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A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: NAZIS, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN THE WEST

SPEAKING IN 1966 to a group of Turks about to leave from Istanbul to work in Cologne, a West German official made this prophecy: "Many of you are going to build new lives for yourselves in Germany. You will put down roots and visit your homeland only as guests."

At the time, few on either side of the equation would have agreed. For the West Germans, the Turks filled an urgent need for labor, which their economic miracle had created. West German unemployment was virtually at zero, and companies were expanding rapidly. In this era before globalization, which allows firms to hopscotch around the globe to open factories near labor and markets, West German companies needed workers where their factories were situated. The country had already imported laborers from Italy, Spain, and Greece and would do so in the coming years from Portugal, Tunisia, Morocco, and Yugoslavia. In all cases the "guest workers" -- Gastarbeiter -- were seen as temporary because they were rotated in and out after a few years.

The Turkish laborers also thought they were taking temporary jobs. Most came from nonindustrialized parts of Turkey, especially the rural stretches of central Anatolia. For them, this was the chance of a lifetime -- a union job in West Germany, where as semiskilled laborers they could make many times the money they could earn at home. Their goals were simple: to help their families and perhaps retire to the Black Sea and live in a home paid for with their savings from Germany. And indeed, for years the workers lived simply and sent money home. No one thought of building a house in West Germany.

Over time, the concept of guest workers began to lose favor. Employers complained about the high costs of training new employees, and workers wanted to stay on. So regulations were relaxed, and the foreign workforce, instead of rotating in and out, was allowed to stay. In addition, the West German government began to let workers bring their families along. By the time West Germany stopped importing labor in 1971, more than 700,000 Turks were living there. In the following years, immigration actually continued because Turks were permitted to move to West Germany to be reunited with family members living there. For the first time in German history, a sizable number of Muslims resided in the country. Today, roughly 2 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany, most of them Muslim. Another 1.5 million Muslims from other parts of the world, especially Bosnia and North Africa, also make their homes there.

Across Europe, similar demographics were in play. Islam's great era of conquests had left large Muslim populations on Europe's fringes -- in Kosovo and Bosnia, for example, and the Crimea; for many centuries, the Muslim Umayyad caliphate ruled much of modern-day Spain as Al-Andalus. Interactions with the Muslim world had a profound impact, reintroducing to the West works of science, literature, philosophy, and mathematics lost to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire but preserved in the great Islamic libraries. Yet overall, Islam and its people had seemed distant, far removed. Since the fifteenth century, when the last Muslim emirate, Grenada, was conquered by Spain, almost no Muslims had lived in western Europe. They became the ultimate outsiders, close enough to be worrisome but far enough away to be exotic. At times viewed with dread (for their slave galleys and scimitars, their reputed despotism and cruelty), Muslims later became a subject of frivolous fascination (for their harems and genies, flying carpets and turbans).

After the postwar immigration, the stereotypes remained, but real Muslims were suddenly living in the midst of western Europeans. As it had in West Germany, economics drove countries to import laborers. Some preferred subjects from former colonies. Sometimes that meant non-Muslims, such as Hindus from India, who went to Britain, or animists and Christians from central Africa, who went to Belgium. But most immigrants were Muslims. With eastern Europe cut off by the iron curtain, low-wage workers were most easily found to Europe's south -- across the Mediterranean in Muslim North Africa and Turkey.

In France, the effects of decolonization and the Algerian Civil War increased the number of Muslims in that country from a statistically insignificant number before World War II to more than four million today. By some counts the number is as high as six million, or 10 percent of the population. (As in many European countries, French census takers do not ask about religion or race.) In Britain, Muslims who had arrived during the colonial era, primarily as traders, formed small enclaves. After World War II, India's civil war triggered a flood of immigration as people fled the subcontinent. The number of Muslims in Britain grew from 23,000 at the end of World War II to 360,000 in 1971 and nearly two million today. In western Europe, Muslims number fifteen to twenty million, about four times the number living in the United States, which has roughly the same size population.

At first, religion did not play a major role in the Muslim guest workers' daily lives. Companies occasionally accommodated the faith of their new employees, creating some of the first places of worship for the new arrivals. In 1965, for example, the Mannesmann smelter in Duisburg, a city in the Ruhr Valley, set up prayer rooms. Workers fulfilled the role of imams themselves, with the person with the best voice and most religious knowledge leading prayers. Over time, however, the desire grew for a normal religious life. Most Muslim immigrants were not wealthy and so couldn't afford to build mosques, so they rented commercial space and converted it into prayer rooms. These hidden mosques are often taken as proof of discrimination against Muslims. While it is certainly true that many local governments have hindered or prevented efforts to build visible mosques, it is also the case that the immigrants were (and in fact still are) working their way up the economic ladder and lacked the financial means to build large, costly places of worship.

For many groups, religion was still tied to the homeland. Turks in Germany brought with them groups such as the Suleymans and the followers of Necmettin Erbakan. The former were arch-conservative pietists who formed the Union of Islamic Cultural Centers (known by its German acronym, VIKZ), which offered schooling in the Koran to youngsters. The latter set up the religious community Milli Gorus, a Turkish variation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Back home, the government kept these groups in check, but in the West, where religious thought was not circumscribed, they spread freely. Worried that religious zealotry was infecting Turks in Germany and that the problem would spread back home, the Turkish officials set up an organization in West Germany known as Ditib, a branch of the Turkish government's religious authority, Diyanet. Over the years it financed many large mosques in Germany and provided the country with imams. In 2007, Germany and Turkey signed a treaty formalizing this process. The situation in other European countries is similar. In France, the Grande Mosquee de Paris is headed by an Algerian civil servant. Britain has lavish mosques paid for by Persian Gulf sheikhs. In another era, immigrants might have taken decades to leave an architectural mark; in twentieth-century Europe, it happened quickly.

This demographic shift was not lost on the Muslim world. When Said Ramadan first landed in Europe in the 1950s, it was a haven precisely because it was not part of the Muslim world. Europe was separate and safe. Organization building was primarily a reaction to oppression back home. But as Europe gained a sizable Muslim population, it regained its historical position as a part of the Muslim world. Traditionally, Islamic thinkers have viewed the world as divided into two areas. In the Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, the word of God reigns supreme. Its opposite is the Dar al-Harb, or House of Infidels. For centuries, Europe was in the latter camp. But now, with millions of Muslims living there, it had rejoined the Muslim world. Whether through luck or brilliant foresight, the Brotherhood was already firmly planted in the West just as this historical transformation was taking place.

***

In a small hotel on the edge of London in 2004, Mohammad Hawari was addressing a panel of men practicing the ancient art of Islamic jurisprudence. The men were helping European Muslims integrate into the West by reconciling the demands of Islam with the secular laws of their host countries. Because Islam regulates many temporal matters -- such as finances, times for prayer, and food -- the need for concrete, practical advice is arguably greater than it is in most other religions. Questions range from the complex (Can I pay into a pension system that is based on interest, which is forbidden by Islam?) to the practical (When do sunset prayers take place during the summer solstice in northern Scandinavia, when the sun doesn't set?) and the mundane (What if I cannot find halal food?). Hawari and the scholars were ready to provide answers. These particular questions had answers that were seemingly simple but had far-reaching implications. Yes, pay into pension plans that have interest, but do not accept the interest. For parts of the world where times of sunrise and sunset vary significantly by season, timetables for prayer are provided. And regarding halal food, Islam is a practical religion and makes exemptions for hardship. If you are truly hungry, eat whatever you can find.

At this session, the panel had decided to tackle family life. Hawari, a prosperous scientist from the German city of Aachen, was addressing a key problem familiar to any modern parent or grandparent: sex. Muslim children, the sixty-three-year-old said, were being waylaid by the West's sexual revolution. They had to stay pure and chaste, saving sexual relations for marriage. It was a normal plea for traditional virtues, one that can be heard countless times a week in mosques, churches, and temples around the world.

Then came a disturbing turn in the discussion. The cause of the sexual revolution, Hawari informed the group, was Jews. They had a secret plan to take over the world by weakening families of other faiths. This was no idle speculation on his part, Hawari told the scholars, all of them taking notes and listening attentively. He had found proof: the minutes of a meeting, which he now read aloud to the group.

"We should seek to collapse morals everywhere to facilitate our control," Hawari read. "Freud is one of us. He will continue to highlight sexual relations in order for them to cease to be sacred in the eyes of the youth, until their major concern becomes satisfying their sexual desire and then their morals collapse." The citation came from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most notorious works of anti-Semitism in Western history. The protocols are purported to be an account of Jewish conspirators plotting to take over the world by undermining Western civilization. The book was the creation of czarist agents in the nineteenth century, who were at the forefront of a new, more dangerous form of anti-Semitism. Maybe more stunning than Hawari's use of the book was the response it elicited: nothing.

It was a meeting of the European Council for Fatwa and Research. The men discussed a series of questions that European Muslims had posed to them. Hawari and other counselors responded, issuing religious opinions known as fatwas. The council is the most influential body involved in shaping Islamic religious opinion in Europe and, through a sister organization, in the United States. It helps set the tone of religious discussion, defining what Muslims are allowed and not allowed to do. Its opinions are not binding, but they are available online and published in books, which are distributed to mosques throughout Europe. Imams take courses in the council's thinking and are advised to use its methods of argumentation when local worshipers raise questions. The council's role in Europe might seem like a bit of bad luck -- perhaps a typical case of immigrants bringing with them the regressive social mores or traditions of their homeland. But that view would be mistaken. As we saw in the previous chapter, the council is a creation of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, a direct descendant of the Munich mosque.

One could argue that the federation, the fatwa council, and any of the other creations of the Muslim Brotherhood are simply minority enclaves. Every society has groups like this: think of the Mennonites and the Amish in the United States. They live according to rules meant to re-create an idealized past, cut off from the mainstream. So what if a few Islamists strive to create a similar community for themselves? This might have held true but for the size of the Muslim immigration to Europe: it completely changed the parameters. Far from setting up rules to govern a fringe group, the fatwa council issues guidelines aimed at tens of millions of European citizens and residents - members of Europe's second-biggest religion. The fatwa council's parent group, the federation, likewise lobbies European politicians, trying to create the impression that its vision of Islam -- for example, requiring headscarves for women -- is the authentic one; Muslims who choose to dress differently are cast as "assimilated" and inauthentic. Also, groups like the Mennonites have not given rise to terrorist organizations, as has the Brotherhood.

Although the Brotherhood says it supports terrorism only in certain cases -- usually against Israel -- it does more than target Jews. It creates a mental preconditioning for terrorism. This mindset divides the world into two camps, those to be protected (a small number of "good" Muslims) and the rest (including many other Muslims), who can be destroyed. Some other religious groups see the world in similar Manichaean terms, but few have given rise over the past decades to so much violence. Thus, when groups like the fatwa council make a decision, it matters.

Hawari, for example, wasn't citing an anti-Semitic tract for effect; that speech was given as the theoretical foundation for a fatwa, an answer to a question concerning the practice of religion. In this case the question was about the legality of a divorce. A French Muslim had written to the council, asking if she was indeed divorced after her husband had shouted "I divorce you" three times, in a drunken rage. According to Islamic law, saying the sentence three times is enough to secure a divorce. The issue for the council was the man's sobriety; the scholars carefully considered his level of intoxication, weighing his ability to think clearly and realize what he was saying. They decided he knew what he had said, and thus the divorce stood. But the scholars never included a more fundamental consideration: the marital dispute had taken place in France. Under French law, a divorce requires a ruling by a French court. Thus the man's rantings were largely irrelevant.

Hawari's citing of the Protocols is another example of his group's disconnection from the broader society. One of the West's greatest traumas is the Holocaust, and at least since the mid-twentieth century most educated people have developed a sensitive understanding of anti-Semitism and can recognize the false claims and scare tactics that inform it. Hawari's ignorance of this -- whether a self-chosen blindness or a true lack of knowledge -- and the council's failure to upbraid him for using such literature was a clear sign that the group itself is not integrated into mainstream Western thought. In this regard, it also fits the fabric of the Brotherhood. The current head of the organization (and past head of the Islamic Center of Munich), Mahdi Akef, has called the Holocaust a myth and expressed solidarity with Iran's leader, who also has questioned it.

Given the council's makeup, its members' acceptance of these ideas is not surprising. Of the council's thirty-five members, two thirds are Muslim Brotherhood activists from the Middle East or Africa. Its head is Youssef Qaradawi, the man who helped rebuild the Brotherhood in the 1970s, along with Akef. Qaradawi is often considered the Muslim Brotherhood's chief imam -- not in a rigid, hierarchical sense, but in recognition of his charisma and influence. He is arguably the most influential religious figure in the entire Muslim world, not just the Brotherhood, and has a popular website and television show. His views are often considered mainstream or even progressive by Middle Eastern standards; he encourages women to work and permits music, which fundamentalists frown upon. But he also sanctions suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and the stoning of homosexuals. He denies that he practices anti-Semitism, but he associates with only a few Jews -- those who belong to an extremist faction called Neturei Karta. This small group of Orthodox Jews opposes the existence of the state of Israel. They sometimes appear in public with Qaradawi, court jesters used to display his tolerance: Jews have a role in our vision of Islam, so long as they know their place.

For years, the Brotherhood pushed this kind of Islam in Europe, not only through the fatwa council but also at scores of conventions, seminars, and workshops. In most major European countries, Brotherhood groups are among the most influential -- the Union of French Islamic Organizations (known by its French acronym, UOIF), the Muslim Association of Britain, and the Islamic Community of Germany, with its ideological Turkish twin, Milli Gorus. Throughout Islamic communities, the Brotherhood was helping to define who was a Muslim and what was considered proper behavior for a Muslim. Invariably, these guidelines were based on a more fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran than the people had previously subscribed to.

***

Mourad Amriou slowly warmed up the crowd inside a small mosque on the outskirts of Paris, giving the congregation a pep talk after the Friday evening prayer. "Just nearby here are Fatimas and Mohammeds who are drinking." said the beefy twenty-six-year-old former rapper, using generic names for Muslim women and men. "Can you believe it? Just around the corner, going to nightclubs. Do you accept it?"

Murmurs of disapproval arose from the crowd as he continued. Life, he said, should center on mosques. Not just for prayer, but for everything from language classes for children to social life. Otherwise, he said, Muslims will become indistinguishable from their French neighbors. "Society has to be based on Islam," he told the gathering.

Amriou was a young Muslim I'd come to know over several months. He did not work for the UOIF but went to its offices for training and for networking with other activists. He read the decisions of the fatwa council and held Qaradawi to be the most profound thinker of the present day. He lived apart from French society, orbiting Paris in a tiny Fiat Punto on the aptly named peripherique ring road around Paris.

On this day, Amriou was in the slum suburb of Aubervilliers, doing a quick "intervention," his term for a pep talk at which he rallies the crowd to the Islamist cause. Before entering the mosque he affectionately tousled the hair of a couple of young boys collecting money in black-and-white Palestinian scarves. The money was for a charity that helps Palestinian orphans.

"Zap zap zap, I go in and say my piece and am out," he said. "I go to all sorts of mosques to pray. Speed speed speed. I'm on the go all the time. Each time of the day a different mosque. But I like the UOIF I like the stuff they do. I know some of the leadership here and some of their works."

Amriou grew up in Paris, the youngest of nine children born to Algerian immigrants. He got involved in drugs, cut an album as the rapper HLM System, and served time in prison. Five years ago he was "converted" from the streets back to Islam by a local member of the Tablighi Jamaat, a rigorously apolitical pietistic group. He still wears thick, hooded sweatshirts from his pre-Islamist era, but they are now balanced by a skullcap and, sometimes, a knee-length cotton gown.

Jews hold a special fascination for him. Typical of Islamists, Amriou compares the lot of Muslims with that of Jews in pre-World War II Europe, the implication being that another Holocaust is around the corner. He says his neighborhood of Paris had no mosques but contained six synagogues, "even though we were far more numerous than they were." He doesn't consider that Jews have been in France for centuries and have fought for a place in society; for Mourad, the Jews' success is a sign that society is unfair.

Recently, one of Amriou's heroes, the charismatic preacher Hassan Iquioussen, was criticized in the media for making anti-Semitic comments. He gave a lecture, recorded and sold widely at mosques across France, in which he repeated typical Islamist anti-Semitic claims: Jews had benefited from numerous prophets but ignored God; thus they deserved whatever they got; they were "vipers" who had "no scruples against killing their prophets; in one morning they killed seventy of them. In one morning." And so on.

For Amriou, the media's reaction to the tape was proof that mainstream society was against Muslims. He considered it a smear campaign based on something absolutely atypical in the speech. "If he's a radical, then we're finished. The UOIF didn't care about that at all. They just laughed when it came out. Everyone there thought it was a joke. A three-year-old tape and he just slipped up. Everyone says that sort of thing."

Amriou's speech to the crowd is short but moving. He recounts his story, the drugs, the nights he'd sleep in the basement of the apartment block to avoid his parents. One old man in the front row begins to cry, probably recognizing in the story a family member, maybe his own son. Then Amriou launches into his critique of Muslims who have lost their way, the men who dance and socialize, the women who do not wear headscarves and associate with men. The crowd of 150 men listens, murmuring approval. At the end, they applaud the speaker and send him off with a glass of tea and a handful of sweets. He hops into his Fiat and heads home. It is 10 P.M., and he will be lucky to get six hours of sleep before morning prayers, a bit of work, and then more rounds.

The work of Muslim Brotherhood activists like Amriou picked up in pace throughout the 1990s and into the new century. Largely shielded from public view, the Brotherhood's grassroots work helped define Islam in Europe. But then an apparent disaster changed everything: the 9/11 attacks, with their links to the Brotherhood's European network. After decades of operating quietly, the Brotherhood was once again at the center of attention.

***

In the 1950s and '60s, German domestic intelligence had kept an eye on the ex-soldiers and Arab students struggling to control the mosque project. The Bavarian branch of the Office for Protection of the Constitution, which monitors domestic extremism, had paid von Mende to keep tabs on the mosque. But after von Mende died, this surveillance stopped. West Germany essentially missed the transformation of the Islamic Center of Munich into a hub of the Islamist world.

One of the few people close to the mosque who drew outside attention was Ahmad von Denffer. He published Al-Islam, the official organ of the mosque and the broader organization, the Islamic Community of Germany. Founded by Achmed Schmiede in the 1950s, the magazine was taken over by the mosque and run by Schmiede and then von Denffer until 2003, when it suspended publication. (It is now a website.) Yon Denffer was strongly influenced by Khurshid Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani version of the Brotherhood' Jamaat-e-Islamiya. Yon Denffer encountered Ahmad after he joined the mosque's governing board in the early 1980s. Later, von Denffer went to Britain to study at the Jamaat-influenced Islamic Foundation, writing several books in English and German, all of which reflect classic Islamist thinking -- that all problems can be solved only by Islam. In the 1980s, he cofounded a charity that channeled money to Afghanistan. Yon Denffer has denied that the charity money supported the mujahideen warriors, but at this time Pakistan-based Afghan charities were synonymous with holy war. For the first time in two decades, German domestic intelligence put the mosque on its informal watch list.

Soon, more signs hinted at the mosque's importance. In 1990, an expert on Islam alleged that the Munich mosque was where policy was being formulated for the entire Muslim world, a claim that drew a sharp rebuke from Al-Islam. Von Denffer and others close to the center also participated in overseas conferences with well-known Muslim Brotherhood leaders, such as a conference in Sudan led by a powerful Islamist political leader there, Hasan al-Turabi. The center also got into a dispute with one of the most important centers of Islamic studies in Germany, the Orient-Institut in Hamburg. One of the institute's affiliates wrote that von Denffer's writings had "clear tendencies of anti-German, anti-Jewish, antidemocratic, misogynist, racist, anti-integration, and Islamistic polemic."

The Munich mosque was also developing disturbing links to terrorism, although at the time they were discounted as one-off events or coincidences. In the 1980s, Mahmoud Abouhalima was a regular at the mosque and sought spiritual counseling from Ahmed el- Khalifa, then the chief imam there. Abouhalima soon after went to the United States, where he was convicted and jailed for helping in the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.Then there was the case of Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, widely thought to be Al Qaeda's finance chief and bin Laden's personal mentor. He was arrested in 1998 in a small town near the mosque while on a business trip to Germany. Before being extradited to the United States, he called Khalifa and asked for spiritual counseling. (He was later put on trial in New York and sentenced to thirty-two years.) Khalifa confirmed meeting both men but said it was a bit of bad luck -- he can't know everyone who passes through town, and he is available to all.

German intelligence was nevertheless alarmed and launched an all-out investigation into Salim's contacts. One, particularly, stood out: Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian businessman living in Hamburg. He attended a small mosque there called the Al-Quds. German police bugged Darkazanli's home and observed his contacts at the mosque, including one particular man, Mohammed Atta. After a while, the police weren't sure what they had, so they dropped the investigation. Two years later, in 2001, Atta flew the first plane into the World Trade Center. The Al-Quds mosque turned out to be the place where the hijackers had been radicalized. Darkazanli was never prosecuted, but he was another less-than-glorious link between the Islamic Center of Munich and extremism.

Shocked by the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government swung hard against the Brotherhood. Investigators were especially fascinated by one of Nada's investment vehicles, Banque al-Taqwa. Himmat sat on its board, and seemingly every Islamist in Europe had bought shares in it, making its shareholder list a who's who of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. Nada had set up the bank as one of the first to operate in conformity with Islamic law. Instead of offering depositors interest, the bank called its customers investors and offered them profits from money it lent out. But he had invested the money amateurishly -- Nada himself said he put most of it in Malaysian businesses shortly before the 1997 Asian financial crisis -- and the bank went under. American prosecutors, however, said the bank was a conduit for terrorist money. Washington declared Nada and Himmat terrorist financiers and had the designation endorsed by the United Nations. Both men's bank accounts were frozen.

The Islamic Community of Germany suddenly faced a financial crisis. As the community's chief officer, Himmat signed the group's checks, but now anything he touched was frozen. (The group had already lost its status as a charity, for which Yazdani had struggled so vigorously in the 1960s. This action was unrelated to the attacks; it occurred in 1998 when mosque officials failed to fill out the proper forms to extend the status.) Then a painful interview was published in Al-Islam, in which Khalifa tried to justify why Himmat, who had not lived in Munich in decades, was running the group. After twenty-nine years, Himmat resigned in early 2002.

Terrorist attacks in Madrid and London followed over the next few years. Investigators were shocked that key suspects were young second- or third-generation Muslims born in Europe. In most cases, the young men had begun their careers as radicals through contact with Brotherhood ideology, attracted to its utopian message and learning through it to separate the world into two classes of people: believers and infidels. Ties to the terrorists seemed to mark the end of the Brotherhood. Its mother mosque shorn of leadership, its champions accused of terrorism, the Brotherhood's European beachhead seemed about to collapse. But then something happened. Just as in the 1950s, Western governments' repulsion began to turn to infatuation. Anti-democratic, anti-Western factions of Islam became fashionable -- then to fight communism, now to fight terrorism and combat extremism.

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