Belgian State Security Investigates Millî Görüş Mosque Headed By Key Muslim Leader

Bel­gian media is report­ing that the coun­try’s State Secu­ri­ty has inves­ti­gat­ed a mosque con­nect­ed to the Mil­lî Görüş move­ment and head­ed by the chair­man of Bel­gium’s offi­cial Mus­lim body. The report says that in the State Secu­ri­ty memo, the Mil­lî Görüş move­ment is labeled as extrem­ist: Accord­ing to the DeMor­gen report:

Octo­ber 5, 2021: In ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, State Secu­ri­ty deliv­ered a memo on the Sul­tan Ahmet Mosque in Heus­den-Zold­er. The memo states that the mosque is known for “affil­i­a­tion with Mil­li Görüs” and con­sid­ers the Turk­ish thrust to be “extrem­ist.” Mil­li Görüs, freely trans­lat­ed as “Nation­al Vision,” has some cur­rents but is gen­er­al­ly very con­ser­v­a­tive, for exam­ple, regard­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty or mixed mar­riages. The orga­ni­za­tion is par­tic­u­lar­ly large in Ger­many, where intel­li­gence agen­cies also con­sid­er them extrem­ist. Last year, an Islam­ic school in Genk was denied recog­ni­tion because it was too close to Mil­li Görüs. The mosque in Heus­den-Zold­er has been rec­og­nized for more than ten years and employs three imams, who are paid by the Min­istry of Jus­tice thanks to the recog­ni­tion. One of these three imams, accord­ing to State Secu­ri­ty, is one of the main preach­ers of the Bel­gian Islam­ic Fed­er­a­tion (BIF), the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Mil­li Görüs in our coun­try. A youth orga­ni­za­tion that meets in the mosque would also spread Mil­li Görüs’ ideas in this way. The mosque in Heus­den-Zold­er is part of the BIF. The chair­man of the mosque com­mit­tee, Mehmet Üstün, is a mem­ber of the local BIF branch, but also the cur­rent chair­man of the Mus­lim Exec­u­tive[…] [Trans­lat­ed by DeepL with edits]

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The Mus­lim Exec­u­tive of Bel­gium is the offi­cial Mus­lim inter­locu­tor of the Bel­gian fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. An ear­li­er arti­cle says that the Mus­lim Exec­u­tive has act­ed sus­pi­cious­ly of late such as hold­ing board meet­ings where many mem­bers say they were not invit­ed and con­duct­ing a num­ber of sus­pi­cious finan­cial transactions.

Mil­lî Görüş is a Turk­ish reli­gious and polit­i­cal move­ment found­ed by Necmet­tin Erbakan, Erdoğan’s polit­i­cal men­tor, which has called for an end to the sec­u­lar regime in Turkey. The GIOR has report­ed about the Ger­man gov­ern­men­t’s asser­tion that Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdoğan’s AKP par­ty has inten­si­fied its rela­tions with Mil­lî Görüş in Germany.