A major survey of the Islamic community in France has found that the younger generation of Muslims is far more radical than their predecessors in terms of preferring Sharia law and supporting Islamist organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Institut français d’opinion publique (Ifop), a leading research polling firm, released this week its annual survey of attitudes among Muslims in France, which it has conducted every year since 1989. According to the pollster, Muslims aged 15 to 24 are more likely to abide by hardline interpretations of the Qur’an and support radical groups than their elders, and indeed more than the same age cohort 36 years ago.
Ifop characterised its findings as “worrying” and said that they undermined the “conventional narrative of secularisation supposedly underway among French Muslims” with the results “exceeding the most pessimistic estimates,” Le Figaro reported.
The survey, which polled 1,005 Muslims drawn from a representative sample of 14,244 people, found that 57 per cent of 15 to 24-year-olds believe that Islamic Sharia laws should take precedence over the secular laws of the French Republic, which they saw as being “less important”.
Meanwhile, 42 per cent of young Muslims said that they had sympathy towards radical Islamist groups, compared to 33 per cent of all Muslims in the country and 19 per cent of Muslims in 1998.
Of the radical Islamist groups to receive support from the younger cohort, the Muslim Brotherhood received the most, with a third of those under the age of 25 backing the group, compared to a quarter of all Muslims in France.
Earlier this year, the government released a report from French intelligence services, which accused the Muslim Brotherhood of engaging in a decades-long “Western conquest strategy” by seeking to infiltrate political and social institutions and by enforcing hardline Qur’anic standards among Islamic ethnic minority communities.
The report found that the Islamist network placed trained activists in local dating service providers, job recruiting centres, and private schools, among others, in a bid to police all aspects of Muslim life, including forced veiling of women, adherence to Ramadan fasting, and beard wearing among men.
The “main emanation” of the Brotherhood in France, the report said, was mosques, of which 139 have been identified as being linked to the radical group. It found that the so-called education services provided by the mosques tend to specifically focus on the “quest for identity of young Muslims.”
According to Ifop, the number of Muslims under 25 attending mosques has risen from seven per cent in 1989 to 40 per cent this year. During the same time period, strict Ramadan observance increased from 51 per cent to 83 per cent. Meanwhile, over the past two decades, the number of young Muslim women wearing veils surged from 16 per cent to 45 per cent.
Director of Ifop’s political and current affairs division, François Kraus, said: “This survey paints a very clear picture of a Muslim population undergoing a process of re-Islamization, structured around strict religious norms and increasingly tempted by an Islamist political project.”
National Rally leader Marine Le Pen also expressed concern over the findings, writing on X: “How much longer will the Macronist power continue to dig itself deeper into denial? How much longer will we accept that the left and the far left, through electoral pandering, encourage this Islamist communalism?
“Faced with this totalitarian ideology that seeks to undermine the fundamental values of our democracy, that wants to impose its laws, its customs, its prohibitions upon us, the evil must be tackled at the root. The fight against Islamist ideologies must be a national cause, both in the political will to eradicate it and in the means deployed to achieve it. No more accommodations, no more renunciations must be tolerated. The steamroller of secularism, of the law, of the affirmation of our values must roll everywhere.”
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