Women and Islamism

The presentation highlights the exceptional foothold that Islamism has gained in Brussels, particularly through the activism of women’s networks brotherist. It shows that several veiled women involved in politics, community organisations or academia form a ‘Muslim Sisters Connection’, structured around organisations linked to Muslim Brotherhood (LMB, FOIE, FEMYSO, EFOMW, EMN, CCIB…). This network carries out coordinated infiltration of public institutions, NGOs, universities and the media. The same women appear in European initiatives such as the anti-Islamophobia toolkit funded by the European Commission. The thread notes that this network has been active since at least 2014–2015 in campaigns against bans on religious symbols. Taken together, this paints a picture of a coherent strategy of influence, integrated into European and Turkish networks, which shapes the Belgian public debate on the veil and Islamophobia.

This presentation will examine female agency within Islamic and Islamist contexts, and the way in which religious discourses relegate women to subordinate positions whilst, paradoxically, advocating for their emancipation.

The appropriation of the female body under Islamist rule is not merely a mechanism of coercion: it is a comprehensive programme aimed at reducing women to a single function, at severing them from their own presence in the world. The body becomes occupied territory, placed under symbolic seal, stripped of its freedom of movement, desire and visibility. Islamism imposes a grammar of disappearance in which every inch of skin, every gesture, every breath must conform to an external order. This dispossession creates a fragmented subjectivity: a woman summoned to live in retreat from herself, exiled within her own body. What is at stake is not a question of dress or morality, but the methodical destruction of the fundamental right to exist in the open. Emancipation, then, consists not merely in unveiling oneself, but in reclaiming sovereignty over one’s own living space: becoming once more a speaking body, a thinking body, a desiring body.

Traditional sources of Islamic law define jihad as a legitimate war-and, in certain schools of thought, an obligatory one-aimed at extending the political and legal authority of Islam. From this doctrinal perspective, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of Muslim Brotherhood, frames its struggle against the Jews within an eschatological vision that structures the conflict with Israel as a metaphysical struggle between Good and Evil. The events of 7 October, during which Israeli women were killed, taken hostage and, in some cases, subjected to sexual violence, reveal a specific logic: these women were treated as spoils of war, in accordance with representations inherited from historical statuses reserved for non-Muslim women in contexts of conquest. Drawing on strategic documents produced by Hamas leaders, as well as the Dinah report and the report presented to the United Nations by Pramila Patten, we will analyse the sexual violence committed on 7 October in the light of the Islamist ideology underpinning it. This presentation thus aims to link the classical categories of jihad, contemporary theological-political constructs, and the practices observed on the ground.

The ambivalence of the law towards Islamism: both a tool for infiltration by extremist movements, which know how to exploit legal loopholes with formidable skill, and an essential bulwark for protecting women, guaranteeing their freedoms and defending our republican institutions. This duality calls for constant vigilance: the law can serve the worst as well as the best, provided it is applied with rigour, clear-sightedness and a certain amount of courage.

The emergence of Muslim communities in the United Kingdom, the rise of parallel legal systems based on Sharia law, the deterioration of women’s personal status, and the weakening of the British democratic state.

This presentation will examine the central role played by certain female figures from Islamist or Islamo-leftist movements in the dissemination and normalisation of demands inspired by political Islamism. Whether community leaders, communicators, activists or academics, they are involved in the gradual infiltration of public institutions, the media, trade unions and university campuses by employing rhetoric that legitimises, normalises or protects the ideology they espouse.

The analysis will highlight how these figures become key agents of ideological entryism, by exploiting their public profile, occupying sensitive positions and using the language of human rights to circumvent institutional safeguards. Their actions aim to pit a multiculturalist model against the state’s requirement for neutrality, thereby undermining the fundamental principles of secularism.

Yasmine will recount her life story: a childhood in Canada within a family of secular Muslims who later became involved in Islamism, eventually becoming supporters of jihad to the extent that they forced her to marry an Al-Qaeda terrorist. She will explain how the transition from religious observance to Islamist ideology, and then to jihadism, took place.