Tower of terrorism at Ground Zero

By: Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury

America is defined by the last phrase of its national anthem: The land of the free and the home of the brave. Freedom, in all its forms, is its greatest legacy, which the nation has bravely fought many wars on many fronts to preserve against the unceasing assaults of totalitarianism of all stripes. Time and again, the heroes of the nation bravely sacrificed their lives to protect freedom and liberty.

Currently, America is faced with the insidious, multifaceted, and most deadly threat of Islamism. Since Islam has been around for centuries, there is a tendency to ignore or even deny the threat it poses to humanity. Various concessions are made, some of them as good faith offerings and some in the hope of placating the Islamists. Yet, concessions to threats are appeasements. And appeasements have never solved any problems. They only whet the appetite of the aggressor, give it more power, and make it even more dangerous.

Very unfortunately, in today’s world, Islamists [including political Islam] are set as Islam’s locomotive that takes the Islamic train on its demolition course. Instead of promoting peace, many of the so-called leaders of the ‘Muslim Ummah’ are engaged in fuelling Jihad and killing innocent people in the name of religion. And sadly, such elements are gradually growing influence everywhere in the world as well brainwashing some of the naïve global leaders like Barack Hussain Obama, who continues to appease Islamists without sensing the degree of threat it poses to his very own country.

Islam and democracy are incompatible. As democracies practice their magnificent accommodating belief, they knowingly or unknowingly lay the track for the advancing train wrecking that is Islam. Radical Islamism threatens to set a new record for brutality, contrary to the contention that there is no reason to worry about it. Jihadist Wahabism’s tentacles are reaching out from its cradle in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf Arab Emirates. The Petrodollar flush Sunni-Shia zealots are liberally financing mosques, Madrassas [Islamic indoctrination schools], Islamic centers at universities, front organizations and lobbyists to promote the Wahhabi or Shiite virulent Islamism in every part of America. That makes America the Vulnerable.

Activities of Tablighi Jamaat is gradually increasing in United States, and according to recent statistics disclosed during last year’s largest Tablighi congregations in Bangladesh, more than four hundred Tablighi groups are actively working in various so-called community mosques or in disguise mostly targeting young Americans with the goal of converting them initially to Islam and later giving them Jihadist provocations.

What is Tablighi jamaat?

Tablighi Jamaat [Conveying Group] is a Muslim missionary and revival movement. Their activities are not limited to the Deobandi community.
Leaders of Tablighi Jamaat claim that the movement is strictly non-political in nature, with the main aim of the participants being to work at the grass roots level and reaching out to all Muslims of the world for spiritual development.
Tablighi Jamat seeks to revitalize Muslims around the world. It is claimed that their ideology and practices are in strict accordance with Qur'an and Sunnah.
Despite their affiliation and influence of the prominent scholars of Deoband, they do not focus any particular sect or community. It gathers its members and aids in community activities such as mosque building and education.
Tabligh maintains an international headquarters, the Markaz, in Nizamuddin, Delhi and has several national headquarters to coordinate its activities in over 80 countries. Throughout its history it has sent its members to travel the world, preaching a message of peace and tolerance. It organizes preachers in groups [called Jamaats, meaning Assembly]. Each group, on average, consists of 10 to 12 Muslims who fund themselves in this preaching mission.
The second largest gathering of Muslims after the Hajj [the pilgrimage to Mecca] is known as Bishwa Ijtema, a non political gathering of Muslims from all over the world hosted by the leaders of "International Tabligh Jama'at". It takes place in Tongi which is on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The Tablighi Jamaat was founded in the late 1920s by the well known scholar Maulana Ilyas [Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhelvi] in the Mewat province of India. The inspiration for devoting his life to Islam came to Ilyas during his second pilgrimage to the Hejaz in 1926. Maulana Ilyas put forward the slogan, 'Come O Muslims! Be Muslims'. This expressed the central focus of Tablighi Jamat, which has been renewing Muslim society by renewing Muslim practice in those it feels have lost their desire to devote themselves to Allah and the Islamic prophet, Muhammad.
Maulana Ilyas was a prominent member of the movement and throughout Tabligh's history there has been a degree of association between scholars of Deoband and Tablighi Jamat. Tabligh was formed at a time in India when some Muslim leaders feared that Indian Muslims were losing their Muslim identity to the majority Hindu culture.
In 1978, construction of the Tablighi mosque in Dewsbury, England commenced. Subsequently, the mosque became the European headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat.
Ameer [Emir] or Zimmadar are titles of leadership in the movement. The first Ameer, also the founder, was Maulana Ilyas [1885-1944], second was his son Maulana Muhammad Yusuf Kandhalawi and the third was Maulana Inaam ul Hasan. Now there is a shura which includes two leaders: Maulana Zubair ul Hasan and Maulana Saad Kandhalawi. In Pakistan the duties of the Ameer are being served by Haji Abdulwahhab. Maulana Muhammad Zakariya al-Kandahlawi is also among the prestigious personalities of the Jamaat, as he compiled the famous book Fazail-e-Amal.
With the ascent of Maulana Yusuf, Ilyas´ son, as its second emir (leader), the group began to expand activities in 1946, and within two decades the group reached Southwest and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Initially it expanded its reach to South Asian diaspora communities, first in Arab countries then in Southeast Asia. Once established, the Tablighi Jamaat began engaging local populations as well.
Although the movement first established itself in the United States, it established a large presence in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. It was especially prominent in France during the 1980s. The members of Tablighi Jamat are also represented in the French Council of the Muslim Faith. Tabligh's influence has grown, though, in the increasing Pakistani community in France, which has doubled in the decade before 2008 to 50,000-60,000.
However, Britain is the current focus of the movement in the West, primarily due to the large South Asian population that began to arrive there in the 1960s and 1970s. By 2007, Tabligh members were situated at 600 of Britain's 1350 mosques.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the movement made inroads into Central Asia. As of 2007, it was estimated 10,000 Tablighi members could be found in Kyrgyzstan alone.
By 2008 it had a presence in nearly 80 countries and had become a leading revitalist movement. However, it maintains a presence in India, where at least 100 of its Jamaats go out from Markaz, the international headquarters, to different parts of India and overseas.
There are many celebrated personalities associated with this movement:
These include the former Presidents of Pakistan, Muhammad Rafiq Tarar and Farooq Leghari [Sardar Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari], and former President of India, Dr. Zakir Hussain who was also associated with this movement. Major General Ziaur Rahman, former President and Chief of Army Staff of the Bangladesh Army, was a strong supporter and member of Tablighi Jamaat, and popularized it in Bangladesh.
Lieutenant General [R] Javed Nasir of the Pakistan Army and former head of Inter-Services Intelligence along with former Prime Minister of Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq have also been linked with the movement.
Other well-known politicians such as Dr. Arbab Ghulam Rahim the former chief mininster of Sindh, and Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq, former Pakistani Federal Minister for Religious Affairs have strong ties with the Tablighi activities.
Many well-recognized writers and scholars, such as Dr. Nadir Ali Khan [famous Indian writer] and others are deeply related with it.
Among Pakistani cricket professionals, Shahid Afridi, Saqlain Mushtaq, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed; and the former Pakistani cricketers Saeed Anwar, Saleem Malik are active members. It is also widely believed that Pakistani middle order batsman Mohammad Yousuf embraced Islam with the help of the Tablighi Jamaat. Others include South African batsman Hashim Amla.
This movement also includes eminent directors and producers including Naeem Butt.
Former renowned singer and pop star Junaid Jamshed has close links with Jamaat, and his departure from professional singing career is attributed as the result of his inclination towards this movement.
Many famed actors and models including Moin Akhter, Hammad Khan Jadoon and many others are strongly affiliated with the movement.
Several business men, industrialists, millionaires are actively serving in the movement.
Tablighi Jamaat terror connection:
Policy analysts and Islamist scholars are fiercely divided in their assessments of Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic revivalist organization that has spread from its origins in India in the 1920s to the broader Muslim world.
Policy communities, for their part, have depicted the Tablighi Jamaat as a "gateway to terrorism" and contend that the organization poses numerous, underestimated security risks. The group appeared peripherally in such high-profile cases as those of Jose Padilla, Richard Reid and John Walker Lindh, all of whom allegedly used the group as their stepping stone to radicalism. However, the Islamic studies community tends to depict Tablighi Jamaat, which roughly translates to "group to deliver the message of Islam," as a revivalist organization that eschews politics in its quest to reform society. What accounts for these starkly different accounts, and how can one resolve some of the deeply perplexing questions surrounding this important and secretive organization?
In an attempt to better understand this movement and its social, political, and potential security implications, the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the U.S. Institute of Peace hosted Eva Borreguero, visiting Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University´s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, to present some of the key findings of her ongoing research on the Tablighi Jamaat. This talk drew on Borreguero´s recent fieldwork in India and Pakistan, two important centers for the Tablighi Jamaat. This USIPeaceBrieing highlights Borreguero´s arguments, as well as some of the important issues that arose during the discussion that followed her presentation.
Tablighi Jamaat: Gateway to Terrorism?
In Britain, France, and the United States, the Tablighi Jamaat has appeared on the fringes of several terrorism investigations, leading some to speculate that its apolitical stance simply masks "fertile ground for breeding terrorism." While acknowledging the involvement of the movement´s individuals, Borreguero discounted the claims made against the organization itself.
Borreguero began her assessment by providing an historical overview of this complex movement. Maulana Muhammad Ilyas founded the Tablighi Jamaat in 1925, against the backdrop of the British Empire and a waning Muslim identity in South Asia. Believing that social, political, and economic hardships beset Muslims in India, Ilyas sought a return to a pristine form of Islam from the heterodox variants flourishing in South Asia. For nearly two decades, the Tablighi Jamaat operated mainly within South Asia. With the ascent of Maulana Yusuf, Ilyas´ son, as its second emir [leader], the group began to expand activities in 1946, and within two decades the group reached Southwest and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Initially it expanded its reach to South Asian diaspora communities, first in Arab countries then in Southeast Asia. Once established, the Tablighi Jamaat began engaging local populations as well. Although the group first established itself in the United States, Britain is the current locus of the group in the West, primarily due to the large South Asian population that began to arrive there in the 1960s and 1970s.

Structure, Composition, and Work:
Despite its secretive nature, Borreguero offered some insights into the organizational structure of the Tablighi Jamaat. The general conception of the group is of a nebulous collection of loosely affiliated, itinerate jamaats. While this is one major component of the group, there is a fixed, hierarchical network of elders and mosques, and the two components do overlap. According to Borreguero, the core of the organization is comprised of "full-time" Tablighis who comprise the shura [council] and who are usually the elders of the mosques affiliated with the group.
In addition to this core, there are the traveling Tablighis who undertake proselytizing missions over varying durations. Formed into jamaats of approximately ten people, these Tablighis’ missions last three days, forty days, four months, or one year. The jamaat’s destination and desired area of focus generally determines the length of these missions. Those who go for three days concentrate on a local city, while a jamaat traveling for a month will do so throughout their country. The longer tours of four months to one year generally take the Tablighis abroad.
During these tours, the jamaat—under the leadership of its emir—stays at a local mosque, which serves as its base for the duration. Four or five members of the group conduct daily ghast, during which they visit neighborhoods [or neighborhoods with large Muslim populations if in a non-Muslim country] and homes, asking the men of the household to attend mosque for Maghrib [sunset] prayers. Those who attend are offered the dawa [invitation] as the Tablighis outline their six principles and encourage attendees to form their own jamaat. Members voluntarily work for the organization and there is no registration process in the group. Participants are free to leave the movement at any time. Consequently, Tablighi Jamaat has a loose, informal recruitment process and attracts members of varying commitment. For example, some members only engage in group activities episodically, while others will do so annually. All of these factors contribute to the uncertainty regarding Tablighi Jamaat´s membership numbers.
Tablighis in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have competing claims as to which comprises the movement’s international headquarters. Those in India contend that Nizamuddin [India] is the base, since the movement grew out of the Deoband school of Islam and it is in Delhi that the group was founded. However, elders in Raiwind [Pakistan] and Tongi [Bangladesh] dispute Nizamuddin’s final authority, citing their countries´ majority Muslim populations and claiming that the organization can operate more openly.
South Asia is by far the most significant region for the group, with Mecca and Medina also serving as important geographical symbols. The organization is diverse and includes persons from nearly every sector of society across the countries of South Asia and beyond. Within South Asia, members of the lower-middle class and the business community have joined the group and some members even hold government posts. In the West, second and third generation Muslim diaspora make up the main pool of Tablighis. This demographic usually has little knowledge of Islam but are also not fully assimilated to culture in the West. According to Borreguero, the Tablighi Jamaat "is a source of re-Islamization that provides an alternative to religious institutions." These individuals tend to be well-educated, multilingual, and have lived in both the West and a Muslim country. She noted that the Tablighi Jamaat also has some appeal to marginal members of society [petty criminals, drug abusers, and so on] who are looking for a renewed identity that submerges them in a community of piety.
Keys to the Success of the Tablighi Jamaat:
Borreguero sees several salient features which explain the Tablighi Jamaat´s successful transformation from a local South Asian movement into a robust transnational phenomenon, including its simple message, its non-political character, the authority of its leadership, and its policy of secrecy.
Outstanding Concerns:
Borreguero addressed the persistent question of how a group so devoted to proselytizing a pristine form of Islam and inner spiritual transformation can coexist with modern society, and specifically whether such a group warrants scrutiny because of its revivalist beliefs.
While recognizing the numerous reports that link Tablighi Jamaat to militancy in various forms, her fieldwork yielded little evidence to support the most sweeping of these claims. During her interviews with Tablighis, they tended not to opine on politics. However, she conceded that for some Tablighis—as individuals—this might not be enough. She claimed that there is no evidence thus far that the group as a whole is involved with militant groups, such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, while acknowledging the potential role that individual Tablighis may have played in them. She claimed that the Tablighi Jamaat remains neutral on these groups, neither condemning nor supporting their actions.
To some analysts, this neutrality is enough to make them culpable. Borreguero admits that militant groups may try to infiltrate the Tablighi Jamaat in order to gain a cover for obtaining visas and traveling abroad. Also, individual members may come to find that the movement’s principles are too apolitical and neutral for their liking. Members of militant groups often attend the Tablighi Jamaat´s Ijtima [congregation] in Raiwind, where they hand out recruitment pamphlets. It is thus possible that a flame sparked and fueled by Tabligh could begin to burn out of control.
Borreguero, however, stressed that once this extreme position is taken, the individual relinquishes his or her membership to the Tablighi Jamaat. She also believes that any overt connection with these groups is not in the best interest of the Tablighi Jamaat. As stated above, the movement’s neutrality allows cordial relations with authorities, or at least keeps them from incurring official harassment. Any collusion with militant outfits would likely invite official proscription, especially in Western societies.
While much light was shed on the Tablighi Jamaat, many questions still remain. To some, its official secrecy and peripheral links to some nefarious individuals have nullified its choice to remain outside politics. But, as scholar Barbara Metcalf writes, "Islamic movements [like the Tablighi Jamaat] may have many goals and offer a range of social, moral, and spiritual satisfactions that are positive and not merely a reactionary rejection of modernity or ´the West.´ Quite simply, these movements may, in the end, have much less to do with ´us´ than is often thought." Borreguero´s insights provided a gateway to better assess the group´s motives and machinations. It may well be that the study of the Tablighi Jamaat as an apolitical traditionalist movement gives an alternate lens through which security concerns over Islamist groups´ hostility toward the West can be viewed.
Every fall, over a million almost identically dressed, bearded Muslim men from around the world descend on the small Pakistani town of Raiwind for a three-day celebration of faith. Similar gatherings take place annually outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Bhopal, India. These pilgrims are no ordinary Muslims, though; they belong to a movement called Tablighi Jamaat ["Proselytizing Group"]. They are trained missionaries who have dedicated much of their lives to spreading Islam across the globe. The largest group of religious proselytizers of any faith, they are part of the reason for the explosive growth of Islamic religious fervor and conversion.
Despite its size, worldwide presence, and tremendous importance, Tablighi Jamaat remains largely unknown outside the Muslim community, even to many scholars of Islam. This is no coincidence. Tablighi Jamaat officials work to remain outside of both media and governmental notice. Tablighi Jamaat neither has formal organizational structure nor does it publish details about the scope of its activities, its membership, or its finances. By eschewing open discussion of politics and portraying itself only as a pietistic movement, Tablighi Jamaat works to project a non-threatening image. Because of the movement's secrecy, scholars often have no choice but to rely on explanations from Tablighi Jamaat acolytes.
As a result, academics tend to describe the group as an apolitical devotional movement stressing individual faith, introspection, and spiritual development. The austere and egalitarian lifestyle of Tablighi missionaries and their principled stands against social ills leads many outside observers to assume that the group has a positive influence on society. Graham Fuller, a former CIA official and expert on Islam, for example, characterized Tablighi Jamaat as a "peaceful and apolitical preaching-to-the-people movement." Barbara Metcalf, a University of California scholar of South Asian Islam, called Tablighi Jamaat "an apolitical, quietist movement of internal grassroots missionary renewal" and compares its activities to the efforts to reshape individual lives by Alcoholics Anonymous. Olivier Roy, a prominent authority on Islam at Paris's prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, described Tablighi Jamaat as "completely apolitical and law abiding." Governments normally intolerant of independent movements often make an exception for Tablighi Jamaat. The Bangladeshi prime minister and top political leadership, many of whom are Islamists, regularly attend their rallies, and Pakistani military officers, many of whom are sympathetic to militant Islam, even allow Tablighi missionaries to preach in the barracks.
Yet, the Pakistani experience strips the patina from Tablighi Jamaat's façade. Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif [1990-93; 1997-99], whose father was a prominent Tablighi member and financier, helped Tablighi members take prominent positions. For example, in 1998, Muhammad Rafique Tarar took the ceremonial presidency while, in 1990, Javed Nasir assumed the powerful director-generalship of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's chief intelligence agency. When Benazir Bhutto, less sympathetic to Islamist causes, returned to the premiership in 1993, Tablighis conspired to overthrow her government. In 1995, the Pakistani army thwarted a coup attempt by several dozen high-ranking military officers and civilians, all of whom were members of the Tablighi Jamaat and some of whom also held membership in Harakat ul-Mujahideen, a U.S. State Department-defined terrorist organization. Some of the confusion over Tablighi Jamaat's apolitical characterization derives from the fact that the movement does not consider individual states to be legitimate. They may not become actively involved in internal politics or disputes over local issues, but, from a philosophical and transnational perspective, the Tablighi Jamaat's millenarian philosophy is very political indeed. According to the French Tablighi expert Marc Gaborieau, its ultimate objective is nothing short of a "planned conquest of the world" in the spirit of jihad.
Origins and Ideology:
The prominent Deobandi cleric and scholar Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalawi [1885-1944] launched Tablighi Jamaat in 1927 in Mewat, India, not far from Delhi. From its inception, the extremist attitudes that characterize Deobandism permeated Tablighi philosophy. Ilyas's followers were intolerant of other Muslims and especially Shi´ites, let alone adherents of other faiths. Indeed, part of Ilyas's impetus for founding Tablighi Jamaat was to counter the inroads being made by Hindu missionaries. They rejected modernity as antithetical to Islam, excluded women, and preached that Islam must subsume all other religions. The creed grew in importance after Pakistani military dictator Zia ul-Haq encouraged Deobandis to Islamize Pakistan.
The Tablighi Jamaat canon is bare-boned. Apart from the Qu'ran, the only literature Tablighis are required to read are the Tablighi Nisab, seven essays penned by a companion of Ilyas in the 1920s. Tablighi Jamaat is not a monolith: one subsection believes they should pursue jihad through conscience [jihad bin nafs] while a more radical wing advocates jihad through the sword [jihad bin saif]. But, in practice, all Tablighis preach a creed that is hardly distinguishable from the radical Wahhabi-Salafi jihadist ideology that so many terrorists share.
Part of the reason why the Tablighi Jamaat leadership can maintain such strict secrecy is its dynastic flavor. All Tablighi Jamaat leaders since Ilyas have been related to him by either blood or marriage. Upon Ilyas' 1944 death, his son, Maulana Muhammad Yusuf [1917-65], assumed leadership of the movement, dramatically expanding its reach and influence.
Following the partition of India, Tablighi Jamaat spread rapidly in the new Muslim nation of Pakistan. Yusuf and his successor, Inamul Hassan [1965-95], transformed Tablighi Jamaat into a truly transnational movement with a renewed emphasis targeting conversion of non-Muslims, a mission the movement continues to the present day.
While few details are known about the group's structure, at the top sits the emir who, according to some observers, presides over a shura [Council], which plays an advisory role. Further down are individual country organizations. By the late 1960s, Tablighi Jamaat had not only established itself in Western Europe and North America but even claimed adherents in countries like Japan, which has no significant Muslim population.
The movement's rapid penetration into non-Muslim regions began in the 1970s and coincides with the establishment of a synergistic relationship between Saudi Wahhabis and South Asian Deobandis. While Wahhabis are dismissive of other Islamic schools, they single out Tablighi Jamaat for praise, even if they disagree with some of its practices, such as willingness to pray in mosques housing graves. The late Sheikh ´Abd al ´Aziz ibn Baz, perhaps the most influential Wahhabi cleric in the late twentieth century, recognized the Tablighis good work and encouraged his Wahhabi brethren to go on missions with them so that they can "guide and advise them." A practical result of this cooperation has been large-scale Saudi financing of Tablighi Jamaat. While Tablighi Jamaat in theory requires its missionaries to cover their own expenses during their trips, in practice, Saudi money subsidizes transportation costs for thousands of poor missionaries. While Tablighi Jamaat's financial activities are shrouded in secrecy, there is no doubt that some of the vast sums spent by Saudi organizations such as the World Muslim League on proselytism benefit Tablighi Jamaat. As early as 1978, the World Muslim League subsidized the building of the Tablighi mosque in Dewsbury, England, which has since become the headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat in all of Europe. Wahhabi sources have paid Tablighi missionaries in Africa salaries higher than the European Union pays teachers in Zanzibar. In both Western Europe and the United States, Tablighis operate interchangeably out of Deobandi and Wahhabi controlled mosques and Islamic centers.

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing:
The West's misreading of Tablighi Jamaat actions and motives has serious implications for the war on terrorism. Tablighi Jamaat has always adopted an extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam, but in the past two decades, it has radicalized to the point where it is now a driving force of Islamic extremism and a major recruiting agency for terrorist causes worldwide. For a majority of young Muslim extremists, joining Tablighi Jamaat is the first step on the road to extremism. Perhaps 80 percent of the Islamist extremists in France come from Tablighi ranks, prompting French intelligence officers to call Tablighi Jamaat the "antechamber of fundamentalism." U.S. counterterrorism officials are increasingly adopting the same attitude. "We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States," the deputy chief of the FBI's international terrorism section said in 2003, "and we have found that Al-Qaeda used them for recruiting now and in the past."
Recruitment methods for young jihadists are almost identical. After joining Tablighi Jamaat groups at a local mosque or Islamic center and doing a few local dawa [proselytism] missions, Tablighi officials invite star recruits to the Tablighi center in Raiwind, Pakistan, for four months of additional missionary training. Representatives of terrorist organizations approach the students at the Raiwind center and invite them to undertake military training. Most agree to do so.

Tablighi Jamaat has long been directly involved in the sponsorship of terrorist groups. Pakistani and Indian observers believe, for instance, that Tablighi Jamaat was instrumental in founding Harakat ul-Mujahideen. Founded at Raiwind in 1980, almost all of the Harakat ul-Mujahideen's original members were Tablighis. Famous for the December 1998 hijacking of an Air India passenger jet and the May 8, 2002 murder of a busload of French engineers in Karachi, Harakat members make no secret of their ties. "The two organizations together make up a truly international network of genuine jihadi Muslims," one senior Harakat ul-Mujahideen official said. More than 6,000 Tablighis have trained in Harakat ul-Mujahideen camps. Many fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and readily joined Al-Qaeda after the Taliban defeated Afghanistan's anti-Soviet mujahideen [Jihadists].
Another violent Tablighi Jamaat spin-off is the Harakat ul-Jihad-i Islami. Founded in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, this group has been active not only in the disputed Indian provinces of Jammu and Kashmir but also in the state of Gujarat, where Tablighi Jamaat extremists have taken over perhaps 80 percent of the mosques previously run by the moderate Barelvi Muslims. The Tablighi movement is also very active in northern Africa where it became one of the four groups that founded the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria. Moroccan authorities are currently prosecuting sixty members of the Moroccan Tablighi offshoot Dawa wa Tabligh in connection with the May 16, 2003 terrorist attack on a Casablanca synagogue. Dutch police are investigating links between the Moroccan cells and the November 2, 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
There are many other cases of individual Tablighis committing acts of terrorism. French Tablighi members, for example, have helped organize and execute attacks not only in Paris but also at the Hotel Asni in Marrakech in 1994. Kazakh authorities expelled a number of Tablighi missionaries because they had been organizing networks advancing "extremist propaganda and recruitment." Indian investigators suspect influential Tablighi leader, Maulana Umarji, and a group of his followers in the February 27, 2002 fire bombing of a train carrying Hindu nationalists in Gujarat, India. The incident sparked a wave of pogroms victimizing both Muslims and Hindus. More recently, Moroccan authorities sentenced Yusef Fikri, a Tablighi member and leader of the Moroccan terrorist organization At-Takfir wal-Hijrah, to death for his role in masterminding the May 2003 Casablanca terrorist bombings that claimed more than forty lives.
Tablighi Jamaat has also facilitated other terrorists' missions. The group has provided logistical support and helped procure travel documents. Many take advantage of Tablighi Jamaat's benign reputation. Moroccan authorities say that leaflets circulated by the terrorist group Al-Salafiyah al-Jihadiyah urged their members to join Islamic organizations that operate openly, such as Tablighi Jamaat, in order "to hide their identity on the one hand and influence these groups and their policies on the other." In a similar vein, a Pakistani jihadi website commented that Tablighi Jamaat organizational structures can be easily adopted to jihad activities. The Philippine government has accused Tablighi Jamaat, which has an 11,000-member presence in the country, of serving both as a conduit of Saudi money to the Islamic terrorists in the south and as a cover for Pakistani jihad volunteers.
There is also evidence that Tablighi Jamaat directly recruits for terrorist organizations. As early as the 1980s, the movement sponsored military training for 900 recruits annually in Pakistan and Algeria while, in 1999, Uzbek authorities accused Tablighi Jamaat of sending 400 Uzbeks to terrorist training camps. The West is not immune. British counterterrorism authorities estimate that at least 2,000 British nationals had gone to Pakistan for jihad training by 1998, and the French secret services report that between 80 and 100 French nationals fought for Al-Qaeda.
A Trojan Horse for Terror in America?
Within the United States, the cases of American Taliban John Lindh, the "Lackawanna Six," and the Oregon cell that conspired to bomb a synagogue and sought to link up with Al-Qaeda, all involve Tablighi missionaries. Other indicted terrorists, such as "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, and Lyman Harris, who sought to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, were all members of Tablighi Jamaat at one time or another. According to Robert Blitzer, head of the FBI's first Islamic counterterrorism unit, between 1,000 and 2,000 Americans left to join the jihad in the 1990s alone. Pakistani intelligence sources report that 400 American Tablighi recruits received training in Pakistani or Afghan terrorist camps since 1989.
The Tablighi Jamaat has made inroads among two very different segments of the American Muslim population. Because many American Muslims are immigrants, and a large subsection of these are from South Asia, Deobandi influences have been able to penetrate deeply. Many Tablighi Jamaat missionaries speak Urdu as a first language and so can communicate easily with American Muslims of South Asian origin. The Tablighi headquarters in the United States for the past decade appears to be in the Al-Falah mosque in Queens, New York. Its missionaries—predominantly from South Asia—regularly visit Sunni mosques and Islamic centers across the country. The willingness of Saudi-controlled front organizations and charities, such as the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth [WAMY], the Haramain Foundation, the International Islamic Relief Organization [IIRO] and others, to spend large amounts of money to co-opt the religious establishment has helped catalyze recruitment. As a result Wahhabi and Deobandi influence dominate American Islam.
This trend is apparent in the activities of Tanzeem-e Islami. Founded by long-term Tablighi member and passionate Taliban supporter, Israr Ahmed, Tanzeem-e Islami flooded American Muslim organizations with communications accusing Israel of complicity in the 9/11 terror attacks. A frequent featured speaker at Islamic conferences and events in the United States, Ahmed engages in incendiary rhetoric urging his audiences to prepare for "the final showdown between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world, which has been captured by the Jews." Unfortunately, his conspiracy theories have begun to take hold among growing segments of the American Muslim community. For example, Siraj Wahhaj, among the best known African-American Muslim converts and the first Muslim cleric to lead prayers in the U.S. Congress, is also on record accusing the FBI and the CIA of being the "real terrorists." He has expressed his support for the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and advocating the demise of American democracy.
Tablighi Jamaat has appealed to African American Muslims for other reasons. Founded by Elijah Mohammed in the early 1930s, the Nation of Islam was essentially a charismatic African American separatist organization which had little to do with normative Islam. Many Nation of Islam members found attractive both the Tablighi Jamaat's anti-state separatist message and its description of American society as racist, decadent, and oppressive. Seeing such fertile ground, Tablighi and Wahhabi missionaries targeted the African American community with great success. One Tablighi sympathizer explained, The Umma [Muslim community] must remember that winning over the black Muslims is not only a religious obligation but also a selfish necessity. The votes of the black Muslims can give the immigrant Muslims the political clout they need at every stage to protect their vital interests. Likewise, outside Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Pakistan need to mobilize their effort, money, and missionary skills to expand and consolidate the black Muslim community in the USA, not only for religious reasons, but also as a farsighted investment in the black Muslims' immense potential as a credible lobby for Muslim causes, such as Palestine, Bosnia, or Kashmir—offsetting, at least partially, the venal influence of the powerful India-Israel lobby.
Not only foreign Tablighis but also the movement's sympathizers within the United States enunciate this goal. The president of the Islamic Research Foundation in Louisville, Kentucky, a strong advocate of Tablighi missionary work, for instance, insists that "if all the Afro-American brothers and sisters become Muslims, we can change the political landscape of America" and "make U.S. foreign policy pro-Islamic and Muslim friendly." As a result of Tablighi and Wahhabi proselytizing, African Americans comprise between 30 and 40 percent of the American Muslim community, and perhaps 85 percent of all American Muslim converts. Much of this success is due to a successful proselytizing drive in the penitentiary system. Prison officials say that by the mid-1990s, between 10 and 20 percent of the nation's 1.5 million inmates identified themselves as Muslims. Some 30,000 African Americans convert to Islam in prison every year.
The American political system tolerates all views so long as they adhere to the rule of law. Unfortunately, Tablighi Jamaat missionaries may be encouraging African American recruits to break the law. Harkat ul-Mujahideen has boasted of training dozens of African American Jihadists in its military camps. There is evidence that African American Jihadists have died in both Afghanistan and Kashmir.
Tablighi Jamaat: The Future of American Islam?
Tablighi Jamaat has made unprecedented strides in recent decades. It increasingly relies on local missionaries rather than South Asian Tablighis to recruit in Western countries and often sets up groups which apparently model themselves after Tablighi Jamaat but do not acknowledge links to it.
In the United States, such a role is apparently played by the Islamic Circle of North America [ICNA]. Founded in 1968 as an offshoot of the fiercely Islamist Muslim Student Association, ICNA is the only major American Muslim organization that has paid open homage to Tablighi founder Ilyas. The monthly ICNA publication, The Message, has praised Ilyas as one of the four greatest Islamic leaders of the last 100 years. While the relationship between ICNA and Tablighi Jamaat is not clear, the two organizations share a number of similarities. They both embrace the extreme Deobandi and Wahhabi interpretations of Islam. ICNA demonstrates disdain for Western democratic values and opposes virtually all counterterrorism legislation, such as the Patriot Act, while providing moral and financial support to all Muslims implicated in terrorist activities. An editorial in the ICNA organ, The Message International, in September 1989 bemoaned the "uncounted number of Muslims lost to Western values" which was a "major cause for concern." In 2003 and 2004, ICNA has collected money to assist detainees suspected of terrorist activities, participated in pro-terrorist rallies, and mounted campaigns on behalf of indicted Hamas functionary Sami al-Arian. Like Tablighi Jamaat, ICNA initially drew its membership disproportionately from South Asians. As with Tablighi Jamaat, ICNA demands total dedication to missionary work from its members. Because many ICNA members spend at least thirty hours per week on their mission, their ability to independently support themselves is unclear. Many cannot hold full-time jobs. ICNA's recruitment efforts have borne fruit, though. All ICNA members are organized in small study groups of no more than eight people, called NeighborNets. As in a cult, these cells provide support and reinforcement for new recruits, who may have sought to fill a void in their lives. Its yearly convocations, patterned on the annual Tablighi Jamaat meetings in South Asia, now attract some 15,000 people.
The estimated 15,000 Tablighi missionaries reportedly active in the United States present a serious national security problem. At best, they and their proxy groups form a powerful proselytizing movement that preaches extremism and disdain for religious tolerance, democracy, and separation of church and state. At worst, they represent an Islamist fifth column that aids and abets terrorism. Contrary to their benign treatment by scholars and academics, Tablighi Jamaat has more to do with political sedition than with religion.
U.S. officials should focus on reality rather than rhetoric. Pakistani and Saudi support for Tablighi Jamaat is incompatible with their claims to be key allies in the war on terror. While law enforcement focuses attention on Osama bin Laden, the war on terrorism cannot be won unless al-Qaeda terrorists are understood to be the products of Islamist ideology preached by groups like Tablighi Jamaat. If the West chooses to turn a blind eye to the problem, Tablighi involvement in future terrorist activities at home and abroad is not a matter of conjecture; it is a certainty.
The Tablighi Role in the Global Jihadism:
However, there are indeed some links between Tablighis and the world of jihadism. First, there is evidence of indirect connections between the group and the wider radical/extremist Deobandi nexus composed of anti-Shiite sectarian groups, Kashmiri militants and the Taliban. This link provides a medium through which Tablighis who are disgruntled with the group’s apolitical program could break orbit and join militant organizations.
One apparent manifestation of this nexus was a purported militant offshoot of TJ, Jihad bi al-Saif [Jihad through the Sword], which was established in Taxila, Pakistan. Members of this group were accused of plotting a coup against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1995. Yet, because of the organization’s extreme secrecy, little is known about it other than that it is believed to have developed in reaction to the TJ’s apolitical, peaceful stance.
The TJ organization also serves as a de facto conduit for Islamist extremists and for groups such as al Qaeda to recruit new members. Significantly, the Tablighi recruits do intersect with the world of radical Islamism when they travel to Pakistan to receive their initial training. We have received reports that once the recruits are in Pakistan, representatives of various radical Islamist groups, such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Taliban and al Qaeda, are said to woo them actively — to the point of offering them military training. And some of them accept the offer. For example, John Walker Lindh — an American who is serving a prison sentence for aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan — traveled with Tablighi preachers to Pakistan in 1998 to further his Islamic studies before joining the Taliban.
Because of the piety and strict belief system of the Tablighis and their focus on calling wayward Muslims back to an austere and orthodox Muslim faith, the movement has offered a place where jihadist spotters can look for potential recruits. These facilitators often offer enthusiastic new or rededicated Muslims a more active way to live and develop their faith. Although the TJ promotes a benign message, the same conservative Islamic values espoused by the Tablighis also are part of jihadist ideology, and so some Muslims attracted to the Tablighi movement are enticed into becoming involved with jihadists.
Additionally, because of its apolitical belief system, TJ seems to leave a gap in the ideological indoctrination of the individual Tablighi because it essentially asks the novice to shun politics and public affairs. The problem in taking this belief system from theory to practice, however, is that some people find they cannot ignore what is happening in the world around them, especially when that world includes wars. This is when some Tablighis become disillusioned with TJ and start turning to jihadist groups that offer religiously sanctioned prescriptions as to how "good Muslims" should deal with life’s injustices.
Once a facilitator identifies such candidates, he often will segregate them from the main congregation in the mosque or community center and put them into small prayer circles or study groups where they can be more easily exposed to jihadist ideology. [Of course, it also has been shown that a person with friends or relatives who ascribe to radical ideology can more easily be radical].
Examples of people making the jump from TJ to radical Islam are the two leading members of the cell responsible for the July 7, 2005, London bombings — Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shahzad Tanweer. Both had life-changing experiences through their exposure to TJ, though by 2001 the men had left the Tablighi mosque they had been attending in the British city of Beeston, because they found it to be too apolitical. They apparently were frustrated by the mosque’s elders, who forbid the discussion of politics in the mosque.
After Khan and Tanweer left the Tablighi mosque, they began attending the smaller Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Beeston, where they reportedly were exposed to frequent political discussions about places such as Iraq, Kashmir and Chechnya. The store’s proprietors reportedly even produced jihad videos depicting crimes by the West against the Muslim world. Exposed to this environment, the two men eventually became radicalized to the point of traveling to Pakistan to attend a terrorist training camp and then returning to the United Kingdom to plan and execute a suicide attack that resulted in the death of them both.
TJ also is used by Jihadists as cover both for recruiting activities, as discussed above, and for travel. Like Khan and Tanweer, many jihadists desire to travel to Pakistan for training, while others want to get to Afghanistan, Kashmir or other places to fight jihad. However, the travel environment is far different today than it was in the early 1980s, when 747 jetliners packed with Jihadists from Saudi Arabia and other places flew into Pakistan en route to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Foreigners traveling to Pakistan today cannot enter the country without a visa, and Pakistani authorities are no longer inclined to issue visas to Jihadists, as Jeffrey Battle and the other members of the Portland Seven had to learn the hard way. Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the friends traveled to China with the intention of entering Afghanistan by way of Pakistan. Once at the Chinese-Pakistani border, however, they found they could not enter Pakistan without a visa. After spending a frustrating month trying to obtain visas from the Pakistani Embassy in Beijing, the seven aspiring Jihadists decided to go their separate ways.
Battle, who reportedly once served as a bodyguard for Black Panther leader Quanell X, later attempted to obtain a visa to Pakistan by saying he was affiliated with TJ. The Pakistanis, probably recognizing him from his prior [and apparently somewhat vocal] visa attempts, denied him again, though he was able to get a visa to travel to Bangladesh using the feigned connection to TJ. Unable to make his way from Bangladesh to Pakistan or Afghanistan, however, Battle returned to the United States, where he was later arrested. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of seditious conspiracy and waging war against the United States.
Similarly, in the spring of 2001 the members of the so-called Lackawanna Six cell traveled to Pakistan under the pretext of studying the Islamic religion and culture at the TJ training center. In reality, the men traveled through Pakistan to Afghanistan, where they attended training at the al-Farooq camp, a training site being run by al Qaeda. Again, the men used TJ as cover for travel, though there is no indication that TJ played any real part in their alleged plot.
Although the TJ organization unintentionally serves as a front for, or conduit to, militant organizations such as al Qaeda, there is no evidence that the Tablighis act willingly as a global unified jihadist recruiting arm. Rather, such activities appear to occur without the knowledge or consent of TJ leaders. Additionally, because of the very size of the organization and it activities in Muslim communities in the West, a great many Muslims have had some sort of contact with the group. TJ itself, however, is not an intentional propagator of terrorism.
Man behind the Cordoba Mosque:

Faisal Abdul Rauf The prospective developer of a $100 million, 13-story mosque 600 feet from Ground Zero presents himself as a Muslim moderate. Yet Kuwait-born Faisal Abdul Rauf also boasts of his issue from an "Egyptian family steeped in religious scholarship". Indeed, Feisal Rauf's Muslim Brotherhood provenance, radical by definition, is as authentic as it gets.

Rauf's father, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Rauf [1917-2004] - an Egyptian contemporary of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna - conveyed to Feisal his family's long tradition of radicalism, which he acquired at Islam's closest equivalent to the Vatican, Al-Azhar University. The elder Dr. Rauf studied and taught there before fleeing Egypt in 1948. That year, Feisal Abdul Rauf was born in Kuwait.

Imam Faisal Rauf has planned for some time to further develop his father's U.S. Islamic expansionism. In 1990, Rauf opened the tiny al-Farah Mosque at 245 West Broadway in lower Manhattan. Area residents did not even notice the mosque until 2006, when the New York State Liquor Authority [SLA] refused to license a new bar on the same block and started yanking others' liquor licenses.

Rauf attended grammar school and high school in the UK and Malaysia, according to his biography. He probably first lived in America only in 1965, at age 17, when his father moved from Malaysia to New York to plan and head the Islamic Cultural Center [not built until the mid-1980s]. Rauf then obtained a BS in physics at Columbia University. In 1971, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Rauf's father headed the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Ave. His father, buried in Suitland, MD, at the for-profit Washington National Cemetery, also founded three Malaysian Islamic studies programs, including the International Islamic University of Malaysia.
Rauf's early UK education and familiarization with American popular culture and values made him an acutely adept practitioner of Islamic taqiyya - deceptive speech and action to advance the interests and supremacy of Islam. To further that Islamic advancement, Rauf in 1997 established the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). His Kashmir-born wife Daisy Kahn, an interior designer by profession, has run the organization since 2005.
Rauf then began cultivating new spheres of influence. In about summer 2002, Rauf started lecturing on Islam at the 750-acre southwestern New York campus of Chautauqua Institution, a 136-year-old non-profit where religion director Joan Brown Campbell took Rauf under her wing. Under the rubric of the "Abrahamic" faiths, a convenient cover for Rauf's Islamic activities, Campbell subsequently named him the prospective head of a Muslim house now planned on campus by another Rauf brainchild - the 501(3)c organization Muslim Friends of Chautauqua. Rauf also befriended Karen Armstrong, the former British nun and devotee of Islam.

In 2003, Rauf befriended leaders of Denver's Aspen Institute, including former executive director and four-term Aspen mayor John S. Bennet. In 2004, under ASMA auspices, Rauf organized a meeting of 125 young Muslims and formed Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow. With Bennet's help, he co-founded the Cordoba Initiative in Aspen, purportedly to "improve" Muslim-West relations. Rauf gets funding from a variety of other liberal organizations, including, for example, Gloria Steinem's Ms. Foundation.

Now, the same Rauf is set to construct a mosque at Ground Zero, which he claims will prove that ‘Islam is not a violent faith’.

As Islamic attacks on September 11, 2001, destroyed the World Trade Center towers, falling jet debris simultaneously crushed the five-story 1923 structure some 600 feet away that until that morning housed a robust Burlington Coat Factory store. Over the ruin of the former retail outlet, Rauf now plans to build a 13-story, $100 million mosque. Rauf says the Cordoba Initiative bought the former retail building to prove to the world that Islam is not a violent faith.
Imam Rauf says that New York Muslims provided nearly $5 million in cash to buy the Park Place building. Yet in fiscal 2009, Rauf's ASMA received large international donations. In the year ended June 30, 2009 - days before Feisal closed the purchase - ASMA received at least $1.3 million. The largest donation, $576,312, came from Qatar. That Persian Gulf nation has long harbored terror financiers, and even the government stands accused of funding international terrorism. Qatar also has, for decades, hosted Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The elderly sheikh, a large and founding shareholder in the terror-financing al-Taqwa Bank, champions sharia law, wife beating, and suicide bombing.
ASMA also received $481,942 from Holland's Millennial Development Goals Fund [MDG3], $144,752 from New York's Carnegie Corporation, $53,664 from the U.N. Population Fund [UNFPA], plus donations from the Rockefeller Brothers and Hunt Alternatives funds, among others.

The Ground Zero mosque plan is more than a little reminiscent of a program initiated by Rauf's late father in 1965. That year, Muhammad R. Abdul Rauf moved to New York to plan and head a huge Islamic Cultural Center that took decades to realize. He bought prime Manhattan real estate at 96th St. and 3rd Ave - roughly two thirds of a city block - apparently with $1.3 million in funding from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. The late Rauf long retained some of that land in a personal trust. But when construction started on the $17 million mosque in 1984, it had received funding from 46 Islamic nations. By 2010, the enormous Islamic complex had added another two buildings. Since 1984, its founders-envisioned apartment unit has been restricted to Muslims alone.

Whenever Feisal first considered building a mosque across from Ground Zero, he had the idea firmly in mind by 2004, when he wrote What's Right with Islam. The book was translated into many languages. In Indonesia's Bahasa, its title translates as "The Call from the WTC Rubble." Rauf promoted the book in December 2007 at a Kuala Lumpur gathering of Hizb ut Tahrir – a terror outfit banned in Germany since 2003, and also outlawed in Bangladesh, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, among other places - and ideologically akin to the Muslim Brotherhood. Both seek to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law [Sharia], and eventually impose Islam and Sharia law worldwide. Most North American Muslim Brotherhood organizations avoid widely publicizing that aim. The Hizb Ut Tahrir however, at a July 2009 Khalifah conference at a suburban Chicago Hilton, openly promised to replace capitalism with Islam and Sharia law.

Now, Imam Rauf is set to construct his dream project, wherefrom possibly the radical Islamists will start Islamization of America. This will not be a mere mosque, but a tower of terrorism to further flex the muscle of militant Islam right inside the heart of United States.
Hope Americans will realize this, before it is too late!

Paris imam backs France's proposed burqa ban

PARIS (Reuters) - A French imam active in Muslim dialogue with Jews has backed a law against full face veils, parting ways with most Muslim leaders in France urging parliamentarians not to vote for a planned "burqa ban".

Hassen Chalghoumi, whose mosque stands in a northern Paris suburb where many Muslims live, said women who wanted to cover their faces should move to Saudi Arabia or other Muslim countries where that was a tradition.

France's National Assembly is likely to pass a resolution soon denouncing full veils and to try in coming months to hammer out a law forbidding them, deputies say.

A parliamentary commission studying the issue, which has been discussed alongside a wider public debate about national identity, is due to publish its recommendations next Tuesday.

Le Figaro said on Friday that parliamentary deputies have decided against a general ban on the burqa, but it would not be allowed in public buildings such as hospitals and schools or on public transport services, citing the text of a decision by the commission obtained in advance by the French daily.

"This measure would oblige people not only to show their face at the entry to public buildings and services but also to keep their face uncovered for the whole time they are in the public space," Le Figaro quoted the document as saying.

President Nicolas Sarkozy calls the veils an affront to women's dignity unwelcome in France, home to about five million Muslims. Fewer than 2,000 women wear the veils, known here as burqas although most are Middle Eastern niqabs showing the eyes.

"Yes, I am for a legal ban of the burqa, which has no place in France, a country where women have been voting since 1945," Hassen Chalghoumi, 36, told the daily Le Parisien.

Chalghoumi, who has received death threats for his promotion of dialogue with Jews, said that full face veils had no basis in Islam and "belong to a tiny minority tradition reflecting an ideology that scuttles the Muslim religion."

"The burqa is a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination and Islamist indoctrination," said Chalghoumi, whose mosque stands in Drancy, site of a wartime camp where Jews were detained before transport to Nazi concentration camps.

Chalghoumi criticised some of the tougher measures proposed by conservative politicians, such as imposing fines or cutting off child support payments for veiled women.

But the Tunisian-born imam, who is a naturalised French citizen, agreed France should not grant citizenship to immigrant women who cover their faces.

"Having French nationality means wanting to take part in society, at school, at work," he said.

"But with a bit of cloth over their faces, what can these women share with us? If they want to wear the veil, they can go to a country where it's the tradition, like Saudi Arabia."

French Muslim leaders and many opposition politicians oppose any ban, saying it would alienate Muslims and possibly violate civil rights laws.

The Star

Saudi Interference with Muslims During the Hajj

by Dr. Irfan Al-Alawi

The hajj pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam - every adult Muslim who is physically able and can afford it is required to make the journey once before dying. For about two million people each year, the hajj is a supreme moment of devotion to the religion of the Prophet Muhammad.

For the Wahhabi clerics who direct the official state sect in Saudi Arabia, however, the hajj is more an ideological than a spiritual observance.

The small number of Muslims allowed to make the journey - 2 million out of at least 1.3 billion Muslims around the world - is a giveaway: The Wahhabis carefully vet hajj pilgrims, to exclude those of whom they disapprove.

Saudi-Wahhabi adherents prohibit and interfere with honours offered by hajjis to Muhammad, his family, his companions, his successors, and other Muslim holy people. In the perverse Wahhabi system - shared with the Deobandi sect in South Asia that leads the Taliban - expressing love for the Prophet and other distinguished Muslims is polytheism, setting up ‘partners’ alongside the creator.

Today, Wahhabis and Deobandis condemn celebrating the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid) as an imitation of Christians, even though mawlid continues to be held wherever Muslims live - even, privately, in the Saudi kingdom. By contrast, traditional Islamic theologians praised the Christians for their love of their Prophet - as he is seen in Islam, although Muslims do not believe Jesus was the son of God. Traditional Muslims reply to the extremists that a religion that does not esteem its Prophet cannot bring fulfillment to its followers.

Wahhabis also despise the preservation of historic religious architecture, including shrines, graves, tombs, and notable mosques and madrassas. To them, Muslim prayer at any such sites is, again, polytheism - making a gravestone or a house into an idol.

During the nearly 150-year long effort, beginning in the 18th century, to establish the Saudi-Wahhabi regime, the fanatics banned any construction, visiting, or prayer at shrines, graves, and tombs. Today they remain especially avid to wipe out the structures in which Muhammad and his family lived, lest Muslims visit and pray at them. Since their seizure of Mecca in 1924, the Wahhabi mentors of the Saudi royal family have schemed to extirpate the very building in which Muhammad was born - it was first turned into a cattle market, then into a library, but remains under threat of replacement by a car park.

They have demolished or otherwise covered over the grave of the Prophet’s mother, and the house in which Muhammad lived with his wife Khadijah and their children. They also destroyed the first Islamic school in which the Prophet taught.

The Wahhabi mutawwa, or morals patrols (often miscalled a ‘religious police’) harass hajjis who visit the Prophet’s Shrine in Medina if pilgrims face the direction of Muhammad’s sarcophagus and utter blessings. But the intersection of naked vandalism and Wahhabi proscriptions against long-established Muslim customs is nowhere more dramatic than at Jannat-al-Baqi, the Medina cemetery of the Prophet’s family and companions. Jannat al-Baqi once included numerous domed shrines. But the Wahhabis tore down the monuments, turned the cemetery into a garbage dump, and prevented identification of any of the graves there.

Recent Western media coverage has noted that Shia Muslims continue to visit the site of Jannat al-Baqi and to pray, recite blessings, and express their emotions at the sanctity of those buried there.

The mutawwa - including Arabs, Afghans, and Bangladeshis who understand the hajjis’ speech - not only tell them to lower their voices, but also confiscate their religious literature, and frequently detain and abuse them. The controversy over Jannat al-Baqi has been interpreted by some non-Muslim commentators as an expression of geopolitical rivalry between the Saudi kingdom, which proclaims its adherence to Sunnism, and Shia Iran. Iran, it is said, is using the issue of cultural devastation in Arabia to gain support for its political position among the world’s Muslims.

To believe such a claim is a serious error. Sunnis, especially followers of Sufi spirituality, are no less outraged by the wanton destruction of Islamic heritage, as symbolized by the transformation of Jannat al-Baqi into a waste ground, than are Shias.

The rescue of Islamic heritage is not a political issue between states but a serious challenge to Muslims of any and all partisan views. Sunni Sufis who visit Jannat al-Baqi to express their affection for the Muslims interred there also suffer at the hands of the mutawwa: they are also pushed around and told how to pray, they see their religious books seized and torn up, and they have been arrested and beaten. In doctrinal terms, Sunni Sufis and Shias differ on many issues, but they are united in seeking to protect Islam’s physical legacy.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that officially rejects the concept of cultural preservation.

While some archeological work goes on, it is typically hidden from the public or downgraded to minor facilities. Saudi King Abdullah has commenced various efforts to normalize his country, which is the sole state in the world to prevent women from driving, among other Wahhabi stupidities.

A bold step in the right direction would be the dissolution of the mutawwa and an end to interference with the spiritual habits of hajj pilgrims, Sunni and Shia, Sufi and non-Sufi, alike.

If anybody believes the contention over cultural vandalism in Arabia favors Iran, an end to such irresponsible Saudi policies would certainly deprive the Iranians of a basis for their complaints.

Hudson New York

Rachel Abrams Slams Saudi Justice System

Rachel Abrams has a powerful blog post that I wanted to reprint here.

The Saudis are tackling Al-Qaeda and have made reforms to help combat terrorism, but terrorism isn’t Islamic extremism’s only manifestation.

To those that want to paint Saudi Arabia as the “moderate” example we’re looking for, read her words below:

When they condemn a woman who’s been gang-raped to 200 lashes for “having sex outside marriage,” or give a destitute 75-year-old widow 40 lashes for engaging in “prohibited mingling” by receiving charity from two young male relatives, or, in the most recent (known) instance, sentence a 13-year-old girl to 90 lashes—to be delivered in front of her classmates—for bringing a cell phone to school—what do they believe they are doing?

For this is as far from protection as you can get, I think. In fact, it’s the opposite: it’s a form of rape; it exposes women and little girls to shame for the accident of being female, and renders them powerless to shield themselves from the disgust, and the disgusting judgement, of the men who control their lives.

World Threats

Saudi Deaths in Fight With Yemen Rebels Reach 113

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The Saudi army has lost 113 troops since the kingdom launched a sweeping offensive against neighboring Yemen's Shiite rebels in early November, a military commander said in comments published Thursday.

The kingdom's well-funded but largely untested military joined the fray after Shiite rebels from Yemen crossed the border into Saudi Arabia on Nov. 5, killing two Saudi border guards.

The Al Riyadh newspaper quoted Maj. Gen. Ali Zaid al-Khawaji as saying the dead include a senior Saudi officer whose body was found with those of two soldiers after a battle last week to drive rebels out of a border village.

The latest toll is a significant jump from last week, when assistant defense minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan said the Saudis had 82 dead and 470 wounded.

The mounting toll underscores the ferocity of the fighting with the poorly armed Yemeni Hawthi rebels, who have been battling their own government since 2004 over neglect and discrimination.

The rebels have gained a reputation for being wily adversaries, taking full advantage of the rugged mountainous terrain of their homes in northern Yemen.

The Saudis have been relying on artillery and air power to defeat the rebels without risking manpower, but the casualties mostly come from mob-up operations in rebel stronghold villages. Saudi chief of staff Gen. Saleh ben Ali Al-Mohaya said the war "is close to a guerrilla war."

Al-Khawaji, the commander of the southern Saudi region, identified the dead officer as Lt. Col. Saeed Ma'tuq al-Omari from Saudi parachutist units and a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War.

"There are field units searching for more bodies," al-Khawaji told the paper.

The world's largest oil supplier, Saudi Arabia has used its military only once before since the kingdom was established in 1932. Saudi troops played a token role in the U.S.-led effort to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991.

Yemen, the Arab world's poorest nation, has been in the limelight since a Yemen-based wing of al-Qaida said it was behind a failed Dec. 25 plot to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner.

FoxNews

Camel-loving saudis respond to cull

THOUSANDS of wild camels, facing a cull in the outback, have been thrown an unexpected lifeline from distant Saudi Arabia, where the animal is revered rather than viewed as a pest.

Saudi camel enthusiasts have mounted a "massive" internet campaign calling on their wealthy countrymen to bring the Australian animals to the desert kingdom, according to a report yesterday.

The response followed the Australian Government's decision to kill 6,000 camels in the Northern Territory town of Dockwer River next week using marksmen firing from helicopters.

The rescue plan has been greeted enthusiastically in Saudi Arabia, with camel-raisers volunteering to take in the Australian animals. "I own more than 80 camels but I am quite willing to receive as many more from Australia," Salim al-Hajjaji said. He had grown up with camels, he told Arab News, an English-language Saudi daily. "I am now about 50 years old but I am as attached to camels as I was in my boyhood."

The camel is an integral and celebrated part of the kingdom's heritage, an icon of its nomadic traditions. Throughout Saudi history, the camel has served as food, friend, transport and war machine. It was key to the conquests of the Middle East and North Africa nearly 1,400 years ago that brought Islam to the world. Arabic has more than 40 terms for different breeds, ages and genders of camels.

Saudi Arabia's rapid, oil-fuelled modernisation, which brought an extensive road network and pick-up trucks, has meant that the once-fabled camel caravans are a thing of the past, although the animal still provides transportation for some Bedouin in remote areas.

Today camels are valued for their milk and meat while camel races are extremely popular sporting events. Every year across the kingdom there are also "beauty" pageants - similar to cat and dog shows in the West - where winners can pick up huge cash prizes.

Australia's relationship with the animal could not be more different. The Government has committed $19 million to camel culling over four years. It is predicted that the million-strong population of wild camels will double in eight years if left unchecked.

The feral camels compete with sheep and cattle for food, crush vegetation and invade remote settlements in search of water, sometimes terrifying people by storming into houses and ripping up water pipes in kitchens and bathrooms.

They have also been branded big polluters, with a single camel allegedly emitting a tonne of carbon a year.

Camels were brought to Australia in the 19th century as pack animals that were well suited to opening up vast unexplored areas. When their work was done, the animals were simply let loose into Australia's deserts.

Khalifa al-Bigaili, a Saudi camel owner, urged Gulf businessmen this week to bring in the Australian animals to farm them for their milk. "We can buy them cheap or get them for free since Australians do not want them," he told Arab News.

The Australian

( Save a camel but lash a school girl? )

Oil-Rich Nations Fall Far Short in Haiti Donations

What do Alyssa Milano, Sandra Bullock, Lance Armstrong, Gisele Bundchen, the country of Senegal and — very possibly — you have in common?

All — including you — have donated more funds to the Haitian relief effort than oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

That's right ... if you personally have donated money to help the earthquake-stricken people of Haiti, then you have contributed more money than the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose combined dollar donation is a big fat zero.

As Haiti slowly recovers from last week's earthquake, nearly $400 million has been donated by countries, individuals and organizations to the devastated nation, accordign to United Nations documents.

But the goodwill has been far from balanced. India, which has one of the world's largest gross domestic products, has donated $1 million, a figure matched or eclipsed by much smaller economies like the Czech Republic ($1.1 million), Botswana ($1.1 million) and Senegal ($1 million).

And those donations have been matched or topped by individuals like Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

The United States leads the way among developed nations with $114.5 million donated as of Wednesday, according to the U.N. That's more than 28 percent of the $397 million donated to rebuild the impoverished Caribbean nation. The United Kingdom and France are next with more than $30.9 million and $16.8 million donated, respectively. Australia ($13.4 million) and Italy ($8.7 million) round out the top five donating countries.

Another $951 million has been pledged from other nations.

Click here to see how much the world has given.

More at FoxNews

Saudi girl, 13, sentenced to 90 lashes after she took a mobile phone to school

A 13-year-old girl has been sentenced to 90 lashes and two months' prison in Saudi Arabia after she took a mobile phone to school.

A court ordered the girl to be flogged in front of her classmates following an assault on the school principal, according to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan.

After the assault she was discovered to have concealed a mobile phone, breaking strict Saudi regulations banning the use of camera-equipped phones in girls' schools.

Brutal: public floggings, such as in this archive picture, are a common punishment handed down by religious courts in Saudi Arabia

Al-Watan said a court in the northeastern Gulf port of Jubail had sentenced the girl to 90 lashes inside her school, followed by two months' detention.

The punishment is harsher than that dished out to some robbers and looters.

Saudi Arabia, a leading US ally in the Middle East, is an absolute monarchy controlled by the Al-Saud ruling tribe, and lacks any legal code.

Absolute monarchy: King Abdullah, ruler of the oil-rich state, meeting Gordon Brown on a 2007 visit to Downing Street

King Abdullah has promoted some social reforms since taking the throne in 2005 but diplomats say he is held back by religious clerics and princes.

Cinemas and music concerts are banned, while many restaurants and even some shopping centres cater to families only, especially on holidays.

Religious police roam streets to make sure no unrelated men and women mix.

The Saudi court system is exclusively controlled Wahahbi/Salafi clerics, and bans the employment of non-Salafi citizens, especially as judges.

Saudi Arabia is the world's leading country in the use of torture-by-flogging, public beheadings and publically crucifying condemned prisoners.

The country crucified two people in 2009, including one in the capital Riyadh during President Barak Obama’s visit last April.

In September, twenty Saudi teenagers who ransacked shops and restaurants were publicly flogged.

Newspapers reported that the teenagers received at least 30 lashes each in a public square.

Most of the hijackers in the September 11 attacks in 2001 came from Saudi Arabia.

Mail Online

'Illegal' Saudi women's gym shut

RIYADH — Health authorities in Jeddah have shut down an "illegal" women's fitness centre attached to a hospital, closing one of the few venues where Saudi women are able to exercise, local media said on Wednesday.

Although health officials have repeatedly blamed the high rates of heart disease and diabetes in the kingdom on poor diets and lack of exercise, health authorities said women's fitness centres were not allowed.

"Anyone who violates regulations governing the running of health facilities would be punished severely because this involves people's health," Jeddah health official Muhammed Abdul Jawad told the English-language Arab News.

The reports did not identify the Jeddah hospital affected, but a photograph in the Saudi Gazette showed an official sealing the club door with an announcement reading "Closed on the order of Jeddah Health Affairs."

While gyms for men in the gender-segregated conservative Islamic society are permitted, women's health clubs are forbidden, despite a clear demand shown by a surge in underground facilities in the past two years.

But last year a number of stand-alone women's gyms were shut, though some attached to or inside hospital premises continued to function.

The reports said the country's municipal and rural affairs ministry had recently closed two other gyms in the Red City of Jeddah and one in Dammam, eastern Saudi Arabia.

AFP-Google News

UN blacklists Yemeni al-Qaeda group

The United Nations security council has added the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to its list of outlawed organisations.

Two of the group's purported leaders, Nasser al-Wahayshi and Qasim al-Raymi, also face new restrictions after the move by the international body's sanctions committee on Tuesday.

Among the sanctions against the two men, who were among 23 fighters who escaped from a jail in Sanaa in 2006, were worldwide freezes on their assets and travel bans.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claims to have been behind the failed attempt to blow up a Detriot-bound airliner on Christmas Day as well as other attacks inside Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

"Today's actions strengthen international efforts to degrade the capabilities of AQAP," Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said.

The UN committee made its decision the day after the US state department added the al-Qaeda group to it list of proscribed organisations.

"We are determined to eliminate AQAP's ability to execute violent attacks and to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat their networks," Philip Crowley, a state department spokesman, said.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was formed in January 2009 after the merger of groups in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

It has since set up bases inside Yemen and has been blamed for the suicide attack on South Korean tourists in March 2009 and an attempt to assassinate the Saudi deputy interior minister across the border in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

Yemen has bolsetered its troops in three of the country's provinces in an attempt to tackle al-Qaeda and has carried out a number of air raids, which it claims have left dozens of fighters dead.

Al-Raymi was among a number of senior al-Qaeda figures reported to have been killed in a Yemeni attack on two vehicles on Friday.

The government in Sanaa is also battling so-called Houthi rebels in the north and a secessionist movement in the south.

Al Jazeera

Iran Responsible for Jordan Bombing?

The Jerusalem Post is reporting here that the Jordanians believe that Iran was responsible for the bombing of an Israeli diplomatic convoy last week.

The sources said the GID was investigating the possibility that the explosives used in the attack had been smuggled into the kingdom by Iranian diplomats.

The attack itself was apparently carried out by local al-Qaida supporters who received money and explosives from Iran, the sources said.

Analysis. The explosives were just as likely “imported” from Syria. King Abdullah II still has fond memories of the attempted El Queda poison gas event on New Year’s Eve a few years ago. If the Jordanian intelligence services lay this at Bashar’s feet, His Majesty will no doubt be suitably angered. I can’t think of a better way to drive Jordan into the undercover coalition to waste Iran.

Several months ago there was an advertised meeting of the intelligence chiefs of Egypt, Jordan and Israel. I said at that time that the senior planners would be meeting shortly thereafter. Although no public statements have been forthcoming about such meetings, my gut tells me they are ongoing.

The recent Saudi attempts at Palestinian factional peace making having been thwarted by Iran’s influence over Hamas, there is zero chance that their will be any kind of final status talks in the near future. The recent rocket and mortar attacks are perhaps a hint of what is to come. At the same time, as reported here earlier, the Houthi Rebellion is back on again. This the Saudis do not need. George Mitchell is spinning his wheels.

To what end are the Iranians throwing their weight around? One reason may be to convince the Arab governments not to provide aid to the Iranian revolutionaries.

The next post will contain the resignation statement of the Iranian Counsel to Norway. The recent resignations and requests for asylum by Iranian diplomats is not going over well in Tehran.

It may well have been for the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist. Even though the Iranians are blaming the Mossad and CIA, the Israelis and we get blamed for so much it is difficult to tell what we really did and what we are being scapegoated for. And the Iraqi elections are in March.

World Threats