Hans Rustad Gilles Kepel: The battle for Europe can go two ways. Its outcome can be a continent whose millions of citizens of Muslim descent represent a paragon of enlightened modernity, and in turn spread visions of democracy to north Africa and the middle east; or it can become a place where Islamists and salafists will manipulate significant numbers of Muslims in Europe to help advance their aim of creating strongholds of uncompromising Islamist identity capable of sustaining political campaigns (as over the hijab) or creating jihadi cells capable of inflicting attacks on the scale of Madrid.
The scale of radical Islamist ambition can be seen by examining the thinking of Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian who was the chief exponent of jihad in Afghanistan. Azzam considered that one of the objectives of jihad was to reconquer Andalusia (alongside Afghanistan, Palestine and Bosnia, among other lands) – because once Muslim, a country must re2_kommentar Muslim for eternity.
In such territories – Israel is the clearest example – it is legitimate to kill men and women, because formerly this was Muslim land seized by illicit occupiers. The same applies to Spain, formerly Muslim al–Andalus; spilling the blood of non–Muslim Spaniards is legitimate. This is one strand of the ideology that conceived and executed the Madrid bombings.
The pamphlets of Abu Musab al–Zarqawi, now circulating in Iraq, similarly view the Ottoman failure to capture Vienna in the siege of 1683 as a crucial setback in the Muslim effort to Islamicise Europe – one they attribute to contemporaneous Shi’a betrayal of the Ottomans in Iraq. For such people, the reconquest of Europe is the completion of a centuries–long task.
For a third Muslim figure, Sheikh Yusuf al–Qaradawi – head of the Dublin–based European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) – the aim is to expand the call to Islam in Europe in a non–confrontational way; and meanwhile to develop by every means the spreading of the word (dawa) in various ways: websites, preaching in mosques, converting indigenous Europeans to Islam, and political participation. Muslim Brotherhood organisations like the Muslim Association of Britain (Mab) and the UOIF seek to become pressure groups campaigning on the veil and related issues in order to expand their political influence.