Episode 4: Different Strands of Islamism in France

For the fourth episode of the ICCT-SACC SENTINEL podcast, Anne-Clémentine Larroque, lecturer in International Affairs at Sciences Po, author of Géopolitique des islamismes, and an analyst in French anti-terrorism trials, joins the series to trace the threat posed by European Islamism, with a focus on the Muslim Brotherhood in France.

Larroque maps a landscape far more fractured than it appears from the outside. Islamist currents have been embedding themselves in Europe since the 1950s, but they are not one movement: some, like the Muslim Brotherhood, grew from the bottom up, while others are backed by states such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey. Some encourage members to stay and build permanent roots in Europe; others preach eventual return to the Gulf. Treating them as a single bloc, Larroque argues, obscures more than it reveals.

She also traces a harder throughline: antisemitism woven into the Muslim Brotherhood's founding opposition to Zionism in British Mandate Palestine - an enmity that, over decades, hardened into a broader rejection of Jews and Israel. Yet in France, the Brotherhood's proponents rarely say so openly, avoiding antisemitic language in public even as more numerous and more radical Salafist voices speak with far less restraint.

A conversation about the ideological fault lines that divide Europe's Islamist movements.

Photo Credits: Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash