A new party formed to influence Rome’s municipal elections faces accusations of seeking to Islamize Italy after it endorsed the inclusion of Arabic on the curriculum of a high school in the nation’s capital. The leadership of the leftist-founded party has stoked fears of Islamization by deploying provocative imagery and rhetoric guaranteed to incite anxiety over Muslim political dominance over Italian civilization.
It’s the ‘Mamdani moment.
Founded as a political movement in November by Francesco Tieri, a left-wing activist who embraced Islam, Muslims for Rome 2027 (MuRo2027) trumpets its Islamic supremacist stance by posting an image of Rome’s Colosseum crowned with a crescent moon on its Instagram account.
In a press statement announcing its creation, MuRo2027 stressed that Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s mayoral race had awakened the need for organizing the Muslim vote. “It’s the ‘Mamdani moment,’ I realize, and we want to embrace the unprecedented role of Muslims as political subjects, no longer political objects,” Tieri said.
“In view of the 2027 Rome Local Elections, we promote ideas and proposals of collective benefit consistent with our religious affiliation,” the group announced on its Instagram page.
Parliamentarian Hits Back at Arabic in Roman Schools
The group triggered outrage on January 14 after it promoted the decision of the Eugenio Montale Linguistic High School to offer Arabic as a third language—after English—along with Chinese, French, and German, and advertised the school’s opening day on January 24.
“Arabic is spoken by tens of thousands of people in the capital,” MuRo2027 said in a press release. “Between do-goodism and nastiness regarding the presence of foreign origins, we stand with knowledge, therefore with good public education.”
The statement attacked a journalist and parliamentarian for opposing its endorsement of Arabic in the school’s curriculum, arguing that there are “also private Catholic high schools offering the same Arabic language curriculum.” The school’s website said it was offering international languages “to engage critically and dialectically with other cultures.”
Criticizing the inclusion of Arabic in the school curriculum, Lega MP Rossano Sasso reposted an image of a woman in a hijab and a man in Islamic clothing, and an image of the Qur’an, noting that MuRo2027 had used these images to promote the school’s decision.
Sasso said he would raise the proposal to include Arabic in Parliament, observing: “Because if we were faced with a proposal from an Islamic party adopted by an Italian public school, we would be witnessing yet another episode of the creeping Islamization of our society.”
Writing in the New York Sun in 2007, Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum and chairman of its board of directors, warned that the introduction of Arabic into public schools is no innocent gesture. Drawing on case studies from the United States, Pipes argued that Arabic-language programs often operated not merely as vehicles for linguistic education but as conduits for Islamist ideology. He observed that such programs frequently relied on outside organizations—some with political or religious agendas—to supply teachers and curricula, thereby bypassing the safeguards of secular oversight. These initiatives, Pipes contended, could subtly foster sympathy for Islamist causes under the pretext of cultural exposure, with little transparency or accountability. “[P]re-collegiate Arabic-language instruction, even when taxpayer funded, tends to bring along indoctrination in pan-Arab nationalism, radical Islam, or both,” Pipes warned.
‘The Left is Desperate’
“My impression is that the Islamists are organizing to form a party or civic list to support the left in the 2027 national elections,” Giovanni Giacalone, Italian expert in terrorism and counter-terrorism at the David Institute for Security Policy, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“The Left is desperate. It needs the Muslim vote. It’s no coincidence that it has aligned itself against Israel. The Islamists, for their part, are moving very aggressively, both politically and in terms of organizing demonstrations,” Giacalone, a senior advisor for the “Monitoring Jihadism Italy Project,” added.
While the Catholic Church has remained silent on MuRo2027, the Italian Jewish publication Bet Magazine Mosaico noted that “‘Let’s take Rome’ may not remain just a line from crime novels.” It reported that MuRo27 had refused to participate in the program Dritto e Rovescio on Channel 4, while dismissing public interest in them as “excessive and spasmodic.”
“The first photo the group posted on their Instagram page depicts the symbols of Islam conquering Rome: an Islamic star and crescent rising in front of the Colosseum,” the article warned.
Calabrian journalist Vincenzo Campanella explained that the image “represents, for many analysts, a precise political message: the affirmation of the symbols of Islam above one of the most iconic monuments of Italian civilization” and “expresses a form of symbolic appropriation that has rarely been seen in national political communication.”
Mamdani the Model
Speaking to FWI, prolific Italian author and founder of two publishing houses, Francesco Giubilei, predicted that “the image of a mayor swearing an oath on the Qur’an, as happened in New York with Zohran Mamdani, could soon become the norm in Europe and Italy.”
Giubilei compared an Islamic party that fought local elections in Monfalcone with MuRo27, stating: “Italian Muslims plan to replicate the model already in place in Northern Europe and France, betting on the demographics and growth of Muslims in Italy in the coming years.”
“They want to remove crucifixes from schools, they cancel Christmas so as not to offend people of other religions, they justify a mayor who swears by a book that preaches Sharia. It’s the subjugation of the West,” Giubilei, an advisor to the Minister of Culture, emphasized.
Earlier, Anna Maria Cisint, member of the European Parliament and former mayor of Monfalcone, warned that MuRo2027 supports “an Islamist ideological-political message that aspires to the application of the Qur’an, the replacement of the Constitution with Sharia law, and the annihilation of our freedoms and rights, starting with those of women.”
Fratelli d’Italia MP Federico Mollicone described the movement as “inspired by Islamic law,” noting, “the [Qur’an] surahs and Italian law are not compatible.”
A month after its founding, MuRo2027 issued a statement denouncing the arrest of top Hamas operative Mohammad Hannoun by Italian police. Described by Italian foreign policy advisor Bepi Pezzuli as “Hamas’s best friend in Rome,” Hannoun, who holds Jordanian citizenship, is a senior member of Hamas’s foreign branch and leader of its Italian cell.
MuRo2027 cited claims that the evidence against Hannoun “was mostly acquired by the Israeli army (IDF) during military operations.”
The Italian newspaper Il Tempo has linked MuRo2027’s founder, Tieri, to the Al-Huda Mosque in the Centocello district of Rome, which is run by Hamas-supporting imam Ben Mohamed Mohamed.
MuRo27 Responds to Allegations
Speaking on behalf of MuRo27, Tieri told FWI that “the public display of religious affiliation, that is, sharing it in public spaces, is fully consistent with Italian secularism”— unlike French secularism. “Historically, the Italian Republic has been governed by a Catholic-inspired party (which had the cross in its symbol, something that still happens today for other small parties).”
“We are not introducing anything new, just something different from our religious beliefs. So perhaps the problem is intolerance toward those with different religious beliefs,” he noted. “We believe our faith is the starting point from which we can contribute to the political debate that will unfold in the run-up to the upcoming local elections in the capital.”
Tieri also said that he did not agree that the rights of Muslims are 100 percent protected in Italy and added that MuRo27 was “neither a Muslim lobby nor a Muslim union” but a movement wanting “to engage in local politics” with “the stated goal of contributing to the common good.”
