Muslim presence in Belgium goes back to the early 20th century, when some 6,000 Muslims lived in the country, according to official figures from 1925. More Muslims came to the country in the wake of World War II and the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, which brought in labourers from around the Mediterranean Basin. But the major increase in the Muslim population followed from bilateral agreements signed in 1964 between Belgium and Turkey and Morocco for the import of labour. The early Muslim presence in the country can be described as a period of quietist Islam. The vast majority of migrant Muslim workers wanted only to have prayer spaces in their work areas and small mosques in their neighbourhoods, devoid of any political undertones. The second and third generations of these Turkish and Moroccan migrant communities make up about 80 per cent of the Muslim community in Belgium today (the rest is made up of migrants from the Balkans, South Asia, the Arab Levant and sub-Saharan African). There are presently between 500,000 and 600,000 Muslims in Belgium, constituting some five per cent of the population. About 40 per cent of these live in the Brussels region, one of Belgium's three regions along with the Flemish and Walloon regions, constituting 17-25 per cent of the population of the capital region and making Brussels the Western capital with the greatest concentration of Muslims. About 12 per cent of Belgium's Muslims have a higher education while 63 per cent have intermediate qualifications. Some 60 per cent of the Muslim population is between the ages of 15 and 25, while about 55 per cent live at the poverty level (56 per cent of the North African community and 59 per cent of the Turkish community) and unemployment ranges from 29 to 38 per cent among Belgian Muslims. Muslims in Belgium, like those around the EU, have been affected by several factors that have had a negative impact on the political and ideological orientations of a segment of the community, due to regional and international shifts and the rise of political Islam in the 1970s and 80s, first and foremost the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iraq-Iran war. The US bombing of Libya in 1986 also prompted the first major Muslim march in Brussels to condemn the bombing and Western policy toward the Islamic world. This marked a turning point in Islamic identity in Belgium, when Islam stepped out of the private sphere and into the public one. The march coincided with the rise of second-generation Muslim immigrants, who engaged in repeated attempts to express their Islamic identity against the backdrop of the crisis of the hijab in France and Belgium and Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. This marked the beginning of the cultural conflict between Muslims and Belgian society. The rise of the second generation of Muslims and identity issues led to a major increase in the number of mosques in the country. By the first decade of the new millennium, there were 328 mosques in Belgium's three regions: 162 in Flanders, 99 in Wallonia, and 77 in Brussels. The distribution of mosques reflects polarisation among the Islamic community. In Brussels, for example, there are 36 North African mosques, 22 Turkish mosques, six mosques for Bosnian and other former Yugoslav Muslims, five Pakistani mosques, four Albanian mosques, and two mosques each for Muslims from Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa. This illustrates the prevalence of ethnicity as a marker of identity, with no one mosque that brings together all Muslims. The Muslim Brotherhood is active in several Arab mosques in Belgium, particularly the Syrian and Egyptian Brotherhood branches, which control the orientation of a number of mosques in Brussels and Antwerp. The Salafi current, in the form of Al-Tabligh wa Al-Dawa and the renewing Salafis, also have a presence in many mosques in Belgium through several imams from Arab North Africa and the Levant. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi preaching current have also played a major role in the establishment of two competing institutional mechanisms that influence religious tendencies in Belgian mosques. The first is the Federation of Mosques in Belgium, in which the Muslim Brotherhood is active, which acts as a framework for all Arab mosques in particular. The second, and in which both the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis are influential, is the League of Scholars of Belgium, which coordinates on matters on jurisprudence and law and mediates between mosques in the event of disputes. In addition to mosques, the 1990s also saw the rise of “religious mediators” in Belgium and Europe more widely, most prominently Tariq Ramadan and to a lesser extent his brother, Hani Ramadan, the grandsons of Hassan Al-Banna. In the context of serving the Muslim Brotherhood project in Europe, Tariq Ramadan has spread the idea of European Islam, the rights and duties of European Muslims, and the importance of integrating into European communities. These ideas have been promoted through a contemporary religious discourse in French, as opposed to the traditional discourse of imams coming from Turkey and North Africa. Religious mediators are not limited to the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. Salafi preachers and imams have also used the Internet to disseminate their ideas in Belgium, calling for a disengagement from European societies, in contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood line. Salafi imams living in France spread their ideas online to French-speaking Muslims in Wallonia and Brussels, while Salafi preachers residing in The Netherlands direct their outreach to Dutch-speaking Muslims in Flanders. This is in addition to Salafi imams in the Arab world who use the Internet to reach Arabic-speaking Muslims in Belgium. The beginning of the spread of political Islam through cross-continental religious institutions can be traced to 1963, with the establishment of the Islamic Centre in Brussels by the World Islamic University. The goal was to establish a large mosque, represent the Islamic community before the Belgian authorities, and later appoint teachers of Islamic religion in Belgian government schools after Belgium recognised Islam as an official religion in 1974, along with Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity and Judaism. In tandem with the university's activity, the Pakistani Tabligh wa Al-Dawa played a similar role, starting its activities in Belgium in the late 1960s with the goal of re-Islamicising Muslim communities through outreach in mosques and weekly religious lessons for Muslims held in Belgian prisons. Due to internal conflicts, however, the group had been severely weakened by the early 1990s and its role declined markedly. As the importance of Al-Tabligh wa Al-Dawa declined, the “renewing” Salafi current came to the fore in Belgium, invigorated by a group of young people who had studied Islamic law and jurisprudence in various religious educational institutions in the Arab Levant, Yemen and the Gulf. This current's activities focussed on establishing more mosques, Islamic centres, religious publishing houses and libraries, and websites. Still, the Muslim Brotherhood remains the most influential party on the Belgian scene. It initiated activities gradually throughout the 1960s, in coordination with the World Islamic University, working through the Muslim Student Union at the Université libre de Bruxelles, created in 1964 by a group of Muslim Brotherhood members fleeing Arab regimes in the 1950s, significantly Said Ramadan (Tariq Ramadan's father) and Essam Al-Attar, a leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Constituting the nucleus of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Belgium, the student union organised seminars and meetings for Brothers in Europe, with such participants as Rached Ghannouchi and Hassan Al-Turabi. The union soon became an umbrella group for unions in several Belgian cities. These later united as the Islamic University in Belgium, which played a major role in controlling several mosques in the country, along with the Muslim Brotherhood role in the Federation of Mosques and the League of Scholars of Belgium. In the late 1980s, the Islamic University became part of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe — the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm in Europe — which moved its headquarters from Britain to Belgium in the late 1990s to enable it to better mobilise and lobby against Arab regimes with EU institutions based in Brussels. The more militant face of the Muslim Brotherhood in Belgium was shown through the activity of groups within the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological wing, subordinate to the Syrian branch led by Essam Al-Attar, whose political discourse focussed on opposing the West and supporting Islamist movements around the world. This wing established the Islamic Vanguard Association, which in turn established an Islamic centre within the Khalil Mosque. The association also lent support to Afghan factions, hosting the office of the Islamic Party under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, then close to the US, at the Islamic centre in the Khalil Mosque. It should be noted that Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated in Afghanistan in 2001 by Abd Al-Sattar Dahman, a Tunisian who had lived in Belgium since 1987. He was an active member of the Islamic centre in the Khalil Mosque and had a relationship with the Islamic Vanguard Association. Under pressure from the Belgian authorities, the association became the Islamic Forum in Europe in 2007 and ceased receiving support from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood led by Al-Attar. Muslim Brotherhood activity in Europe extended to its Turkish incarnation, represented by the Islamic Federation of Belgium, subordinate to the Turkish Milli Gorus organisation. Formed by cadres with the Turkish Welfare Party led by Necmettin Erbakan, it began its activities in Belgium in 1985. Initially, the organisation worked to support Islamist movements in Europe, in the context of its conflict with the secular regime in Turkey. But with Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rise to power in 2003, the organisation began cooperating with the Turkish state to serve the Muslim Brotherhood project. Significantly, the organisation owns numerous channels for outreach. In addition to controlling 30 per cent of Turkish mosques in Belgium, the organisation plays a major cultural, social and education role in the Turkish community through radio and television channels it owns and schools it manages. It also has a capital stake in several small banks in Belgium, which it can use to finance its activities. Belgium offers a European model of integration in that it upholds the separation of religion and state in a modulated way. In contrast with France, it recognises religious confessions, finances the construction and maintenance of mosques, and pays salaries to teachers of Islam in government schools. But this has not held up in light of the polarisation and interactions between various Islamist currents, as well as rising unemployment and low education levels among Muslim communities. Considering the polarisation among Belgian Muslims, between the Arab and Turkish Islamic models on one hand and various Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood currents on the other, it was therefore logical that this same attraction and polarisation would extend to political Islam and include armed jihadi groups, from the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, and the Moroccan Fighting Islamic Group, which came to Belgium in the early 1990s, as well as Al-Qaeda, which arrived in the early 2000s, and finally the Islamic State group in the past few years. As a result, Belgium has become a major centre for the preparation of terrorist attacks in Europe, carried out by jihadi groups since the 1990s. It is also the number-one source of Western fighters in Syria, with 380 fighters having originated from the country so far. The first Western suicide bomber was Belgian as well — Muriel Degauque, who blew herself up in Iraq in 2005. The bombing of the Paris metro in 1995 was carried out by Armed Islamic Group cells from Belgium. Several Belgians of North African origin were also involved in the Casablanca bombings of 2003 and the Madrid bombings in 2004, while the most recent attacks in Paris in 2015 were carried out by elements residing in Belgium. These were all early warning signs of the attacks at Brussels airport in March of this year. The writer holds a PhD in international affairs from the Sorbonne in Paris.
