Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, received €35,000 – roughly $39,290 – per month from the Qatar Foundation as a “consultant,” documents obtained by French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot show, the Swiss newspaper Tribune de Genve reported. Ramadan received a further €19,000 from organizations such as the League of Muslims in Switzerland when he was arrested last year on rape charges.
Chesnot and Malbrunot detail this information in their book Qatar Papers - How the emirate finances Islam in France and Europe. Their work discloses Qatar’s central role in funding Muslim Brotherhood operations across Europe. They say they received the supporting documents on a USB stick sent by a whistleblower. It contained Qatar Charity bank records, internal emails and more. The charity, like Qatar Foundation, is run by Qatar’s ruling Al-Thani family.
The spending serves Qatar’s political goal of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, analysts told the journalists in their accompanying documentary, a portion of which has been posted online. The Brotherhood aims to control people’s public and private lives, they said, and to obtain political power with the end goal of establishing their caliphate.
Qatar Charity may be best known in the West for its funding of terrorist operations.
French intelligence reported in 2013 that Qatar Charity funded an al-Qaida linked terrorist group in Mali called Ansar Dine. It also helped finance the 1998 al-Qaida bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Qatar Charity has legitimized itself through partnerships with mainstream Western charities including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation, the documentary said.
Qatar Charity spent €71 million– roughly $79.7 million – on 113 projects at mosques and Islamic centers and spent €3.6 million – roughly $4 million – on five mosque projects in Switzerland alone, a 2014 internal document showed. The Muslim Cultural Complex of Lausanne in Prilly, Switzerland received 1.6 million Francs – roughly $1.6 million – from Qatar Charity according to the documents. An internal note thanked Qatar and its Ministry of Islamic Affairs for money to purchase a mosque in Biel, Switzerland.
Donors Mohamed and Nadia Karmous, who Tribune de Geneve reported are closely linked to Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, played a central role in this scheme. Qaradawi notoriously stated in 2007 that Islam would conquer Europe by means of immigration and proselytism. Mohamed Karamous is referred to as the “treasurer” of the university of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, European Institute of Human Sciences (IESH), founded by Qatar in central France.
These mosques and Islamic centers serve the purpose of spreading Islamic culture across Europe, the journalists said.
Malbrunot told Tribune de Geneve that Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood aim to create a “micro counter society” through the “re-Islamization” of Muslim communities across Europe. They have a political vision of their brand of Islam dominating the world.
