Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden (17)

Last year, we posted a translation of a Swedish article about a researcher conducting dissertation research at the University of Lund on the Muslim Brotherhood in Sweden. Sameh Egyptson’s research actually came under investigation as reported here. Here is a follow-up report on the case, which we translated last December. We are now pleased to translate an update from Nyheter Idag that the prosecutor has closed the case. The entire dissertation (in Swedish) is linked here.

The below translation is by Fousesquawk. It is part of a series on the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the 17th such article on Sweden.

 https://nyheteridag.se/forundersokning-mot-egyptson-laggs-ned/

Preliminary investigation against Egyptson dropped

The preliminary investigation against Sameh Egyptson’s attention-grabbing and debated dissertation on political Islam has been dropped, Prosecutor Pia Björnsson tells TT (News).

In February last year, researcher Sameh Egyptson presented the dissertation, “Global Political Islam? The Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Federation in Sweden” at Lund University.

In the dissertation, Egyptson advanced the thesis that the Islamic Federation is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which means that Sweden is infiltrated by political Islam.

In the dissertation, several persons were named as being active in the Islamic Federation in Sweden or some of the Islamic Federation’s sub-organizations, which led to several reports to the Appeals Board for Ethics Review (Önep).

Önep prosecuted the dissertation since it was considered that Egyptson used sensitive personal information without ethics review permission, and in February, Prosecutor Pia Björnsson initiated a preliminary investigation into Egyptson’s dissertation to determine if Egyptson had permission to conduct the research.

“I consider that I did research within the framework of academic freedom. This is an attempt to deter researchers from working on important societal issues,” said Egyptson to Dagens Nyheter when the investigation was initiated.

But now the investigation has been dropped. “This was expected since I began my dissertation before the law (2003:460) on ethics review even existed, something my critics didn’t care about when they reported me,” Egyptson writes in a posting on the X platform.

“My hope now is that the Ethics Review law will be reworked so that researchers will be able to feel free without fear to choose controversial and debated topics, and that it will be possible to research public persons in leading positions, based on public sources and their own public statements, without this being deemed as ‘sensitive personal information’ and being forbidden from researching it,” Egyptson further writes.

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