Abdur-Rahman Muhammad was born Kenneth William Oliveira Jr. on July 9, 1962, in Providence, Rhode Island, the descendant of whalers from Cape Verde who had long ago settled in New England.1 Now a minority-majority city (with whites representing roughly 40 percent of the population), in the 1960s and 1970s Providence was still quite racially homogeneous, with whites in the majority by a wide margin. It also has a history of racism, which authorities and civil society have tried to reverse in recent years.
As an African American, Abdur-Rahman recounts suffering from various forms of discrimination during his youth. In some cases, the racism was overt, as when a ten-year-old Abdur-Rahman and a handful of his friends were attacked by “a white mob of parents” at the elementary school to which he was bused when authorities sought to desegregate the local school district. But other forms of discrimination were more subtle. He says, “We found out later that the school system had a soft racism and a soft segregation going on, where they had kind of like two tracks and the white kids would be sent off to classical high school and minorities went on another track.” From Abdur-Rahman’s perspective, the supposedly tolerant Northeast of the United States was no less racist than the South. “Malcolm X,” he quips, “used to say: ‘Stop talking about the South; as long as you are south of the Canadian border you’re south.’ New England was like that.”
When Abdur-Rahman was fourteen, that racism manifested itself in a way that affected his life forever. His cousin, a year younger than him, was dating a white girl, Anne, and one “quiet Sunday afternoon” the three of them were sitting on the stairs of the back side of the Rhode Island State House, throwing rocks into the empty adjacent parking lot—“just stuff kids do.” All of a sudden, the three heard the “Starsky and Hutch-like” screech of car wheels and a police car appeared in front of them. “My cousin,” recounts Abdur-Rahman, “read the situation way quicker than I did” and ran away. “I was trying to process this,” he continues, “and I didn’t know police brutality, I was just standing there with Anne and my big afro.”
According to Abdur-Rahman, two policemen walked out of the car and approached him and Anne. “Is this your girlfriend, nigger?” one of them asked. Without waiting for an answer he turned to Anne, scolding her for associating with “black motherfuckers.” They sent her home and grabbed him, tossing him against the car and then kneeing him in the back seat of the car. “They started driving me around the city, terrorizing me, using all sorts of racist names and saying they will find my body at the bottom of the river.” The long ride ended at the police station, where Abdur-Rahman was booked for “disturbing the peace or something—they trumped up the charges, that’s what they did then, they had you in the system so if they pick you up again.…”
By his own account, that incident was a major turning point in Abdur-Rahman’s life. “From that point on I was very angry, very angry. I changed, everyone noticed the change. It turned into a hatred of white people—probably not everyone because I liked my teachers, they were very good to me, but, you know, white people as a category,” he says. This anger was accompanied by a newfound black consciousness. Growing up in a city with a small black population and having never been politically engaged, Abdur-Rahman admits that until then he had only vaguely heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the various forms of political activism that were inflaming the African American community in the 1960s and 1970s. But after the incident, “I got militant” and “I started giving myself a self-education on black literature”: the books of black activists like H. Rap Brown and Kwame Ture, the writings of Black Panthers leaders, and, more than anything else, the works of Malcolm X. Soon, “not only do I not believe in the system, I want to take it down, I want a revolution.”
Abdur-Rahman’s anger did not prevent him from performing well in high school and making his way to Howard University—“it was 1980 and I was the first in my ’hood to make it to college.” Founded shortly after the end of the American Civil War and located in Washington, D.C., Howard is America’s preeminent historically black university. Coming from Providence, Abdur-Rahman was elated to find himself at a black university in a majority-black city, and he immersed himself in Washington’s vibrant black culture. He was drawn to various black political movements and was particularly fascinated by the rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, an American black nationalist movement that adopts a particularistic form of Islam with little in common with traditional Sunni Islam but with a strong message of racial pride.2 “I didn’t really understand all the differences,” Abdur-Rahman admits. “I just knew that I liked the image of militancy and unity and brotherhood, it was intoxicating. I listen to it now and it is nonsense, but back then, at eighteen, I was a kid, he [Farrakhan] had a booming voice, and I was spellbound.”
After less than two years at Howard, though, Abdur-Rahman was forced by financial difficulties to temporarily leave. To make money in the hopes of eventually returning to school, he started a business with a fellow Howard student selling gadgets at sporting and musical events. Business was very good, but Abdur-Rahman was disturbed by the excesses and debauchery he witnessed while touring with singers and performers. “I’m starting to move in a spiritual direction,” he recalls. “I’m starting to get serious about looking at becoming religious.” He started frequenting a black Baptist church in Washington but was disappointed by some immoral behavior he witnessed there. He also found certain aspects of the Bible contradictory. “But in a black church,” he says, “criticism of the Bible is not allowed; it’s all about the singing, the preaching, collecting money, building a new building.… There’s a really anti-intellectual strain in it that I found unsatisfying.”
“It was around 1986,” he continues, “and I was really disillusioned with Christianity; I thought black people are Christian but it didn’t make sense to me, I saw too many contradictions.” Abdur-Rahman had had several contacts with African American Muslims over the years and had always found their views fascinating. But he never seriously thought of converting until one day he picked up the Quran (“I’ve always had a copy”): “I opened it and it just hit me between the eyes. It was clear this was written by God, I was convinced.” He immediately decided to convert. He called Kwame Pitts, a Muslim friend from Howard, and together they went to the apartment of a group of Arab students, where he recited the shahada (declaration of faith) and formally converted. One of the Arabs said he “looked like an Abdur-Rahman” and, without much thought, Kenneth decided to become Abdur-Rahman.
His first days as a Muslim were not easy. His father became very upset about the conversion, and fasting for Ramadan in the heat of the Washington summer was taxing. Yet Abdur-Rahman embraced his new religion with enormous enthusiasm, devouring books about it and attending mosques with assiduity. In the fall of 1987, thanks to the money he had earned through his business, he returned to Howard. But there his academics took a back seat to Islamic activism. Pitts introduced Abdur-Rahman to Johari Abdul-Malik, another African American convert who studied at Howard, and the three became inseparable. They organized lectures, collective prayers, and other events, attracting a growing number of young Muslims on campus. “Our dawa was popping,” says Abdur-Rahman, “and they were calling me the dawa machine.”
The success Abdur-Rahman’s group was having on Howard’s campus reached the ear of Abdurahman Alamoudi. An Eritrean-born biochemist, from the 1980s to the early 2000s Alamoudi was one of the most influential figures of the American Muslim Brotherhood milieu. The organization he headed, the American Muslim Council (AMC), organized events, often held in Washington’s most prestigious hotels, that were attended by high-ranking politicians, media personalities, and religious leaders. The FBI praised AMC as “the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States”; the State Department appointed Alamoudi as “goodwill ambassador,” routinely asking him to travel throughout the world representing American Muslims; and the Department of Defense put him in the powerful position of training and vetting the imams who attend to the religious needs of American Muslims serving in the military.
In 2003, however, an unexpected discovery during a routine customs screening at London’s Heathrow Airport wiped away 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 then Saudi crown prince Abdallah. A year later Alamoudi pled guilty to all charges and was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. The investigation also revealed Alamoudi’s financial dealings with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas and al Qaeda, and the Treasury Department accused him of fund-raising for them in the United States.3
But in the fall of 1989, when he reached out to Abdur-Rahman and his friends, Alamoudi was at the height of his power. Flattered by the attention of a celebrated figure of the Muslim community, Abdur-Rahman drove with Johari to meet Alamoudi in Herndon, Virginia, in the same suburban office building occupied by many of the companies and organizations run by the U.S. Brotherhood network that would be raided by U.S. authorities in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks for suspected links to terrorism. “Alamoudi had charisma,” reminisces Abdur-Rahman. “He was a smooth dude, very charming, he made you feel like you were very important.”
Abdur-Rahman replays the moments of that important encounter, which shaped his future. “He said: ‘Brothers, we’re hearing some very good things are happening at Howard University and we want to help you; you need a musalla [prayer room], you need materials, you need teachers and we’re going to help you, inshallah.’ ” As he was saying this, Alamoudi reportedly showed Abdur-Rahman and Johari piles of Islamic books and audiocassettes, which he said were a gift to them. “I grew up in the streets,” says Abdur-Rahman with a smile, “so in the back of my mind I was already waiting for the strings.”
Indeed, Abdur-Rahman explains, Alamoudi had a request: “We need to know who your speakers are going to be. If you can give us a list of all the speakers you are going to have for the next year, that would be helpful.” He then proceeded to pull out a list of speakers he said the Howard group should invite on campus. Finally, he suggested that they call their group the Howard Muslim Student Association, to match the name of the national organization that was the first seed of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.
Here, before continuing with Abdur-Rahman’s story, we must review the history of the American Brotherhood milieu, as it is little known and often contested. Some, in fact, have questioned whether the Brotherhood ever operated in America; more have questions whether various American Muslim organizations have links to it. Mirroring debates taking place in almost all Western countries, others have exaggerated the presence of the Brotherhood in the United States and, even more controversially, its influence over both American Muslim organizations and the U.S. political establishment—at the most extreme, voicing wild conspiracy theories, prominent in some segments of the Arab media and among some fringe American right-wing commentators, that cast the Brotherhood as an all-powerful hydra controlling the U.S. government.
Leaving aside the more complex issue of assessing aims and influence, it is fair to say that ample documentary evidence, supplemented by many personal testimonials of individuals who belong or used to belong to the group, clearly demonstrates that the Brotherhood has been operating in the United States from at least the late 1950s. And it is equally fair to say that that presence has historically been large and well-organized, even in comparison to European countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, with an important Brotherhood presence. The common belief that America has traditionally hosted fewer Islamist movements than Europe does hold true for all of them. For example, the United States contains nothing like the number of jihadist militants found in many central and northern European countries. But the Muslim Brotherhood is unquestionably the exception to this rule. Confirmation of the historically large and sophisticated presence of Brotherhood networks in America also comes from Kamal Helbawy, who played an important role in establishing, uniting, and solidifying them in the early days.4
Two overlapping factors account for this phenomenon. One is the usual socioeconomic background of those who join the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world. As we have seen, the Brotherhood is a highly selective group that opens itself up to individuals that are not only committed but, in most cases, successful and highly educated. It is an organization that recruits heavily in schools and universities and attracts large numbers of high-achieving young men who are pursuing or have obtained high levels of education. Various studies have also demonstrated that the group attracts a disproportionate number of individuals who have pursued high degrees, particularly in medicine and engineering.5
The second factor that explains the early and large presence of Brothers in America is the size, openness, and quality of the American university system. Indeed, starting in the 1950s and as part of a deliberate Cold War strategy to counter Soviet influence in nonaligned countries, U.S. authorities began to encourage the presence of students from non-Western countries at American universities. Historians estimate that in the 1950s and the 1960s, more than half a million students from throughout the Muslim world, as well as from other parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, attended universities in the United States.6
As noted elsewhere, aside from a few exceptions such as Kamal Helbawy or Yussuf Nada, during those years the first footholds of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West were established not by those acting as part of a concerted strategy but simply by individuals who had joined or were close to the Brotherhood while at universities in their countries of origin and had decided to continue their studies in European and American universities. While no exact numbers are available, the substantially larger number of U.S. universities, from elite institutions to local community colleges, and generous U.S. student visa policies suggest that a larger number of Brothers traveled to the United States to study than to any European country.
Once they arrived on U.S. college campuses, those Brotherhood pioneers founded the first student organizations that could fulfill their basic religious needs.7 They were scattered throughout the United States, but many were based in universities in the Midwest; it is therefore unsurprising that, in the winter of 1963, some one hundred students representing fewer than twenty Muslim student organizations from various parts of the country met on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, twin towns less than a hundred miles from Chicago, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, in the heart of the American Midwest.8 The result of the meeting was the creation of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), America’s first national Muslim student organization.
MSA was the brainchild of a small group of student activists who came from different countries of the Muslim world but were united by a common vision of Islam as inherently political. Founders of MSA included activists from various backgrounds, including several Shias, yet a crucial role was played by members and sympathizers of national branches of the Muslim Brotherhood who had settled in the United States since the 1950s.9 While MSA was not a “pure” Brotherhood organization, its links to the Brotherhood were strong.10 From its inception, Brotherhood members held key positions, influencing its ideology and direction. Moreover, MSA became a sort of parallel structure of the Brotherhood: despite its independence, it provided an inexhaustible recruiting pool and a perfect avenue to disseminate the Brotherhood’s ideas.11 It published Islamist literature, organized events, fund-raised, and created countless subgroups along ethnic or professional lines.
The prominence of Brotherhood networks on U.S. campuses throughout the final decades of the twentieth century is widely documented by the publications of various groups; to a lesser degree, some academic writings and internal documents have been introduced as evidence by U.S. authorities in various terrorism financing cases related to the milieu. But confirmation also comes from the testimony of a handful of individuals who—at different times, in different places, and with different roles—were active in Brotherhood circles on U.S. college campuses and who, after leaving the movement, decided to tell their stories.
One of them is Jamal al Hossani, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood in his native United Arab Emirates who, in 2014, decided to tell his story to the Abu Dhabi–based television station Al Emarat.12 Al Hossani recounted how he started to be active in Brotherhood circles in his own country as a teenager but understood that the groups were run by the organization only when he was summoned by the organization’s leaders in Abu Dhabi on the eve of his departure to the United States to study at a university. “You have reached a stage where you are one of us,” he recalls being told on that occasion.
Al Hossani claims that, once in the United States, he became involved in various organizations and activities within the U.S. Brotherhood milieu. He used many of them, like the annual event held during Christmas holidays by the Muslim Arab Youth Association and attended by some ten thousand people, to spot potential recruits among the Emirati students attending. “The conference attracted over 150 Emirati students studying in the United States,” he says, and he organized outings just for them. “After I was appointed to the student union office for Emirati students in the USA, I became in charge of maintaining the union’s activity, managing its elections, and keeping communication lines open with organization members when preparing so-called religious seminars, conferences, and other activities with concealed political objectives set by the leadership.” According to him, the Emirati branch of the Brotherhood had a central “operations office” in the United States that had divided the country in zones determined by the distribution of Emirati students and had assigned one member to oversee each.
Al Hossani spent two decades with the Brotherhood, becoming active again in the United Arab Emirates—a country that in 2014 designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization—after returning from the United States. He has since become a vocal critic of the group, arguing that it deceives and manipulates young Muslims to adopt a narrative that is divisive and conducive to violence. “You become part of this organization and it’s then difficult to get out,” he says. “It’s like a kind of brainwashing, and you start to accept things that you did not accept ten years earlier.”
While al Hossani traveled to the United States as an inducted member specifically tasked to run the activities of a Middle Eastern branch of the Brotherhood—in itself a telling indicator of the movement’s extensive presence in America—Mustafa Saied has a very different story.13 Born to an affluent family in India, Saied traveled to the United States in 1990 to attend the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. On the plane, he recounts, he made a to-do list: “learn to skateboard and bungee-jump, go on road trips, hang out with girls.”14 Once in America, he thrived in class and outside of it, making friends from all backgrounds and experiencing as many aspects of American life as possible. In 1993 he spent a semester at Disney World, taking classes on Disney’s business approach.
One day, back in Knoxville, he decided “on impulse” to stop at the mosque near campus—something he had never done before. He saw a group of students discussing Quranic verses and he joined the conversation. “I knew a couple of things,” he recounts, “and they were so impressed.” He was invited back and asked to join a study group. Within days he stopped shaving and began praying five times a day. Many of his old interests, such as movies, music, and dating, were abandoned. Saied began devouring Islamic texts, particularly those of Yussuf al Qaradawi, and participating assiduously in the activities of the study group along with a handful of other students. A gifted speaker, Saied was also allowed to give speeches inside the mosque, excoriating “Americans who indulged in alcohol and premarital sex, or celebrated ‘false’ holidays such as Halloween and Christmas.” He also celebrated attacks against Israel: “Our view was that suicide bombings were fine.”
Throughout 1994 Saied “sensed that his allegiance to radical Islam was being tested by members of his study group,” although he did not understand why. Everything changed one afternoon, when a fellow student summoned him to the campus cafeteria. After sitting in a quiet corner, the student disclosed his affiliation with the Brotherhood and invited Saied to join the group. “It was a dream, because that’s what you’re conditioned to do—to really love the Ikhwan,” he recalls. “Everything I had learned pointed to the Muslim Brotherhood being an awesome thing, the elite movement. I cannot tell you the feeling that I felt—awesome power.”
As seen in other cases, after being inducted, Saied learned the names of other Brothers in the local area and was surprised to discover that several prominent figures belonged to the group. “I was shocked,” he recalls. “These people had really hid the fact that they were Brotherhood.” In the following months Saied immersed himself in Brotherhood literature and activities. He also traveled throughout the country to attend Brotherhood-linked events. He remembers being particularly struck by a conference held in December 1995 at hotel in Toledo, Ohio, that was organized by the Muslim Arab Youth Association, a now defunct organization of the U.S. Brotherhood milieu that was very active in the 1980s and 1990s.
Keynoting the conference was Qaradawi, and Saied had the opportunity to meet the Qatar-based cleric. “I was awestruck because he was the biggest Muslim Brotherhood figure in the world, and I had met him,” he recalls. During his speech, Qaradawi laid out a vision that critics of the Brotherhood have often cited as indicative of the group’s desire to work for a patient and gradualist, yet still disturbing, goal of conquering the West. “What remains, then, is to conquer Rome,” said Qaradawi, referring to a well-known hadith. “The second part of the omen, ‘The city of Hiraq [once emperor of Constantinople] will be conquered first, so what remains is to conquer Rome.’ This means that Islam will come back to Europe for the third time, after it was expelled from it twice.… Conquest through Da’wa, that is what we hope for. We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’wa.”15
In Knoxville, Saied became a fund-raiser for Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), a Chicago-based charity that claimed to be raising funds for children and the poor in war-torn countries such as Bosnia and Chechnya. Saied managed to raise thousands of dollars in the community, but he later found out from a BIF emissary who had come to Knoxville that some of the funds were destined for fighters. Saied immediately stopped fund-raising. In 2002 BIF was designated a terrorism financier by the U.S Treasury Department, and close ties between its founder, Enaam Arnaout, and Osama bin Laden were revealed.16
In 1996 Saied moved to Florida, where he continued his activism. But an encounter at a small gathering in a private home in Chicago the following year led him to reevaluate his choices. There two young American Muslims started questioning Saied’s views, basing their arguments on Quranic verses. The four-hour argument left Saied defeated, “out of arguments.” Later that night, rethinking the discussion, Saied concluded that he had been wrong all along. “Oh my God, what have I been doing?” he kept asking himself. Saied’s doubts were reinforced by the views of his new wife, an American Muslim of Pakistani descent, who was horrified by some of her husband’s positions.
By the late 1990s Saied left the Brotherhood and adopted a significantly more liberal interpretation of Islam. While still a devout Muslim, he worries about the politicization of Islam and the influence of the Brotherhood on American Muslims. “They have this idea that Muslims come first,” he says, “not that humans come first.” “Anti-American sentiment is usually reserved for closed-door discussions or expressed in languages that most Americans don’t understand,” he adds. “While such rhetoric has been drastically reduced since 9/11, it is still prevalent enough to be a cause for concern.”
The examples of al Hossani and Saied stand in for many others that show the deep network of study groups, activities, and organizations that the U.S. Brotherhood network had created by the early 1990s. It is therefore not surprising that Alamoudi, one of the vital cogs in the U.S. Brotherhood machine of the era, tried to co-opt the small group that Abdur-Rahman and Johari had formed on the campus of Howard, the home of African American elites where the Brothers, according to Abdur-Rahman, had long sought to establish a presence.
Abdur-Rahman, despite being impressed by Alamoudi’s image, was distrustful of his offer. “We don’t need to sell out our principles,” he says he told Johari on the way back from the meeting, “change our name and be under them, we’re not going to be under them, under anybody.” He adds, “My thing was, we were going to build black Islam, being the vanguard of Islam in the black community, and do so independently.” He remembers Johari being more noncommittal.
In the following months, several problems arose for Abdur-Rahman. A Moroccan preacher, whom Abdur-Rahman believes to have been a Brotherhood member, began attracting a following on campus. Johari distanced himself from Abdur-Rahman and, according to the latter, began convening small study groups at his house without telling Abdur-Rahman. “Things were falling apart,” say Abdur-Rahman, “and there was a lot of fitna [internal dissent].” Abdur-Rahman says that the Moroccan preacher and Johari began to spread rumors about him, which caused him to lose a significant portion of his following on campus. “It became clear that Johari was becoming a real enemy,” he says. “He literally stabbed me in the back.”
In 1990 the tensions on campus and problems in his personal life (he got divorced that year) led Abdur-Rahman to leave Washington and move to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he spent thirteen months studying Arabic and the Quran. “I went down to recharge,” he says, “licking my wounds.” When he returned to Washington, he found that the situation on Howard campus had completely changed. “The Ikhwan had Howard on lock, complete total lock,” he says. Johari had opened the local branch of MSA, the first of various positions in the American Brotherhood milieu he would come to occupy (he later became director of outreach for the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center, the network’s main hub in northern Virginia). And, according to Abdur-Rahman, he had “a crew around him,” badmouthing and ostracizing Abdur-Rahman.
Abdur-Rahman understood that he could no longer operate on Howard’s campus, but he wanted to remain active in Islamic circles. Thanks to his charisma and knowledge, which grew during his time in Salem, by 1994 he had attracted a small group of African American Muslims around himself. He also identified a small house not too far from Howard that could serve as a mosque for the congregation and as a home for him. Abdur-Rahman and his congregation did not have enough money for the down payment, however, and despite his bad experience with the Brotherhood during his university years, he decided to approach Alamoudi for help.
Abdur-Rahman and Alamoudi, in fact, had always had good personal relations, which had been cemented during a long car ride together back to Washington from an Islamic conference in Chicago. Once approached, the Brotherhood leader decided to help Abdur-Rahman and give him the money for the down payment. “That’s the one thing I’ll say about him,” says Abdur-Rahman of Alamoudi. “If you needed help he’d give it to you; he’s never going to give you enough to be independent, but he always helped, would often pull out a wad of cash and give me something that would help me spread Islam. He was something else.”
On various levels, argues Abdur-Rahman, Alamoudi embodies the characteristics and modus operandi of the Brotherhood: charming and generous when necessary, but also ruthless and manipulative. Alamoudi’s impressive résumé also represents the evolution of the American Brotherhood milieu. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Alamoudi became president of the Brotherhood-linked mosque in his area, the Islamic Society of Boston, and of the Muslim Student Association at the national level.17 But by the second half of the 1980s, after having relocated to Washington, he became affiliated with two crucially important organizations of the American Brotherhood milieu in its “adult” phase: the Islamic Society of North America, where he served as regional representative for the Washington area, and the SAAR Foundation, where he was executive assistant to the president.
By the late 1970s the American Brothers, like their European counterparts, had realized that their presence in the country (and in Canada, where the Brothers were active yet fewer, and initially subordinate to the group in the United States) was permanent and that a student organization, even one as sophisticated as MSA, was not enough to fulfill the needs of the organization. They therefore incorporated the Islamic Society of North America, an umbrella organization intended to coordinate the activities of MSA and the other groups born from the same milieu.18 ISNA, MSA, and the North American Islamic Trust, the body that holds the deeds to the network’s mosques, soon established their headquarters on a multimillion-dollar, forty-two-acre site in suburban Indianapolis.19
Among the various sources documenting the first years of the Brotherhood in the United States and its growth from student groups, one of the most authoritative and comprehensive is a lecture given to other Brotherhood members in Kansas City in the early 1980s by Zeid al Noman, a masul (official) of the Executive Office of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.20 Al Noman describes a striking level of organization. Though the group had only just established a presence in the country, al Noman outlines a formal and extremely complex structure. He explains that the group had no less than twenty collegial bodies and committees that operated within a well-defined hierarchy and met regularly. While some of the committees discussed security or dawa methods, the organization’s central bodies drafted and oversaw meticulous long-term plans of action. According to al Noman, the Brotherhood’s Shura Council in the United States approved five-year plans for the group’s activities, which the Executive Office, to which al Noman himself belonged, put together annual work programs to implement.
According to al Noman, the plan for the 1975–1980 quinquennium was simply “general work,” but the 1981–1985 quinquennium unveiled a major shift in the American Brotherhood’s views and perceptions of its goals. The Shura Council and the Executive Office understood that basing the movement’s activities within a student organization was limiting, because its membership changes as students graduate. Only a permanent network of organizations could implement the quinquennial plans. “What the Movement should be,” said al Noman, “is to become a Movement for the residents.” Al Noman refers to this new phase as “the settlement of the dawa.”
The writings of another member of the American Brotherhood from its early days provide a glimpse of the network’s focus on developing organizations. In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the Strategic Goals for the Group in North America,” an eighteen-page document written in 1991, Mohammed Akram—then a member of the Shura Council of the U.S. Brotherhood—stated that “it must be stressed that it has become clear and emphatically known that all is in agreement that we must ‘settle’ or ‘enable’ Islam and its Movement in this part of the world [America].”21 Crucially important in order to advance this goal was the development of what Akram calls “the organizational mentality,” examples of which he finds in the prophet Mohammed (“the first pioneer of this phenomenon”) and the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna (“the pioneer of contemporary Islamic Dawa”). Akram wrote to other members of the Shura Council, “We must say that we are in a country which understands no language other than the language of the organizations, and one which does not respect or give weight to any group without effective, functional and strong organizations.”
In accordance with these plans, during the second phase of their presence in the United States, the Brothers began developing a web of organizations, each with its own magazine, website, annual conference, subdepartments, and regional branches but unified by common financial sources, interlocking boards of directors, and occasional participation in common initiatives.22 The few hundred individuals who run them form a small social network united by family, business, and, most important, ideological ties. Affluent, well-connected, highly educated, and motivated, they constitute a clique of leaders with ample clout but few followers.
As in all Western countries, the relationship between these groups and the Brotherhood is often a source of debate, particularly between supporters and critics of the organization. For example, Shaker Elsayed—a top official of the Muslim American Society, one of the organizations of the cluster with closest links to the Brotherhood—admitted in 2002 that roughly 45 percent of MAS activists are members of the Brotherhood but stressed that the organization is operationally independent and “not administered from Egypt.” “Ikhwan members founded MAS,” notes the Egyptian-born Elsayed, “but MAS went way beyond that point of conception.”23 “We really see that our methods and means are different from the Orient,” similarly insisted the American Brotherhood leader al Noman in his Kansas City lecture. “[W]e did not take or borrow a method or a means from the Orient unless it was compatible with the reality of the Islamic Movement over here.”24
The complexity and size of the American branch of the Brotherhood in its early days are confirmed by many internal Brotherhood documents retrieved by the U.S. government and published writings of members of the milieu. They are also detailed by various individuals who had intimate knowledge of the milieu and spoke to me about it. Kamal Helbawy, a frequent visitor to the United States between the 1970s and 1990s, is one of them. Another one is a less known yet arguably even more informed insider, a former member of the American Muslim Brotherhood milieu named Hussien Elmeshad, who for the first time decided to publicly speak about his time in the Brotherhood for this book.25
Elmeshad grew up in a religious family in Cairo. In the 1960s, while in high school, he began to attend Brotherhood study groups. His interactions and fascination with the group continued while he pursued business studies at al Azhar. But it was only in 1978 that Elmeshad formally joined the Brotherhood (or, as he puts it, “became organized”). And, interestingly, his induction did not take place in Egypt but in Jersey City, New Jersey. Elmeshad, in fact, had moved to the United States to continue his studies, and before leaving Egypt he had been told by a local leader of the Brotherhood to introduce himself to the late head of a Jersey City mosque “controlled by the Brotherhood” to continue his process of integration in the group. Indeed, just a few weeks after connecting with the head of the Jersey City mosque, Elmeshad was formally inducted. “The process was fast,” Elmeshad explains, “because I had already started it in Egypt and I had come recommended by prominent members in Egypt.” Elmeshad’s induction process, started in Egypt and formalized in the United States, indicates a high level of connectivity between the Brotherhood in the Arab world and that in the West.
Upon induction, Elmeshad was inserted in a complex structure that mirrored, albeit on a smaller scale, that of the Brotherhood in Egypt. He became part of a local usra in New Jersey, which was part of a complex regional and national structure. The naqib of Elmeshad’s own usra was an Egyptian graduate of Columbia University who was the director of the Eastern region of the United States (which covered the eastern seaboard, from Boston to Virginia), one of the four regions into which the Brotherhood had divided the country (the others were South, Midwest, and West). Members of each region would meet regularly, often at outdoor camps. Elmeshad recalls that at some of these camps some 2,500 people were present (although the number includes not just Brothers but also their family members).
According to Elmeshad, areas like Chicago, New York/New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and California have historically been the main Brotherhood hubs in the country, but the group had a presence also in secondary cities and remote areas. “Members of the Brotherhood in America all know each other,” explains Elmeshad, “we are one big family, and everybody helps each other.” While national leaders constantly interact with one another, national conferences of public organizations of the milieu are the occasion in which they all come together. Similarly, these gatherings serve the purpose of reinforcing the sense of belonging on the cadres and further “bringing in” individuals who are in the process of joining the Brotherhood.
Elmeshad played an integral role in this milieu for around two decades. He was close to most of the top leaders of the American Brotherhood milieu, and top Brotherhood leaders from abroad (former murshid Mashour and Akef, among them many) often stayed at his New Jersey home when visiting America. As is common, membership in the “secret” structure of the Brotherhood coincided with roles in the “public” organizations of the milieu. Elmeshad was a member of ISNA and served as treasurer of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) for six years. Given his business background, he was involved in many financial activities of the American Brotherhood milieu, from fund-raising for the local Brotherhood school in Jersey City to occupying key positions in various businesses linked to the organization. “From nine to five I worked as a deputy bursar at Columbia University,” Elmeshad explains, “but all my free time was devoted to the Brotherhood.”
By the late 1990s Elmeshad began to feel disenchanted with the Brotherhood. His reasons are very similar to Helbawy’s, a man Elmeshad considers his mentor. Elmeshad is still an ardent believer in al Banna’s message, which he considers “the true Islamic thought.” But he argues that the current leadership of the Brotherhood, in Egypt exactly like in the United States, has swayed from the right path, losing sight of spirituality and grassroots activism to concentrate on politics and power. Obsession with secrecy and blind obedience, argues Elmeshad, are just some of the many deviations from al Banna’s true message implemented by the generation currently leading the Brotherhood. In 2003, while living in Bahrain, Elmeshad formally left the Brotherhood.
As Elemshad’s role indicates, access to ample financial resources was crucial to developing this network—and, as the case of Abdur-Rahman shows, to exerting influence over many individuals and organizations that espoused conservative interpretations of Islam but did not belong to the movement. To be sure, this success would not have been possible without the drive and organizational abilities of its members, but the guarantee of substantial funding is arguably the single most important determinant of the Brothers’ expansion in America—as in other Western countries. “Since they were well-connected in the Middle East, they were able to bring money to build various institutions,” argues Inamul Haq, a professor of religion at Benedictine University. “They were in a position to define American Islam.” Without the Brotherhood, he continues, “we would have seen a more American Islamic culture rather than a foreign community living in the United States.”26
Connections in the Middle East were indeed the key. Three of the early pioneers of the Brotherhood in America, Jamal Barzinji, Ahmed Totonji, and Hisham al Talib (the so-called three Kurds), who were the founders of many of the most prominent organizations of the networks, worked for various companies owned by the major Brotherhood financier Yussuf Nada and were introduced by the Egyptian millionaire to his network of wealthy Arab Gulf donors.27 The three Kurds also served in leadership positions inside global Brotherhood organizations such as IIFSO and WAMY, allowing them to have access to some of the most generous sources of funding for Islamic activities of the second half of the twentieth century.
No less revealing is the active presence in the United States of top Egyptian Brotherhood financier Mahmoud Abu Saud, one of the fathers of modern Islamic banking. Ahmed Elkadi, his son-in-law, arrived in 1967. and served both as treasurer of the American Brotherhood’s secret structure and as president of the North American Islamic Trust.28 In 1990 Abu Saud founded the American Muslim Council, which was headed by Alamoudi until his arrest.29
Another institution in which Alamoudi was involved, the SAAR Foundation, is paradigmatic of the American Brothers’ ample access to financial resources. SAAR received substantial financial backing from wealthy Arab Gulf donors—particularly the al Rajhi family, one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest. “We asked investors to give us one large lump sum rather than smaller amounts every year,” stated the SAAR vice president and former MSA president Yaqub Mirza, explaining the foundation’s fund-raising mechanisms in the early 1980s. “This way we were bringing in from $10 million to $20 million a year.”30
An investigative report by the Washington Post in 2002 revealed additional details about SAAR’s financial activities:
In 1984, Yaqub Mirza, a Pakistani native who received a PhD in physics from the University of Texas in Dallas, used money from the Rajhis to start SAAR in Virginia, with the goal of spreading Islam and doing charitable work. Mirza also sought out business ventures for SAAR. By investing the Rajhis’ money with Washington real estate developer Mohamed Hadid, he made SAAR one of the region’s biggest landlords in the 1980s. The SAAR network also became one of South America’s biggest apple growers and the owner of one of America’s top poultry firms, Mar-Jac Poultry in Georgia. “The funds came very easily,” said a businessman who dealt with SAAR. “If they wanted a few million dollars, they called the al-Rajhis, who would send it along.”31
With such sums floating around, it was not difficult for Alamoudi to occasionally dispense a few dollars to Abdur-Rahman, money that did not buy his allegiance but made him indebted to the network. Abdur-Rahman, in fact, regularly attended Dar al Hijrah throughout the late 1990s and into the following decade and occasionally spoke at second-tier events organized by the milieu. He was friendly with most of the leaders of the network and shared large components of the Brothers’ ideology, even though his personal emphasis was always on the African American Muslim community.
“I was definitely a fellow traveler,” he says. “What I didn’t like about the Ikhwan,” he adds, “was the deception, because I didn’t see why it was necessary. Why are you acting like you are ashamed of Islam?” Abdur-Rahman maintains that he had always been disturbed by the Brothers’ decision not to reveal their identity to outsiders. He recalls that some members, after years of interactions, did tell him they were Brothers, but there was always a “kind of sneakiness, like you’re ashamed of something; when I brought it up with actual Ikhwan they would say it was because of the things we suffered in Egypt, in Syria, we have to dissimulate.”
Abdur-Rahman claims to have had his first doubts about his adherence to Islamist ideology and, consequently, activism on the fringes of the Brotherhood milieu after the August 1998 bombings of the U.S embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were both carried out by al Qaeda. He recalls the reaction to the attack in his congregation, where sympathies for Bin Laden had frequently been expressed in those years. “We saw all these Africans get killed, black people like us,” he explains, “and it was like, I don’t know, how do you square that circle?” To some degree, unbeknownst to Abdur-Rahman, this reaction was similar to Alamoudi’s. In a phone call that was intercepted by U.S. authorities, who had long monitored his activities, Alamoudi told his interlocutor that the attack against the embassies in East Africa had been “wrong,” but in his opinion only because “many African Muslims have died and not a single American died.”32
Another episode that frustrated Abdur-Rahman was the American Brothers’ support of George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential elections. “Bush had once made an offhand comment about not profiling Muslims,” he says, “and they seized on it and decided he was the candidate for Muslims; they organized an event at Dar al Hijra to get all imams on the same page to get our communities to vote for Bush.” Abdur-Rahman recalls having a major falling out with Alamoudi over this decision, as he believed that the Brothers had not consulted the African American Muslim community, which overwhelmingly preferred the Democratic candidate, Al Gore.
But the tipping point for Abdur-Rahman was the attacks of September 11, 2001. “9/11,” he says, “was where you learned who’s who and what’s what, you learned who is a good person, forget religion, ideology, who is a good person. That’s when you learn who is a human being and who is not.” “And at that point,” he added, “I had to take stock of my life, examine what I did and what I believed.” In the dramatic days that followed the attacks, Abdur-Rahman was also particularly taken aback by the conspiracy theories that abounded in Brotherhood circles and that attributed the attacks to a “Jewish conspiracy.” “I started seeing the hypocrisy and started seeing the dissimulation of the Ikhwan,” he says, “picking up the flag and acting like they never had a hand in creating this.” Abdur-Rahman says he was “disgusted” by the hypocrisy of certain Brotherhood leaders, starting with Alamoudi, who, after years of rallying against America, were outdoing one another in displays of patriotism in the tense days following the attacks.
The secrecy and the “Machiavellian approach to politics, always trumping religion,” were key reasons why Abdur-Rahman distanced himself from the Brothers. An additional major factor was seeing that thousands of Americans had been killed by an organization with which the Brothers had always had an ambiguous relation, viewing them as “well-meaning brothers who were too hasty and impetuous” in pursuing a just agenda. But what led Abdur-Rahman not just to distance himself from movement but to become a vocal critic is the racism he says he discovered inside it.
Abdur-Rahman’s entire adult life has been shaped by his desire to defend and empower the African American community. While for decades this commitment has been deeply intertwined with the Muslim faith, which he still practices with devotion, Abdur-Rahman has a strong sense of black identity, which arguably overshadows any other. It is for this very reason that for him, witnessing various forms of racism against blacks inside the Brotherhood milieu dealt an intolerable blow to the Brothers’ image.
“The way that they propagate the religion,” he says, passionately,
the way they sell it to you is that there’s no racism in Islam and all Muslims are like the teeth of a comb.… Then you find out that it’s not true, you find out it’s almost of a policy of who they wanna give shahada to [who they want to convert] and who they wanna bring into the fold. First is Caucasians. First because in American society Caucasians enjoy white privilege. Obviously, since the Ikhwan are about getting power for themselves, they want to insinuate themselves through the powerful group, so they do it through marriage, buying into it. When a Caucasian becomes a Muslim, then his white privilege can become part of their project. If you marry a Caucasian their children will be white or whiter—it has value to them, it’s like a currency. They can move more easily through society and gather intel and understand the society without being detected.
Abdur-Rahman basically believes that the American Brothers, seeking to infiltrate the upper echelons of American society, have made a decision to prioritize Caucasians in their dawa to non-Muslims, deeming them to be more “useful” than African Americans. Evidence supporting his argument includes an essay that he found in a decades-old publication of the Brotherhood milieu:
When the white American becomes Muslim, he is an excellent Muslim, and he represents an excellent type. This is because his social background is better than that of the black Muslim. The schools in which he studies, the environment in which he lives are at a higher level than those of the black American. This background gives the white American Muslim the possibility to comprehend and learn more than the black Muslim. But there is also a large number of black Muslims who are extremely good; they appear to be outstanding because the number of black Muslims is greater, among whom there are some who cannot grasp things quickly. The white Muslims are few in number, but when one of them becomes Muslim he is an excellent and active Muslim. We have plans for paying attention to these white Muslims and choosing certain elements among them in order to become propagators of Islam and to become effective in white society.33
This kind of overt racism was too much Abdur-Rahman to bear, and not long after 9/11 he broke with the Brotherhood milieu in which he had been involved for almost two decades. He has since become a strong critic of the “Immigrant Muslim Syndicate,” his term intended to highlight its “foreign and mafia-like nature.”34 He still lives in Washington, D.C., where he runs a company providing tours whose theme is the life of Malcolm X and giving lectures on Islam to diverse audiences.
Abdur-Rahman’s first contact with the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States came when Brothers in the Washington, D.C., area witnessed the success of his activism in the local African American Muslim community and sought to co-opt him. After his refusal, which he says cost him dearly, he maintained close relations with the milieu, participating in its activities, mobilizing for it, and receiving funds from it for some twenty years. Despite being made privy to various aspects of the organization’s ideology and mechanisms, he never received an offer to join it and remained simply a fellow traveler. Although it offers admittedly limited insights into the Brotherhood, Abdur-Rahman’s experience is an interesting one, as it illuminates several aspects of one of the largest and most organized branches of the Brotherhood in the West. Moreover, many of his motivations for leaving the milieu overlap with those of actual members, including its lack of transparency and internal racism.