A world-renowned expert on the Muslim Brotherhood has won a legal victory against a Muslim female doctoral student who sued her for defamation over a post on X calling out the Islamist infiltration of French universities.
On June 11, the Strasbourg Judicial Court annulled a lawsuit against Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, author of The Muslim Brotherhood and Its Networks: The Investigation, brought by Iman El Feki, a PhD candidate at the University of Strasbourg, France, who claimed she had been defamed by the expert’s tweet discussing the “Islamization of knowledge.”
In her tweet posted on March 4, 2025, Bergeaud-Blackler, who has been living under round-the-clock police protection after her book on the Brotherhood was published in 2023, said that El Feki, “unlike me, is free to go and teach at the university whenever and however she pleases.”My client is deeply shocked that the University of Strasbourg supported the plaintiff, even paying her legal fees. It’s absurd.
Brotherhood Expert Sued for Defamation, Religious Discrimination
El Feki sued Bergeaud-Blackler before the Strasbourg Judicial Court on two grounds: public defamation and discrimination on religious grounds, under the French Press Act of 29 July 1881, which affirms the right to a free press in the country. In its ruling, the court declared El Feki’s complaint invalid because it failed to specifically cite the defamatory passages in the posts published about her by Bergeaud-Blackler.
“The court followed the only compass that matters: the law (and nothing but the law), according to which the nullity of this procedure was imperative,” advocate Louis Cailliez, who represented Bergeaud-Blackler, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“The nullity of the proceedings was recognized based on the 1881 law on freedom of expression because the plaintiff was unable to clearly define the allegedly defamatory statements she was challenging (sometimes certain sentences, sometimes others, which were contradictory),” he explained.
“This is a very important legal victory,” Cailliez stressed, noting that the lawsuit was “an ideologically motivated procedure aimed at silencing Bergeaud-Blackler’s courageous and vital work on the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into the French academic world.”
In a May 22, 2025, letter seen by Le Figaro, Strasbourg University’s president, Frédérique Berrod, assured El Feki of the “institution’s support in his matter.” Le Journal du Dimanche reported that the university had allocated around 1,800 euros in public funds to El Feki’s legal action, even though she was not eligible for it.
“My client is deeply shocked that the University of Strasbourg supported the plaintiff, even paying her legal fees. It’s absurd,” Cailliez told FWI, warning that Bergeaud-Blackler is being targeted by numerous Islamists and that the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy in France remains one of provocation, victimization, and targeting. “Their objective is to have my client convicted to discredit the rigor of her research and silence her,” he remarked.
El Feki Glorified Palestinian Resistance
In an X post, Bergeau-Blackler, who is an anthropologist and senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) quoted a tweet from @JCoupable, an online activist who fights cybercrime and online hate, who wrote that El Feki was promoting an anti-Israeli contingent in the feminist march on 8 March.
The tweet by @JCoupable noted that “the Strasbourg Islamist Iman El Feki is sharing the same image that shocked social media a few days ago.” The text of the attached image in capital letters reads: “Glory to the Palestinian women resisters. For the liberation of Palestine from the sea to the Jordan.”
“Do not think this is an isolated case. Brotherhood ideology has gradually taken root in universities over the past thirty years,” Bergeaud-Blackler tweeted. “It plays a growing role in shaping the study of contemporary Islam and controls the editorial boards of journals in which no critical approach is allowed.”
“This is called ‘the Islamisation of knowledge,’ and it is a Muslim Brotherhood project, as I explain in: Le Frérisme et ses réseaux (2023),” she added, referring to her book on the Muslim Brotherhood.
El Feki’s Islamist Activism
On her Instagram account, El Feki has uploaded a video titled “Why am I not neutral?” She spoke on “infiltration and separatism” at Odyssee Culturelle event on May 5, 2025, in Strasbourg. The program was advertised under the banner of the Etudiants Musulmans de France — an organization identified by French intelligence and the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs as part of the Muslim Brotherhood network.
She is a signatory of the October 2023 petition “Sociologists in Solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian People,” which accuses Israel of committing “internationally supported genocide.” Her Instagram account shares a poster promoting the “8 March radical march” in Strasbourg, “for the liberation of Palestine, from the sea to the Jordan/Glory to the Palestinian women fighters.”
The march was organized by Samidoun (Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network) and Urgence Palestine. Samidoun is banned in Germany and designated a terrorist organization and sham charity by the USA and Canada. A 2023 question in the European Parliament notes that “Samidoun actively supports Hamas by disseminating and glorifying Hamas terrorist murders of Jewish people and by celebrating the rape, torture, execution, and kidnapping of civilians.”
Islamist-Leaning Groups Defend El Feki
Islamist-leaning outfits have rallied behind El Feki, who has yet to respond to questions submitted to her via LinkedIn. Hania Chalal, President of the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO), complained that the case was won on “a procedural flaw” that was “enough to definitively bury” it without the substance ever having been examined.”
“In the preliminary phase, the public prosecutor’s office had supported Iman El Feki’s complaint. At the hearing, however, the same prosecutor’s office reversed its position and sided with the motion to dismiss filed by the defense,” Chalal claimed.
In its May 2024 “comprehensive report,” France’s Interior Ministry specifically named FEMYSO as a “training structure for high-potential leaders within the Muslim Brotherhood movement,” FWI reported.
On June 2, days before the court’s ruling, the Society for Middle Eastern and Muslim World Studies (SEMOMM) expressed its “solidarity” with El Feki and sharing their “deep concern about the attacks she is facing and, more broadly, about the threats to academic freedom and freedom of expression.”
“We call on our colleagues to mobilize alongside Iman El Feki during this trial, to show her the support of our academic communities and our common commitment to the defense of academic freedoms,” the SEMOMM statement said.
In May, SEMOMM issued a statement defending François Burgat, a retired CNRS research director, who was sentenced later that month by the Court of Appeal of Aix-en-Provence to a 5,000 euro fine for publishing and sharing content deemed an apologia for Hamas terrorism.
