Pierre Durrani was born in Stockholm on January 20, 1972.1 His fair skin and piercing blue eyes hide the Pakistani ancestry displayed in his last name. His father was born in Lahore in 1942, when the city was still part of colonial India and the state of Pakistan was still only a political project that would be realized five years later. Durrani’s father’s lineage is complex and reflects the melting pot that is Pakistan, a mixture that has always fascinated Pierre: Pashtun and Kashmiris, rich and poor, ordinary people and famous Sufi saints.
His father grew up in a poor family and had hardly any formal schooling. Nonetheless, he was, according to Pierre, a man “with high cognitive abilities, who could compensate for his lack of formal education” with his personality and intelligence. He also had an adventurous nature. Barely twenty, after seeing postcards of Sweden shown to him by a Swedish missionary couple in Lahore, he decided to make his way to the Scandinavian country. On his own, he hiked throughout the Middle East and Turkey with just a rucksack, spent some time working odd jobs in Switzerland and Germany, and eventually, by 1964, made his way to Stockholm.
At the time Sweden was still a very homogeneous country; immigration, mostly from Italy, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia, had only recently begun. Charismatic and entrepreneurial, the “kind of guy who could easily read people and pull their strings,” Pierre’s father immediately found success in his new country. He worked for Swedish state television as a photographer and opened his own shop, Pakistanska (The Pakistani), which mostly sold Indian-style clothes to hippies. In 1968 he met Pierre’s mother at a party. Eighteen and recently arrived in Stockholm, Gunilla was descended from a line of hardworking farmers, a member of a deeply conservative and religious family from the north of Sweden. She immediately fell in love with the charm and exoticism of Pierre’s father, and the two soon married.
The couple had three children, a son (Pierre) and two daughters. They lived in the relatively affluent Kungsholmen area of Stockholm, but by the time Pierre was eight, they were divorced. Pierre’s feelings toward his father, who has recently passed away, are strong but mixed. His charm and magnetic personality made him extremely popular and successful. But he also had “a dark side,” tended to manipulate people, and, according to Pierre, had sociopathic tendencies and undiagnosed ADHD. Moreover, he was prone to violent outbursts—which was one of the main reasons for the divorce, according to Pierre.
After divorcing, both parents soon remarried and Pierre divided his time between them. During the week he lived with his mother and his stepfather; over the weekend he would crash at his father’s shop or apartment. Pierre describes those years as difficult, particularly as he entered adolescence. He had a bad relationship with his stepfather, whom he describes as racist and closed-minded. The arguments soon turned into fistfights, and at seventeen Pierre left his mother’s home. He became closer to his father, who found him an apartment near his. He “surfed through school” without studying much and became active in Stockholm’s thriving punk/anarchist/alternative scene. He participated in violent protests and occupations, getting arrested once but avoiding prison because he was a minor.
“Looking back at my life now at forty-six, it was, I guess, my way of coping with internal problems, of finding my own tribe,” he explains, bringing up a concept—the search for identity—that would recur often in his life. “I was quite depressed and even had suicidal thoughts, even though I never acted on them.” The anarchist scene provided him with that sense of belonging for which he was desperately searching, a tribe with its own narrative and rituals that enabled him to feel part of something.
In 1990 Pierre’s father, concerned about his son’s physical and psychological well-being, decided to take him to Pakistan. Pierre had visited his father’s country of birth on several previous occasions, but now, for the first time, he was to spend an extended amount of time there in order to get away from the demons that were haunting him back in Sweden. It was, as Pierre put it, a “culture shock.” He had grown up straddling his parents’ two cultures. After the divorce his mother had become a practicing Pentecostal, and until the age of sixteen Pierre had gone to Sunday school. His summer holidays were spent at his maternal grandparents’ farm, immersed in “picture-perfect” Swedish nature and traditions. At the same time, he had been exposed to Islam. His father was not particularly devout but still considered Islam an important part of his life and identity. Pierre had celebrated ‘Eid and other Islamic festivals, which his father saw as cultural markers. But being in Pakistan, surrounded only by Muslims, was a completely different experience.
Pierre stayed with his aunt, who lived in an old part of Lahore. His aunts, uncles, cousins, and the many relatives and friends he came to know during his stay did not live Islam in a politicized way—their Islam, as Pierre puts it, was still uncontaminated by the “Arabization” and consequent extremist trajectories that developed under President Zia ul Haqq in the 1980s. They lived Islam fully and were traditionalist but not militant or intolerant. Pierre was immediately conquered. Spending the nights on the rooftop of his aunt’s house, drinking carrot juice and listening to the call to prayer, he found the solace that had eluded him in Stockholm. “I became interested in Islam not by active choice but by easing into it,” he recounts. “After a couple of months it became a lifestyle; the adan [call to prayer] in the morning felt good, inculcating me in an environment that felt my own.” It was, as he puts it, “exotic and familiar at the same time.” “I had grown up in the Pentecostal Church, been a punk for a while, tried shamanism and a few other things,” he wrote in 2002, “and had finally found my way to the religion I knew least about yet had roots in—Islam.”2
Pierre felt he had finally found a tribe to belong to. He did not feel he had to formally convert, because he had always been to some extent Muslim, having grown up with a Pakistani father. But he was reluctant to call himself a Muslim or pray, an activity he actually began only during a short trip back to Stockholm. Once back in Pakistan he took his Muslim faith more seriously, praying, going to the mosque, and reading literature. Fasting for the first time during Ramadan was extremely challenging but reinforced his commitment to the religion. After ten months in Pakistan, he saw himself as a practicing Muslim. He and his father decided it was time for him to return to Sweden.
Back in Stockholm, Pierre reenrolled in school, this time selecting a more demanding field of study. For a year or so he juggled his two identities. He identified as a Muslim and continued to learn more about Islam. But he also went back to drinking beer and listening to punk rock music. Eventually, in his “perennial hunt for authenticity,” his interest in and commitment to Islam prevailed. He started attending a mosque in Husby, an area of Stockholm with a large immigrant population. Worshippers came from all over the world: the Middle East, Somalia, Eritrea, Albania. Most were “ordinary Muslims,” while others were “active on the Muslim scene.” The distinction between various sects, currents, and organizations within Islam, with their frequent clashes and fissures, was lost on Pierre at the time. But his active presence at the mosque brought him close to the mosque’s leadership. And Pierre also possessed a rare feature among the mosque’s attendees: native knowledge of the Swedish language, the lingua franca of the diverse congregation. Soon he was asked by the mosque’s leadership to deliver the Swedish translation of the khutba, the Friday sermon. At the Husby mosque Pierre got to know a group of young activists who had recently formed an organization called Swedish Young Muslims. In 1992 Pierre was elected to the board of the organization, a position he kept for the following ten years.
Pierre immersed himself in Stockholm’s small but active Muslim scene. He attended various mosques, went to lectures, and tried to do as much as possible to learn about and support his new faith. In 1994 he was reportedly approached by one of the most prominent leaders on that scene, Mustafa Kharraki, and offered the opportunity to study at the European Institute for Human Sciences (IESH), the Western Brotherhood’s foremost center of higher learning. Established in 1992 by Yusuf al Qaradawi and based in a castle in a bucolic part of Burgundy, IESH provides Arabic language and Islamic education to some 120 students resident on campus plus 200 students studying by correspondence each year.
Kharraki assured Pierre that all expenses for his stay in France would be covered. Pierre later found out that Kharraki had secured a grant from a Swedish government agency that provides financial support to religious organizations other than the Swedish state church. In September 1994, thanks to the support of the Swedish state, Pierre enrolled at IESH in one of the school’s very first incoming classes. By his own admission, Pierre had no clue that the school was de facto the Brotherhood’s school of higher learning. “I had heard of the existence of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he recounts. “I kind of knew that environment was linked to it, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to put it together.”
Life at IESH turned out to be ideal for Pierre. “Now I have a different view [of it],” he says, “but at the time I thought it was great.” Book smart and curious, he thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual challenge that Islamic theology provided him with. He describes the curriculum as “traditional and Islamist, Salafi-light.” The works of Qaradawi were featured prominently, as were those of other Brotherhood ideologues. But not all texts—or all teachers—were Islamists. Pierre reminisces with particular fondness about a “more secular-minded” Arabic teacher from the Levant who transmitted his deep love for the Arabic language to him and other students.
Pierre enjoyed the social life provided at IESH no less than the intellectual stimulation. The sense of camaraderie that naturally arises among students living in a castle in the middle of the countryside suited Pierre’s deep-seated desire to belong, to “find his tribe.” “That was a beautiful year, very monastic in a sense,” he recalls. “We stayed there, we prayed in the night, we fasted together.”
Pierre became particularly close to two fellow students from the United Kingdom. Both of South Asian descent, in the UK they had been involved in youth organizations linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, the Brotherhood’s “sister organization” in the Indian subcontinent.3 And both struck Pierre as more “plugged in” when it came to activities at IESH besides the purely academic. Pierre had picked up on the fact that most of IESH’s leadership and some of its students frequently met outside the classrooms or took part in activities together. Many of these meetings occurred during visits to the campus of senior scholars such as Faysal Mawlawi, the late leader of the Lebanese branch of the Brotherhood who had strong connections to the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (Union des Organisations Islamiques de France, UOIF), the main Brotherhood spawn in France (on which, see the following two chapters). Pierre also noticed that his British friends and some others at the school used the term “Harakat Muslimiya” (Islamic Movement), the name frequently used by Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami to refer to themselves.
In this way, Pierre slowly came to realize that IESH was a Brotherhood institution. Its leadership and management were Brotherhood; most of its teachers belonged to or sympathized with the Brotherhood; and most of the students were Brotherhood members or promising activists handpicked by Brotherhood leaders in their countries of origin to be trained and perhaps selected to become Brotherhood members. He was therefore not surprised when, a couple of months after the start of the school year, his two British friends approached him and told him he was going to receive an invitation to join the group.
The process of swearing the oath was, as Pierre describes it, “strange, reminiscent of the Freemasons.” After class Pierre was asked to go on a stroll in the countryside, and his friends walked in a different direction. Following the directions he was given, he found himself at a lush villa, which reportedly belonged to IESH’s principal. Waiting for him were some fifteen people, all teachers or students at the school. He was asked to kneel down, place a hand on the Quran, and swear the oath, which “had words from the Quran that are also used when pledging allegiance to Sufi tariqat [orders].” He was then given a copy of the mathurat, a booklet with daily prayers and selected readings by Hassan al Banna.
Pierre’s reasons for joining, as he recalls them, were multiple and overlapping. Some had to do with his desire to belong. Seeing the activism of the sworn Brotherhood members at IESH “created an interest in wanting to be in the in-group environment; if something goes on in the school I want to know about it, and I want to relate to it in some sense, that was even by then one part of my thinking.”
At the same time, the offer came after a long and, clearly, effective process of vetting and grooming that had operated unbeknownst to Pierre. He recounts having been increasingly included in conversations about the need to engage in organized, collective work in order to defend and spread Islam. The name of the group had been used with ever-greater frequency, and it had become clear to him that not just many of the people at IESH but also many of the people he had interacted with in Sweden were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore accepting the invitation to become a member felt to him natural, “easing in.” “Most of all,” he says, “I wanted to help Islam establish itself in a good way, and I thought that was a manhaj [methodology] that was workable in our time and age, and I had the contacts and the networks already since I was a member of the board of the Swedish Young Muslims.”
In 1995 Pierre finished his first year at IESH but decided not to continue his studies; instead, he returned to Sweden. Back in Stockholm, he immediately saw the local Muslim scene in which he had been active in a completely different way. Now a sworn Brother, albeit a low-ranking one, he found out that many of the activists he had interacted with were Brotherhood members. In his days as a young activist, before studying at IESH, he had been deeply involved in various Muslim organizations—organizing events, serving on the board of Swedish Young Muslims, making connections with various elements of Swedish society and the Swedish establishment that he, born and raised in Sweden and mostly in a “truly Swedish” family, knew better than did the activists who had arrived in the Scandinavian country as adult immigrants.
But all this had been done without any knowledge that Brotherhood activists were behind the many organizations and initiatives in which he feverishly involved himself. As he puts it, “I was basically helping an organization I didn’t know the existence of.” “I had heard the name [Muslim Brotherhood] because I was not stupid,” he explains, “but I didn’t connect the dots at all by then.… I had the worldview that Islam is one, that’s it.” Later, he explains, it became clear to him that “my whole vocabulary and way of explaining things and presenting myself and whatever texts I wrote” were unconsciously influenced by the Brotherhood’s thinking. Now, as even a low-ranking Brother, Pierre had a different vantage point and could know who among the Muslims with whom he engaged in Sweden were Brotherhood members.
This dynamic described by Pierre, with a not so subtle hint of anger, of having been “used” and “shaped” by an organization without even knowing it is not uncommon in Western Brotherhood milieus. As Kamal Helbawy explained, the Brotherhood uses various organizations, particularly youth and charitable ones, for purposes ranging from advancing their political agenda to collecting funds (and, simultaneously, to spotting potential new recruits). They tend to hide and deny any link to the Brotherhood, and most activists who are involved in them are unaware of the heavy Brotherhood presence inside them.
Back in Stockholm, Pierre was soon included in a local usra, something he did not know existed before joining the group. He also found out that the Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden had a relatively sophisticated yet completely secret structure, which resembled that of the mother group in Egypt. It had, in fact, a system of usra, a shura council, and an elected emir.4 In those years the Swedish branch of the Brotherhood also supervised Brotherhood activities in neighboring Norway and Finland (Denmark always had an independent structure).5
This new perspective enabled Pierre to better understand the dynamics of what he terms the “activist Muslim scene” in Stockholm and, more broadly, in Sweden. It soon became clear to him that the vast majority of organizations populating that scene had been founded or were in one way or another controlled by the small group of Brothers who had begun establishing a presence in Sweden in the late 1970s. In substance, he argues, a dozen or so individuals who belonged to various national branches of the Brotherhood in the Middle East and North Africa had managed to carve out for themselves a position of enormous influence as Islam began to organize in Sweden. The same men (and a handful of women—mostly their wives) sat on the board of dozens of mosques, charitable organizations, schools, business enterprises, and other kinds of organizations, creating a tightly knit web of connections and giving the impression of a wide network that purportedly represents the “Swedish Muslim community.”
The core of that network is represented by the Islamic Federation in Stockholm, which was established in 1981 and became the more comprehensive Islamic Federation in Sweden (Islamiska Förbundet i Sverige, IFiS) in 1987.6 IFiS is the flagship organization of the Brotherhood in Sweden, the network’s most visible public face. Its headquarters are at Kapellgränd 10, a building in Stockholm’s central Södermalm district, within walking distance from most Swedish political institutions and media outlets. The same building houses many other organizations that serve different purposes but are all part of the network and see the same individuals rotating through them in various leadership positions.7
Through his activism before he joined the Brotherhood and much more deeply afterward, Pierre came to know the “big men of Islam in Sweden,” the dozen or so self-appointed leaders of the country’s Muslim community. According to Pierre, one of them was the naqib of his usra, Ahmed Ghanem. Ghanem ran the Islamic Information Society (Islamiska Informationsföreningen), which published most of the network’s literature. He later served as president of IFiS and currently runs the Gothenburg mosque, in the country’s west. His wife, a Swedish convert, was also very active on the scene.
Abdallah Salah, another member of Pierre’s usra, is also a well-known figure. Tunisian born, he was one of the founders of Swedish Young Muslims, the organization that Pierre joined before his trip to France. In addition, Salah has long been country manager for the Swedish branch of Islamic Relief Worldwide, the Brotherhood-associated charity giant described by Helbawy, and has served as vice president of IFiS and chairman of the Ibn Rushd Educational Association. He is appreciated beyond the Muslim scene and was even voted “Stockholmer of the month” in November 2015 for his work in welcoming refugees to Sweden.8
Pierre also had a “relatively close” relationship with another founder of Swedish Young Muslims, Chakib Ben Makhlouf. The Moroccan-born Ben Makhlouf heads various educational organizations of the Swedish Brotherhood network, including a school in northern Stockholm where Pierre briefly worked. Pierre later found out that other activists that he befriended in his pre-Brotherhood days belonged to the same network. Mustafa Kharraki, the man who invited Pierre to go to IESH, was (and still is) very engaged, having occupied leadership positions in many of the network’s organizations, from Islamic Relief (where he served as president) to Ibn Rushd, from IFiS to the Muslim Council of Sweden. In keeping with Brotherhood patterns, his son Mohammed Amin is also active, having served as president of Swedish Young Muslims and later as spokesperson for IFiS.
These and a few other smart, well-educated, and motivated activists control a wide web of overlapping organizations with interlocking boards that demonstrate the ubiquity of a small clique of Swedish Brothers—or, better, their ability to project the impression of having big numbers and being representative by creating countless organizations with high-sounding names. The individuals who belong to the Swedish Brotherhood milieu have consistently denied their membership in the organization or that the milieu even exists. One notable exception is Jordanian-born Mahmoud Aldebe, one of the historical leaders of the Swedish Brotherhood milieu, who in 2013 published an open letter to reveal his involvement in the organization and to criticize its aims. He wrote:
I, Mahmoud Aldebe[,] … was one of those who established the Swedish branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden and who wrote its statutes. I abandoned my commitment to the Islamic Federation in Sweden (IFiS) and the Muslim Brotherhood in 2010, after over 25 years as a leading figure for the organization. I’m not saying this to besmirch anyone, but the truth should come forward.
The problem is not the movement per se, but those who rule over it. I devoted my whole adult life to defending the Islamic Federation in Sweden, but realized I was its tool—and thus decided to leave all my positions of responsibility in the federation and the Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden. This move cost me much, but I sacrificed it all to save myself from the dark tunnel. Now the truth must come to light, and I chose to go out and describe the true picture of the Islamic Federation in Sweden.…
… The problem we are facing is the double message, which is more harmful than beneficial. Dialogue is pursued with Christian and Jewish groups in official forums, but internally they spread fears regarding them. They speak of democracy, but actually do the opposite. The Federation managed to deceive those who want to have dialogue with them in Sweden.
Aldebe continued with a long list of institutions (among others, Ibn Rushd Study Association, Swedish Young Muslims, the Stockholm mosque, and the Gothenburg mosque) and individuals (Chakib ben Makhlouf, Mostafa Kharraki, Khemais Bassomi, Mohammad Amin Kharraki, Omar Mustafa, and Mahmoud Khalfi) that he, like Pierre, claimed are associated with the Brotherhood. Aldebe concluded his letter with a sharp critique of the Brotherhood:
Today, the Federation uses its conferences to prove to Swedish politicians that it controls Islam in Sweden. The Federation also works to make Sweden accept its order for Muslims. The division is sharp and clear: the enemies of Islam cannot be tolerated. Its representatives are active in large parts of organized Islam in Sweden.… [D]emocracy, equality, and freedom of speech are met with great dislike. They speak of democracy to achieve their own goals and to exert power over Islam in Sweden.
The Swedish Brothers’ activism is also reflected in their high status in the broader family of the European Brotherhood, as Pierre discovered during his activist years. In June 1995 he participated to a conference, sponsored by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, titled “Young Muslims in Europe.” Subsidized by Swedish taxpayers, the conference was run by youth organizations of various European Brotherhood branches: Young Muslims UK, Jeune Musulmans de France, Muslimische Jugend Deutschland, and Pierre’s Swedish Young Muslims.
The conference caused discomfort among some of the participants, who were unaware of its underlying aims and accepted an invitation to it because of the Swedish government’s endorsement. Most notable among them was famed French scholar Gilles Kepel. “I was surprised to see how the youth conference was controlled by the Islamists,” Kepel confessed to a Swedish newspaper at the time. “They are well-organized, intelligent, and have a built-up contact network throughout Europe. With this, they succeeded in taking control over the youth conference, even though they are in the minority among Muslims in Europe.”9
The outcome of the event was the formation of the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (FEMYSO), the Brotherhood’s pan-European youth organization. FEMYSO and its twin entity, the abovementioned FIOE, which, according to Ahmed Akkari, solved the internal dispute within the Danish Brotherhood, represent the European Brothers’ lobbying arm at a pan-European level. Strategically headquartered in Brussels in two buildings located a few blocks from the European Commission and other institutions of the European Union, FIOE and FEMYSO (which for years shared its building with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Helbawy’s organization) enjoy a degree of access to the European seats of power that no other European Muslim organization can even dream of gaining. Their leaders have often been invited to testify before the European Parliament and to represent the “Muslim point of view” in debates with policy makers.
FIOE’s leaders are ambiguous about their relation to the Brotherhood. Ahmed al Rawi, the organization’s former president, says that FIOE shares “a common point of view” and has a “good close relationship” with the Brotherhood.10 Other officials deny any connection.11 But some Middle Eastern–based affiliates of the organization proudly proclaim that FIOE’s ideological and methodological identification with the Brotherhood is complete. Salem Abdul Salam Al Shikhi, a member of FIOE’s European Council for Fatwa and Research, writes of FIOE that “it represents the Muslim Brotherhood’s moderate thought taking into consideration European specialty, and working under European regimes and laws.”12 As usual, the terminological difficulties related to defining the nature of the Brotherhood make the identification of organizations linked to it controversial.
The Swedish Brothers’ prominent role in the European network goes well beyond having hosted FEMYSO’s founding meeting or the fact that IFiS is a founding member of FIOE. More tellingly, many members of the Swedish network have occupied some of the highest positions inside the Brothers’ two Brussels-based organizations. Omar Mustafahas served as a FEMYSO board member and Abdirizak Waberi, discussed in more detail below, as the organization’s vice president. Moreover, despite formally occupying only less visible positions related to education in Sweden, Chakib Ben Makhlouf served in the powerful position of president of FIOE until 2014—a position previously held by European Brotherhood bigwigs such as Ibrahim el Zayat and Ahmed al Rawi.
Pierre moved with ease in this milieu. Educated, eloquent, enthusiastic, and with a significantly deeper knowledge of Swedish culture, society, and language than the first-generation Brotherhood leaders, he soon became one of the main public faces of the Brotherhood-dominated organized Swedish Muslim community. He routinely gave interviews, appeared on television (there was even a documentary about him), and attended high-profile meetings with politicians and government officials. “If you forget my last name, everybody thinks I’m Swedish,” the Nordic-looking Pierre says with a smile. “The Brothers loved that.”
Pierre’s form of Islamic activism was of the quintessential Brotherhood kind, composed of grassroots community organizing, media outreach, and engagement with the political system at all levels. He was not involved in any kind of militant or violent activity, something “I have never been interested in.” And, according to him, the broader Brotherhood milieu he had become part of was similarly focused on carving out for itself a position of leadership within the nascent Swedish Muslim community in the eyes of both the Swedish establishment and the community itself.
Yet, he notes, there was a “gray area.” While he was taking action in Brotherhood spaces—mosques, lectures, protests—it was not uncommon for him to come into contact with individuals who embraced more radical forms of Islamism. “I got to know people who were in Afghanistan or were injured during the Bosnia years,” he says, referring to the two large jihadist mobilizations of the 1980s and early 1990s, respectively. “I knew many people who fought in jihad.” He describes how he frequently interacted with the fairly large cluster of Algerian jihadists active in Stockholm during the days of the Algerian civil war of the early 1990s, as well as with Oussama Kassir, a veteran of the Lebanese civil war who years later was arrested because of his attempt to set up an al Qaeda–linked training camp in Oregon.
“In those days in the ’90s,” he says, “everything was connected and most active people on the so-called Muslim scene, religious Muslims, got to know each other, at least indirectly, or at least recognized each other. I was part of that environment.” Pierre explains that during those years Stockholm’s Muslim community was small, and the active Muslim scene even smaller. It is clear that those who attended the city’s relatively few mosques or participated to events such as pro-Palestine protests were a small cohort, and, not surprisingly, everybody more or less knew everybody else.
But Pierre argues that such familiarity was not just a matter of casual interactions. Unquestionably, the Brothers had their own structure, which was clearly separate from those of other groups, and their methods were different. But according to Pierre, in those years—unlike today, he argues, when the boundaries are more distinct—the moments of ideological and, at times, operational overlap between the Brotherhood and the jihadist milieu were not insignificant. “The general idea that was conveyed to me was that we are all brothers against the kufar [infidels],” he explains. “We [the Brothers and jihadists] have differences. Some might get directly into action, some do not. But in front of the enemy we stand united.”
Once Pierre was back in Sweden as an initiated member of the group, his active involvement in the organization lasted for only two years. It was not long before he started having reservations about several aspects of the Brotherhood, starting with its views on Islam and Sweden. For example, he felt that the language used inside his usra should have been Swedish, not Arabic, as most of the activities discussed related to Swedish society and how to bring Islam to Sweden. To his frustration, his suggestion was rejected.
Pierre began developing similar concerns while serving as editor of Salaam, the first and arguably most influential among the early publications on Islam in Swedish. Salaam played a key role not just in disseminating Brotherhood-leaning writings but also in bringing some of the pioneers of the Brotherhood in Sweden together with a fairly large group of Swedish converts to Islam or, as in the case of Pierre, individuals of mixed background who had grown up in the country. Many of the converts were women who had married Brotherhood members (like the wife of the head of Pierre’s usra) or others active on the Muslim scene. (For discussion of this, see chapter 8.)
By 1996, Pierre recounts, Salaam had become the site of an “undercover struggle” between the Brotherhood pioneers and their underlings more closely tied to Sweden. “A new generation of guys with levels of consciousness were trying to create a new hybrid form [of Islam] which they themselves, us, we called ‘Blue Yellow Islam’ ” (a reference to the colors of the Swedish flag). “We wanted to truly integrate Islam in a Swedish context,” he continues, “and do so in a way that it would have been a win-win situation for both Sweden and Islam.” The goal was “an Islam that would really fit into and therefore also help Swedish society, because we thought it was the recipe for everything, for any problem: more Islam, better Islam.” But, he adds, “We wanted an Islam that was Swedish not just language-wise but also in the sense that it would meet with the beautiful, old, archaic ways of Swedish culture, which are very difficult for many immigrants to get to know.”
Pierre and some of the Swedish-born converts at Salaam found the Brotherhood leadership that headed the magazine to have little interest in understanding Swedish culture and even less in adapting some of their religious, political, and social views to it. “Blue Yellow Islam,” he maintains, was a nice slogan for those wishing to be seen as moderates in the eyes of the Swedish establishment, but the pioneer Brothers dismissed outright any liberal view that conflicted with their dogma.
Moreover, and perhaps most disturbingly to Pierre, they expressed a deep contempt toward Swedish society and people. Pierre describes these attitudes as sheer racism, providing many examples of Brotherhood leaders deriding Swedish people for their perceived naiveté, loose morality, and poor personal hygiene. Pierre was equally disturbed by forms of racism within the Muslim community. He argues that the Brotherhood leadership, largely composed of Arabs, spoke disparagingly of Eritrean, Somali, and other African Muslims, shattering the ideal of color-blind brotherhood that should characterize not just the organization but the entire global community of believers in Islam.
Pierre connects these attitudes at least in part to the Brotherhood’s structure. During his time as part of an usra and in the lower levels of Brotherhood’s Swedish branch, Pierre witnessed a “masonic-like structure” and an obsession with secrecy that he found highly problematic and that he thinks is lost on most Western observers. “To understand the Brotherhood,” he insists, “one should look at medieval guilds, religious and knights’ orders from the era when Europe was more Christian, and secret societies; and understand the intermarriages, the financial links.” Moreover, in his view this setup, necessary in Middle Eastern countries but completely out of place in the West, fosters victimhood, paranoia, conspiracy theories, and a constantly adversarial mind-set.
“I came to the conclusion,” he says, “that these guys [the Brothers] didn’t know much about Europe and they are causing more harm than good right now; they are cheating Swedish society, they are taking money which isn’t theirs, they are talking internally in very racist and very xenophobic ways about the majority of the population and it’s very disheartening.” Such thinking naturally led him to the decision to disengage from the group.
Pierre’s departure from the Brotherhood was not dramatic. By late 1996 or early 1997 he simply stopped going to his usra meetings and detached from the Brotherhood milieu, no longer identifying himself with the organization. He nonetheless remained active on the Swedish Muslim scene—particularly within the Swedish Young Muslims—working “somewhat in opposition against the Brotherhood but still working within the framework of the organization they had set up.” He did not formally leave the organization, and there was not, at least as far as he knows, any acknowledgment of his departure.
The events of September 11, 2001, were “an eye-opener” for Pierre—a reaction shared by many Islamist activists throughout the West, particularly converts.13 Bombarded with media requests, he provided the “Muslim point of view” about the attacks. While condemning them, Pierre recalls, he also made points that were “apologetic, impregnated with the Brotherhood’s narrative of victimhood and grievance.” He realized that his frames of reference, his way of viewing the world, had become heavily influenced by the Brotherhood’s ideology. Feeling that he no longer wanted to use his position of influence as one of the most influential spokespeople for Swedish Muslims to spread the Brotherhood’s narrative, albeit unwittingly, he decided to leave activism.
Like the decision to leave the Brotherhood, Pierre’s departure from the activist scene was quietly made. He explains that one of the main reasons for this reticence was his desire not to cause pain to the many people he had influenced. “I was one of the most visible guys [on the activist Muslim scene]; … many people got inspired by my speeches, I had an audience of like 500 to 600 people and changed their emotions like that.… I’ve helped so many people enter into a more religious worldview, I didn’t want to hurt or confuse them too much by saying ‘Nope, I leave this, it’s a waste of time, it’s a mistake, goodbye.’ ”
This move coincided with his growing interest in the spiritual aspects of Islam, an aspect he felt the “politics-obsessed” Brothers wholly neglected. “I was one of the spiders in the web,” says Pierre, describing his role in the Brotherhood-linked activist world with an analogy commonly used by Brothers and their critics alike, “but as someone who wanted to make this whole religious scene more pious. I was not the most pious guy myself; I tried my best, but my idea is that we don’t need strange politics from a strange country, we need something which fulfills the spiritual vacuum of people who want to have that as part of their lives, and it’s all about focusing on God, it’s about prayer, it’s about knowing your traditions.”
By the late 1990s Pierre had begun cooperating with the networks linked to Hamza Yusuf and Muhammad al Yaqoubi, conservative preachers who traced their spiritual roots to Sufism. He later became closer to various Sufi tariqat, such as the Naqshbandiyya, the Chistiyya, and the Shadhiliyya. He found solace in these orders’ deeply spiritual and esoteric forms of Islam, which rejected politics. Yet his religious fervor has waned with the years and he now only occasionally practices the faith. He recalls making dua (praying) during his father’s funeral in Pakistan in 2014, but doing so “because whatever religion they have, that’s their religion and traditions and I love parts of that, I am still emotionally attached to it in a sense,” rather than out of a sense of belief.
Over the past few years Pierre has focused mostly on his personal life. He moved with his wife and two children to a rural village not far from Stockholm, where he was able to ponder and make peace with his life choices. While continuing his studies, he has also remained an attentive observer of the “Muslim scene” of which he was once an integral part. And, since 2016, he has decided to resurface in the public sphere. Like many other former activists in high-commitment movements, after a hiatus devoted to introspection and putting his personal life in order, Pierre felt ready to speak out about his personal experience. He has been participating in a collective, government-funded research project that seeks to analyze the presence of Muslim Brotherhood networks in Sweden and critiquing the Swedish establishment’s approach to it. He has also begun giving interviews again, discussing his previous role in Brotherhood-linked organizations, describing how the Brotherhood milieu in Sweden works, and warning the public about the harm it does to Swedish society.
Pierre perceives this new role as a personal responsibility, makings amends for the damage he thinks he caused during his activist days. He feels that for years, thanks to his knowledge of Swedish society, he enabled the Brotherhood milieu to better infiltrate various parts of the Swedish establishment, empowering a force that harmed both relations within the Swedish Muslim community and the social cohesion of Swedish civil society at large. He now feels that it is his personal duty to warn the Swedish establishment and public about the dangers of that milieu, without employing either the excessive political correctness that often characterizes the Swedish debate on the matter or the alarmist or racist tones used by some critics of the Brotherhood.
Pierre’s attempt at a balanced criticism of the Brotherhood’s milieu in Sweden starts from his analysis of the organization’s goals. As in most Western countries, some of the most hardline critics of the Brotherhood in Sweden argue that the group wants to turn the country into an Islamic state and impose sharia. Pierre, intimately involved in the milieu for a decade, argues that its views on the subject are significantly more sophisticated. On one hand, he argues, there is no denying that privately many members of the milieu indeed want some form of Islamic rule in Sweden. Yet there is no well-defined vision of what that system should look like—no specific view other than the conviction that such a system would somewhat magically cure all the social ills affecting Sweden. And, Pierre is clear, the ideal Islamic order that some members of the Swedish Brotherhood milieu would envision in a remote future is different from what hard-core Salafists or jihadists would like to create.
Moreover, Pierre argues, if dreams of an Islamic order are at times voiced internally, the milieu is quintessentially pragmatic and keenly aware of what it can and cannot attain in the short and middle term. It fully understands that the chances of Sweden becoming an Islamic state in the near future are nonexistent and therefore does not work on making that dream a reality. But it does concentrate, he claims, on carving out progressively larger spaces for Islam and for itself in as many aspects of Swedish life as possible: within Sweden’s Muslim community, within Sweden’s political and legal system, in public debate, and in any other environment in which it can gain traction and establish a foothold so that it can further its agenda.
For various interconnected reasons Pierre believes that while this strategy of gradual Islamization by infiltrating the system is common to all Brotherhood branches throughout the West, Sweden is the ideal country in which to pursue it. One basic reason, as Pierre notes, is demographic: Sweden had traditionally been a very homogeneous country, but it quickly became extremely diverse (in 2017 Statistics Sweden, the Swedish government agency responsible for producing official statistics, calculated that 24.1 percent of the country’s inhabitants had a foreign background).14
In Pierre’s view, “Swedish society was not able to cope with all of the complexities and differences coming here.” When it comes to Islam, he argues that the Swedish establishment accepted at face value the false claim made by a small milieu of organized and savvy activists that they represented the entire Muslim community. Not possessing tools to understand the complex dynamics within global Islam and within the country’s new yet fast-growing Muslim community, the Swedish establishment fully embraced an active minority, ignoring the many other voices that make up the mosaic of Swedish Islam. “The Brothers are the ones who explained to the Swedish state what Islam is.”
According to Pierre, this ignorance goes hand in hand with two other elements of Swedish society: its emphasis on trust and its embrace of political correctness. “Swedish culture, going back to the Vikings,” he argues, “values trust enormously; people do not expect duplicity and find it difficult to conceive that somebody would try to deceive them.” This “blue-eyed naiveté,” as Pierre terms it, has played into the hands of the Brothers, who have “not been honest about who they are and what they want” yet have rarely found their true motives questioned. At the same time, the value placed on honesty by Nordic culture also means that when trust is broken the consequences are severe. “You can use the vacuum of naiveté and blue-eyedness within the Swedish institutions for a while,” he argues, “but when it closes, everything closes, so they [the Brothers] have somehow dug their own grave.”
Equally propitious for the Brothers is the high level of political correctness that characterizes Swedish society. “Everybody is too scared of calling a spade a spade,” sighs Pierre, bemoaning the inability of many of his countryfolk to see or, better, to publicly express any negative views about minorities, even when doing so would not be tantamount to displaying prejudice but would simply be treating them the same way they would ethnic Swedes. Moreover, he argues, the Brothers have learned how to employ the language of human rights, democracy, and multiculturalism to their own advantage without themselves truly valuing those concepts. Their ability to use the language of the contemporary Swedish Left has enabled them to be seen as a victim group and deflect any criticism as bigoted.
The final but crucial element making Sweden a very hospitable country for the Brothers is its deep embrace of multiculturalism. Sweden was the first European country to formally adopt the policy, enshrining it in a law that was unanimously passed by Parliament in 1975. Since then the country has invested heavily in promoting a strong version of multiculturalism, openly rejecting any form of assimilation and advocating the retention of identity of all minority groups. This policy, argue Pierre and the academics and experts with whom he has recently been working, creates the perfect opportunity for the Brotherhood milieu to carve out large areas of influence. They write in the study “The Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden”:
In a country like Sweden, according to World Values Survey the world’s most secular nation, it would border on political suicide to be upfront with the fact that one is working for sharia to govern society or that men and women by birth are biologically predisposed to different tasks. In Sweden and other Western countries, the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] instead offered to insert its Islamic project within the ideological framework of multiculturalism. For years, ever since Mahmoud Aldebe’s tenure as one of the leaders of the MB’s network, the MB’s activists have argued that Muslims should be recognized as a religious “minority” because they have a special way of life that must be preserved. Aldebe claimed in a letter to former MP and Social Democratic Party chair Mona Sahlin that “special legislation” (read: sharia) was an essential part of Muslim lifestyle.15
Pierre and his colleagues believe that the Brothers have duped the Swedish elites into buying their unsubstantiated claim to represent an imaginary homogeneous “Muslim community” and their view that “Muslims should be incorporated into society as a collective entity where everyone submits to Islam in the MB’s version of what the religion requires, and that this group demands collective rights.” In essence, the Brothers are exploiting the concept of multiculturalism as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of creating a parallel society, run by them and funded by the Swedish state. Whereas Qaradawi has long urged Western Brotherhood leaders to create a “Muslim ghetto” (“Try to have your small society within the larger society,” the spiritual leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood has advocated, “otherwise you will melt in it like salt in water”), the Swedish Brothers are doing so with the approval and financial support of Swedish society.
These dynamics have played out on various levels over the years, but Pierre finds them particularly problematic in connection with public funding and access to the political system. The two issues are extremely complex and deeply intertwined. Neither is exclusive to Sweden, as they appear in various forms in almost all Western countries. But the degree of intensity with which both play out in Sweden appears to be well above the norm, definitely making Sweden one of the most “Brotherhood-friendly” countries in the West.
Public funding to Islamists is something Pierre has been denouncing with particular vehemence since coming back into the spotlight. Public funding of civil society activities, particularly if seen as furthering the country’s multicultural project, is famously lavish in Sweden, provided through a web of public organizations such as the Commission for Government Support for Faith Communities, the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society, the Public Inheritance Fund, and many other national, regional, and municipal bodies.16 Pierre and other critics argue that organizations linked to the Brotherhood have created a block informally known as “Muslim civil society” (Muslimska civilsamhället) which, thanks to their superior understanding of how the system works and their tight connections to Swedish elites, has in effect monopolized access to the generous funds given by the Swedish state to the Swedish Muslim community.
Pierre calls this a perverse dynamic, with “well-meaning Swedes paying for organizations that are working against Sweden.” Aje Carlbom, a Malmoe-based academic who has recently written a report about the Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden, argues that through this system, “economic resources go to a MB-associated network of politically oriented activists with ambitions to build a parallel Islamic sector governed by different values compared to the majority society.” By helping MB-associated organizations develop their activities, Carlbom continues, “the state (or other funding providers) offers tax funding to a small group of actors who spread messages that undermine the dominant values in society.”17 Or, as Pierre puts it, “the welfare state pays dawa work dressed up in the language of minority rights.” He adds, “They are good at getting taxpayers’ money and luring different authorities to pay for different projects with the multicultural buzzwords like ‘democracy,’ ‘women’s rights,’ ‘human rights,’ and ‘cultural understanding’ and what have you, because these guys are adaptable and charismatic and keen on getting their goals realized; they use whatever means there is to achieve their own goals.”
Pierre is similarly concerned about the high level of penetration of the Brotherhood network inside the upper echelons of the Swedish political establishment. He remembers how in the 1990s, when the milieu was still in its relative infancy and he was intimately involved in it, the Swedish Brothers talked about the need to create solid ties to political parties. The internal debate on what party with which to ally themselves focused, according to Pierre, not so much on ideological affinities but on a cold calculation of which relationship would advance the milieu’s efforts the most.
The first party with which the Brotherhood milieu formed a relationship was the Social Democrat Party (Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti, SAP), the oldest and largest political party in Sweden. Frequent contacts throughout the 1990s were formalized in 1999, when the SAP entered into an agreement with the Brotherhood-dominated Muslim Council of Sweden (Sveriges muslimska råd, SMR) with precise numerical benchmarks for the participation of Muslims as candidates for the party.18
The relationship between the SAP and the Brotherhood milieu has remained firm ever since. Tellingly, one of the rising stars of the milieu, Omar Mustafa (who has served as president of IFiS, director of Ibn Rushd, and vice president of Islamic Relief, besides playing active roles in many other groups), was elected to the SAP’s national governing board in 2013. Media exposés of the links between the organizations he was involved in and misogynistic and anti-Semitic views forced him to resign only a few days after his election. “You can’t hold an elected position within the Social Democrats,” commented the embarrassed head of the SAP, Stefan Löfven, “unless you can fully stand up for the party’s values that all human beings are equal and for equality between women and men.” For his part, Mustafa insisted that he was the victim of “unfounded attacks and conspiracy theories about Islam, Muslims, and Muslim organizations” and vowed to continue working within Muslim civil society for “justice, equality, and human rights.”19
Pierre claims that despite this close relationship with the Social Democrats, the Brotherhood milieu has always considered establishing alliances with other parties as well, including those with very different leanings. On one level, this strategy makes sense because the Swedish Brothers, like their counterparts throughout the West, might agree with left-wing parties on certain issues (immigration, multiculturalism, foreign policy) but tend to see eye to eye with conservative parties on others, especially social issues (abortion, gay marriage, and so on). But it could be argued that the approach is merely opportunistic, as those in the milieu seek to cover all political bases and have ties to power irrespective of political outcomes.
Whatever the reason, those in the Swedish Brotherhood have succeeded in creating solid ties to most political parties. An especially pertinent example is that of Abdirizak Waberi, a prominent member of the milieu who has served as president of IFiS, board member of SMR, and vice president of FIOE in Brussels. In 2010 Waberi was elected to the Swedish Parliament for the Moderate Party, the historical center-right rival of the Social-Democrats, and served on the Defense Committee and the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense
But Pierre feels most directly involved in the case of another member of the Brotherhood milieu who rose to a high level in Swedish politics: Mehmet Kaplan. In the 1990s Pierre and Kaplan were the two main figures behind Swedish Young Muslims, holding most of the leadership positions in the organization and developing a close personal relationship. It was around that time that Pierre introduced Kaplan to Sweden’s thriving environmentalist movement and to the Green Party, a scene in which Pierre had been active since before his trip to Pakistan at age eighteen. Indeed, one of Pierre’s main tasks during his days inside the Brotherhood milieus was introducing members of the milieu to Swedish institutions with which they had little familiarity. “These guys didn’t have a clue about Sweden,” says Pierre with a smile. “And I, with my language skills and local knowledge, was good at connecting them.”
Kaplan rose through the ranks of the Green Party. He served in Parliament between 2006 and 2014 and as housing minister between 2014 and 2016 in the Social Democrat–Green Party government led by Stefan Löfven—the head of the Social Democrats who, as mentioned above, had expressed his regrets about Omar Mustafa’s election. Kaplan’s appointment as minister elated the Brotherhood milieu. In an interview with Arabic-language media, Mahmoud Khalfi, the imam of Stockholm’s IFiS-controlled mosque and, like Pierre, a graduate of IESH, called it “a breakthrough for the Islamists in Sweden” and complimented Swedish politicians for “having normalized relations with the Islamic association known for its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.”20 Despite this enthusiasm, Kaplan’s time in government was short and troubled. He was at the center of various media storms for comparing Swedes traveling to Syria to fight to those who fought in Finland during World War II, and the treatment of Palestinians to that of Jews in 1930s Germany. As the media uncovered his close ties to both the Turkish ultranationalist group Grey Wolves and the Islamist Millî Görüş, Kaplan was forced to resign in April 2016.21
After a hiatus from the public scene during which he continued to observe the developments within Sweden’s Brotherhood milieu and the country’s approach to it, Pierre Durrani has decided to leverage his personal experience to warn his country about what he perceives as bad decisions made over the past twenty years. He argues that out of a toxic combination of ignorance, well-meaning naiveté, and, at times, political opportunism, Sweden’s elites have empowered a small group of self-appointed representatives of the country’s Muslim community at the expense of all other Muslims and, more broadly, social cohesion within Swedish society.
Pierre believes that the Brothers are an obstacle to the creation of a cohesive and truly multicultural society, as their influence promotes both jihadist radicalization and right-wing extremism. Indeed, he says, that influence has “hindered the growth of a healthy conversation about Islam, Islamism, and integration, as they charge anybody who seeks to have a reasonable conversation about these issues with accusations of racism and Islamophobia.” This has had a paralyzing effect on the public debate and on the ability of the Swedish state to take measures against even the most extreme fringes of the country’s Islamist movement. While the Brothers have little to no role in the recent mobilization of foreign fighters going from Sweden to Syria (proportionally, one of the largest such groups in Europe), Pierre sees their influence as preventing Swedish authorities from taking substantive actions on the matter.
A direct consequence of the paralysis within Swedish society and political establishment triggered by the Brothers’ use of the racism card, according to Pierre, is “the growth of a radical right” inside Sweden. Pierre argues that the Swedish state’s inability to even openly discuss various issues related to immigration and Islam have inevitably led many ordinary Swedes to listen to extremist voices. He sees a very troubling future in which right-wing sentiments may take violent and authoritarian forms, in large part because of the Brothers’ chilling effect on public debate.
A deep thinker with a strong sense of ethics and responsibility, Pierre engages in these debates with passion and a desire to undo what he think he did wrong in his youth—empowering a movement that he believes is damaging to both Sweden and Islam. Even though his personal story is unique, Pierre is representative of the first generation of Western-born individuals (whether born Muslims, converts, or, as in Pierre’s case, of mixed background) who became active in Brotherhood networks without knowing the ideological stripes of the organizations in which they so passionately involved themselves.
His trajectory out of it, driven by a mix of reasons but primarily by ideological disillusionment with Islamism in general (and not just the Brotherhood’s version of it), is not uncommon, as the stories of various current and former members of the movement suggest. Many of them, though, for reasons that vary from shame to fear of retribution to simply a desire to leave behind what they consider a bad experience, simply disengage without speaking out—as Pierre himself did in the first years after he left the movement.