The website of the Islamiska Förbundet i Sverige (Islamic Association of Sweden) is reporting on the 3rd Swedish Imam’s conference held by the Swedish Imam’s Council. According to the report, some 50 imams from various Swedish cities participated. The program also included the following individuals from the European Muslim Brotherhood:
- Sheikh Hussein Mohammed Halawa from Ireland, Secretary General of the European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR)
- Abdallah Ben Mansour from France, a board member of Union des organization islamiques de France and one of the founders of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE)
- Dr. Mohammed El-Hawari from Germany, member of the European Council of Fatwa and Research.
Also participating was Dr. Muhammad Ayash al-Kubaisi from Qatar, a professor of Sharia (Islamic law) in Qatar University and known to be associated with the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, close to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Islamiska Förbundet i Stockholm is the Swedish member organization of the Federation of Islamic Organizations In Europe (FIOE), the umbrella organization representing the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. The European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) is headed by Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi and is part of FIOE. The ECFR meets annually and a Wall Street Journal reporter who attended a 2004 meeting described the extremism and antisemitism that took place:
“…members, speaking in Arabic, explained how European Muslim family life was under attack. ‘Extremist fundamentalist powers based on aggression on the part of the Crusader and Zionist alliance in the West are now preparing their cultural strategy according to a new wave of secular tendencies,’ said Ahmed Ali Al- Imam, a Sudanese religious figure who advocates the implementation of sharia in his religiously divided country. Other papers accepted traditional norms that directly contradict Western law and society, especially regarding women and marriage. Women should only cut their hair with their husbands’ permission, and “any woman who would marry without a male guardian’s consent, her wedding is invalid,” declared Muhammad Hawari, a Germany-based member of the group. Sometimes the group’s advice seems aimed at Muslims from another era. ‘Children should eat clean food and use clean water. They should not urinate in water wells,’ Mr. Hawari wrote in a paper. Adoption, he added, was forbidden, because a woman might be seen in a state of undress by a child other than her biological offspring. And if a child is adopted, Mr. Hawari said they should not be given equal rights to biological children.”
The same reporter also wrote that a Council member cited “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious anti-Semitic forgery written in czarist Russia, in a position paper on how Muslim families are under threat in Europe. “The Protocols, the speaker said, was evidence of a Jewish plot to undermine Muslim moral values through sexual permissiveness.”
A post from December 2010 reported that the imam of Stockholm’s largest mosque had condemned the recent suicide attacks in the Swedish capital. A local media report from April 2006 states that although later expelled, an Al Qaeda recruiter was operating in the Södermalmsmoskén, also known as the Great Mosque, and that the mosque was known for having “fundamentalist” sympathizers as well as individuals associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The mosque is run by the Islamiska Förbundet i Stockholm. In May 2004, local media carried a report by a local Muslim who said that Hassan Moussa was giving incendiary speeches at the mosque in Arabic that were incorrectly translated into Swedish. These speeches including accusations that the US was “raping Islam.”
A post from 2007 reported the construction of a large new Saudi-funded mosque in Goteborg, Sweden that was possibly tied to the Islamiska Förbundet i Sverige.