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A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: NAZIS, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN THE WEST |
MODERN WARS
Chapter 13: THE BROTHERHOOD TRIUMPHANT ON AUGUST 24, 1973, it finally happened: a muezzin stood inside the bright new Islamic Center of Munich and issued a call to prayer. It was the first documented call to prayer inside a mosque in Bavarian history, and the mosque itself was just the sixth in all of West Germany. It stood bright and modern, a three-million-mark ($5 million in 2009 terms) structure in the pan-Islamic style: a dazzlingly slender us-foot minaret crowned with a golden half-moon. A spiral staircase wound up to the muezzins balcony, although this was just a symbolic piece of architecture; the Muslims didn't want to irritate their German neighbors with public calls to prayer. The prayer room was lodged inside an oval structure -- nicknamed the "atomic egg" -- made of steel-reinforced concrete and covered with cobalt and azure tiles. Nestled inside were meeting rooms, offices, and a library. It was the work of a Turkish-German architect, who had labored long to design something appealing but affordable. About two hundred dignitaries and diplomats attended the opening, including many of the once-young students who had seized control of the project fifteen years earlier. But for anyone who had followed the history of the mosque, the scene presented a strange anomaly. When it came time for the head of the mosque to present the chief benefactor with a golden key, it wasn't Said Ramadan who picked up the Saffian leather case and handed it to a sheikh from afar. Instead, a Pakistani student did the honors. Ramadan wasn't just absent. He had left the project in disgust and was about to be expelled from the commission. *** Ramadan's power had peaked eleven years earlier, when he helped set up the Muslim World League. He had worked tirelessly for decades to unite Muslims around the world in a common cause. With the league's foundation, he had succeeded in setting up a lasting institution. Ramadan was so influential at the decisive meeting that, according to one account, he personally handed King Saud the official proposal to found the league. Ramadan had wanted to end national boundaries and allow Islam to rule supreme. But, as the founding ceremony revealed, the Saudis dominated the league from the start. The kingdom controlled all the top posts and funded the group. Many in the Muslim Brotherhood made their peace with the Saudis. The kingdom was the site of Islam's holiest places. The country was rich, so it could support almost any endeavor, from libraries and schools to training centers and an international missionary movement. Moreover, the ruling house supported a conservative strain of Islam that in some ways was similar to the Brotherhood's. Many members of the Brotherhood who were persecuted at home found refuge in Saudi Arabia. Almost all accepted Saudi money. Ramadan, however, stubbornly held out, determined to remain independent even as the Saudis pushed him hard. In 1963, the Muslim World League asked Ramadan to make his Islamic Center of Geneva its first overseas office. Ramadan refused, also rejecting efforts to turn his magazine, Al-Muslimoon, into an official league organ. The letter he sent to rebuff the league's offer of money was signed and dated with the fictive place name "Islamistan" -- a signal that he wanted no country to control him or his work. The Saudis didn't cut ties with Ramadan right away. He still held a diplomatic passport with the title ambassador- at-large for the Muslim World League. Later, probably reflecting his growing frustration with the Saudis, he traveled on a Pakistani passport. As power shifted in the Muslim world, the students moved away from Ramadan. A few factors contributed to this, money especially. Namangani might have been biased in saying Ramadan talked big and delivered little, but he had a point: Ramadan was so controversial that few who pledged money actually came through with the donation. He'd gotten his biggest pledge from a Saudi businessman -- small chance that he would pay, now that Ramadan was splitting with the Saudis. The Brutus in this drama was Ramadan's protege, Ghaleb Himmat. Some fellow students speculate that national identity might have contributed to the trouble -- Himmat was a Syrian and Ramadan an Egyptian. Syria had the second-most-vibrant branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its chief, Issam ai-Attar, had arrived in Europe in the early 1960s, in exile. Himmat might have wanted to bring Attar, instead of Ramadan, to Munich. (He would later marry Attar's daughter.) Attar, however, refused, settling in the German city of Aachen and founding an Islamic center there. Others posit that the real problem lay in the fact that Himmat didn't share Ramadan's idealism. Ramadan hoped to spread the Islamist vision through education and teaching. Himmat was more political -- and, in fact, would lead the center toward a violent, turbulent future. "Said Ramadan was a traditional Islamist. He knew the teachings of Imam al-Banna -- he lived in his home," says Kamal al-Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood's official spokesman during the 1990s and an acquaintance of both men. "Maybe some new members tended to be more political and not enough interested in education. Maybe some people didn't pay attention to the full teachings of Imam al- Banna." By the mid-1960s, Ramadan had had his fill of the students, says Obeidullah Mogaddedi, one of Ramadan's early followers in Germany who stayed on at the mosque after Ramadan left. "The [students] disgusted him and he said, 'I won't have anything more to do with you.'" Himmat recalls it differently. He said Ramadan's departure had nothing to do with nationalism or different ambitions. Ramadan, he said, had never played much of a role in the mosque project and later was too busy for it: "He was in a few meetings. After a while he apologized and said he couldn't go on any longer. I don't know why. It was a burden for him to struggle for us in Munich." Before he left Munich for the last time, in about 1966, Ramadan warned Faisal Yazdani, the young Pakistani who became his successor, that he was surrounded by political opportunists. Ramadan half-jokingly warned him about political intrigues -- and the likelihood that the Arabs viewed themselves as superior to other Muslims: "Now you'll know what the Arabs are like." *** At first, the students seemed cursed. After losing Ramadan, they had no experienced organizer. They had no idea how to lobby for money and lacked the resources for fund-raising trips. The ex-soldiers' departure also hobbled them. When von Mende's men were still part of the plan, the Muslims could count on getting a plot of land for free and government recognition of their venture as a charity -- meaning that donations would be tax-free. German officials, however, now withheld both concessions. For two years, the students tried fruitlessly to raise money. Faisal Yazdani stepped in to help. Ramadan had asked him to join the Mosque Construction Commission in 1960, seeing in him a capable idealist. Yazdani came from a good family, well connected in the Muslim world. Ramadan, ever the internationalist, probably didn't want the project to be dominated by Arabs. He made a wise choice; the young man proved to be devoted to the cause. His father had sent him to Germany to study medicine, but he gave up his studies to work on the mosque, becoming chairman of the Islamic Community of Southern Germany (the new name of the Mosque Construction Commission) in 1965, after Ramadan left. Through his father, a successful Pakistani businessman, Yazdani received introductions to the Pakistani ambassador in West Germany and through him to the embassies of other Muslim countries. Protests from these embassies caused the West German Foreign Office to pressure Bavarian officials into granting the society tax-exempt status. This valuable privilege was worth tens of thousands of dollars over the next thirty-five years. Eventually, the students raised enough money to buy land on the outskirts of Munich and hire an architect. The land wasn't desirable -- it had a high water table, and the mosque's basement would lie underwater, requiring costly modifications. But they were making progress. In 1967, the cornerstone was laid, and the Pakistani ambassador made a speech. Completion seemed just around the corner. Then, another crisis occurred. Yazdani's main source of money had been the kingdom of Libya. Himmat had contacts there through the Muslim Brotherhood, and the court was expected to finance the project. The building's foundation was laid, the concrete shell erected, and even the heating pipes and radiators installed. Muammar al-Qaddafi's coup detat in 1969, however, ended the Libyan monarchy and cut the flow of money. The mosque, still a shell, stood exposed to the elements. The pipes began to rust. In desperation, Yazdani went back to the Libyan embassy, now under Qaddafi's control, and pleaded for money. The ambassador sent a secretary to Munich to survey the site. Eager to burnish his credentials in the Muslim world, Qaddafi agreed to pay the balance, about 1.5 million marks. By 1971, the money was flowing, and the mosque opened two years later. *** A few months later, members of the Islamic Community of Southern Germany gathered again in Munich. This meeting would shape the mosque's character for decades to come, putting it firmly in the hands of the politically expansionist, Saudi-financed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood -- in other words, in Himmat's hands. As at everyone of the group's biannual meetings, the key decision was who got to be chairman. Yazdani had held the office since 1965 and seemed a shoo-in. Together with Achmed Schmiede, the German convert whom Ramadan had taken to the founding of the Muslim World League in 1962, he had almost exclusively raised the funds for building the mosque. Yazdani, however, was not present. His father had been ill, and he had returned to Pakistan to be with him. In his absence, someone started a whispering campaign implying that Yazdani had enriched himself on the project. These charges were later proven groundless, or at least dropped. All the major contractors had been paid directly by the Libyan embassy, which would have made it hard for anyone to skim off money. But the rumors made Yazdani vulnerable, and a faction of the Arab students mobilized against him. Just as it happened a decade earlier, when the Arab students had forced out the emigre Muslims, the vote this time was close and controversial. The Arabs ran two candidates, Himmat and an Egyptian. In the first round, none of the candidates got the two-thirds majority. Then the Egyptian stepped aside, and Himmat won, with the Arabs united behind him. When Yazdani found out about the decision, he was crushed. "I have to say that I'm happy that it's built." says Yazdani. "But at times I am still a little disappointed at how it turned out. It wasn't as idealistic as I thought it should have been." One problem, he said, was the emphasis on Arabs over other Muslims. "I talked to them about having different Muslims, but they didn't want it. They wanted just one group, Arabs." The idea that Arabs banded together to expel a Pakistani might sound conspiratorial -- or like the complaints of a sore loser. Perhaps the resemblance to the earlier expulsion of the Central Asian ex-soldiers is coincidental. But events the next year showed the group's exclusionary nature. In 1974, one hundred Turkish guest workers filed a grievance with the Islamic Community of Southern Germany. The Turks claimed that they and others had been consistently denied membership, even though the group's own bylaws stated, "Any Muslim can be a member who supports the purpose and goals of the society." The Turks said they did so. They had supported building the mosque and now wanted to help run it. A Turk had even designed the building. But the group voted against the Turks' joining, saying it would hurt cohesion. In 1975 the Turks tried again, this time supported by Yazdani, who was still formally a member of the mosque. The meeting was closed to outsiders. Yazdani asked that everyone present on the mosque grounds be allowed to attend the meeting -- many Turks had come, hoping to crash the Arabs-only party, and Yazdani was hoping for a show of support. But Himmat and his supporters voted to keep the meeting closed. Yazdani then filed a motion charging that the mosque had been hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood. Himmat and his followers, according to their minutes of the meeting' said this accusation was ridiculous. Yazdani had no proof, they said. He was voted out of the group, and that was the end of his involvement with the mosque. Over the coming years, he would work as a court translator and distance himself from the mosque. The mosque society then again took up the issue of whether Turks could join. Many of those waiting outside were guest workers -- part of a new, unprecedented wave of Muslim immigration to Europe. They said they had been told they could attend the meeting. Germany had few mosques; most houses of worship were small prayer rooms rented by the immigrants. These people were eager to join a real mosque with a dome and minaret, one, in fact, modeled on the Ottoman style. In addition, the Islamic Community of Southern Germany had expanded to include mosques in Nuremberg and Ulm -- this growth was the reason for its name change. The Turks felt that it should have a broader base than just the few dozen students who had been running the project for the past fifteen years. The leadership rejected this bid for inclusion. Then the group moved to change its constitution to limit membership. Previously, the constitution stated that anyone interested in the mosque could join; now it was changed to create two classes of people: ordinary members who could attend the mosque and a group who ran it. The decision meant the Turks could pray and donate money but not vote. In a bitter irony, it reflected their role in German society: guest workers but not full citizens. The official account of the meeting states that the core group wanted to remain small so it could take action more effectively, even at a moment's notice. At the time of the meeting, the Islamic Community of Southern Germany had just forty-one members, about the same number as a decade earlier, when it was called the Mosque Construction Commission and focused entirely on building the Munich mosque. Now it had members across southern Germany but had kept the same central leadership. Over the next twenty-five years, Himmat would make good use of this cohesion, leading the Islamic Center of Munich down an adventurous path. It would eventually grow into a national organization, send shoots across the Atlantic, and lay the cornerstone for European organizations that endure today, ensuring that the Brotherhood's version of Islam would come to be the most influential one in the West. The mosque would be bombed and burned; it would become a focal point for jihad, recruiting young Muslims to fight in Bosnia. Men later convicted of terrorism would seek it out as their mosque of choice, and Himmat himself would one day be forced to resign from its leadership, when he was accused of financing Al Qaeda. But before all this would happen, Himmat found a partner to balance his weaknesses. Himmat was reclusive, living far from the mosque and rarely appearing in public. Photos of him are hard to find, and over the years he turned down all interview requests. Youssef Nada was his opposite: flamboyant, outgoing, and publicity hungry. He also brought valuable contacts to Himmat. He was several years older, a veteran of the Muslim Brotherhood who secured money for the mosque and international contacts with the Brotherhood back in Egypt. If Ramadan had been the visionary and Himmat its new titular head, Nada was its Macher, the man who put the people and the money together. *** Youssef Nada had joined the Brotherhood as a youngster in his hometown of Alexandria, a city in the Nile Delta, the same area that had produced the movement's founder, Hasan al-Banna. He remembers as a child how out on the street two groups of boys were fighting. The Brotherhood's youth wing -- an organization similar to the Boy Scouts -- stepped in and broke up the conflict. Nada joined soon after, in 1948, the same year that Banna was assassinated. He became a committed member, seeing in the Brotherhood a path to national salvation. When he was twenty-three years old, he was arrested and thrown in jail. It was 1954, and Nasser was rounding up anyone associated with the Brotherhood, banning the group and sending its members far and wide. It was the same wave of arrests that Ramadan had narrowly escaped, but Nada wasn't so lucky and was imprisoned for years. "I witnessed electrical shocks, fire, ice baths, whips, hanging from ceiling upside down, and dogs," Nada says of that time. While in prison, however, he met many senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, ties that would last the rest of his life. At first, he concentrated on business, working in the family dairy. But he found life under Nasser unbearable. Nada still felt close to the Brotherhood, but the group was banned, and he felt the weight of close surveillance. He sought a way out and finally, in 1960, went to Austria to study cheese making, which he hoped to launch as a business venture back in Egypt. He also set up a business exporting Emmentaler cheese to Egypt. In Austria Nada quickly got in touch with exiled members of the Brotherhood and heard about the students in Munich. In 1960, he drove from his new home in Graz to Munich to participate in the students' Bairam festival. That was the beginning of his contact with Himmat. At first, the two men met infrequently. Nada would go to Munich once in a while but was not an essential part of the group. Links with Munich became even less frequent when he developed somewhat odd business ties with Libya. "Students there [in Libya] were eating tunafish sandwiches. I convinced the court they should eat processed cheese. Tunafish is messy, but processed cheese is neater. You spill less oil on your books when you eat processed cheese." With this insight, Nada packed up and moved to Tripoli. It was there that he helped the students in Munich secure initial financing for the mosque. The Libyan court so valued Nada's advice, he says, that it asked him to be the country's agricultural adviser. "I said, 'I am ready.'" He also won a concession to import building materials from Austria. Like most of Nada's successful ventures it was a quasi monopoly, one that relied on good contacts. During the Qaddafi coup in 1969, those contacts evaporated, and Nada fled. He claims he had to be smuggled out of the country, so tight had he been with the monarchy. He fled first to Tunis and then to Greece and finally Germany. His business in ruins, Nada had a nervous breakdown and went to a clinic in the German spa town of Wiesbaden. It was there he became close friends with Himmat, who was still in Munich, a couple of hours away. Nada decided to make Europe his home and set out to find a permanent base. He moved to Campione d'Italia, an Italian enclave in Switzerland near Lake Lugano. By then, Nada and Himmat were inseparable. Himmat asked Nada to join the Islamic Community of Southern Germany, and in 1971 he did. Soon, Himmat was also living in Campione, just a few doors down from Nada. When the group met again in 1973, he traveled down from Campione -- and for the next three decades the mosque and its ever-growing network of Islamic centers in Germany would be run out of the Italian enclave. At the 1973 meeting, Ramadan was officially kicked out based on his unexcused absences; Nada voted in support of the action. Nada helped guide the mosque into the Saudi Brotherhood network. He still had close ties with the Brotherhood in Egypt, and he says that for decades he functioned as the group's unofficial foreign minister. It's hard to know how credible this claim is, but he did undertake missions for the Brotherhood to Iran during the Islamic revolution and to Afghanistan to help the mujahideen. Nada wanted to make peace with national governments. He had big business plans that required cooperation, not conflict, with authorities. In this sense, Nada was unlike Ramadan, who never shied away from confronting governments. But in other ways, Nada was more revolutionary than Ramadan. While Ramadan remained in Geneva, isolated and cut off, Nada's frenetic business and diplomatic efforts took place at the center of a worldwide revolution in Islamist activity. The marriage of Saudi money and the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology had set the stage for the spread of Islamist thinking, not only across the Muslim world but into the West too. Nada, Himmat, and the Islamic Center of Munich would be its epicenter.
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