Radical Islam in America: Salafism's Journey from Arabia to the West by Chris Heffelfinger

Author:Chris Heffelfinger [Heffelfinger, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2011-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

SALAFI INFLUENCE IN AMERICA

”Indeed the time is ripe for the Divine Shanī’ah”

—Shaykh `Umar `Abd al-Rahman1

BY THE 1990S one finds Salafism at its most diverse and fragmented in its more than two-hundred-year history. Much of this phenomenon has to do with the dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood from, and within, Egypt in the 1950s and 60s. As a result of this process, pure ideological Salafi activists like `Abdullah `Azzam, fighting in defense of the global umma, formed movements independent from the Brotherhood activists that found a home in Saudi educational institutions from the sixties onward. But these efforts overlapped and mingled, as Saudi funding supported the mujahidin in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the nineties, and Brotherhood activists interacted with the adherents of Wahhabi thought in the kingdom’s universities. What existed by the nineties was a movement made up of numerous distinct and largely autonomous groups, various branches descended from earlier Salafi thought competing among themselves for the representation of Muslim interests.

In America during the 1990s, this translated into a complex network of groups and personalities, with varying degrees of connectivity to Salafi thought and activism overseas. But significant questions of identity hang over the Muslim community in the United States. It is complex and diverse, true, but so many of the American Muslim organizations that have been active in the late twentieth century have roots with the founders of Islamist activism in the United States, those that grew out of the Muslim Students Association in the early sixties and the subsequent endeavors of that pioneering circle of Salafi-inspired activists. It was a movement imbued with Brotherhood currents coinciding with the dispersal of its members from Egypt; those that were transplanted into Saudi Arabia and Iraq, namely. It was also connected to, in varying degrees, the Saudi financing that followed through a number of organizations operating in the United States, much of it through the complex network of businesses, investment firms, charities, and nonprofit organizations discussed earlier.

Clearly, the early activists of the 1960s had established a vast network, and over the decades it grew to include many shades of Muslim activists. Should groups like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)— the largest of the American Muslim organizations—be considered as Salafi, or Salafi-influenced? Certainly the organization had ties, through its leadership, to Salafism in Saudi Arabia. Muzammil Siddiqi, ISNA president from 1997-2001, earned his master’s degree from the Islamic University in Medina, after which he held positions with the Muslim Students Association and the Muslim World League office at the United Nations in the 1970s.2 Another one of ISNA’s past presidents, Mohammed Nur `Abdullah, received his higher education from Umm al-Qura University in Mecca in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Siraj Wahhaj, a prominent preacher and activist among American Muslims, was involved with ISNA since the eighties and was named as a vice president in 1997. He also studied at Umm al-Qura University in the late seventies. ISNA is now headed by Ingrid Mattson, a convert to Islam and Professor of Islamic Studies trained in the United States.

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