Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited a gender-segregated mosque Monday morning whose imam is a member of a group considered a terrorist organization abroad.
Samy Metwally, the lead imam at the Ottawa Muslim Association, is a “a member of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS)”, according to the mosque’s website. In 2014 the United Arab Emirates placed the group on its list of designated terrorist organizations.
“IUMS was founded by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading ideologue and a notorious figure who, among other accomplishments, was for many years banned from entering France and endorsed the murder of Israelis,” Daniel Pipes, an author and Islamic studies scholar who has taught at Harvard and University of Chicago, explained via e-mail.
The Muslim Brotherhood is also designated a terrorist organization by at least half a dozen countries globally. It has not been designated as such in Canada, though the federal government has come under increased pressure in recent years to do so.
The IUMS website posts various theological and political messages from al-Qaradawi in English. In a call for Syrian rebel groups to halt their infighting, he writes: “Allah Almighty has specified you to carry the banner of jihad, and to defend Islam, and to protect the sanctity of Muslims.”
Trudeau was at the Ottawa mosque to give remarks recognizing Eid al-Adha, a major holiday in the Islamic world. Trudeau is immensely popular with Muslims, the majority of whom voted Liberal, according to a recent Environics Institute survey.
“That PM Trudeau went to an IUMS-associated mosque is typical of left-leaning politicians, who apply a crude violence filter: if the person has not personally advocated or engaged in violence, then no problem,” Pipes noted. “To put it mildly, that misses the point.”
Metwally, who graduated from the Sunni Al-Azhar University in Egypt and is a member of the Council of Imams of Ottawa-Gatineau, is also described as a “senior Sharia researcher.”