Author: Sarah Downey and Michael
Hirsh
Publication: Newsweek
Date: September 30, 2002
URL: http://www.msnbc.com/news/811234.asp
Focusing on a fundamentalist strain
of Islam, investigators are searching American mosques for signs of support
for terror. It's a delicate balancing act
When Zacarias Moussaoui arrived
in Norman, Okla., to take flight lessons, one of his first stops was the
white gated mosque just down the street from the university campus.
MOSQUE MEMBERS Hussein Al-Attas
and Mukkaram Ali took Moussaoui in. All three joined a local gym. And when
Moussaoui needed to get to Minnesota (where he was later arrested and accused
of being the "20th hijacker"), Ali offered to drive but then broke his
hand, so Al-Attas agreed to go. (Ali gave them his laptop computer for
the road.)
While Moussaoui was a bit gruff,
no one questioned him closely about who he was or what he was doing there.
"It's human nature that we help each other, especially in Islam," a Norman
mosque board member told NEWSWEEK. Al-Attas and Ali, who were detained
as material witnesses in the Moussaoui case, were "in the wrong place at
the wrong time. We hope the FBI finds the truth that they are innocent,"
said mosque member Hassan Farah Ahmed.
HELPFUL FELLOW MUSLIMS
In San Diego, Khalid Almihdhar and
Nawaf Alhazmi, who helped to fly American Flight 77 into the Pentagon,
also found aid and comfort in a Muslim community. They used members of
their local mosque to find housing, first renting an apartment blocks from
the Islamic Center of San Diego and later moving in with a prominent cofounder
of the mosque. They bought a car from another member-the same blue 1988
Toyota later found at Dulles International Airport after the hijackings.
According to federal documents, friendly mosquegoers helped Almihdhar and
Alhazmi open bank accounts, visit travel agencies, obtain driver's licenses,
credit cards and Social Security cards- and even picked up one terrorist
at the airport. (Mosque members believed the men were the well-meaning
immigrants they claimed to be, and no charges were filed.) And when the
peripatetic pair finally settled down in the Washington, D.C., area, they
stayed in a motel near a fundamentalist storefront mosque in heavily Pakistani
Laurel, Md. The morning of 9-11, NEWSWEEK has learned, they dropped a duffel
bag at the mosque's door. Taped to the baggage was a note: FOR THE BROTHERS.
Who are these mysterious brothers
the hijackers left behind when they immolated themselves on September 11?
Was that just the usual endearing term that fellow Muslims use for each
other? Or is there a deeper connection? This is a law- enforcement conundrum
that U.S. authorities are just beginning to grapple with: how to investigate
a sympathetic network that often includes thousands of American Muslims
who have fallen under the influence of fundamentalist Islam, and who may
not be directly involved in terrorism but are- often inadvertently-part
of its infrastructure of support.
The vast majority of Muslims in
America are neither terrorists nor sympathizers. Few Muslims who avow fundamentalism
sign on to terrorism, just as few Christians who become born again seek
to bomb abortion clinics. And last week the Feds touted the role of helpful
Muslims in Lackawanna, N.Y., in alerting them to suspicious activity. But,
privately, authorities fear that would-be terrorists can still find a lot
of quiet help-as well as a hiding place-in many of the same communities.
Indeed, some of the most prominent Muslims in America-including several
who have spoken out against extremism on U.S. television-are linked to
possible terrorist financing in tax havens in Liechtenstein, the Isle of
Man and the Bahamas.
SUPPORT NETWORK
The terrorists' American support
network also raises new questions about the complicity of Saudi Arabia
that go well beyond the well-known fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were
Saudi. Both the Norman and San Diego mosques are supported by an entity
called the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT. Both mosques say they
are not extremist; Dr. Omaran Abdeen, a spokesman for the San Diego mosque,
insisted, "We have no outside influences from anybody." But authorities
say NAIT has long been a funnel for Saudi and other gulf money seeking
to spread an often anti-American brand of Islamic fundamentalism in American
mosques from southern California to South Carolina-a little-noted movement
financed by Saudi billions over the past 40 years. Some experts call it
"petro-Islam."
Over the past four decades, unnoticed
by most Americans, NAIT money has helped the Saudi Arabian sect of Wahhabism-or
Salafism, as the broader, Pan-Islamic movement is called-to seize control
of hundreds of mosques in U.S. Muslim communities, a NEWSWEEK investigation
shows. Salafists believe in a strict interpretation of the Qur'an and a
pure, self-contained Islamic state. But many also embrace the idea that
integration into the West- or American society-is profane, and that Christians
and Jews are enemies. Among those raised to believe in this creed was Osama
bin Laden. According to NAIT documents, the trust holds title to at least
20 percent of the mosques in America, or at least 250 out of some 1,200
nationwide. But even that figure understates Salafi influence, especially
since NAIT grew somewhat estranged from Saudi Arabia after NAIT refused
to endorse U.S. troops on Saudi soil in the 1990s. An April 2001 survey
by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 69 percent of Muslims
in America say it is "absolutely fundamental" or "very important" to have
Salafi teachings at their mosques (67 percent of respondents also expressed
agreement with the statement that "America is an immoral, corrupt society").
NAIT chairman Bassam Osman declined a request for an interview on the trust's
role in spreading Salafism.
WITTING VS. UNWITTING
The problem investigators face is
that, with so many U.S.-based Muslims apparently in sympathy with fundamentalist
views, it's often difficult to determine who is a knowing accomplice and
who is an unwitting one. "It's hard to know when fiery rhetoric or the
agreement with it moves to the next step and becomes part of a criminal
conspiracy," says James Kallstrom, an ex-FBI official who ran terror probes
in the 1990s. "Where does religious zealotry leave off and terrorism begin?"
The Salafi takeover of American
mosques has not come without protest from many Muslim moderates. "The Brotherhood
has infiltrated our community ... tearing down what we have been attempting
to build for half a century," alleged disaffected members of the Bridgeview
Mosque in Illinois in a lawsuit for control (which they lost). "The events
of September 11 will have a profound impact on the American Muslim in the
long run," predicts Vali Nasr, a University of San Diego expert. "Most
Muslims thought of fundamentalism as an issue in the Muslim world, not
an issue in the U.S. It was like the Irish in Boston supporting the [Irish
Republican Army]. Now many of them know they could have been [victims]
in the World Trade Center."
Freed up by a post-9-11 law that
permits the bureau to infiltrate religious organizations, the FBI has swept
up suspects or accessories who have been detained for long months without
being charged-provoking occasional outcries of Arab McCarthyism. But by
looking everywhere at once, investigators are often finding suspicious
activity in unexpected places. In Oregon, a Portland mosque not known for
extremism is now beset by several investigations from a federal antiterror
task force. The Islamic Center of Portland's Masjid As-Saber-until recently
a NAIT affiliate-has in recent weeks seen the arrest of its imam at the
airport, where his luggage allegedly tested positive for traces of TNT,
-and the sentencing of a onetime Hamas supporter on federal firearms and
fraud charges. No terror-related charges have been filed, and a lawyer
for the imam, Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, says
he'll be exonerated.
Salafi influences are not limited
to Arab and South Asian immigrants-the majority of mosquegoers in America.
Federal investigators have been looking into a small group of African-American
as well as immigrant Muslims who they say are connected to Al Qaeda. They
say these men were radicalized by contacts in extremist- controlled mosques
in New York and New Jersey.
ANTI-AMERICAN VIEWS
Even some African-American Muslims
who condemn terrorism have come under Saudi Arabian influence, and sometimes
espouse anti-American views that can be misconstrued. Among them: Siraj
Wahhaj, a Brooklyn-born African-American who became the first Muslim to
give the opening prayer in Congress. He's known locally as a smiling man
in white robes who's a doer of good deeds. In the 1980s he and members
of his mosque, Masjid At-Taqwa, shut down drug houses in the Bedford-Stuyvesant
area.
Yet Wahhaj, who is a member of an
elite, consultative body that reports back to Saudi Arabia on the status
of Islam in America, has also been known to say some disturbing things.
At a 1991 Texas rally, he gave a speech titled "The Muslim Agenda in the
New World Order," in which he said that America would fall unless it accepts
the Islamic agenda. In 1993 two members of his mosque pleaded guilty in
connection with charges of plotting to kill the secretary-general of the
United Nations, a U.S. senator and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and
blow up major buildings and tunnels.
Asked about his anti-Western sermons,
Wahhaj says he is critical of the United States government, just as he
is critical of the Saudi Arabian, Egyptian and Israeli governments. "I'm
not anti-West," he says. "That's silly. I am the West." Wahhaj also sidesteps
questions about Wahhabism, saying he does not "want to get caught in a
trap of [defining] Muslims."
Federal officials
are also exploring connections between terrorists and an African-American
Muslim in Seattle. James Ujaama, a onetime community activist there, was
a leader in a now closed Dar es Salaam mosque, a storefront operation in
a run-down neighborhood whose 100 or so members were a mix of immigrant
African Muslims and American converts, mostly African-American. Last month
Ujaama was indicted in federal court on two terror counts alleging he provided
material support to Al Qaeda in the form of "training, facilities, computer
services, safe-houses and personnel." (Ujaama has maintained his innocence.)
Some critics
warn that authorities, in their zeal to shut down Al Qaeda, may be alienating
their best allies in the war on terror by occasionally lumping the innocent
with the guilty. In Virginia, Eyad Alrababah recently went to the FBI with
what he knew about Nawaf Alhazmi and Hani Hanjour, the Flight 77 hijackers
whom he first met in March 2001 at the Dar Al Hijra mosque in Falls Church
(another NAIT property). Today Alrababah faces deportation. Nancy Luque,
an attorney for several prominent Muslim businessmen whose businesses in
Herndon, Va., were raided by the Feds last March (and have not been charged),
says, "If you start treating the moderates this way, then you make everybody
an enemy of this country."
(With Mark Hosenball in Washington,
Nada El Sawy and Peg Tyre in New York and Andrew Murr in Los Angeles)
