Last year, Swedish authorities declared that the number of Islamist militants in Sweden had risen from 200 to 2,000 over a 10-year period. Now, a 265-page report has been released on the fundamentalist branch of Islam known as Salafism, which advocates a return to ‘pure’ Islam. The report, the largest ever of its kind, shows a clear rise of Salafism in Sweden.

 According to the study, which was commissioned by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, a government department, “not all Salafists are jihadists, but all jihadists are Salafists”.

It shows evidence that Salafist preachers in Sweden are co-operating in order to push their message across Muslim communities, and that disturbing every-day behaviour is now common even in children.

The study was created in order to understand, by interviewing police, social workers, and community representatives, how religious beliefs lead to acts of terror.

It found a well-organised ideology that was consciously creating a deep social rift between Muslims and Swedes by pushing for Sweden’s Muslim minority population to reject the country’s mainstream cultural surroundings, allowing terrorists and radical jihadist recruits to emerge.

According to author and prominent extremism researcher Magnus Ranstorp, “Salafists advocate gender segregation, demand that women veil themselves to limit ‘sexual temptation,’ restrict women’s role in the public sphere and strongly oppose listening to music and some sports activities.” The religious movement appears to be highly coordinated.

“It is interesting that the Salafist preachers, on whom the study focuses, appear to be more in cooperation with each other, rather than rivals. Instead, these preachers seem to divide their da’wa (mission) into different geographical areas,” Ranstorp says.

Muslims are encouraged by prominent extremist leaders to refrain from making friends of non-Muslims, to encourage them to love Allah, and to hate non-believers for not following Islam. They are instructed to refrain from joining wider communities and groups and must resist changing their appearance, language and behaviour in order to adapt and integrate with Swedish culture.

Sweden is home to over 800,000 people born outside of Europe (largely from Syria and Iraq) as well as hundreds of thousands of second and third-generation migrants, and these instructions are becoming deeply ingrained in these sections of the population.

In the Swedish municipality of Boras, officials are reporting that they are seeing young children refusing to drink “Christian” water from the taps and washing themselves in the mosque after spending the day in contact with non-Muslims.

In Vasteras, teenage criminals are reportedly using what they are taught about non-Muslims to justify stealing from shops with non-veiled cashiers while shouting “kafir” (a derogatory Arabic term for a non-believer). Other reports have emerged detailing accounts of groups of Muslims harassing immigrant shop owners, demanding to know if they follow Allah and abusing them otherwise.

In Gothenburg, which has supplied more recruits from Sweden to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) than any other city, Salafists informed their followers that voting in secular Swedish elections was “haram” – forbidden.

One interviewee makes it clear that the influence of these extremist Islamist leaders spreads beyond the mosques. “Swedes have no idea how much influence political Islam has in the suburb. Swedish laws are not applied there.”

In its conclusion, the study urges Sweden to be more open to understanding and exposing the clear links between radical Islam and terrorism. “When the then-National Coordinator Against Violent Extremism said that the question of why so many people chose to travel to IS from Sweden was ‘a million dollar question,’ it is an illustration of the overall inability of Swedish authorities (with the exception of police and security police) to see that this problem has not emerged from a vacuum.”