Muslims in the West today face a real predicament: “their Islam is being hijacked,” according to writer and thinker Ibrahim Eissa.
Currents of political Islam, he argues, impose intellectual isolation, dominate pulpits and mosques, and claim sole authority to represent Muslims—under the banner of “Islamic exceptionalism.”
Why does the Muslim in the West succeed in science and the economy, yet live in conflict with Western civilization? And why has “Islamophobia” become a weapon for extremists to justify an even more dangerous “West-phobia”?
In this analysis, Ibrahim Eissa explores these paradoxes and warns of the heavy price all will pay because of the “hypocrisy” of those who claim moderation—and the silence of the moderates.
This article is the English translation of an episode from Ibrahim Eissa’s program on Alhurra’s digital platforms.
The Third-Generation Crisis
I believe it is one of the great tragedies that Muslims in Europe and America are under the sway of Islamist groups and currents—and the Muslim Brotherhood—so much so that they have conflated Islam with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Let me tell the story so we grasp its dimensions, and how I see Muslims in the West as being in real danger—perhaps more than Muslims living across the Middle East and the Arab world.
Why?
First, Muslims in the West are immigrants—whether first- or second-generation. The grave disaster began to appear with the second and third generations.
We cannot ignore the fact that an alarming number of French Muslims—or Muslim French citizens—as well as German and Belgian Muslims joined ISIS, pledged allegiance to the “Caliphate,” and carried out massacres. There was also the British Muslim member of ISIS in Syria who boasted in 2015 of burning the Jordanian pilot alive or slaughtering Coptic prisoners, and so on.
There is a very serious problem: Islam in the West is being hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood and extremist currents.
Why?
They decided to convince Muslims in the West to separate and isolate themselves from Western culture and civilization—on the grounds that it is an infidel culture that wants to pollute his religion—and that Muslims must preserve their religious identity by building walls and fences around it.
What happens then?
Many Muslims in London go to mosques controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood or Islamist groups.
Eighty percent of the mosques are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, and twenty percent by the Shi‘a.
This is the control and dominance of Islamic currents and political Islam over mosques and associations that speak in the name of Islam in the West.
You go, as a Muslim wanting to maintain your rites and teachings, to pray in the mosques, listen to the Friday sermon, perform Friday prayer, find moral and spiritual solidarity, and warm yourself among those who share your faith.
At that moment, you are exploited.
This spiritual need is exploited by filling the person’s mind with extremism, backwardness, alienation, and separation from the Western society in which he lives—on the pretext that it is a society whose morals and concepts contradict Islam and are hostile to it.
You are told to retreat into your shell, to stay with us in the mosque or these religious institutions, and that we will speak on your behalf.
The Trap of “Islamic Exceptionalism”
Here, even Western institutions—parliaments, human-rights organizations, the media, and research and academic circles—have started dealing with Muslims in the West on the basis that their “exceptionalism” must be respected.
And what is this “exceptionalism”?
You find it is the exceptionalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, not that of Muslims.
In other words, the Western left, American or European, will say: if a woman is Muslim, she has the right to wear the hijab, and we must not oppose it—on the assumption that this is the Muslim woman’s freedom. They convinced the West that the hijab is Islam.
Therefore, when France decides that hijab-wearers may not enter schools, this is treated as hostility to Islam, a rejection of Islam, a hatred of Islam—rather than a rejection of a certain concept within Islam.
It has come to seem as if Islam is identical with the Brotherhood’s concepts, opinions, and theories; as if Islam is isolated from human culture and civilization.
And so, the Muslim’s “demands,” to set himself apart from the West and the surrounding civilization, become to attend Islamic schools, listen to Islamist preachers, and learn his religion at the hands of political Islam.
This becomes a seizure of the Muslim mind, to the point that Muslims of the second and third generations – additionally influenced by the conditions of migration, economic reality, social pressure, absence of a spirit of integration, social media, and the Brotherhood’s and political Islam’s ability to dominate pulpits, mosques, and religious associations in America and Europe – have effectively ended up in a state of enmity with the society in which they live.
They work, succeed, earn wages and money, climb the social ladder, study in educational and academic institutions, hold posts and responsibilities, and live in safety under a law that does not discriminate against them.
Despite all this, the Muslim in the West appears opposed to these very concepts, resenting them; the Muslim’s story with Western civilization has become one of hostility and rejection – even though Muslims live under its protection.
There is even an “Ansar al-Sharia Association in Belgium” calling for the application of Islamic law in Belgium!
There are mosques inside Europe that accuse European citizens of apostasy — the very people who allowed you to build that mosque!
“Islamophobia” and “West-phobia”
You flee Arab or Muslim countries and go to the West claiming persecution.
Then, as soon as you manage to live in the West—even as a refugee—your mission becomes to persecute the West: you get in a car and run over French or German citizens walking in the street, simply to announce your anger “for the sake of Islam and Muslims and the Islamic State,” and to claim that the West is hostile to Islam.
My son, you are living inside the Western world!
The first generation of Muslims in the West was perhaps more moderate and more in tune with centrist ideas, believing that Islam is a civilization spacious enough to coexist with all ideas and values.
They fully respected the fact that these European, Western, and American societies allowed for plurality, diversity, and difference—even disagreement.
Suddenly we get the second and third generations of immigrants or refugees—the very ones who produced what is called the “Islamic Revolution in Iran,” or the “Islamic Awakening” that emerged from Saudi Arabia, along with the dominance of Islamist groups.
This product of the 1970s led to a new wave of Islam in the West: an intolerant, extremist wave hostile to the West itself and to coexistence with it.
Here lies a severe predicament, because this phase brings very strange paradoxes.
We have an Egyptian writer specialized in Islamic affairs, who has produced a substantial intellectual output critical of Islam; he lives in Germany and holds German citizenship.
Imagine that this writer, thinker, and researcher decided to move from Germany to Lebanon because he felt Lebanon was safer for him than Germany!
Why?
Because Islamists in Germany decided to persecute this thinker—pursuing him, accusing him, and declaring him an unbeliever—because he said, “I am against Islam,” and declared himself to be an atheist.
They cannot tolerate his ideas, nor can they coexist with him.
The death threats reached the point that German authorities assigned him protection. So, in the heart of Western Germany, Muslims are being hijacked by Islamic currents that cannot tolerate a single writer speaking against Islam—they besiege, pursue, and seek to kill him—while he finds refuge in the diversity that exists in Lebanon.
Then comes the new “invention”: the invention of “Islamophobia.”
Any Muslim in the West—or Arab Christian—who voices any critique of the ideas of extremism, terrorism, and fanaticism spread by the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist organizations in the West, or preached by mosque preachers and orators—any Muslim who says these ideas run counter to Islam’s concept—is immediately met with the charge of “Islamophobia.”
This is the new extremist “innovation.”
Any Western researcher or writer who speaks about religious extremism is immediately accused of “Islamophobia.” In fact, Muslims in Europe and the West in general are all too often prey to a different fear of their own: “West-phobia.”
It is very strange: Germany received a million Syrian refugees in 2015, and then Syrian refugees came out in demonstrations supporting extremism and terrorism, accusing the West of waging a crusader conspiracy against Islam—though it was the West that received these migrants and refugees.
Here is the terrible, monstrous schizophrenia. True, moderate Muslims in the West must pay attention: their Islam is being hijacked.
