In Ismailia, in 1928, a twenty-two-year-old Egyptian schoolteacher founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al-Banna did not write a plan for a coup. He wrote a method, and that method is an order of operations: first the individual, then the family, then society, then the state. Islamise from below, and wait. That reversal of the calendar is what separates the Brotherhood from movements that want power now, and it is what makes the thing hard to see from outside.
## Munich, Geneva: Europe becomes a base
Thirty years later al-Banna's son-in-law arrived in Europe. Said Ramadan took charge of the building committee for the Munich mosque, then founded the Islamic Centre of Geneva, the oldest on the continent, funded in part by the Brotherhood and by Prince Faisal. The Munich body became the Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland, which German authorities now regard as the Brotherhood's German branch.
## The doctrine: Europe as a land of mission
The theorist was Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He shaped what is known as the law of minorities, fiqh al-aqalliyyat: Europe is not a land of enemies to be fought, it is a land to be won over. In 1997 he chaired the new European Council for Fatwa and Research in Dublin. That doctrinal shift, analysed by Florence Bergeaud-Blackler in her study of the movement, is what licenses permanent settlement and patient influence work.
Entryism leaves one trace: no structure carries the Brotherhood's name. The Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, founded in 1989, became the Council of European Muslims. Its youth branch is FEMYSO. In France, the UOIF became Musulmans de France in 2017. The names change; the root never signs.
Entryism leaves one trace: no structure carries the Brotherhood's name.
In May 2025 a report titled "The Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism in France" was handed to the French Defence Council. It counts 139 places of worship directly linked to the Brotherhood and 68 more judged close to it, about 7% of the country's roughly 2,800 Muslim places of worship, but 10% of those that opened between 2010 and 2020. It describes some 280 associations and 21 schools teaching around 4,200 pupils. These figures are contested by political actors, and they are attributed here to their source and their date.
## The same finding elsewhere
France is not a special case. In Germany, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution names the Deutsche Muslimische Gemeinschaft as the most important and most central organisation of the Brotherhood milieu, a network estimated at around 1,450 people. In 2020 Austria set up a state documentation centre on political Islam.
For Jews in Europe this is not an abstract question. The Hamas Charter of 18 August 1988 defines the movement, in article 2, as "one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine". The article is absent from the 2017 document, and scholars still disagree about what that newer text replaces. As for al-Qaradawi, he explained on Al Jazeera in January 2009 that the last punishment of the Jews had been administered by Hitler, and that it was a divine punishment.
## Naming what can be named
Entryism is not an invasion. It is a patience. And what is named here is not a population: it is an organisation, its doctrine and its structures, with public reports behind every figure. That is exactly why it can be named.
