansion of the Brotherhood, an increase in its audience. The wolf knows how to disguise itself as a sheep.”26
As he describes these dynamics, Ahmed bemoans the “naïveté of well-meaning Westerners” and shows extreme frustration with the West’s “inability to understand the threat.” Yet, since leaving the Brotherhood, he has become enamored with the traditions of Western philosophy and political culture. “During these years of self-imposed exile in Greenland,” he explains, “I have immersed myself in the work of Western philosophers and have become inspired by the humanist thinking of the Christian world.” He devoured Spinoza, John Stuart Mill (“I cherish his point that there is no value in having freedom of ideas if you cannot express them,” says Ahmed, referring to the cartoon saga), Montesquieu, and many others.
He is particularly fond of Karl Popper’s concept of the Open Society. “The whole point of an Open Society,” he observes, “is that it learns from its mistakes and tries to be better, never trying to live in perfection since that is a state of utopia not possible to reach. Europe learns and develops through critiques and free minds, not by fear and tyrannical control with the minds. This is why I believe in the European spirit.” The concepts of change and self-improvement Ahmed found in Popper’s work were the final triggers that made him change his worldview and life. “The Open Society taught me the ability to change, give space to development. Had it not been for this understanding, I would never have taken the step to change. My belief in the European spirit gave me the strength to change.”
Ahmed has been very public about his personal journey. In 2014 he published a book (in Danish), My Farewell to Islamism: The Muhammad Crisis, the Double Game, and the Fight Against Denmark, that recounts his story. In 2018 he published another, more introspective book, The Courage to Doubt.27 In it, he recounts how Western philosophy inspired him to leave Islamism and change his worldview. “It is the story of being wrong and trying to give a better contribution and how to have the courage to doubt and dare to broaden one’s perspective,” he explains. “Above all, it is a story of belief in the Open Society.”
Ahmed has accompanied these publishing activities—despite the logistical difficulties that come with being based in a village in Greenland—with frequent media appearances, making him a household name in Denmark. His aim is to use this profile to contribute to what he believes is a necessary development: separating faith and politics in the mind of Muslims. “My dream,” he says, well aware of the difficulty of the task, “is to create a counterculture in the Muslim world, one that challenges authority and dogma and democratizes religion … [to] create a Kierkegaard-inspired movement in the Islamic world, so that it becomes a personal approach to religion, not one based on authority. And I would like Muslims to accept Voltaire’s principle that it is necessary to protect the values of people who think differently from them and that only secular societies are capable of having people with different views live together.”
“My issue is not with Islam or Muslims,” he continues. “They are hostages of a political game played by Islamists. I wish they understood that it is wrong to combine politics with religion, it’s an unhealthy mixture engineered by people seeking political power for themselves.” Ahmed, in fact, argues that most Muslims are “unaware of the political movements in their midst.” He points out, “It is difficult also for Muslims to spot a Muslim Brother. I was a Brother and nobody knew that; I was just a preacher to them and they loved me. I wish Muslims understood the mechanisms of power behind this, how Islamism is all about political power, not religion, not personal salvation.”
Expanding on these thoughts, Ahmed maintains that the Brothers constitute the most insidious threat to the development of cohesive, multicultural societies in the West. “Everybody is always focused on the jihadists,” he argues, “but the Brothers are more dangerous in the long term; they undermine integration, they have a sophisticated ability to teach Western Muslims that they don’t belong in Western society and that they are better than the others. It is the recipe for disaster in the long run.” Ahmed goes so far as to draw parallels between the Brothers and the Lebanese civil war he lived through: “The way things are going, I would not be surprised if one day, in response to Islamism, the right wing will militarize to defend Europe; it is the natural progression of the culture of us versus them the Brothers are spreading among Western Muslims.”
Driven by these fears, Ahmed devotes his energy to warning about the threat posed by Islamists, and by the Brothers in particular. “It is not a personal vendetta; I don’t hate anybody in the Brotherhood personally,” he says. But he feels that it is his duty to “make a difference and prevent Islamists from gaining further influence.” Ahmed often highlights how Denmark has always treated him fairly, welcoming him both as a refugee and, most remarkably, after his actions triggering the cartoon controversy. For this reason, he feels that he has to repay this behavior by helping the country. He argues that former Islamists like him should play a pivotal role in this effort: “We are the first generation of Western-raised Islamists, we understand these dynamics better than anybody else. We can make a difference.”
Unrelenting and passionate, Ahmed is driven by what he terms his “idealistic foolishness” in his effort to raise awareness about Islamism. At times he despairs about the West’s ability to overcome this challenge, worrying about its own moral relativism. “Europeans no longer look at ideas,” he says, “they just think that everything is about material goods and they can’t conceive that other people are moved by an ideology,” he explains. Nonetheless, Ahmed remains optimistic: “Today, I clearly see Europe, despite its deficiencies, as a place for the world to look up to; as said in old days: Ut Roma cadit, sic omnis terra [As Rome falls, so does the whole world].”