Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

“Low level of organisation” is the kind of bureaucratic phrasing that pretends to be neutral while doing real political work. Coming from a European politician, it signals a familiar governance reflex: if a community can’t present a single, legible counterpart, the state can frame it as deficient rather than simply plural. The line isn’t just descriptive; it quietly sets the terms of engagement. Organised equals reliable partner, easily consulted, easily policed, easily funded. Disorganised becomes a problem to be managed.

The follow-up clause - “quite diverse” - softens the first statement while reinforcing it. Diversity here functions less as celebration than as an explanation for why Muslim groups don’t map neatly onto the institutional templates European governments prefer: hierarchical, nationally representative, fluent in administrative norms. The subtext is that public authorities would like “Muslim representation” to operate the way established churches or long-settled civic associations do, even though Muslim communities in Europe are often shaped by migration waves, ethnic and linguistic differences, varying religious currents, and unequal access to resources.

Context matters: in the post-9/11 era, European states increasingly sought “partners” in Muslim communities for integration policy and counter-radicalisation. That demand incentivised umbrella bodies and “official” interlocutors, yet also produced suspicion about who gets to speak for whom. De Vries’s phrasing captures that tension: a managerial complaint disguised as observation, implying that better “organisation” would make Muslims governable in the way the state prefers - and that the burden for that legibility sits with the community, not with the institutions trying to simplify it.