In Sweden, there are a number of Muslim organizations that together constitute what is known as "Muslim civil society" (
Muslimska civilsamhället).
What is important, when discussing Muslim civil society in Sweden, is
their political influence, their ideology and their structure.
IFIS
One of the most important organizations in Sweden's Muslim civil society is the Islamic Association of Sweden (
Islamiska Förbundet i Sverige -- IFIS), established in 1981. Some of the goals of IFIS, which you can read about on their
website,
are to "influence and form opinions on issues that concern the Muslim
group and its interests in Sweden" and "increase participation,
influence and representation of Muslims in public institutions and
bodies". In other words, IFIS works as a lobby organization for Muslims
in Sweden.
It is a lobby organization that has been successful.
Former IFIS chairman Abdirizak Waberi represented the second largest
party, the Moderate Party, in parliament between 2010 and 2014, when
this party was in government. When Waberi sat in parliament, he was a
member of the defense committee, which decides the policies for the
Swedish Armed Forces.
Waberi's time in parliament was a remarkable experience for many
Swedes. In several interviews before 2010, Waberi said he believed in a
literal interpretation of the Koran. In an
interview from 2006, he supported the idea that men could have four wives. In another
interview
from 2009, he said that he does not shake the hand of a woman; that men
and women should not dance with each other, and that he would rather
live in a country with Islamic sharia law. After these interviews,
clearly revealing that Waberi is an Islamist, and that he got to
represent Sweden's second-largest party in parliament, apparently
without Swedish media or anyone else providing scrutiny over his past
statements.
Omar Mustafa, who took over as chairman of IFIS in 2011, after
Waberi, was elected to the leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic
Party (SAP) in April 2013. Mustafa's election into the leadership of
Sweden's largest party triggered a reaction in which the media actually
started to write about IFIS operations. The media
reported
that shortly before Mustafa was elected to the SAP leadership, IFIS had
organized a conference in Stockholm, where it had invited speakers with
anti-Semitic views. When the media began to examine IFIS's operations
more closely, Omar Mustafa was forced to resign from the Social
Democratic leadership.
Despite the scandal around Omar Mustafa, IFIS continues to have a
close relationship with both the largest party, the Social Democrats and
the second largest party, the Moderate Party.
Mehmet Kaplan and "Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice"
Mehmet Kaplan is an example of how a person with origins in Muslim
civil society can climb up into the Swedish government. Kaplan was
secretary of the
Swedish Young Muslims (
Sveriges Unga Muslimer
-- SUM) between the years of 1996-2000. Then he became the chairman of
this organization, until 2002. Between 2005 and 2006, Kaplan was the
press secretary for the
Muslim Council of Sweden (
Sveriges Muslimska Råd). In 2008, Kaplan founded the organization
Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice (
Svenska Muslimer för Fred och Rättvisa -- SMFR).
Kaplan was a member of the Green Party's leadership between 2003 and
2011. He represented the Green Party in parliament between 2006 and
2014. Between 2014 and 2016, Kaplan was Sweden's Minister of Housing.
After "alternative" media outlets in Sweden started writing about
Kaplan's dealings with various kinds of extremists, the Swedish
mainstream media started to examine Kaplan. In 2014, Kaplan had already
been criticized for having
compared
the Swedish jihadists who travel to Syria to join groups such as ISIS,
with the Swedes who had gone to Finland during WWII to defend Finland
from the Soviet military aggression.
When the media began to
examine Kaplan, it
emerged
that in the summer of 2015, he had participated at a dinner where the
leader of the fascist Turkish organization, the Grey Wolves, was in
attendance. The media also
found that Kaplan for several years had held meeting with the Islamist organization, Milli Görüs. It then
emerged that Kaplan in 2009 compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians with the Nazis' treatment of Jews.
Kaplan also
sat
for several years on the board of an organization called Charter 2008,
which defends dangerous jihadists and criticizes the war against
terrorism.
When Mehmet Kaplan founded Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice (SMFR) in 2008, its "vision statement"
stated:
"If you want to participate and influence the development
of society, it is inevitable to become politically involved. Everything
that is connected to power is ultimately linked to politics. Without
power, it is not possible to create change. As an individual,
organization and society, active players constantly seek power to get
through various forms of changes, push through solutions to various
societal problems, as well as the ability to express themselves about,
as well as define, various societal challenges. One of SMFR's goal is to
gain power to change the world for the better."
This "better" world is an Islamic world. In the same "vision statement", SMFR writes:
"Islam should be the starting point for SMFR's
operations. It is on the basis of Islam where the main inspiration,
commitment, drive, motivation, guidance and values will come from."
SMFR embodies its goal by writing in its program that Islam should be
a natural part of Europe's cultural heritage. SMFR wants to work for a
Swedish Muslim culture. In other words, SMFR works for the Islamization
of Europe and Sweden.
SMFR is actively trying to realize their vision. The organization's
spokesperson and secretary-general, Yasri Khan, was nominated for the
Green Party leadership and would certainly have been elected into the
leadership, before a journalist in April 2016
revealed that Yasri Khan did not shake hands with women.
Members of the Green Party, which sits in the government of Sweden,
apparently knew Yasri Khan refused to shake hands with women, and yet
they were helping to elect him into the party leadership. The Green
Party spokesman and Sweden's Minister for Education, Gustav Fridolin,
told the media:
"I knew about it. I had not realized how offensive some women think that it can be."
Fridolin's former press secretary is a woman
named
Anwahr Athahb. Only two years before Athahb became Fridolin's press
secretary, she had been elected to the vice-chairmanship of SMFR. Before
that, she
was
the secretary of the organization. In 2014, Athahb was one of the Green
Party's leading candidates for the European Parliament. Her
campaign-slogan was "The EU needs more Muslim women in Parliament".
Today, Athahb works at an
Arabic talk show on
Sveriges Radio, Sweden's national public taxpayer-funded radio broadcaster.
Muslim civil society's political influence is great, reaches all the
way up to the government, and that it exists in almost all major parties
in Sweden.
Because there are so many examples of Muslim civil society's
political influence, it is not possible to include all examples in this
article. But a final example may clarify how strong this influence is.
Already in 1999, the Muslim Council of Sweden (SMR) signed an
agreement with Sweden's Social Democrat party that:
"In the coming term, Muslims' participation in social
democracy will evolve so that: in 2002 there should be among social
democratic elected representatives Muslims in 15 municipal lists, 5
county lists and on the parliamentary lists in at least five counties."
There are few lobbying organizations that can get the largest party
in Sweden to sign an agreement with such clear and concrete promises.
Ideology
The Islamic Association of Sweden (IFIS) writes on their
website that they are members of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE). There are strong
links between FIOE and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Besides IFIS's links to the Muslim Brotherhood through FIOE, IFIS
often shows sympathy and support for the Muslim Brotherhood. In August
2013, IFIS
held
demonstrations in Stockholm in support of Egypt's former Islamist
President Mohamed Morsi, who had been deposed. The entire Muslim civil
society in Sweden criticized the military coup against Morsi. Yet, the
same Muslim civil society never criticizes the Islamist regimes in Iran
and Saudi Arabia. When the United Arab Emirates decided to list the
Muslim Brotherhood and all branches of the movement as terrorists, they
also
listed
IFIS as terrorists, because the authorities in the UAE assessed that
this organization in Sweden was part of the international network of the
Muslim Brotherhood.
When a debate started in 2014 on making it illegal for Swedish
citizens to travel to other countries to participate in jihad, the
Muslim Human Rights Committee (
Muslimska Mänskliga Rättighetskommittén), one of the organizations within Swedish Muslim civil society, claimed that such a law would be racist. Furthermore, they
argued that people who fought in jihad abroad were not even a threat against Sweden.
So when it comes to ideology, it seems clear that Muslim civil
society in Sweden has an ideological direction that is close to the
Muslim Brotherhood's ideology, while they criticize the laws and
measures that prevent Islamic terrorism.
Structure
To understand the structure of Muslim civil society in Sweden, we
need to look at Kapellgränd 10, in Stockholm, the official address for
at least 15 different Muslim organizations, including the Stockholm
Mosque. Muslim organizations such as IFIS, the European Muslim Rights
Council, the Forum for Young Muslims, Sweden's Imam Council, the Ibn
Rushd Educational Association and the Swedish Muslim Scouts, use this
same address for their organizations. The bulk of Muslim civil society
in Sweden is controlled from Kapellgränd 10. Thus, the structure of
Muslim civil society appears quite centralized.
The centralization of Muslim civil society can also be seen in that a
few people sit in the leading positions of different Muslim
organizations. If, for example, you take the organization,
Ibn Rushd,
which is an Islamic educational association in Sweden, its chairman is
Helena Hummasten, who was chairman of the Muslim Council of Sweden until
2014. The principal of Ibn Rushd is Omar Mustafa, who was chairman of
IFIS until 2016. The development manager of Ibn Rushd is Mustafa Tumturk, who is also a
board member of the Muslim Council of Sweden. Mohammed Fateh Atia, who is responsible for digital development in Ibn Rushd, has also been
vice-chairman
of the Swedish Young Muslims (SUM). These are just a few examples of
how a handful of people have strategic roles in several organizations in
Sweden's Muslim civil society.
Conclusions
Conclusions that can be drawn about Muslim civil society in Sweden include:
- Muslim civil society has significant influence in almost all major Swedish political parties.
- Muslim civil society's influence is strong enough that one of their representatives was a government minister.
- Muslim civil society in Sweden is an Islamist movement with organizational and ideological links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
- Muslim civil society consists, on paper, of several organizations
but in practice, it operates as a single organization in which a few
people have the leading roles.
We have been talking mostly about Islamism as something foreign, not
among us in the Western world. But the influence of Islamists, or
extremist Muslims, in a Western country such as Sweden is large; there
have been Islamists in the Swedish government and parliament, without
the media or establishment even reacting.
The greatest threat from Islamism comes not from the suicide bombers
who carry out spectacular attacks, but from Islamists quietly
infiltrating our democratic institutions and normalizing their ideas
among us. It is a threat that must be recognized and addressed.
Nima Gholam Ali Pour is a member of the board of
education in the Swedish city of Malmö and is engaged in several Swedish
think tanks concerned with the Middle East. He is also editor for the
social conservative website Situation Malmö. Gholam Ali Pour is the
author of the Swedish book "Därför är mångkultur förtryck"("Why multiculturalism is oppression").
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9603/sweden-islamists