With Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood: Brotherism, Islamophobia and the EU, Florence Bergeaud-Blackler and Tommaso Virgili deliver one of the most structured and comprehensive analyses to date of the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence within European institutions. Produced for the ECR Group in the European Parliament, the report does far more than issue warnings: it maps out a system of influence, identifies the actors who sustain it, deciphers its ideological vocabulary, and describes the institutional ecosystem that allowed it to take root.
At the heart of their demonstration lies a concept: “Brotherism.” It is not a mere synonym for “Muslim Brotherhood,” but a term that captures the movement’s strategic transformation in the European context. In Europe, the Brotherhood no longer appears primarily as an Islamist movement; it operates as a broader system of influence, wrapped in the language of rights, anti-racism, and minority representation.
A report that breaks with comfortable ambiguity
For years, European public debate has swung between two caricatures: those who see the Brotherhood’s hand everywhere, and those who refuse to acknowledge its presence for fear of feeding prejudice. Bergeaud-Blackler and Virgili cut through this polarization. Their work is neither paranoid nor naïve. It is based on texts, internal documents, identifiable networks, and meticulously traced institutional trajectories.
One of the report’s most important contributions is its rejection of the idea that Europe was “infiltrated” by a hidden conspiracy. Instead, it shows that Europe itself created the conditions for this influence. By multiplying dialogue platforms, grant programs, anti-discrimination initiatives, and consultations with “civil society,” the EU opened a field in which actors skilled in institutional navigation could thrive.
The Brotherhood’s networks understood this faster than anyone else.
What is Brotherism according to Bergeaud-Blackler and Virgili?
The authors use the term Brotherism to describe a strategic shift. In Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood does not present itself as a revolutionary or theocratic organization. It re-emerges as a constellation of NGOs, research centers, advocacy groups, and community associations operating under the banner of human rights, anti-discrimination, and the defense of Muslim minorities.
Brotherism does not signal an ideological abandonment. It is a translation of the original worldview into a grammar compatible with Brussels and Strasbourg. The rhetoric shifts: the movement no longer foregrounds an Islamist political project, but speaks instead of “combating Islamophobia,” “empowering Muslim communities,” and “representing marginalized voices.”
The doctrinal core remains intact—only its public presentation changes.
This conceptual shift is central to the report: Bergeaud-Blackler and Virgili show that Brotherism is precisely the Brotherhood’s ability to absorb the moral and legal categories of the EU, while quietly maintaining continuity with its ideological heritage.
Influence built through NGOs, networks, and manufactured expertise
Another major contribution of the report is its detailed description of how Brotherhood-aligned networks gained ground. The authors show how certain organizations, ideologically linked to the Brotherhood, have received EU funding, joined official working groups, produced institutional reports, and offered “training” on Islamophobia or minority rights.
This landscape is diverse: visible NGOs coexist with quieter structures, platforms, research hubs, and transnational networks often connected through key individuals. But the same patterns appear repeatedly: proximity to Brotherhood ideology, adoption of a shared interpretative framework, and a concerted effort to dominate anything related to Islam, Muslims, or anti-Muslim racism within EU structures.
What stands out is that this influence does not rely on numbers but on procedural mastery.
Brotherism, in their description, is less a street movement than a bureaucratic strategy.
Islamophobia: from a necessary concept to a political shield
One of the report’s most sensitive sections concerns the concept of “Islamophobia.” Bergeaud-Blackler and Virgili do not deny the existence of prejudice, discrimination, or violence against Muslims. Their point is different: they examine how certain Brotherhood-aligned groups have redefined and instrumentalised the term.
According to the report, Brotherism has helped install an implicit equivalence between criticism of Islamist ideology and hatred of Muslims. This semantic shift is far from trivial. It produces several effects:
it delegitimizes doctrinal analysis, replaces political scrutiny with identity politics, and frames any inquiry into Islamist networks as potential racism.
The authors explain how Brotherhood-linked organizations were consulted—or directly commissioned—to produce studies on Islamophobia, which were then used to inform policy recommendations. This is where Brotherism becomes a real ideological lock: a politicized definition of Islamophobia ends up shielding a specific ideology from criticism.
European vulnerabilities laid bare
The report would be incomplete if it limited itself to the Brotherhood’s tactics. A substantial part of Bergeaud-Blackler and Virgili’s work deals with Europe’s own vulnerabilities.
First, there is the EU’s search for “representative interlocutors.” Brussels favors organizations that appear structured and authoritative. In the case of Islam, this has advantaged groups with Brotherhood roots at the expense of the actual diversity of Muslim positions.
Second, the fear of being accused of Islamophobia produces a widespread institutional self-censorship.
Questions about doctrinal positions or funding sources are avoided; distinctions between religion and political ideology are blurred; vague concepts are allowed to enter official language without rigorous debate.
Third, Europe suffers from a structural lack of understanding of the Muslim world. The report reminds readers that the Muslim Brotherhood is banned, restricted, or fiercely contested in several Muslim-majority countries. Yet in Europe, it sometimes enjoys academic and institutional legitimacy that it no longer possesses in its own societies.
What this report changes in the European debate
One of the great strengths of Bergeaud-Blackler and Virgili’s work is that it removes the issue of the Brotherhood from the realm of rumor. Their analysis does not rest on impressions or insinuations, but on a careful reconstruction of texts, structures, financial flows, events, and institutional dynamics.
The report does not offer a grand theory of subversion. It describes a system: actors, language, intermediaries, techniques. And from this system it draws concrete lessons.
Brotherism is not a fantasy but the European form of the Brotherhood’s contemporary strategy.
The EU failed to recognize its specificity, absorbed as it was by a normative agenda—diversity, inclusion, anti-racism—that Brotherhood networks learned to speak fluently.
The central question therefore becomes: not whether the Brotherhood “exists” in Europe, but how EU institutions helped structure the public conversation on Islam through an ideological lens shaped by Brotherhood-aligned actors.
A call for lucidity rather than a crusade
The report’s conclusions do not call for witch-hunts, nor for perpetual indulgence. Bergeaud-Blackler and Virgili advocate something far more demanding:
transparency in funding, serious scrutiny of doctrinal frameworks, a clear distinction between criticism of ideas and discrimination against believers, and an end to the reflex that grants representational authority to those who claim it most loudly.
Their work marks a turning point. It provides a precise analytical framework for understanding Brotherism—neither exaggerating its power, nor denying its impact. What happens next depends on political leaders, researchers, journalists, and citizens:
either continue to confuse civil society with ideological networks, or finally acknowledge what this report demonstrates with remarkable clarity—Europe has been shaped, in part, by an ideology it refused to name.