A resolution calling for Europe to adopt a coordinated approach toward Muslim Brotherhood networks and their reported influence was passed by the European Parliament. That parliamentary measure represented one point in a longer series of comparable actions taken across the continent.
A French security report had already documented the main concerns put forward by MEPs — notably that young people were being drawn into radical networks through social media platforms and within educational environments. The document raised concerns about efforts by Islamist political movements — the Muslim Brotherhood among them — to establish influence within educational institutions at both school and university level.
A government report published in May 2025 prompted French authorities to take steps addressing the Brotherhood's foothold within state institutions, placing the country among the more recent in Europe to address the matter. Roughly eighteen months after the initial measures were introduced, researchers and commentators in France have continued to raise questions about what concrete steps have been taken to address the role of political Islam.
That same month, Aymeric Durox — a senator affiliated with the National Rally (RN) — put forward allegations before the French Senate about what he described as Brotherhood penetration of university institutions. Among the bodies he specifically named, as recorded on the Senate's official website, were the regional student services centres known as Crous, which oversee student accommodation and welfare across French university towns.
A question directed at the minister for higher education, research and space was placed before parliament by Senator Durox. The interior ministry document he invoked identified the Muslim Students of France (EMF) as the student-facing arm of the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) — an organisation now operating under the name Muslims of France — and characterised that body, within the same report, as constituting the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to the senator, the EMF had provided the movement with a substantial portion of its cadres at the European level. He also drew attention to the group's founder, Fouad Alaoui, whom an interior ministry report identified as holding a central role in the movement's financial operations across Europe.
Among those put forward were two figures from the European Muslim youth sphere: Hania Chalal, who leads the European Forum of Muslim Youth and Student Organisations, and Hiba Latreche, at the helm of the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations, known as Femyso. Under the European Parliament resolution, EU institutions would be called upon to examine whether Femyso and other entities or individuals connected to the Brotherhood warrant placement on the bloc's roster of designated terrorist organisations.
A resolution put before European institutions in January called on France's National Assembly to place the Brotherhood and its leadership on that designated list. With that context in place, Senator Durox put a question to the government about what steps it planned to take regarding associations with ties to the Brotherhood that were operating within universities. He further sought assurances on two points: that public funds would be kept away from such organisations, and that those organisations would not be positioned to push university governing bodies toward adopting any particular set of religiously motivated demands.
That same month, the body advising France's government on private education matters returned an adverse ruling on the appeals brought forward by Lille's Averroès Muslim school. Authority over the outcome passed to the Nord department's prefect, while the school continues to operate without a place in the state contract framework.
A three-year backdrop of friction with state authorities preceded the committee's vote, in which most of the school's proposals were set aside rather than approved. A contractual arrangement tying Averroès to the state — one that had been in place since 2008 — was brought to an end by the Nord prefecture in December 2023, setting off the dispute now at issue.
Inspections conducted over a period preceding that decision had turned up concerns spanning the school's curriculum, its governance arrangements, and the sources and handling of its funding. Averroès has been categorised by authorities as falling within the orbit of the Muslim Brotherhood, with those same authorities contending that the school runs a model incompatible with the principles underpinning the French Republic.
Inspectors visiting in 2023 found that the content of an ethics course rooted in Islamic teaching — delivered to students at the start of upper secondary school — warranted further scrutiny. Inspectors determined that certain teaching materials in circulation contained content at odds with republican values, particularly regarding equal treatment of men and women, the role of religious law in civic life, and how non-Muslims are to be regarded.
The inspection report further flagged concerns about the outlooks held by certain members of staff, alongside connections between individuals in the school's orbit and organisations reported to have ties to the Brotherhood. Among the inspectors' discoveries were student assignments containing conspiracy theories, a garbled rendering of the national motto, an absence of materials addressing secularism and other faiths, and multiple texts authored by Hassan Iquioussen, an imam reported to have ties to the Brotherhood.
Questions about how the school finances its operations have drawn independent attention. Investigators in France turned their attention to the school's ties with Qatar Charity after footage circulated in which a teacher acknowledged the organisation's role in funding the purchase of the school's premises. Proceedings in the dispute have yet to reach a resolution.
A 2025 interior ministry document had already put the concept of "municipal Islamism" on record as a matter of concern, citing the Brotherhood's foothold in France as an open question — and the Averroès case has since drawn on those same terms. Those who study political Islam characterise the movement as spanning a range of ideological positions while maintaining a notable level of activity, with its footprint in civic affairs and local governance continuing to expand.
According to the French report, Turkey has taken on the role of a regional hub for the Brotherhood across the Middle East, with access to state resources that the organisation channels toward expanding its footprint in Europe. A 2025 assessment from France's security and intelligence apparatus identified networks described as "Turkish Muslim Brothers" operating across Europe, France among them, while noting that outreach by these networks had so far remained largely confined to Turkish-speaking populations.
According to the document, the Brotherhood had established a foothold across several central European countries — Germany, Austria, and Switzerland among them — as far back as the 1950s and into the 1960s. According to the report's findings, countries where identity along religious or cultural community lines is officially acknowledged or actively supported — the UK and Belgium among them — have offered the movement more fertile terrain, as have nations where religions hold formal legal standing and may draw on optional tax contributions to sustain themselves, Germany being a case in point.
