I want to call attention to an extremely important book by an Egyptian now living in Sweden, Sameh Egyptson. Holy White Lies: The Muslim Brotherhood in the West, which appears to have been published at the author’s own expense by Dar Al-Maaref, is an exhaustive study of the Muslim Brotherhood organisation’s designs to assert its influence over major governmental and non-governmental institutions in the West.

Its plans and strategies towards this end rely on lies, deception and doublespeak. The author uses Sweden as a case study representative of other Western countries.

The title of the book is taken from a fatwa issued by Sheikh Youssef Al-Qaradawi and posted on his personal webpage, telling Muslims that it is okay for them to lie: “Among the properties of Islam is that it combines idealism and pragmatism.

Islam is the method of God who knows from the nature of life and the needs of the people that which made Him licence the telling of lies in certain situations out of consideration for human nature and appreciation for their pressing needs and urgencies.”

In Maqasid Al-Sharia (The Intents of Islamic Law), Al-Qaradawi holds that the best argument on the question of lying was that proposed by Abu Hamed Al-Ghazali in his encyclopaedic Revival of the Theological Sciences: “I know that lying is not a sin in and of itself but because of what it inflicts on the interlocutor or others.

In its least harmful degree, the informant believes the opposite of what is true. He is ignorant. Often there is gain and benefit in ignorance. Lying is the outcome of that ignorance and, as such, it is permissible and, perhaps, necessary.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s other main strategem for acquiring influence in the West is gradualism. Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna was the first to formulate this strategy for attaining the movement’s political ends.

Egyptson cites Al-Banna, in his letter to Muslim Brotherhood youth, saying that the ultimate end is to control and rule the world or, to use Al-Banna’s term, to attain “worldwide mastery”.

Al-Qaradawi also stresses the need to observe the principle of gradualism: “By gradualism, here, we do not just mean delay and procrastination of execution, or using the word ‘gradualism’ as a means to put camouflage the urgent demand to establish God’s rule and apply his law.

Rather, by this term, we mean specifying the aim, drawing up the plan and designating the stages whereby each stage leads to the next through planning, organisation and design.”

Because of the Muslim Brotherhood’s central planning organisation, the directives of which must be followed by all branches throughout the world, we hear the same arguments reiterated by Muslim Brotherhood leaders everywhere. Holy White Lies cites the following excerpt from an interview with Chakib Benmakhlouf, president of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, published in the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat: “We have a programme.

We have an agenda for the next 20 years and a short-term plan, a middle-term plan and a long-range plan.” He adds: “Our presence in Western Europe is not so deeply rooted.

I reckon it is only about 50 years old. Muslims should not accelerate things. It is sort of difficult to jump from the first to the tenth gear. We begin at the ground level.

Taking Sweden, for example, we find that the government gives assistance to mosques, funds Islamic schools, and gives you the right to sit in municipal councils and parliament. The Jews only got to where they are today after a long history.

They say that they are jealous of Muslims because Muslims managed to accomplish more in a short time than they could accomplish in hundred years.”

The book details the stages of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of Sweden which began with an electoral alliance with the Swedish Social Democratic Party after which it infiltrated the Green Party, the Moderate Party and the Centre Party.

The process has also engaged various Islamic organisations such as the Muslim Association of Sweden and its subsidiary associations and allies, as well as the Muslim Youth of Sweden, the Association of Islamic Schools, the Hajj and Umra Company, the Swedish Muslim Scouts, the Muslim Women’s Association, the Swedish Muslim Students Federation, the New Crescent Cultural Organisation, the Society of Quran Reciters, the Muslim Council of Sweden, etc.

Egyptson brilliantly links these organisations with international Islamic organisations that serve as branches of the International Muslim Brotherhood, such as the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE), the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the Muslim World League, the Milli Görüş, Taqwa Bank, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Munich Mosque, the European Institute for Human Sciences and the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisation (FEMYSO).

What emerges is a clear picture of a highly centralised organisation, linked through a massive web to hundreds of regional and local organisations all collectively bent on a single aim: tamkin (empowerment).

According to Egyptson, one of the most significant Islamic theological research works into the subject of “empowerment” is that of Mohamed Al-Sallabi, a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research. In Enlightening the Faithful on the Jurisprudence of Victory and Empowerment, the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood leader writes that among the diverse means to attain empowerment are for the people of the true faith “to reach power and to control government, to defeat heretics and save the faithful in battles, and to inherit the earth and empower the religion of God”.

Al-Sallabi goes on to maintain that one of the avenues to empowerment is to share power in non-Muslim countries, which is to say for Muslims to participate in governments with non-Muslims with the ultimate aim of defeating the non-Muslims in the end and taking control using, of course, democratic means towards this end.

In other words, as Holy White Lies makes palpably clear, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and strategy is founded on the arts of deception.

This is something not yet realised by Western societies, which have opened their doors to those organisations that work so stealthily to eliminate non-Muslim societies.

As for the author, just as Sameh Egyptson benefited from his familiarity with Swedish society and its institutions, so too did he benefit from the practical experience he gained with Muslim Brotherhood ideas and modus operandi in his country of origin where he grew up, and from where he migrated to Sweden as a young man.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 22 November, 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline:The Muslim Brotherhood in the West

https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/318009.aspx