A Quiet Revolution (29 page)

Malcolm X would now issue a “strong endorsement” of Sunni Islam. He would return to Saudi Arabia later that year to meet Said Ra- madan, son-in-law of Hasan al-Banna, with whom he would continue to have exchanges.
46
During this visit Malcolm X received training in da‘wa at the Muslim World League. In addition, the University of Medina made a number of scholarships available to him to distribute to Ameri- cans wishing to study there. Malcolm X would also continue to have re- lationships with “various Saudi-financed missionary groups” until his

assassination in February
1965
.
47

The trend toward Sunni Islam—and Sunni Islam, moreover, as taught and practiced by the network of interconnected Islamist organi- zations comprising the Saudi-based Muslim World League, the Jamaat-i, and the Brotherhood—among African Americans grew steadily stronger in the ensuing years. Other notable African American Muslim leaders pursuing this path included the jazz musician Talib Dawud, who was in- troduced to Qutb’s writings by an Egyptian immigrant of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmad Tawfiq. Tawfiq had studied at al-Azhar in the
1960
s. Returning to the United States in
1967
with English translations of Qutb’s works and inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, he founded the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood on East
113
th Street in New York.
48

After the death of Elijah Muhammad in
1975
, his son W. D. Mo-

hammed succeeded him. The younger Mohammed converted to Sunni Islam and led the larger proportion of the followers of Nation of Islam away from the beliefs taught by his father. (Louis Farrakhan, who re- jected this move, would become the leader of those who remained with the Nation of Islam.) After W. D. Mohammed made this move to Sunni Islam he became a “major beneficiary of funds from Muslim majority countries.” In
1978
a number of such countries, among them Saudi Ara- bia and Qatar, designated Mohammed the “sole consultant and trustee for their distribution of funds to missionary organizations in the U.S.”
49
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Through the seventies and eighties Sunni Islam continued making gains among African American Muslims for many reasons, among them the growing availability of funding from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in support of missionary efforts, and as a result of the growing presence of immigrant activist Muslims.

Sherman Jackson notes that the Salafi movement among African Americans, a movement he describes as “genetically linked to the Wah- habi movement,” also began to make gains among African Americans in the
1970
s, a time in which, Jackson writes, “many [African Americans]

went to Saudi Arabia to study, often on scholarships provided by the Saudi government.” The Salafi movement’s influence, Jackson observes, “goes far beyond its numbers,” as its “staunchly ‘protestant’ approach resonates with the generality of Blackamerican Muslims.”
50

Beginning in the seventies, African American Sunni Muslim lead- ers now “mingled regularly with foreign and immigrant imams,” Curtis noted. By the early
1980
s, he continued, as many as twenty-six African American communities “were receiving the services of leaders provided

by the Muslim World League.”
51

Through these times some African American leaders and com- munities were strongly influenced by the Islamist writings of Sayyid Qutb and Abu’l ‘Ala Mawdudi, writings that organizations such as the MSA and ISNA disseminated. Despite this, however, and despite the “patronage [which] many African American organizations received from Muslim-majority countries (such as Saudi Arabia) and pan-Islamic organizations (such as the Muslim World League) they nevertheless did not ‘blindly sign on’ to other people’s agendas.” Rather, as GhaneaBassiri explains, they “continued to practice Islam within the context of the her-

itage of Islam in African America and focused on the problems of their own communities.”
52

GhaneaBassiri goes on to note that there is a general tendency among Muslims in America to group themselves in mosques “on the basis of ethnicity and nationality”—and one might add common lan- guage—with South Asian and Arab being strong examples of these, a tendency, he observes, that also applies to African American groups. Thus while some African American leaders such as W. D. Mohammed and Siraj Wahhaj of al-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn serve on the execu- tive boards of national Muslim organizations like ISNA, they remain “cul- turally and socially within the African American Muslim community.” Importantly, all of this meant that through the seventies and eight-

ies Sunni Islam would increasingly be the dominant form of Islam fol- lowed in African American mosques. This Sunni Islam, emanating from the League, blended and braided together Wahhabi Islam, the Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that of the Jamaat-i Islami.

As ISNA and CAIR and other organizations with Islamist roots (among them, for example, MAS—an organization with ICNA and Ja- maat-i connections founded in
1992
)
53
increasingly gained prominence over the ensuing years, the Islamist form of Islam steadily became the

normative form of Islam, increasingly accepted now by many Muslims as well as non-Muslims as the one “true” and “correct” form of Islam.

As such organizations gained prominence, they and their leaders became the nation’s authorities on Islam. The government and media both turned to them—naturally enough, given that they were the most visible Muslim American organizations on the landscape. The idea that wearing hijab was a “religiously mandatory requirement” for Muslim women was of course among the ideas that they taught—as it continues to be, as a glance through any of the journals and materials they publish today makes clear.

Thus in the mid- to late
1990
s, as a new generation of American

Muslims schooled in such schools and attending mosques began to come of age, the numbers of young women in hijab seemed suddenly to mul- tiply. An ethnically diverse first generation of American-born Muslims, all raised within the framework of the Sunni Islam of the Islamic Revival or Islamic Awakening, were reaching adulthood.

The
1990
s was also the decade in which America experienced its first terrorist attack at the hands of Islamic militants. Islamist organiza- tions continuing to emerge in these years into positions of uncontested dominance on the American landscape would find themselves under at- tack, caught up in the fierce debates of the day and the palpably more hostile atmosphere that was now gathering force regarding Islam in America—topics I describe in the following chapter.

•
8
•
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The
1990
s

A Changing Climate in America

F

ollowing the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in
1979
, the United States and Saudi Arabia joined forces, out of their shared hatred for the Soviet Union and its “godless empire,” to defeat communism in Afghanistan.

Saudi Arabia encouraged its youth to go to Afghanistan to fight the jihad against the Soviet Union. In Washington, the Reagan administra- tion had elevated Wahhabism “to the status of liberation theology—one that would free the region of communism.”
1
The jihadists, dubbed “free- dom fighters,” were “trained and equipped by the CIA and supported by petro-dollars from the Arabian Peninsula.”
2
Fighters were recruited elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world. When Egypt, in the mid-eight- ies, released Islamists jailed in connection with Sadat’s assassination, they were sent on pilgrimage to Mecca, and from there they boarded flights to Pakistan to fight the communists in Afghanistan.

Islamist activists traveled internationally to preach and recruit for the jihad. They became the “beneficiaries of America’s tolerance for anti- communists of any stripe,” and they circulated and recruited freely, in- cluding among Muslims in America. Altogether the U.S.’s pursuit of such policies would have the effect, wrote Gilles Kepel, of turning the United States into an “Islamist haven.”
3
The United States had become “one of the main fund-raising destinations” for the recruitment of jihadis—or

mujahedeen—for the war in Afghanistan.
4
Recruitment activities were under way now in Brooklyn and New Jersey, for instance, and indeed the Services Bureau, an organization supported by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, opened branches in thirty-three cities across America, and recruitment centers for the Afghan jihad were opened even on American university campuses.
5
Islamic student associations, according to Kepel, now welcomed “preachers and activists” who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, and these student associa- tions would set up the Islamist movement’s “first English language web- sites.”
6

Contemporary observers of ISNA’s
1987
Annual Convention re-

ported that new currents were making themselves felt at ISNA and that there was a noticeably larger presence that year of Brotherhood mem- bers from abroad than had been the case in previous years. One such observer—Larry Poston—reported that the keynote speaker at the con- vention that year was Khurram Murad, a very senior figure in the Ja- maat-i Islami known for his activism in the work of da‘wa. Poston found Murad’s speech alarming in its forcefulness. Urging Muslims to hold on to their faith and to pursue the work of da‘wa, Murad’s address con- cluded, wrote Poston, with a “ringing challenge to the listeners to both maintain and refine their Islamicity in the midst of a secular environ- ment. If this is done, he stated, America will soon become a Muslim continent.”
7

While Poston found Murad’s projected vision for America alarm- ing, this was evidently not a speech promoting militant jihad against America—or indeed against anyone. Rather, as reported by Poston, it seems to have been a speech that remained fully within the confines of mainstream Islamists’ commitment to pursue and promote their vision through advocacy and activism as voters and citizens. Preachers recruit- ing for the jihad in Afghanistan were apparently not doing so—or were not reported to have been doing so—at ISNA’s conventions.

Through the late
1980
s and early
1990
s Afghanistan had become a

gathering place and training ground for militant Islamists from across the world. Coming together there to fight a common enemy, they also built up a network of jihadis across the globe.

The Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in
1989
,

and the regime they had installed finally fell in
1992
, shortly after the de- mise of the Soviet Union. With the fighting over in Afghanistan, as Fawaz Gerges, an authority on radical Islamism, wrote, “tens of thousands of hardened fighters baptized into a culture of martyrdom” were free now to cause havoc within Afghanistan and wherever they dispersed to across the world. Gerges continued, “How could these warriors be demobilized and reintegrated into their societies as law-abiding citizens? Could the genie be put back in the bottle?”
8

Egypt, as we saw in Chapter
6
, now experienced an outbreak of un-

precedented violence, much of it associated with two militant Islamist groups to which Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman was a religious advisor, and one that was headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri.
9
Both Abdel Rahman and al-Zawahiri were major figures in the Egyptian and international militant Islamist movements, and both had been initially arrested in Egypt in connection with Sadat’s assassination. Both, following their re- lease, went on to work for the jihad in Afghanistan. As Kepel noted, Afghan veterans who had acquired military skills in the training camps of Afghanistan would now deploy these skills “against their own regimes and then against the West from the
1990
s onwards.”
10

It would not be long before America also would find itself the tar- get of violence as some of the most radical jihadists made their way to America where they would plot and execute violence and raise funds and recruit for jihadism. One of these radicals was Abdel Rahman—known as the blind sheikh. Abdel Rahman would be tried in
1995
in the United States for his role in the
1993
bombing of the World Trade Center. He was convicted and sent to prison for life.

An Egyptian and a graduate of al-Azhar, Abdel Rahman had em- braced the teachings of Qutb and Mawdudi and had become a religious guide of the Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Sadat.
11
Impris- oned for a time under Nasser, Abdel Rahman had left Egypt in the
1970
s

when Sadat attempted to “rein in” the Islamists, spending a period in Saudi Arabia, where he found “wealthy sponsors for his cause.”
12
He was detained and tortured in Egypt for his role in Sadat’s assassination but was eventually acquitted and released in
1984
. Abdel Rahman then be-

came an active preacher and recruiter for the jihad in Afghanistan, and as such he was favorably viewed by both the Saudis and the Americans.
13

Brought to trial again in Egypt (and eventually convicted in absentia) in
1990
, Abdel Rahman fled to Sudan, where he obtained a visa for the United States.
‌

In America Abdel Rahman was based in the New York area, where there were recruitment centers for the war in Afghanistan and where he was free to preach and recruit at local mosques.
14
He applied for per- manent residence status in January
1991
, and, despite his well-known

history of involvement with violent groups in Egypt, he obtained a green card in April—obtaining it with “unusual rapidity,” Kepel re- marked. Throughout this period Abdel Rahman also traveled fre- quently to Europe and the Middle East to raise funds and recruit for the jihad in Afghanistan—engaging, that is, in the types of activities that, since the eighties, “had been gratefully assisted and subsidized by the CIA.”
15