The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West

Lorenzo Vidino

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231522298
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Europe and North America, networks tracing their origins back to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements have rapidly evolved into multifunctional and richly funded organizations competing to become the major representatives of Western Muslim communities and government interlocutors. Some analysts and policy makers see these organizations as positive forces encouraging integration. Others cast them as modern-day Trojan horses, feigning moderation while radicalizing Western Muslims.

Lorenzo Vidino brokers a third, more informed view. Drawing on more than a decade of research on political Islam in the West, he keenly analyzes a controversial movement that still remains relatively unknown. Conducting in-depth interviews on four continents and sourcing documents in ten languages, Vidino shares the history, methods, attitudes, and goals of the Western Brothers, as well as their phenomenal growth. He then flips the perspective, examining the response to these groups by Western governments, specifically those of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Highly informed and thoughtfully presented, Vidino's research sheds light on a critical juncture in Muslim-Western relations.

1

Who Speaks for Western Muslims?

No American Muslim leader ever had better access to the U.S. political establishment than Abdurahman Alamoudi. After his arrival in the United States as a student in 1980, the Eritrean-born biochemist involved himself in various American Muslim organizations, assuming leadership positions in several of them.¹ By the end of the decade he had settled in Washington, where he began to develop an impressive network of contacts within the upper echelons of the American political establishment. In 1990, Alamoudi cofounded the American Muslim Council (AMC) and soon became a regular visitor to the White House, establishing cordial relationships with both Republican and Democratic administrations. He held frequent meetings with members of Congress and even managed to successfully lobby Congress to host, for the first time in history, the opening invocation from an Islamic leader.²

By the mid-1990s Alamoudi had become a staple of Washington’s political life.³ His organization planned events with interfaith groups, dealing with the country’s Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders at the highest levels. Representatives and senators, bishops, and media personalities, eager to establish relations with American Muslims, enthusiastically attended AMC’s events, which often were held in Washington’s most prestigious hotels. ⁴ After extensive meetings the Department of Defense put Alamoudi in the powerful position of training and vetting the imams who attend to the religious needs of American Muslims serving in the military.⁵ His organization was praised by the FBI as “the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States,” and the State Department even appointed him as a goodwill ambassador, routinely asking him to travel throughout the world representing American Muslims.⁶ Washington’s establishment considered Alamoudi a successful, representative, and moderate Muslim leader who could be a spokesman and model for the American Muslim community.

In 2003, however, an unexpected discovery during a routine customs screening at London’s Heathrow Airport undid Alamoudi’s accomplishments. He was found to have concealed $340,000 in his suitcase. An investigation revealed that Alamoudi had been illegally importing funds from Libya since 1995 and that part of the money was intended to support a murky plot—conceived by the Libyan government and two London-based Saudi dissidents linked to al Qaeda—to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah. A year later Alamoudi pled guilty to all charges and was sentenced to twenty-three years in jail.⁷ The investigation also revealed Alamoudi’s financial dealings with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and al Qaeda, for which the Treasury Department accused him of fund-raising in the United States.⁸

To many in Washington, Alamoudi’s ties did not come as a complete shock. Since the 1990s, in fact, law enforcement agencies had been quietly monitoring his links to elements suspected of terrorist ties.⁹ In addition, over the years, Alamoudi had repeatedly made comments that clearly displayed his sympathies for Islamist outfits banned in the United States. Once, authorities intercepted a phone conversation in which Alamoudi told his interlocutor that the 1998 attacks perpetrated by al Qaeda against American embassies in East Africa had been “wrong,” but only because “many African Muslims have died and not a single American died.”¹⁰Alamoudi had also expressed his political views in public venues. In October 2000, speaking at a rally in Washington’s Lafayette Park, just a block away from the White House, he proudly proclaimed: “Hear that, Bill Clinton, we are all supporters of Hamas! I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah!”¹¹

The case of Abdurahman Alamoudi and AMC raises a number of questions. In 1996 AMC claimed to have 5,000 members, out of a population of American Muslims that the group itself estimated, quite generously, at 7 million.¹² How could the head of an organization that by its own calculations represented no more than 0.07 percent of the American Muslim population, whose leadership had never in any way been elected by the Muslim community, have become the de facto spokesman for American Muslims, testifying before Congress and expressing views in the media on behalf of the whole community? The extraordinarily poor judgment of large segments of the American political establishment requires some explanation. Why would U.S. authorities, who were or should have been aware of Alamoudi’s views and ties to suspect groups, embrace him and his organization as a model for American Muslims?

Though the height of Alamoudi’s fall makes his case unique, the issues raised by his case are hardly limited to him or to the United States. Rather, they highlight a situation that is common to virtually all Western countries, whose governments have been attempting for the past twenty years to identify representative and, in their view, moderate interlocutors within their Muslim communities. While circumstances and experiences vary from country to country, most display similar patterns and difficulties. Particularly after 9/11, the debate over which individuals and organizations Western governments should engage as the representatives of their local Muslim communities has been intense and seemingly unending. As the story of Alamoudi dramatically shows, such choices are not easy—for reasons that lie in the internal dynamics of Western Muslim communities and in the intricacies of how Western governments decide such matters.

The Birth of Western Islam

The year 710 marked the first contact between Europe and the then nascent Muslim world.¹³ Raiders led by the legendary commander Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa to the Iberian peninsula and began a drive into the continent that ended just twenty-two years later, when Charles Martel defeated them in Poitiers. The following thirteen centuries have been characterized by continuous tensions and conflicts between Europe and the Muslim world. In the Middle Ages, when Europe was in a state of cultural and economic crisis and Islamic civilization at its peak, Muslims seemed to have the upper hand. Although they never managed to penetrate into the heart of Europe, they occupied or battled in its southern and southeastern extremities. By the seventeenth century, fortunes appeared to reverse; the decline of Muslim influence began with the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz, which was signed by the Ottomans after their second unsuccessful siege of Vienna. European powers slowly surpassed Muslim powers in economic, scientific, cultural, and military achievements and began their expansion into Muslim lands. By the end of World War I, only a few pockets of this territory were free of their direct or indirect control.

The end of World War II heralded a new era of Muslim-European relations. European countries slowly came to realize that they could no longer afford empires and, more or less reluctantly, granted independence to their colonies in the Muslim world. Moreover, the economic boom that followed the war created a need in European countries for cheap, unskilled labor—satisfied with immigrants who came largely from Muslim countries. Thus large numbers of Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans found jobs in France, a country with which they had historical ties, as did Pakistanis and Indians in Great Britain and Turks in Germany. Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries also attracted Muslim workers. Both sides envisioned this migratory movement as a temporary and mutually advantageous solution to pressing economic problems. The Europeans assumed that immigrant workers would stay for only a few years, contribute to the region’s economic growth, and then go back to their countries of origin. By the same token, migrant workers originally planned to use the fruits of their hard labor to build a new life for themselves in their home countries. European governments did not feel the need to devise policies to accommodate and integrate individuals who would soon return to their countries of origin, and Muslims limited their religious life to a few makeshift mosques, leading some experts to speak of “cellar Islam.”¹⁴ Muslims, and consequently Islam, therefore remained in effect an invisible presence in Europe.¹⁵

The situation changed significantly in the 1970s. In the wake of the economic downturn triggered by the 1974 oil crisis, most European countries restricted immigration.¹⁶ Yet, even as regulations reduced the influx of new laborers, family reunification laws enacted throughout Europe allowed migrant workers to be joined by their spouses and children. Rather than returning to their home countries, the vast majority decided to settle permanently in Europe with their extended families. Since then, Europe’s Muslim population has grown steadily. To the first wave of immigrants has been added a second and even a third generation of European-born Muslims, most of them citizens of their country of birth. As large numbers of asylum seekers have joined legal and illegal immigrants, the Muslim presence has expanded to areas of southern Europe it had not previously reached. Today, virtually all European countries host a Muslim minority, and the best estimates put the number of Muslims living in Western Europe at between 15 and 20 million—making Islam the continent’s second religion.¹⁷

With the arrival of women and children, Muslims and non-Muslims began to interact not only in factories but also in schools, hospitals, and housing projects, with public administrations and local institutions.¹⁸ Muslims began expressing the need to build mosques, to have their faith taught in public schools, to celebrate weddings and funerals according to Islamic tradition, to find halal butchers, and so on. As they transitioned from being temporary laborers to permanent residents and then to citizens, Islam left the cellars and became more visible.¹⁹ Having become a stable presence in Europe, Muslims grew more vocal in demanding that their faith be accommodated into European societies and that they be accorded the same rights as other religious groups.

The history of Islam in North America is in some respects different from that of Europe. A small Muslim presence had always existed in the United States, as some slaves from West Africa had Islamic practices that they maintained throughout their captivity.²⁰ From the late nineteenth century to the present, waves of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans have settled in North America, albeit in numbers proportionally lower than those of most European countries. As a result, the American Muslim population, currently gauged at between 3 and 5 million, is extremely diverse, dominated by no single ethnic or national group. Particularly noteworthy is the high number of converts—estimated as more than 40 percent of the country’s Muslim population.²¹ A large percentage of the converts are African Americans, who often adhere to particularistic forms of Islam, such as those espoused by the Nation of Islam.

The distinctions between American and European Islam go beyond immigration patterns and ethnicity. Whereas Muslim immigrants to Europe were and, to a large degree, still are uneducated and unskilled laborers, the vast majority of Muslims who have settled in the United States and Canada are well-educated professionals, many of whom initially left their homelands to study at American universities. Most belong to the middle and upper middle classes; unlike European Muslims, who generally languish at the bottom of measures of economic integration, the average American Muslim household’s income is equal to, if not higher than, that of the average non-Muslim American household, and the percentage of Muslim college graduates is more than double the national percentage.²² While large segments of European Muslim communities contend with deprivation and marginalization, American Muslims generally have integrated more easily into the mainstream culture both socially and economically. Moreover, the American tradition of religious freedom and diversity creates an environment in which the accommodation of Islam presents fewer problems than in Europe.

Despite such differences, Islam in both Europe and North America has experienced a remarkable surge in numbers and thus in visibility over the past three decades. As large communities have formed in most Western countries, policy makers have had to address the governance of Islam.²³ All Western countries recognize religious freedom, but they have fundamentally different ways of accommodating and regulating religion, most developed over centuries of often tense interactions between various churches and the state.²⁴ The rights and obligations of both parties have gradually been defined in models that range from the state churches of England and various Scandinavian countries to the rigid separation (verging on antagonism) between religion and state that characterizes the French system. Because Islam, as a newcomer to the West, had to adapt to these different and long-established patterns, its governance varies significantly from country to country.²⁵

A Leaderless Community

A major issue facing several Western countries is the legal status of Islam.²⁶ All states fully guarantee individual freedom of religion, but they may take different approaches to organized religion. In such countries as the United States, Great Britain, or the Netherlands, religious groups can constitute themselves and conduct their activities without the need of any government authorization. But in several European countries, only those recognized by the government can enjoy various legal and fiscal benefits. Germany, Italy, Spain, and Belgium are among those that rely on a concordat system: religious groups must undergo a vetting process that ensures their compatibility with the values of the state and must sign an agreement with the state to gain the rights that have been traditionally granted to Christian churches. Few of the different approaches to the legal recognition of Islam have been free of difficulties and controversies.

Most other aspects of the governance of Islam in the West, particularly in Europe, have also posed serious problems. With rare exceptions, Western countries are still struggling to determine if and how to teach Islam to Muslim children in public schools. The construction of mosques and Muslim cemeteries often spurs political confrontations because the relevant laws are unclear. Despite the efforts of some countries, the qualifications and legal status of most imams preaching in Western mosques are unregulated, creating problems of inequitable treatment of Muslim clerics and allowing the infiltration of radicals.

The reasons for these problems are many—the massive increase in the number of Muslims living in the West during a relatively brief period; the tendency of any debate concerning Islam to become politicized and unusually heated—particularly in the post–9/11 world; and the resistance of various political forces to many, if not all, concessions to Islam have all played a role. Another crucial factor, perhaps less obvious, is that nearly all Western Muslim communities lack unified leadership. Most other religious confessions, from minority Christian churches to Jewish and Buddhist groups, have been able to identify leaders—often through umbrella organizations—who could legitimately be seen as representative and could speak to policy makers seeking to extend to them the legal and financial benefits traditionally accorded major Christian churches.

The task of finding interlocutors within the various Muslim communities of the West, in contrast, has been excruciatingly difficult. Many governments deal with a vast array of organizations fighting to become the anointed representatives of the Muslim community and unwilling to cooperate with their competitors. Which of these should sit at the table with the government to negotiate issues such as regulating the slaughter of animals according to the halal method or drafting legislation to allow Muslims not to work on Friday? Which should be asked to partner with the government to draft programs to teach Islam in public schools or to train imams? As one commentator stated, “When government officials look for a responsible interlocutor, they find that the Muslim voice is a cacophony rather than a chorus.”²⁷

This cacophony is the direct by-product of the extreme diversity of Western Muslim communities, which are deeply divided by ethnicity, national origin, language, sect, and political opinion.²⁸ Indeed, many wonder if it would be more appropriate to speak of “Muslim communities” rather than a single Muslim community.²⁹ Though some of the divisions (particularly those along ethno-linguistic lines) are slowly diminishing as new generations of Western-born Muslims come of age, they are reflected in the high number of distinct organizations created over the past few decades.

To navigate this complex landscape, the myriad of Musli...

Table of contents

• Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare Bruce Hoffman, Series Editor
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 - Who Speaks for Western Muslims?
• 2 - The Western Brotherhood
• 3 - Aims and Methods
• 4 - The Governments’ Dilemma
• 5 - Great Britain
• 6 - Germany
• 7 - The United States
• 8 - The Brothers and Terrorism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page