American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us

by Steven Emerson

  Wahhabism was the religion of the al-Saud family when they unified the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s and seized power, establishing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabis were fierce puritans and iconoclasts, their origins beginning in the 1700s in the Arabian peninsula. They destroyed many Muslim shrines, including the graves of many of the Prophet’s first followers and the Garden of Khadijah, his first wife. Visitation to tombs, they claimed, was idol-worship, a corruption of “true Islam,” a view with no basis in Islamic law or doctrine.

  Modern adherents of Wahhabism are tethered to Islamic militancy. “Their way of thinking is that Islam has to be reformed, and with a sword,” said Sheikh Kabbani. “They think they cannot reform Islam except with the mentality of a sword and the mentality of a gun. Unfortunately, extremism appeared in Islam, but not because of Islam. Islam always presented—and I say it many times that Prophet Muhammad used to act this way with his neighbors or his friends that [were] not Muslims—[giving them] gifts, flowers, and love, not ever holding a sword against them, or ever starting a struggle or a fight against them. There are many events in Muslim history where the Prophet made peace treaties with non-Muslims.”4

  Kabbani’s chief message, when he testified to the State Department, was to beware. “These people nowadays are developing two ways of understanding the situation of Islam. From one side they think that they have to reform it; it is a duty on them, they have been brainwashed to think that they have to cleanse the world of devils and demons and of countries that suppress them, oppress them, and try to shut them down…. I am speaking openly to give advice to the government and the U.S. officials in order to open their minds because this is a big danger that may result in a struggle within the United States.”5

  Sheikh Kabbani has, not surprisingly, angered the American Muslim establishment by charging that they have backed terror causes. For understandable reasons of self-interest, it was not a message that the American Muslim establishment wanted the American public to hear. “There have been many nonprofit organizations established in the United States whose job is only to collect money and to send it…to extremists outside the United States…. They send it under humanitarian aid, but it doesn’t go to humanitarian aid…. Yes, some of it will go to homeless people and poor people but the majority, 90 percent of it, will go into the black markets in these countries and [to] buying weapon arsenals.”6 He also argued that certain Muslim organizations had “hijacked the mike” in claiming to speak for the entire community.

  Sheikh Kabbani is a traditional Muslim who practices the discipline of Sufism. Sufism originated in the teachings of Mohammad and was formalized into forty different schools. They seek to uphold the tenets of perfection of character and purification, parallel with the requirements of practical law and doctrine. Sufism is a much more relaxed and tolerant version of Islam, popular in the Eastern Mediterranean. The “whirling dervishes” of Turkey are Sufi Muslims. Sufis are not very popular with Muslim fundamentalists, who see them as just the sort of frivolous offshoot that they are trying to abolish in returning to the True Islam. It is not surprising to find Kabbani and the fundamentalists in disagreement.

  But the important thing is this. There are many, many sides to the Islamic religion, and the existence of a strong element of militant fundamentalists is a threat not only to American institutions and lives, but also to moderate Muslims. Tarek Fatah, who hosts “The Muslim Chronicles” on Canadian television, told The Toronto Star he has kept his bags packed since criticizing Muslim extremism on television. “I’ve been getting death threats, and moderate leaders in the U.S. have also faced fierce criticism for opposing extremist regimes and North American organizations that condone the actions carried out by extremists in the name of Islam,” he said. “The moderate voice is almost nonexistent.”

  “It saddens me that CAIR Canada has become one of the leading organizations speaking on behalf of Muslims,” he added, speaking of the Canadian branch of the Council for American Islamic Relations. “And they won’t even come out and formally denounce the people we know are behind the terrorism, because they have indirect support from the same groups. This nonsense of condemning the act and then wriggling out of their responsibility needs to be confronted.”7

  Some of the struggles between the fundamentalists and moderates have been well publicized. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood made an unsuccessful knife attack on seventy-two-year-old Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was deemed “too moderate” in his religious beliefs. But such a visible hero is echoed many times over by less famous victims.

  Another American unsung hero was Seifeldin (“Seif”) Ashmawy, an Egyptian-born Muslim and peace activist who immigrated to the United States in search of freedom in 1969. He organized a group of like-minded moderate Muslims to form the Peace Press Association, publishing a monthly newsletter entitled Voice of Peace. He also appeared monthly on “Religion on the Line,” a WABC-radio program, and served on the Advisory Board of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. Prior to the first World Trade Center bombing, he debated Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in New Jersey, which shows no small amount of bravery.

  Ashmawy’s magazine, Voice of Peace, was a voice of reason. He continually exposed the pretensions of Muslim groups and pointed the way toward a more rational assessment of the religion. In 1996, he testified alongside me before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “most of our [Islamic] institutions in the United States are controlled by either extremists or profiteers. Both are abusing the freedom which we enjoy and…are being supported and financed by…the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and the Gulf States.”8

  Ashmawy was particularly critical of American Muslim organizations that purported to speak for all Muslims and yet, in certain cases, were radicalized and actively involved with terrorist organizations. In Senate testimony, for example, he argued that “The American Muslim Council is an umbrella group of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and it is actively involved in championing the movements of Hamas, Algerian FIS, Tunisian Al-Nahda movement, Turkish Welfare Party, Jordanian Islamic Action Front and the Sudanese National Islamic Front. The American Muslim Council does not represent American Muslims, it represents the extremists and those that believe in terrorism.”9

  In an often-quoted letter headed “Deception in the Media,” published on the MSANEWS Web site (run by the Muslim Students Association) and dated January 17, 1996, Ashmawy took both the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American Muslim Council to task for defending Islamic extremism. “It is a known fact that both the AMC…and CAIR have defended, apologized for and rationalized the actions of extremist groups and leaders such as convicted World Trade Center conspirator Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, Egyptian extremists,…the Sudanese Islamic Front, and extremist parliamentarians from the Jordanian Islamic Action Front,” he wrote. “The real challenge for moderates like myself is to prevent my Muslim brethren from being deceived by extremist groups that pretend to represent their interests.”

  Ashmawy did more than just expose media spokesmen and argue for a more moderate and tolerant version of Islam. He also tried to warn the U.S. government about the spread of terrorism to its shores. In his Senate testimony he stated,

  Indeed, what I have discovered is that the heart, if not the soul, of the extremists is in fact largely in the United States, where these radicals have set up many of their fundraising and political headquarters. These groups have literally hijacked the mainstream Islamic organizations here in the United States. They are the engines that drive the radical groups in the Middle East. Besides [providing] millions of dollars of funds as well as propaganda, these groups do something far more dangerous: they provide legitimacy to the radicals.

  Tragically, Ashmawy died in a car accident in 1998. His courageous voice will always be missed.

  *

  My final example of a hero is also a close friend. Khalid Duran—the colleague with whom I went to Pakistan—has been my friend for ma
ny, many years. He is a Muslim and a thoughtful scholar with wide-ranging interests, and a sensitive and humane individual. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that there is also a price on his head in the Muslim world.

  Duran was born in Spain of parents who were descended from the Barbary pirates of Morocco. “Whenever my children ask about our origins I tell them ‘You don’t want to know,’” he says. “But when I did tell them my youngest daughter thought it was kind of exciting. ‘Now I can be Captain Hook on Halloween,’ she said.”

  Duran lost his father at four but his mother worked doubly hard in bringing him up. Using a wide network of friends and relatives throughout Europe, she helped him get a good education. In 1956 he was sent to live with Hafiz Kamil Silajdzic, a family friend in Bosnia. “They had a ten-year-old son named Haris,” says Duran. “I was six years older but we became pretty good friends.” Forty years later, Haris Silajdzic became the prime minister of Bosnia, serving from 1993 to 2000, when he resigned in a dispute over how big a part religion should play in the government. (He wanted less.)

  Fascinated with his culture and devoted to Islam, Khalid went to Pakistan to finish high school. “I studied in one of the madrassehs—the ones you see in the news, where they now teach nothing but the Koran. They’ve been there all along. It’s just that in my day it was a much more liberal education.” Duran mastered Urdu, the native language of Pakistan, as well as Arabic. (He already had Spanish and German and would eventually learn English.) “I think my ambition was to be minister of education in some country,” he says. “I just never figured out which one.”

  At twenty-two he returned to Europe and began studying sociology and political science at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, supporting himself by doing road construction work. He did his Ph.D. dissertation on “The Quest for Muslim Identity,” a study of Amhad Amin, a liberal Egyptian reformer of the early twentieth century. While at the universities he was also courted by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. “It was just a very natural thing,” he says. “It was a way for Muslims to get together. They didn’t ask me to build bombs or perform terrorist acts or anything. Mostly we had a lot of meetings.”

  Duran enjoyed the company of fellow Muslims but soon began to doubt their ideology. “It didn’t ring well in my ears,” he says. “I had grown up in Spain with Franco’s fascism and after a while I began to say to myself, ‘You know, this sounds like the same thing.’ It was a very, very narrow point of view. Muslims were the only good people in the world and we were the only good Muslims.” After a few years he quietly dropped his participation.

  Upon finishing graduate school, he returned to Pakistan to teach at Islamabad University. “At the time Pakistan was still very much under the British influence and everything was taught in English,” he says. “I taught in Urdu. I was the first professor ever to do that. I had only learned it in high school but I could speak it better than the natives.”

  The years from 1968 to 1974 were turbulent, with the break-away of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh and a brief war with India. “There were many sects and they were always recruiting me,” he recalls. “I tried them all but it never worked out. I’m too undisciplined.”

  Instead, he began a further exploration of the Muslim world, doing anthropological research on three cultures—the Andalusian Muslims of Spain, the Swahili Muslims of East Africa, and the Hindustani Muslims of northern India. In the process he met his wife, who is East African.

  “Islam is a highly flexible religion that has adapted to many local circumstances,” he says. “In Spain you can see the influence of Judaism. In East Africa, you see traces of animism. In India, there is a lot of Buddhism in Islam. Each culture is quite different yet each thinks of itself as the true Islam.”

  With his broad-based background, Duran began to serve as an ambassador of moderate Islam in many European forums—especially after the Iranian Revolution brought Islamic fundamentalism to the fore. In 1978 he wrote The Political Role of Islam for the German Middle East Institute. Among other things, he pointed out the catastrophe that was being caused by Saudi oil money spreading Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world. For this effort he was blacklisted by the Saudi Embassy.

  “The fundamentalism of the last half-century is a stranger to traditional Islam,” he says. “It’s based on something entirely different. Basically, it’s a revolt against the modern world. People in modern societies are very cosmopolitan and tolerant of ethnic and cultural differences. They thrive on them. But fundamentalism tries to establish an ethnic purity and withdraw from cosmopolitan society.

  “People don’t remember, but the Muslim Brotherhood grew up in Egypt in the 1930s as an imitation of European fascism, which was also a revolt against modernity. In Italy and Germany you had the brownshirts and the blackshirts. In Egypt you had the greenshirts, which was the Muslim Brotherhood. It failed in Europe but survived in Egypt and spread to other parts of the Islamic world.”

  Duran warns that much of the hatred for America comes from the vast disparity of incomes across the globe. “This isn’t just an Islamic thing,” he says. “You find resentment of America and its people everywhere where there are poor people. They don’t have enough to eat and then they turn on television and see something like ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty.’ It’s bound to cause resentment. Of course you have to realize that watching a television set in the Third World means sharing it with 20 or 30 other people.”

  Yet some of the worst anti-Americanism among Muslim fundamentalists comes from people who are often remarkably well educated—engineers, doctors, and even scientists. Duran has an answer for that as well.

  “The odd thing about Islamic fundamentalism is that it’s always had its strongest appeal among engineers,” he says. “There’s even a joke about it in Arabic. The words ‘al-ikhwan al-muslimun’ mean ‘Muslim Brothers’ and ‘al-ikhwan al-muhandisun’ means ‘Engineer Brothers.’ In Egypt they always say the Muslim Brotherhood is really the Engineering Brotherhood.”

  Duran attributes this to shortcomings in education. “Engineers don’t exercise their fantasy and imagination. Everything is precise and mathematical. They don’t study what we call ‘the humanities.’ Consequently when it comes to issues that involve religion and personal emotion, they tend to see things in very stark terms. The Muslim Brotherhood has become very conscious of this. They’ve set up special programs in the universities to try to recruit students in the humanities, but they never have any luck. Having an education in literature or politics or sociology seems to inoculate you against the appeals of fundamentalism.”

  With his broad knowledge and humanistic outlook, Khalid Duran has never had any trouble moving in a multicultured world. His German-language book on Osama bin Laden has been a bestseller in Germany ever since September 11, 2001. In 2001 he also published Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews with the American Jewish Committee. The book was endorsed by Prince Hassan of Jordan and received favorable reviews throughout the Muslim world.

  Unfortunately, it did not satisfy the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. CAIR wrote a derogatory review, censuring the book’s contents and attacking Duran personally, questioning whether he was a “real Muslim.” “They referred to me as ‘The Pretender,’” he says. “They not only questioned my religion, they doubted my origins and said that Khalid Duran probably wasn’t my real name!”

  Sheikh ‘Abdu-I-Mun‘im AbuZant is a mullah with Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, that nation’s fundamentalist organization. After reading CAIR’s review of the book (not the book itself), Sheikh AbuZant called Duran an “apostate” in Ash-Shahid, a Jordanian newspaper.10 Apostasy in Islam is generally regarded as high treason. According to most interpretations of the shari‘a (law), an apostate from Islam is to be put to death.

  Brazenly ignoring reality, CAIR immediately claimed that AbuZant’s death threat existed only in the minds of the American Jewish Committee and was a ploy to increase sales of the book.11 An article in
Az-Zaituna, the party paper of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), CAIR’s parent body, called the fatwa concocted, while at the same time dismissing it as unimportant because it had appeared “in a local paper.”12 But in fact the reality was that Duran was now in physical danger.

  *

  More than anything else I have experienced in my investigation of Muslim radicalism here and abroad, Khalid Duran’s experience proves to me that radical fundamentalists do not represent the real Islam. The breadth of Duran’s scholarship and understanding matches that of the great Arab scholars of the Caliphate—the Golden Age of Islam that the fundamentalists look back on with such nostalgia. Yet here when they find the same lofty understanding right in their midst, they reject it and even try to kill it. This is the same book-burning fanaticism that Europe witnessed during the dreadful decade of the 1930s.

  I can only hope Muslims everywhere will eventually recognize the self-destructive path that fundamentalism represents and will return to the highest ideals of their true religion.

  But in the end, wishing for a “nice” ending to the clash between militant Islam and Islam, we must not blind ourselves to the bitter reality that militant Islamic fundamentalism holds the far more powerful upper hand in the intra-religious debate within Islam. For years prior to September 2001, the West—and the United States in particular—deluded itself into the belief that militant Islamic fundamentalism could be contained, that it was not a strategic threat to the U.S., that it could be co-opted, and that there existed a rigid separation between those groups that “condemned” terrorism and those that engaged in it. The horrific casualties of September 11 showed that our Western conceptions were in fact misconceptions. Militant Islam, in its various incarnations, will continue to be a fixed feature on our political landscape for many years to come.