Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [22]
The FBI surveillance did not capture any images of Ali Mohamed, who was expanding his reach from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization and moving deeper into the center of al Qaeda.
The United States had played host to a significant number of jihadists, many of whom were now contemplating life after the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish bin Laden’s goal of taking the jihad global, al Qaeda would have to establish a formal presence on American soil. Before that could happen, blood would flow.
3
The Death Dealers
Rashad Khalifa was a rising star in the Islamic world. An Egyptian scholar raised in the Sufi tradition, he moved to the United States in 1959 to study biochemistry. Khalifa decided to stay and raise his family in Tucson while working in his field. His son was the first American of Egyptian descent to play major league baseball.1
An obsessive student of the Koran, Khalifa used computers in his day job and was inspired to apply them to analyzing the holy book. He discovered an arcane pattern within the Koran that revolved around the number 19—as seen in the number of chapters and verses, the occurrences of references to numbers within the Koran, and other, even more complicated, derivations.
Based on his writings and translation work, Khalifa became a spiritual leader in his own right. At first, his “mathematical miracle” of the Koran was warmly received by Muslim scholars as proof of the uniqueness and the divine creation of the Koran. But Khalifa didn’t stop there.2
Over time, his studies led him to conclude that the hadith and Sunnah— Islamic traditions about the life of the Prophet Mohammed—were not reliable sources for Islamic practice. Many of the more socially restrictive practices in Islam are supported by these traditions. Eliminating the hadith and Sunnah from the mix led Khalifa into an increasingly liberal interpretation his faith. At the Masjid Tucson, where his followers gathered, Khalifa permitted men and women to pray together, and he didn’t require women to cover their heads. Word of these practices started to spread.
Worse still, the mathematical analysis of the Koran didn’t add up perfectly. According to Khalifa’s calculations, one small section of the Koran was illegitimate—written by a human hand and not the living word of Allah. This proclamation was the final straw. The suggestion that even one word of the Koran should be changed or deleted was considered heresy by many Muslims. Khalifa’s critics charged he was setting himself up as a prophet, in contradiction of Islamic teachings that state Muhammad is history’s final prophet.3
In 1985 a group of scholars led by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Bin Baz, issued a fatwa declaring Khalifa an apostate, a religious crime for which he could be killed under a strict reading of Islamic law.4
One Tucson resident who looked on Khalifa with disapproval was Wadih El Hage, one of the first wave of American al Qaeda operatives (see chapter 2). El Hage agreed with the conservatives—Khalifa was not following the true teachings of Sunni Islam and “in general behaved like an infidel.”5
As word of Khalifa’s liberal views and his more esoteric heresies spread further, Islamic radicals in Brooklyn took notice. The anti-Soviet jihadists at the Al Kifah Center were now hardening into wild, undirected radicals, and their influence was growing.
In late 1989 the head of the Al Kifah Center, an al Qaeda–linked Egyptian named Mustafa Shalabi, sent an envoy from New York, an Egyptian, to investigate the Rashad Khalifa situation.
The envoy