Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [5]
Around the same time, the Saudis began to take an interest in American Islam. With its de facto control over Hajj pilgrims and a massive reservoir of oil money, the Saudi government had struck a long-time deal with its extremely conservative clerical establishment. In exchange for political backing from the religious authorities, the government would provide all of the support needed to spread the Saudi interpretation of Islam to every corner of the world.
The primary vehicle for this support was the Muslim World League (MWL), founded in 1962 with help from several major Brotherhood figures. One of the league’s founders and at least one other member of its leadership council were also CIA intelligence assets.7 The MWL was richly subsidized by the Saudi government, and it passed along that subsidy to Islamic organizations around the world, including those in the United States. Of course, the support came with strings attached.
The MWL’s scholars were out to “correct” Muslims whose practices did not fall in line with the ultraconservative beliefs of the Saudi establishment, often referred to as Wahhabism, after its founder, an eighteenth-century cleric named Muhammad Ibn Abd Al Wahhab. Starting in the mid-1970s, the MWL began an aggressive campaign to take control of American Islam under the guise of “coordinating” the Islamic work. The league directly hired top leaders away from American-based groups such as the Muslim Students Association and used a variety of means to install Saudi-influenced imams in mosques around the country.8
The Saudis were especially concerned with reforming the beliefs of African American Muslims under the influence of the Nation of Islam and eventually pulled its leader, W. D. Muhammad, into their orbit. The group’s internal political struggle gradually splintered the Nation of Islam along fault lines that dated back to the assassination of Malcolm X.
Factions emerged, which aligned at various points on the spectrum between religious and Black Nationalist orientations. Sometimes these conflicts broke out in violence. In January 1973 members of the Nation of Islam from Philadelphia brutally executed seven relatives of Khaliffa Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the African American leader of a Sunni-oriented breakaway sect who had written scathing letters attacking the character and religious beliefs of NOI leaders. Four of Khaalis’s young children—one just a baby—were among the victims.
Unsatisfied with the justice of the courts, Khaalis and several followers responded by laying siege to Washington, D.C., in March 1977, killing one person, wounding several more, and taking more than a hundred hostages. Khaalis demanded that the men who had killed his family, by then in prison, be delivered to him for execution, along with prominent members of the national Nation of Islam who had no clear connection to the case.
Khaalis also demanded that movie theaters boycott the film Mohammad, Messenger of God, a biographical drama directed by Syrian American Moustapha Akkad. Although widely considered respectful of Islam, the film’s depiction of Muslims offended Khaalis’s sensibilities.
It is difficult to look at the unthinkable tragedy that devastated Khaalis’s family and conclude that the siege was primarily an act of religiously motivated jihad. Yet the protest against the movie foreshadowed later controversies, and Khaalis framed much of his rhetoric in terms of broad Islamic principles. The siege was broken during its second day, and Khaalis and his accomplices were arrested and imprisoned. Today the incident is largely forgotten.9
Such moments of high drama were relatively few. The unfolding tension between NOI and the growing Sunni-influenced African American community simmered but seldom boiled over. The Saudis patiently and steadily supported the conversion of Black Nationalist Muslims into Sunni Muslims, equipping many