Belgium’s biggest mosque, officials say, is a hotbed for extremism
BRUSSELS »
The Grand Mosque of Brussels is Belgium’s biggest and oldest site of Muslim worship. Officials in Belgium said it is also a hotbed for Saudibacked Islamist extremism.
Now the Parliament wants the country’s leaders to take over the sprawling complex that is just steps from the gleaming core of the European Union. It is the latest attempt to tighten security after radicalized Belgians emerged at the heart of terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels in the past three years.
The sudden move against the mosque underscores the challenge for Western European leaders seeking to embrace what they call a “European Islam” that endorses pluralistic values. For too long, many officials say, they have stood by as imams preaching the ultraconservative interpretation of Islam favored by clerics in Saudi Arabia and Qatar have worked among their populations, encouraging the frustrated descendants of North African immigrants to wall themselves off from mainstream society.
But the very same crackdown on the mosque puts Belgian policymakers in the unusual position of picking and choosing among strains of Islam in the name of protecting freedom of religion and democracy. The dilemma has grown more pressing after Europe was struck repeatedly by Islamic State-inspired terror, often perpetrated by disgruntled citizens born inside the countries they have targeted.
The mosque’s leaders “are trying to live in their splendid isolation with a radical point of view, and their aim is not to integrate into our society. And that is a big problem,” said Servais Verherstraeten, one of the leaders of a Belgian parliamentary commission that recommended last month that the government break the Saudi government’s 99-year rent-free lease on the mosque. The lease was handed to Saudi King Faisal in 1969 as a goodwill gesture by Belgian King Baudouin.
“We want in Belgium an Islam practiced by people who respect our constitution, who want to integrate into our country,” Verherstraeten said. “There is the perception that there is something to hide in the most important mosque in the country.”
Leaders of the mosque and community center, which is run by the Mecca-based World Muslim League, deny that they espouse a conservative vision of Islam and say that they are working to improve openness.
“I don’t see any contradiction between what we’re trying to do and European Islam,” said Tamer Abou El Saod, the executive director of the Islamic and Cultural Center of Belgium, which oversees the mosque.
Abou El Saod, a polyglot Swedish businessman, swooped in to run the center at the end of May after his predecessor upset the parliamentary commission with halting testimony at a hearing. Several lawmakers publicly questioned what he was covering up. That former director was a replacement in 2012 for a director who was quietly asked to leave Belgium after authorities said he advocated radical ideology.
“We can admit that we had some internal management issues,” said El Saod, who described himself as someone who was sent in to fix problems. “This place has maybe not been communicating enough in Belgium. “An imam who talks to people here has to be different from one in Oman.”
El Saod’s office at the mosque have photographs of Mecca adorning the walls, along with blurry likenesses of the old Belgian and Saudi kings.
The Saudi lease is unusual but not unique. The Saudi government operates an Islamic school near Washington Dulles International Airport, for example, and it helps fund mosques and imams around the world.
Belgian counterterrorism officials acknowledge that a move against the crowded mosque will do little to stem radicalization that more often comes over the internet or on the street, and they said they have no evidence that its imams have advocated violence or lawbreaking.
But they also said they were mistaken to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude to the squat, plain concrete mosque tucked in the corner of the central Brussels’s Cinquantenaire Park, across the street from apartment buildings and the boxy office block that holds the E.U. diplomatic headquarters. On Fridays, worshipers spill from prayers and mix with joggers and suited bureaucrats taking strolls along the park’s manicured paths.
In the half-century since the Saudi government took over the site, Belgian authorities said the mosque has espoused the hardline interpretation of Islam favored in the conservative Gulf monarchy. That has undermined an effort originally intended to help serve Belgium’s then-growing Moroccan and Turkish guest-worker communities, they say. The center is Belgium’s main hub for conversions to Islam, and its religious and Arabic-language schools teach 850 pupils.