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March 28th, 2024

War on Jihad

Belgium to terminate Saudi mosque lease

 Michael Birnbaum & Quentin Ariees

By Michael Birnbaum & Quentin Ariees The Washington Post

Published March 21, 2018

BRUSSELS - The Belgian government has decided to terminate the long-term lease of the country's largest and oldest mosque to the Saudi royal family, as part of what officials say is an effort to combat radicalization.


The move caps a long-running discussion about what to do about the Grand Mosque of Brussels, a sprawling complex in the heart of the city where worshipers mix with bureaucrats and diplomats headed to the nearby glassy office buildings of the European Union. The mosque, administered by Saudi-backed imams, has been a target of Belgian security services for years. But after radicalized Belgians emerged as key players in terrorist attacks in France and Brussels in 2015 and 2016, policymakers felt new urgency to take action.


Belgian King Baudouin signed over the mosque for 99 years, rent-free, to Saudi King Faisal in 1969 as a goodwill gesture, which also secured cheaper oil for the European nation.


A parliamentary commission set up to make Belgium safer after the March 22, 2016, Brussels attacks recommended in October that the lease be broken.


The Belgian government said in a statement Friday that it is seeking "to put an end to foreign interference in the way Islam is taught in Belgium."


"With this, we end Salafist, violent extremist influences," Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon wrote on Twitter.


Leaders of the Mecca-based World Muslim League, which runs the Grand Mosque, deny that they espouse the ultraconservative Wahhabi version of Islam that was long embraced by the Saudi royal family and instead say they preach an inclusive vision to their flock. The league is largely but not exclusively supported by the Saudi government. According to the announcement, the group will have to vacate the mosque within a year.


The decision puts the Belgian government in the position of picking ideological winners and losers among strains of Islam, and national authorities will likely have to offer financial backing to whomever next takes over the mosque, as they do for churches, synagogues and other mosques in the country.


Belgian security officials acknowledge they have never heard anything illegal preached at the mosque. And there is no any evidence that anyone connected to the attacks worshiped at the mosque. But authorities say they believe imams there preach a vision of religion that leads members of the community to close themselves off from mainstream Belgian society.


Lawmakers want the mosque "to be managed by Belgian Muslims, in a transparent manner, not by a foreign power," said Gilles Vanden Burre, a member of the commission that recommended breaking the lease.


"From now on, the mosque should establish a sustainable relationship with Belgian authorities, while respecting the law and the traditions of our country, which convey a tolerant vision of Islam," said Justice Minister Koen Geens in a statement.


In practical terms, the mosque's leaders have not always been able to connect to Belgian society. The main imam, Abdelhadi Sewif, an Egyptian citizen with ties to Cairo's conservative powerhouse Al-Azhar University, does not speak French or Dutch, Belgium's two main languages.


Still, when Belgian authorities tried last year to test some of their concerns about the mosque in the courts by trying to deport Sewif, a judge struck the effort down, saying there was no evidence the imam threatened Belgian society. He was allowed to remain in the country, where he has lived 13 years.


Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who will meet Tuesday with President Donald Trump on a two-and-a-half-week visit to the United States, has said he wanted to fight extremist interpretations of Islam and to scale back the Saudi government's backing for conservative mosques around the world.

The Belgian government's decision to terminate the lease came after months of negotiation with the Saudi government. The Belgians did not say whether they were paying a settlement to the Saudis, and a spokesman did not reply to a request for comment. The Saudi Embassy in Brussels also did not reply to a request for comment.


Ahead of the announcement, a Belgian official said the Saudi government was not fighting the effort to sever its ties to the mosque. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the ongoing talks.


Belgian leaders plan to hand management of the mosque over to the Muslim Executive, the official government-backed umbrella group for Belgium's Muslims, many of whose families emigrated in the 1960s from Morocco and Turkey. The group will have a year to come up with a new structure for the mosque.


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