A Polish newspaper has reported on a youth conference held by the Polish branch of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). According to the report:
Young Muslims from Central and Eastern Europe met in Warsaw. They come from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Kaliningrad Oblast and Poland. They are between 18 and 29 years old. The meeting in Warsaw was called the Muslim Youth Convention but it has a mere 35 participants, only men. “We have limited accommodation possibilities,” explains Mufti Tomasz Miskiewicz, president of the Muslim Religious Association in Poland. He asserts that this is the only reason why there are so few participants, not the fact that there is only scant interest in the free six-day meeting. The organizers of the seventh Muslim Youth Convention, which means the Polish branch of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and the Muslim Religious Association in Poland, chiefly aim to educate the religious Muslim elite. “We are doing this in the spirit of tolerance, understanding and of living together in peace in line with our Tatar tradition,” says Mufti Miskiewicz. “We hope that some of these young people will choose religious studies in higher education establishments in the former Soviet republics, in Turkey or in the Arab countries.” For the time being, the participants at the convention attend lectures on the history, culture, ethics and law (sharia) of Islam, and they pray. “We get up at 0300 for a joint morning prayer, a thing that religious Muslims normally do at home,” says Ahmed Ismail, who helped organize the convention. He admits that one of the purposes of such meetings is to overcome reticence and encourage young people to talk about their religion in public, because world events create only an unfavorable image of Islam among the public. Muftis from Ukraine and Estonia as well as the presidents of Muslim organizations from these countries also came to Warsaw. According to estimates, Poland has around 35,000 Muslims, including 8,000 members of the Muslim Religious Association. There are likewise 35,000 Muslims in Lithuania; 15,000 in Estonia; 5,000 in Latvia; 60,000 in Belarus and as many as 600,000 in Ukraine (including the Crimea).
U.S. government agencies and officials have argued that WAMY has helped spread Islamic extremism around the world as well as sponsoring terrorism in places such as Bosnia, Israel, and India. Numerous previous posts have discussed WAMY’s activities throughout the world. Also active in Poland is the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE), the European umbrella group representing the global Muslim Brotherhood in Europe.
(Description of Source: Warsaw rp.pl in Polish — Website of Rzeczpospolita, center-right political and economic daily, partly owned by state; widely read by political and business elites; paper of record; URL: http://www.rzeczpospolita.pl)