In its ongoing battle to root out the Muslim Brotherhood, the French Ministry of the Interior on Wednesday banned the European Institute of Human Sciences, a training centre for Imams, for promoting “radical Islam” and “armed jihad”.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced the state-mandated dissolution of the European Institute of Human Sciences (IESH), a school for Imams located in the rural hamlet of Saint-Léger-de-Fougeret in the Nièvre department of the Bourgogne region in central France.
Founded in 1992 by the Union of Islamic Organizations of France — since renamed as the Muslims of France — the training centre has frequently been accused of associating with radical Islamists, and its parent organisation allegedly has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, French paper of record Le Figaro reports.
The school was raided last year by the government’s Central Office for the Suppression of Large Financial Crime, following suspicions that the IESH had received undisclosed funding from foreign sources, specifically Qatar, which could have potentially contravened a 2021 law aimed at combating separatism within France.
Announcing the ban on X, Retailleau accused the European Institute of Human Sciences of promoting “radical Islam” and of “legitimising armed jihad”.
“The fight against the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood movement continues,” he said. “I thank the state services that, on a daily basis, wage this vital battle to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from advancing their Islamist agenda.”
The move came in the wake of a bombshell report from French intelligence services published in May, which found that the Muslim Brotherhood has embarked on a decades-long “Western conquest strategy” to infiltrate national and European Union institutions to advance hardline Islamism and Sharia throughout the continent.
The report found that the Muslim Brotherhood has been actively placing trained loyalists in community institutions, including private schools, employment recruiting centres, dating services and even in local shops to control all aspects of the lives of people within Muslim communities in Europe.
However, the report noted that the main locus of operations in France was through mosques, with at least 139 being identified as having direct links to the Brotherhood, and hundreds more found to be promoting fundamentalist Islam.
Meanwhile, some 114 Qur’anic education schools were also found to have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in France.
The dean of the European Institute of Human Sciences, Larabi Becheri, has denied that his organisation received foreign funding since the passage of the 2021 law on separatism, and has maintained that the imam training school did not promote radical Islam.
“We train French-style imams to avoid radicalism,” he claimed.
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