The radicalization of U.S. Muslims

Inside U.S. mosques, American Muslims hear a message of fundamentalism

National Post/November 17, 2001
By Marina Jiménez

Jersey City -- The Masjid Al-Salam, an unadorned storefront mosque on top of a Chinese takeout and a jewellery store, has a note tacked up inside with a stern warning: Those who do not belong to this Muslim community will be prosecuted for trespassing.

Leaving behind the gritty rows of Dollar Stores and pizzerias on Kennedy Boulevard, a main thoroughfare in this gateway to New Jersey, I nervously approach the entrance, a scarf pulled firmly over my head. I climb the mosque's stairs, passing by a U.S. flag taped to the second-storey window. It is Friday, the Muslim day of worship, and I am curious to hear the sermon of the imam, unedited for public sensibilities.

This mosque, after all, gave a platform to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric believed to be the spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to blow up the United Nations building.

Two of the more than 1,000 people arrested in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks lived in an apartment building around the corner from the Mosque of Peace, and are said to have worshipped here.

Behind the closed door of the "sisters" room, the women, many of whom are from Egypt and Morocco, stand on prayer mats in a diagonal line facing Mecca. All but the youngest wear long cloaks and veils.

Over a loud-speaker, we hear Sheikh Mohammed, the mosque's Egyptian-born imam, call for a show of loyalty -- but not to the United States. He asks all those in the mosque to come to the aid of their brothers and sisters, oppressed Muslims around the world.

"What will happen to you on Judgment Day if you have not been a good Muslim?" the invisible presence thunders in Arabic. "What excuse will you give? The faces of liars will darken.

"Muslims are under attack in Chechnya, Palestine and Afghanistan," he continues, echoing the message of Osama bin Laden, who recently extended his list of Muslim conflicts to include those in such non-Arab regions as southern Sudan, Somalia and the Philippines. "The Nation of Islam is like a body and if one part of the body is under attack, then the whole body doesn't work properly."

This message -- that Muslims are under global attack by the West -- is a common one, repeated in mosques around the world, according to Farid Esack, a professor of Islamic Studies and visiting scholar at Auburn Theological Seminary at Columbia University. "The people know that the imam's message is to come to the aid of the Taliban, and that the imam believes the religion is under attack," he says.

As Afghanistan falls to opposition forces, and ordinary people celebrate the end of the Taliban and their rigid brand of Islam, radical imams in Pakistan, North America and elsewhere continue to define the war on terrorism in religious terms: Christendom versus Islam.

The Taliban may be driven out of Kandahar, but their fundamentalist ideology appears certain to live on. Bin Laden may be captured, but there are many more bearded Islamists who will continue his violent cause.

Although most U.S. Muslims, who endorsed George W. Bush for President, were quick to condemn the attacks, and the President was just as quick to declare "Islam is peace," there are signs that, in a faith that has increased significantly in size, social standing and political influence in the United States in the past decade, the public and private discourse are sometimes quite different.

Hamza Yusuf, an influential American Muslim scholar who was invited to the White House to pray with Mr. Bush after the attacks, later came under criticism for having said, in a speech two days before the terrorist hijackings, that the United States "stands condemned" and faced a "terrible fate" because of its treatment of minorities.

A Cleveland television station recently aired a 10-year-old videotape of Imam Fawaz Damra, a mainstream cleric, saying Muslims should direct "all the rifles at the first and last enemy of the Islam nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews." (He has since apologized.)

Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, a former imam with Manhattan's Islamic Cultural Center who is now back in Cairo at al-Azhar University, told an Arabic-language newspaper the "Jews were behind these ugly acts [of Sept. 11], while we, the Arabs, were innocent."

To mainstream Muslims, who complain that fundamentalist leaders have co-opted the voice of the faith, this virulent anti-Semitism is anathema.

Some have begun to describe the internal debate reflected in the double-edged messages coming from some of Islam's leaders as the "Islamic Reformation."

The war has presented Muslims with a major crisis, says Dr. Esack. While radical clerics call for a jihad, or holy war against the American infidels who have retaliated against the Taliban, other Muslims condemn this theology.

"Jihad is self-struggle, but it also means a physical combat involving violence," says Dr. Esack. "You can't deny it. And that is incompatible with the fundamentals for peaceful co-existence."

He believes Islam needs to rethink its paradigms and develop a model of peaceful co-existence.

Yet inside the Al-Salam mosque, there is another kind of message for congregants.

"Know Your Rights," says a sign in English and Arabic pinned to a bulletin board. It goes on to remind Muslims who worship here that they are not required to reveal their immigration status to authorities, or speak to the Immigration and Naturalization service or the police. If the FBI threatens to get a Grand Jury subpoena to compel a witness to speak, do not submit, the sign advises. If people feel they are under surveillance, prudence is the best course.

The Muslim community in North America is relatively new and therefore full of insecurities. While Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States, with 7 million adherents, 60% of the country's 1,200 mosques have been established in the past two decades, according to a 2001 survey by the Hartford Seminary made in conjunction with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Nearly 30% of all congregants are converts and the majority of those are African-American males.

There is also a strong influence in the United States of Wahabism, a puritanical Islamic sect that originated in Saudi Arabia and is said to have inspired the violent extremism of Bin Laden and the Taliban.

Estimates of the percentage of American Muslims who worship in mosques that adhere to Wahhabist fundamentalism vary widely. Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Muslim leader who follows the mystical Sufi order, suggested in 1998 that 80% of American Muslim mosques have been taken over by Islamic extremists. He also notes the majority of followers do not necessarily agree with their leaders' views.

Others take issue with this characterization, noting Sufism has traditionally been suppressed by Wahabism and there is a history of personal rivalry between Sheik Kabbani and conservative Muslims.

The Hartford Seminary survey found that one-third of U.S. mosques preach a literal interpretation of the foundational texts of Islam, and two-thirds of mosque leaders believe America is immoral.

Daniel Pipes, of the Middle Eastern Forum, thinks many American Muslim institutions and mosques are influenced by radicals because they were funded by the Saudis when they were established during the 1980s. Many African-American imams were also sent to study in Saudi Arabia.

Of course, all religions struggle with their extremist fringes. The difference with Islam, however, is that the fringe exerts a disproportionate influence. Rashied Omar, an imam and scholar at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, attributes this disproportion in part to the media, for giving them a platform, and to U.S. support both for Israel and for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, which he says gives them a cause.

Dr. Esack believes there is another force at play: envy. "The Muslim problem with U.S. hegemony is not that there's a single power in control of the world," he explains. "It's that Muslims are not in charge. Many Muslims have a deep yearning for the whole world to be Muslim."

A middle-aged man of Arab descent who worships at the Al-Salam mosque in Jersey City, harbours just such a goal. The pizzeria owner would like to see the establishment of an Islamic Nation that would implement the law of Sharia. Literally translated as "the way," the religious law of Sharia calls for punishment of crimes to be imposed according to the Koran, with amputation of a hand for theft and beheading for capital offences. "Sharia is tough but it would bring good results," says the man, who did not want his name printed.

Imam Omar Abu Namous, who replaced the controversial Imam Gemeaha at Manhattan's Islamic Cultural Center, believes the creation of an Islamic state is at the heart of the religion.

"A unified Muslim state would be the ideal instrument to convince the world that Islam is the last version of God's word. God meant his word to be obeyed," he explains patiently.

He sees an Islamic nation as no different from the European Economic Community, which is unified by "Christianity, democracy and secularism."

The imam also believes Muslim militants were not responsible for the massacre of 17 Christians last month in Pakistan, hinting darkly that the "enemies of Islamic unity" could be behind the murders. When pressed to name these enemies, he replied: "Russia, India, Israel."

Mr. Pipes, a critic of the Islamists, who subordinate spiritual concerns to political ones, sees the vision of Islamic unity as dangerous. "I'd rather have the U.S. constitution than Islamic law at its most extreme," he says.

To illustrate what he means, Mr. Pipes quotes Siraj Wahaj, an influential African-American convert to Islam, who expresses the vision this way: "Muslims owning property all over, Muslim businesses, factories, halal meat, supermarkets ... Newark International Airport having Muslims flying fleets of planes, Muslim pilots ... can you see the vision of an area of no crime, controlled by the Muslims?"

This utopia may always remain a fantasy -- at least in North America, where just 2% of the population is Muslim. In any case, the inflexibility of fundamentalist Islam makes it highly unlikely it could ever dominate North American life, with its emphasis on free speech and individual rights.

Already, there are signs of rebellion in the Muslim ranks. At a round-table discussion of clerics, held recently at the Islamic Cultural Center, a row of veiled women sitting at the back of the mosque, did the unthinkable: They challenged the authority of the imams.

"You asked us to vote for George W. and we did and he hasn't moved on the issue of Palestine," a woman with an American accent in a black hijab said loudly, addressing a crowd of several hundred. "We're waiting. We're not asking to fight but we are waiting to be told what to do.... You want to blame someone for what is happening to Muslims? Look in the mirror."

Several women cheered and hollered and clapped.

Such a scene would be unthinkable in Muslim nations such as Pakistan, where women often cannot even enter the mosque, let alone question a cleric.

On this fall afternoon, as the sun created geometric shapes on the mosque's mint-coloured walls, the imams looked momentarily shocked.

"Be disciplined," one finally answered. "Follow the leadership here in this country."

Perhaps in the end, it is not U.S. forces in the Middle East, but the dynamics of the North American melting pot at home that will undermine the Islamist jihad, and help bring about its ultimate defeat.