Dr. Tommaso Virgili

Tommaso Virgili is a lawyer specialising in comparative law in Islamic countries. He is a Senior Policy Advisor at the AJC Transatlantic Institute, where he advocates for EU-Israel relations and the fight against antisemitism. He is also a visiting researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, where he was previously a postdoctoral researcher, and an associate researcher at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies.

He holds a PhD in comparative public law and a Master’s degree in law from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, as well as a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies with Arabic from the American University of Paris and Cairo. he devoted his doctoral research to the tensions between Islam, constitutionalism and individual freedoms in Egypt and Tunisia. This work resulted in the monograph *Islam, Constitutional Law and Human Rights: Sexual Minorities and Freethinkers in Egypt and Tunisia* (Routledge, 2022).

His areas of expertise include Muslim Brotherhood networks in Europe, legalist Islamism in Italy and the European Union, freedom of conscience in Muslim-majority countries, and the interactions between integration policies and religious fundamentalism. He was previously Programme Director at the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels and a 2023–2024 fellow at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) at the University of Tunis. His recent publications include the report *Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood. Brotherism, Islamophobia and the EU*, co-authored with Florence Bergeaud-Blackler (ECR Group in the European Parliament, 2025), the chapter ‘Islamism in Italy: The Muslim Brotherhood Network and Its Allies’, published in the *Handbook of Political Islam in Europe* edited by Thomas Jäger and Ralph Thiele (Springer, 2023, pp. 441–459), as well as the study *Did Secularisation Kill God? Changes in Religiosity and Values among Natives and Migrants in Europe*, co-authored with Benedetta Panchetti (Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, 2024).