| Daily Times | Thursday, June 10, 2010 |
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Considering the admixture of an aggressive political Islam, analysts unable or unwilling to propose foreign policy alternatives to reliance on Riyadh and a series of governments relying on such analysts, the perpetual US confusion about the Islamic world and its dynamics, especially the militancy, is not surprising“And there are those who build a mosque from mischievous motives, to spread unbelief and disunite the faithful” — Holy Quran 9:107
With the above verse of Surah Taubah (Repentance) opens the May 2010 book A Mosque in Munich, by The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-winning former correspondent, Ian Johnson.
The news cycle has moved on since the first part of this article appeared, but has it really? The carnage at the Ahmediyya congregations in Lahore only underscores the importance of understanding the genesis of the bigotry perpetuated from mosque pulpits.
In an interview, available on the internet, Ian Johnson, a University of Florida alumnus, says, “Right now, the CIA roadblocks anyone trying to get information on our dealings with radical Islam, claiming that releasing documents, even half a century old, would harm the national interest. It was like this with the Nazis. The CIA released information only when Congress passed a law mandating it. I think something similar will have to happen here too.”
These are not just any documents that Johnson is talking about. These are files related to the relationship of western intelligence agencies, primarily the CIA, with the most important organiser, agitator, fund-raiser and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West and a disciple and successor of Hasan Al Banna — the late Dr Said Ramadan.
According to Johnson, the story of Dr Ramadan and the western powers consorting with him and the Brotherhood is “really a strange one with memorable characters”. He says, “The people involved are so bizarre that they sound like the start of a joke: you have a brilliant Nazi linguist, a CIA man who is a nudist, and a radical Muslim.”
The nudist CIA agent was Robert Dreher, stationed in the then West Germany in the 1950s, who worked with the Muslim radical Said Ramadan, to lay the groundwork for what has become a colossal labyrinthine of mosque-centres, front outfits, financial gateways and, above all, the ideological clearing-houses for Wahabiism, throughout Europe and the US.
The irony is that this is not just an obscure story from the distant past that is of academic interest only. The process is continuing and there are people like Stephen Schwartz trying to obfuscate — in the name of pragmatism — the attempts to find a way through. Forward-looking Muslim-Americans face multiple challenges if they are to seriously consider getting back the mosque-centres.
Firstly, Wahabiism in the US masquerades as the non-denominational Islam. In a classic Brotherhood way, hundreds of Islamic centres are really controlled by leadership recruited from the middle and upper-middle classes. For South Asian-Americans, primarily concerned with offering prayers or getting Quranic education for their children, to see through this modernist façade might be difficult, but not impossible. As a rule of thumb, these centres never mention Sufi Islam and its various exponents. The Naqshbandi Sufi Sheikh Hisham Kabbani of Fenton, Michigan, has testified before the State Department regarding the Wahabi control of the US mosques, citing 114 such centres.
Then comes the financing, which started in the 1950s with the Saudis paying for Dr Said Ramadan’s Cadillac and the Saudi ARAMCO sponsoring the Muslim Brothers’ trip to meet President Eisenhower and continues to date. Mainstream faith-based Islamic organisations have not only received help in cash and kind from the Saudi kingdom, but their activists state that they are not shy of receiving foreign funding for their ventures. The website of King Fahd, maintained after his death by the Saudi hajj minister, proudly lists the mosques personally funded by the late monarch.
US authorities had named two large Islamic groups, one of which runs an endowment (waqf) that holds title to hundreds of mosques in the US, as un-indicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007, for support of terrorism. But a deeper probe into the conduct of the US mosque-centres remains outstanding.
One of the cohorts of Said Ramadan, Hajji Amin al-Hussaini, nabbed after World War II for war crimes, was let go for ‘pragmatic reasons’ — not much different than an un-indicted co-conspirator status.
In his most recent interview on June 5, 2010 aired on the National Public Radio (NPR), Ian Johnson made a shocking revelation, saying: “Shortly after 9/11, there was this desire to cut all ties with Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and even to prosecute them. The fundamental problem with that effort was that it tried to link them directly to terrorism, which is really not so much what the Muslim Brotherhood does.
“The Muslim Brotherhood creates the worldview that can lead to terrorism, the milieu where that can flourish. So, after these prosecutions failed, the Muslim Brotherhood re-established itself, and by the second term of the Bush administration, there were already very clear efforts where brotherhood groups in Europe are being clearly cultivated for US foreign policy aims.
“So, much of the rhetoric that you hear today is similar to what we were saying in the 1950s: that Islam is essentially a tool that we can use for foreign policy purposes. I think this is kind of — this is a fundamental problem in how we look at this religion. It has come back to haunt us again and again, but we continue to make the same mistake.”
Considering the admixture of an aggressive political Islam, analysts unable or unwilling to propose foreign policy alternatives to reliance on Riyadh and a series of governments relying on such analysts, the perpetual US confusion about the Islamic world and its dynamics, especially the militancy, is not surprising.
Ian Johnson records that on the eve of his meeting with the Muslim Brothers, the gist of Eisenhower’s message, as reported by his aides, was: “The president thought we should do everything to emphasise the ‘holy war’ aspect.” If this is still the attitude that the US administration is going to take towards the Muslim Brotherhood, its various incarnations and its Saudi patrons, this might be the third and probably an insurmountable hurdle for everyday Muslim-Americans, before they can take back the mosque pulpit.
(Concluded)
The writer teaches and practices Medicine at the University of Florida and contributes to the think-tanks www.politact.com and Aryana Institute. He can be reached at mazdaki@me.com
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