Iranian-born Mohammad Fazlhashemi, a guest on the Swedish radio programme Sommar i P1 this summer, is Sweden’s first professor of Islamic theology and philosophy . The professorship was established in 2013 and made possible through a donation from the Swedish government as well as direct funding from the Turkish state, through the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet).
The cooperation and funding of the professorship were made public when Turkish President Abdullah Gül paid a state visit to Sweden in March 2013. Diyanet is Turkey’s state authority for religious affairs, which administers and oversees Turkey’s mosques, trains and pays imams, issues religious fatwas, and organizes pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina.
Diyanet also funds mosques, imams and theological initiatives outside Turkey – including in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. Under the ruling AKP party and President Erdoğan, Diyanet’s budget, staff and political influence have grown considerably, raising questions both inside and outside Turkey about the agency’s increasing role in foreign policy.
The Turkish state/Diyanet owns and operates several mosques throughout Sweden, including in Fittja/Botkyrka and Rinkeby. Its activities in Sweden are overseen by a religious affairs counsellor based at the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm. Nine Swedish mosques have imams who are sent and paid by the Turkish state, Dagens Nyheter revealed in April 2017.
The newspaper reported that their duties included reporting on critics of the regime.
Emin Poljarevic is an associate professor of Islamic theology and philosophy at the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University. In 2021, he contributed, together with Anna Ardin and Mattias Irving (former board members of the Social Democratic Association for Faith and Solidarity), to an anthology on Islamophobia in Europe published by the Turkish government-aligned think tank SETA.
In May 2018, Mattias Gardell, professor and scientific director at CEMFOR (the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism) at Uppsala University, contributed to the same anthology. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu was the keynote speaker at its launch. In 30 of the anthology’s 64 pages, Mattias Gardell accused Sweden’s parliamentary parties of Islamophobia. SETA’s 2021 report was also produced with support from, among others, CEMFOR at Uppsala University.
Like Turkish President Erdoğan, racism researcher Mattias Gardell maintains that Hamas is not a terrorist group.
Gardell was a central figure in the first Ship to Gaza convoy in 2010, in which the Turkish group IHH participated in the preparations. IHH has close ties to the Turkish government and President Erdoğan and has historically supported the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Germany banned IHH’s German branch in 2010.
According to terrorism researcher Magnus Ranstorp, IHH has close connections to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and Hamas. Muhammad Sawalha, a senior figure in the terrorist organization Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, was, according to both Sawalha himself and reporting by the television channel Al Jazeera, one of those who organized the convoy.
Gardell himself denies that Sawalha was involved in the 2010 Ship to Gaza convoy.
In March 2018, the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism (SKMA) wrote that Gardell was scheduled to share a platform in Turkey with two individuals who had made racist statements about Jews: Mehmet Görmez, who headed Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, and Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, who had made antisemitic statements about Jews. Following the SKMA’s post, Gardell withdrew.
– It is true that I withdrew from a panel after SKMA drew my attention to a participant with whom I did not want to share a platform, he explained.
Both Mohammad Fazlhashemi and Mattias Gardell have written for Parabol, where Kajsa Ekis Ekman is editor-in-chief. The Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism (SKMA) has repeatedly criticized Kajsa Ekis Ekman, primarily over her dissemination of conspiracy theories, including her praise of the American antisemitic and racist leader Louis Farrakhan.
