This article is a fascinating example of the role of a single place (Munich
mosque) in a series of geopolitical intrigues. The author of the piece
clearly has an agenda. Any comments on this from people who have more
background knowledge on the subject?
Nick
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A mosque for ex-Nazis became center of radical Islam
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
By Ian Johnson, The Wall Street Journal
MUNICH, Germany -- North of this prosperous city of engineers and auto
makers is an elegant mosque with a slender minaret and a turquoise dome. A
stand of pines shields it from a busy street. In a country of more than
three million Muslims, it looks unremarkable, another place of prayer for
Europe's fastest-growing religion.
The mosque's history, however, tells a more-tumultuous story. Buried in
government and private archives are hundreds of documents that trace the
battle to control the Islamic Center of Munich. Never before made public,
the material shows how radical Islam established one of its first and most
important beachheads in the West when a group of ex-Nazi soldiers decided
to build a mosque.
The soldiers' presence in Munich was part of a nearly forgotten subplot to
World War II: the decision by tens of thousands of Muslims in the Soviet
Red Army to switch sides and fight for Hitler. After the war, thousands
sought refuge in West Germany, building one of the largest Muslim
communities in 1950s Europe. When the Cold War heated up, they were a
coveted prize for their language skills and contacts back in the Soviet
Union. For more than a decade, U.S., West German, Soviet and British
intelligence agencies vied for control of them in the new battle of
democracy versus communism.
Yet the victor wasn't any of these Cold War combatants. Instead, it was a
movement with an equally powerful ideology: the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded
in 1920s Egypt as a social-reform movement, the Brotherhood became the
fountainhead of political Islam, which calls for the Muslim religion to
dominate all aspects of life. A powerful force for political change
throughout the Muslim world, the Brotherhood also inspired some of the
deadliest terrorist movements of the past quarter century, including Hamas
and al Qaeda.
The story of how the Brotherhood exported its creed to the heart of Europe
highlights a recurring error by Western democracies. For decades, countries
have tried to cut deals with political Islam -- backing it in order to
defeat another enemy, especially communism. Most famously, the U.S. and its
allies built up mujahadeen holy warriors in 1980s Afghanistan to fight the
Soviet Union -- paving the way for the rise of Osama bin Laden, who quickly
turned on his U.S. allies in the 1990s.
Munich was a momentous early example of this dubious strategy. Documents
and interviews show how the Muslim Brotherhood formed a working arrangement
with U.S. intelligence organizations, outmaneuvering German agencies for
control of the former Nazi soldiers and their mosque. But the U.S. lost its
hold on the movement, and in short order conservative, arch-Catholic
Bavaria had become host to a center of radical Islam.
"If you want to understand the structure of political Islam, you have to
look at what happened in Munich," says Stefan Meining, a Munich-based
historian who is studying the Islamic center. "Munich is the origin of a
network that now reaches around the world."
Political and social groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood now
dominate organized Islamic life across a broad swath of Western Europe.
These connections are frequently little known, even by the intelligence
services and police agencies of these countries.
While these groups renounce terrorism and officially advocate assimilation,
the upshot of their message is that Europe's Muslims -- now representing
between 5 percent and 10 percent of the continent's population -- need to
be walled off from Western culture. This in turn has helped create fertile
ground for violent ideas. Islamic terrorists have increasingly used Europe
as a launching pad for their attacks, from the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S.
to last year's bombing of trains in Madrid.
These current tensions are embedded in the events of half a century ago.
Postwar Munich was a ruined city packed with Muslim emigres fleeing
persecution. While the West tried to observe and control them as valuable
pawns in the Cold War, they encountered formidable rivals seeking their own
power bases in Europe's burgeoning Muslim world.
Over the next few decades, four men would try successively to control the
Munich mosque: a brilliant professor of Turkic studies, an imam in Hitler's
SS, a charismatic Muslim writer with a world-wide following and a
hard-nosed Muslim financier now under investigation for backing terrorism.
Most favored some sort of accommodation with the West. But the victor had a
bolder vision: a global Islam opposed to the ideals of secular democracy.
The Scholar
Gerhard von Mende's interest in Muslims originated in 1919, when his father
was murdered. The family had lived in Riga, part of a once-large German
minority in Latvia. When the tiny land was invaded by the Red Army at the
end of World War I, members of the bourgeoisie were rounded up and sent on
a forced march. Mr. von Mende's father, a banker, was pulled out of the
line and shot dead.
That awakened in the 14-year-old a loathing of things Russian. After
fleeing with his mother and six siblings to Germany, he chose to study
other people who were oppressed by Russian rule -- the Muslims of Central
Asia. A blizzard of papers and books brought him academic prominence.
Linguistically gifted, he spoke fluent Russian, Latvian and French, as well
as passable Turkish and Arabic. When he married a Norwegian, he picked up
her native tongue as well.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 put a premium on people like
Mr. von Mende, who understood something about the lands that Germany's
blitzkrieg was overrunning. He kept his job at Berlin University but was
seconded to the new Imperial Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories --
or Ostministerium -- to head a department overseeing the Caucasus.
Germany's initial victories left it with staggering numbers of Soviet
prisoners -- five million in all. Due in part to the efforts of Mr. von
Mende and the Ostministerium, Hitler agreed to free prisoners who would
take up arms against the Soviets. The Nazis set up "Ostlegionen" -- Eastern
Legions -- made up primarily of non-Russian minorities eager to pay Moscow
back for decades of oppression. Up to a million soldiers took up Hitler's
offer.
As the war progressed, Mr. von Mende became one of the chief architects of
the Nazi policy toward Soviet minorities. He was dubbed their
"lord-protector," establishing national committees of Tatars, Turks,
Georgians, Azerbaijanis and Armenians. Desperate for soldiers, the Nazis
viewed these committees as little more than a way to keep their turncoat
allies in the war. But for the people involved, they were like
governments-in-exile, a taste of independence for which they were grateful
to Mr. von Mende.
Colleagues from this era describe Mr. von Mende as a well-dressed, regal
man with a wry smile, who used his personal charm to win over the exiles --
especially his favorites, the Turkic Muslims of Central Asia. He opened his
home in Berlin to them for long dinners with the conversation flowing in
Russian, Turkish and German. In the last months of the war, he cemented
their loyalty through an act of bureaucratic genius: With Germany's
infrastructure bombed to a pulp, he managed to get thousands of "his" Turks
transferred to the western front -- Greece, Italy, Denmark and Belgium --
figuring it would be better if they ended up in British or American
prisoner-of-war camps than Soviet. Those who fell into Soviet hands were
shot as traitors.
By the late 1940s, hundreds of Muslim ex-soldiers were stranded in the U.S.
zone of occupation in Munich. Mr. von Mende, whose Nazi past left him with
limited job prospects, decided to devote himself to looking out for them.
That decision would prove beneficial -- both for the Muslims and for Mr.
von Mende. It was the beginning of the Cold War and Western intelligence
agencies were desperate for anyone who could provide a glimpse behind the
Iron Curtain. They needed people to analyze documents, broadcast
anti-Soviet propaganda and recruit spies.
In October 1945, Mr. von Mende wrote a letter to a "Major Morrison" in the
British Army, according to a letter in his private papers that his family
made available. He laid out the Ostministerium's unique source of knowledge
about the Soviet peoples. He explained who worked for it and in which POW
or Displaced Persons camp they were being held. It was the beginning of his
intelligence career.
Mr. von Mende settled in the British-occupied sector of Germany, in the
commercial center of Dusseldorf. Although he was no longer an academic, he
called his office the "Eastern European Research Service." His staff was
made up of ex-Ostministerium employees -- basically a re-creation of the
Nazi apparatus that oversaw the Muslims during the war. Funding came from
British occupation forces initially, then a variety of West German
agencies, including the national domestic intelligence agency and the
German foreign ministry, according to foreign-ministry documents and Mr.
von Mende's private correspondence.
Mr. von Mende spent enormous amounts of time helping the Muslims who used
to work for him in the Ostministerium. He wrung money out of the West
German bureaucracy for them to be fed, clothed and housed -- conditions
were appalling and even a decade after the war's end many were still living
in barracks.
But at heart, his task was simple: keep tabs on the emigres and prevent
them from falling into another country's control. The main threat was the
Soviet Union, which wanted to stop the emigres from making anti-communist
propaganda. Some emigre leaders in West Germany were murdered. Many carried
weapons in defense against KGB assassins.
CIA vs. Nazi Imam
By 1956, a rival emerged to threaten Mr. von Mende's control over the
Muslim ex-soldiers of Munich: the American Committee for Liberation from
Bolshevism, widely known as Amcomlib. Set up as a U.S. nongovernmental
organization to run Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Amcomlib was in
fact a thinly disguised front for the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA
funding lasted until 1971 when Congress cut Amcomlib's ties to the
intelligence agency.
During the 1950s, the head of Amcomlib's political organization was Isaac
Patch, who is now 95 and living in retirement in New Hampshire. Reached by
telephone, Mr. Patch defended Amcomlib's strategy of using Muslims to fight
the Soviets. "Islam was an important factor, no question about it," Mr.
Patch said. "They were strong believers and strong anti-communists."
Amcomlib forged ties with Ibrahim Gacaoglu, a former Nazi soldier from the
Caucasus who, like Mr. von Mende, was looking after Muslim soldiers
stranded in Germany. Mr. Gacaoglu controlled food packages from the U.S.,
which he doled out to his followers, according to his organization's
documents. Mr. Gacaoglu also did propaganda work for Radio Free Europe. In
1957, for example, he held a news conference with another former German
political officer, Garip Sultan, who headed Radio Liberty's Tatar service,
according to documents and Mr. Sultan. The two decried Stalin's abuses in
Chechnya. Mr. Sultan, now 81 years old, said in an interview that he wrote
Mr. Gacaoglu's speeches and a pamphlet for him on the situation of Muslims.
For Mr. von Mende and his colleagues, Mr. Gacaoglu's CIA connections were a
problem. West Germany and the U.S. were on the same side of the Cold War,
but Mr. von Mende didn't appreciate foreign agencies trying to influence
German residents. As one informant had put it in a report to his boss:
"Germany is a gate that no one controls because there doesn't seem to be a
gatekeeper. Everyone comes and does what he pleases."
Mr. von Mende decided that Germany's Muslims needed a leader he could
trust. He turned to a friend from the war: Nurredin Nakibhodscha Namangani.
Mr. Namangani had come from a long line of imams in his native land,
modern-day Uzbekistan. But his religious service had mostly been in an
unholy organization: Hitler's infamous SS. According to an autobiographical
sketch he gave German authorities, he had been arrested by Stalin's
security forces in 1941 and soon after liberated by the invading German
army. He served as imam in various capacities, ending as imam for an SS
division. He won some of Germany's highest commendations, including the
Iron Cross.
Mr. Namangani arrived in Munich in 1956 to an uproar. Opponents such as Mr.
Gacaoglu charged Mr. Namangani with having participated in wartime
atrocities. Mr. Namangani's unit reportedly helped put down the 1944 Warsaw
uprising of Polish partisans against the Nazis, but any personal role in
atrocities is not evident in German war records.
Mr. von Mende beat back the attacks, persuading the federal government in
Bonn to accept Mr. Namangani as the "Hauptimam" or "chief imam" of
Germany's Muslims, on the West German payroll.
In late 1958, Mr. Namangani came up with a plan to rally the ex-Muslim
soldiers behind him: a "Mosque Construction Commission." At the time,
Germany had only a couple of mosques. Munich's mosque would be different:
bigger and dedicated not to traders and visitors but to Germany's first
permanent Muslim population of any note.
"For 13 years, Muslims haven't had a fixed place for their services and
have had to hold them in various places," Mr. Namangani told the assembled
50 or so Muslims, including some Muslim students from the Middle East.
Once, Muslims had been forced to hold services even in a brewery, other
times in a museum, according to minutes of the mosque commission. Now, he
told the group, Munich would be a center for Muslims and the Bavarian state
government would certainly help out, according to the minutes.
It was a big event, so big in fact that someone special was on hand: Said
Ramadan, the Geneva-based secretary general of the World Islamic Congress,
a group that wanted to unite Muslims around the world. The rest of those
assembled donated 125 marks in total (about $275 in today's money) for the
mosque's construction. Mr. Ramadan himself gave 1,000 marks.
Mr. von Mende quickly put out feelers for information on the well-heeled
visitor. Soon, his index of people to watch contained a new entry:
"Said Ramadan, Geneva. Circa 36 years old, 3 children. Since 1956 drives an
expensive Cadillac, gift of the Saudi Arabian government. R.S. (sic) is
supposed to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood."
The Brotherhood Arrives
Said Ramadan's arrival in Europe was the result of a clash of ideas that
continues to tear at Islamic societies. At heart, the problem is how to
reconcile Islam with the modern nation-state. Like many religions, Islam is
all-embracing, prescribing behavior in many spheres, politics included. But
when taken literally, these requirements can clash with today's liberal
democracies, which promote individual freedom.
In 1920s Egypt, a young schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna came down firmly
on the side of orthodoxy. Troubled by what he saw as the immorality of a
rapidly modernizing Egypt, he set up an organization called the Muslim
Brotherhood. His plan was to re-Islamicize society by teaching the
fundamentals of Islam in the everyday language of the coffee shop, not the
classical Arabic of mosques. He set up welfare organizations and was famous
for his commitment to social justice.
But this collided with other visions of Egypt, especially those imported
from the West, such as socialism and fascism. Heavily involved in the
turbulent politics of postwar Egypt, Mr. Banna was assassinated in 1949. A
few years later, a military coup brought in a socialist government that
banned the group in 1954.
Many members were thrown in jail and some were executed. Mr. Ramadan was
the most prominent member to flee abroad. He was Mr. Banna's son-in-law and
was famous for having helped organize Jerusalem's defense against the new
state of Israel in 1948. Few countries in the region wanted to shield Mr.
Ramadan; Egypt was a regional powerhouse and its neighbors were wary of
antagonizing it. After stops in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Pakistan, he
arrived in Geneva in the summer of 1958 on a Jordanian diplomatic pass,
accredited to the U.N. and also neighboring West Germany.
While in Germany, he set out his ideas in a doctoral thesis called "Islamic
Law: Its Scope and Equity." It was published as a book and became a classic
of modern Islamist thinking.
"He was decent and intelligent," says his doctoral adviser at Cologne
University, Gerhard Kegel, now 93, "if a little fanatical."
Not fanatical in the sense of advocating violence, Mr. Kegel says, but in
his view of a world in which Islam guides all laws and there is no
distinction between religion and state. Mr. Ramadan also published a
magazine, Al-Muslimoon, which surveyed events in the Muslim world and
criticized secularism.
Mr. Ramadan, like others in the Muslim Brotherhood, strongly opposed
communism for rejecting religion. During the Cold War, that made him a
natural ally of the U.S. But Mr. Ramadan also opposed the U.S. and other
Western countries for their interference in Mideastern affairs. Then as
now, that put people like Mr. Ramadan in a tough position: They needed to
cooperate with the West but didn't want to be Western collaborators.
Historical evidence suggests that Mr. Ramadan worked with the CIA. At the
time, America was locked in a power struggle with the Soviet Union, which
was supporting Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. As Nasser's enemy, the
Brotherhood seemed like a good ally for the U.S.
A document from the German foreign intelligence service, known by its
initials BND, says the U.S. had helped persuade Jordan to issue Mr. Ramadan
a passport and that "his expenditures are financed by the American side."
Swiss diplomats concurred that the U.S. and Mr. Ramadan were close.
According to a 1967 diplomatic report in the Swiss federal archives: "Said
Ramadan is, among others, an information agent of the British and
Americans."
When the Swiss newspaper Le Temps reported the contents of the diplomatic
report last year, the Ramadan family responded in a letter to the editor
that read in part: "Our father never collaborated with American or English
intelligence services. He was, on the contrary, the subject of permanent
surveillance for numerous years."
Members of the Ramadan family refused to comment. They include two sons,
the popular Muslim intellectual Tariq and his brother, Hani, who heads an
Islamic center in Geneva that his father set up.
A Fateful Alliance
Although he was fortunate to have escaped the Middle East, Mr. Ramadan's
Swiss exile cut him off from his base of support. He began to look around
for allies, according to colleagues who knew him then. Soon, an opportunity
presented itself: He was contacted in 1958 by some Arab students in Munich
eager to build a new mosque.
The students had come to Germany to study medicine, engineering and other
disciplines in which German education excelled. Many had been involved with
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and were also using the chance to escape
persecution. Mr. Ramadan "was a gifted orator and we all respected him,"
says Mohamad Ali El-Mahgary, who now heads an organization affiliated with
the Munich mosque, the Islamic Center of Nuremberg.
The students quickly united in wanting to get rid of Mr. Namangani, the
former SS imam. Fired up by Muslim Brotherhood ideology, they saw the Uzbek
as a throwback to an earlier era, one where, for example, local traditions
allowed for drinking alcohol when this was expressly forbidden in the
Quran. Over the next three years, Mr. Ramadan and the Brotherhood showed
their political mettle -- first sidelining the soldiers and their German
allies, then striking out on their own.
First Mr. Ramadan teamed up with Amcomlib to undermine Mr. Namangani. In
1959, he organized the "European Muslim Congress" in Munich, which Mr. von
Mende's informants reported was co-financed by Amcomlib, according to
German foreign-ministry archives and Mr. von Mende's personal letters. The
goal: marginalize Mr. Namangani by making Munich's mosque a European-wide
center, not just for Munich's Muslims. For the U.S., this would help
strengthen their man, Mr. Gacaoglu, and limit the West Germans' influence
over the emigres.
In 1960, Mr. Ramadan took formal control of the mosque-construction
commission, with the students convincing the former soldiers that only Mr.
Ramadan could raise the money needed for a mosque, according to interviews.
Mr. Ramadan was elected chairman and Mr. Namangani relegated to deputy.
Flummoxed, Mr. von Mende tried to figure out what Mr. Ramadan's goals were.
His reports show that he was convinced that Mr. Ramadan was working with
the U.S. But he needed confirmation and so turned to Germany's
foreign-intelligence service. In a private letter to a former colleague in
the Ostministerium, Mr. von Mende asked for information on Mr. Ramadan and
suggested stealing files from his office in Geneva. He even estimated how
much the operation would cost, bribes and travel costs included. Mr. von
Mende's BND contact confirmed that Mr. Ramadan was backed by the U.S. As
for stealing his files, the colleague advised against it: Mr. Ramadan was
"much too careful" to leave valuable information in them.
Adding to Mr. von Mende's worries was that the CIA was now openly backing
Mr. Ramadan. In May of 1961, a CIA agent attached to Amcomlib in Munich,
Robert Dreher, brought Mr. Ramadan to Mr. von Mende's office in Dusseldorf
for a meeting to propose a joint propaganda effort against the Soviet
Union, according to Mr. von Mende's personal papers and interviews with
contemporaries of the men. Mr. von Mende quickly turned them down.
Mr. von Mende decided he had to use Mr. Namangani to engineer Mr. Ramadan's
removal. At first, it appeared the two had succeeded. In late 1961, Mr.
Namangani called a meeting of the mosque commission. Mr. Ramadan was
accused of financial irregularities. The soldiers put forward a new
candidate and in a close vote won a simple majority. In memos to each
other, German officials crowed that Mr. Ramadan was gone and with him the
plans for a "monumental mosque."
But a sharp-eyed city government official noted that the commission's
by-laws had required that Mr. Namangani's candidate win a two-thirds
majority. The simple majority hadn't been enough. Once again Mr. Ramadan's
ability to mobilize had been decisive: His students had turned out in
force, unlike Mr. Namangani's more-numerous soldiers. Mr. Ramadan was still
in charge of the mosque commission.
Discouraged, the soldiers began to leave the commission. Mr. Namangani
remained head of the West German organization that oversaw the former
soldiers' spiritual needs, but had nothing more to do with the mosque. In a
seven-page letter to German officials that is now in the Bavarian state
archives, Mr. Namangani explained he was tired of fighting Mr. Ramadan.
"The Mosque Construction Commission has drifted far from its original goal
and there is the danger that it will become a center for those engaged in
politics," he wrote.
The emigres' departure from the mosque commission slowed its progress but
didn't hurt it. The German bureaucracy, packed with many former Nazis, was
still sympathetic to the idea of building a mosque, memos among officials
show. They apparently didn't know that their former comrades-in-arms had
left the commission. The West German bureaucracy even gave the mosque
project, now firmly under Muslim Brotherhood control, tax-exempt status,
which would be worth millions over the next decades.
Mr. von Mende, though, realized that his Turks were left in the political
wilderness. In memos to the German foreign ministry, he said the federal
government must do everything possible to block Mr. Ramadan, whom he saw as
a foreign-backed outsider. Whether Mr. von Mende could have stopped Mr.
Ramadan is unknown: In December 1963, while sitting at his desk in
Dusseldorf, Mr. von Mende had a massive heart attack and died immediately.
He was 58 years old.
A few months later, his Eastern European Research Service was closed and
Mr. von Mende's network of informants dried up. It would only be decades
later, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., that Germany would
seriously focus domestic intelligence on the Brotherhood's Munich
operations.
The Banker's Vision
Cloaked from outside scrutiny, the mosque had less and less to do with the
needs of Munich's Muslims. And around this time, evidence of the CIA's
involvement dried up. Instead, control eventually passed to an unlikely
location: Campione d'Italia, a swath of mansions and millionaires in the
Swiss Alps. Here, from a terraced villa overlooking Lake Lugano, one of Mr.
Ramadan's trusted lieutenants, Ghaleb Himmat, ran the Munich mosque and
influenced the network that grew out of it.
Of all the characters in the mosque's history, Mr. Himmat is the most
enigmatic, although he is one of the few still alive. A Syrian, he went to
Munich in the 1950s to study but ended up amassing wealth as a merchant.
Now under investigation by several countries for links to terrorism, he
normally shuns publicity. He agreed to comment briefly on the telephone for
this article.
Contemporaries and archival records indicate that Mr. Himmat was a driving
force behind the mosque. In 1958, members of the mosque commission say, he
led the movement to invite Mr. Ramadan to Munich. Documents show that the
two worked closely together. They went on fund-raising trips abroad and Mr.
Himmat stood in for Mr. Ramadan when the older man was back in Geneva.
Mr. von Mende's death should have left Mr. Ramadan firmly in charge of the
project. But over the next few years, he lost control to Mr. Himmat. The
exact nature of their split isn't clear, but close associates say it had to
do with their different nationalities. Mr. Himmat denies this, saying he
does not know why Mr. Ramadan left.
At the same time, Mr. Ramadan was losing the support of his Saudi backers.
Short of money, he stopped publishing his magazine in 1967. Over the last
quarter century until his death in 1995, Mr. Ramadan's influence waned. His
son Tariq describes him in a book as prone to "long silences sunk in memory
and thoughts, and, often, in bitterness."
Mr. Himmat assumed control of the mosque just before it opened in August of
1973. Under his leadership, the mosque grew in importance, functioning as
the Muslim Brotherhood's de facto European embassy. As its influence grew,
its name changed. From Mosque Construction Commission, the group became the
Islamic Community of Southern Germany and, today, the Islamic Community of
Germany. It is now one of the country's most important Islamic
organizations, representing 60 mosques and Islamic centers nationwide.
The group also became a cornerstone in a network of organizations that have
promoted across Europe the Muslim Brotherhood way of thinking. The Islamic
Community of Germany, for example, helped found the U.K.-based Federation
of Islamic Organizations in Europe, which unites groups close to the Muslim
Brotherhood and lobbies the European Union.
Mr. Himmat says the mosque has always been open to all Muslims but that the
Brotherhood came to dominate it because its members are the most active.
"If the Muslim Brotherhood considers me one of them, it is an honor for
me," Mr. Himmat said in the telephone interview. "They are nonviolent. They
are for interreligious discussion. They are active for freedom."
For decades, German authorities paid little attention to the activities in
Munich, viewing them as unconnected to German society. They were slow to
grasp the warning signs. In 1993, after a car-bomb attack on the World
Trade Center in New York killed six and injured 1,000, investigators
discovered that one of the organizers was Mahmoud Abouhalima, who had
frequented the mosque. He was tried in the U.S. and in 1994 was sentenced
to life in prison without parole. German domestic intelligence began to
observe the mosque, intelligence officials say, but dropped their efforts
after a short while when no links to terrorism appeared.
The Sept. 11 attacks changed that. Three of the four lead hijackers had
studied in Germany, as did another key organizer. As German and U.S. law
enforcement searched for clues, some, it is only now becoming apparent, led
back to the Munich mosque.
Mr. Himmat, it turned out, was one of the founders of Bank al-Taqwa, a
Bahamas-based institution whose shareholder list is a who's who of people
associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. The bank has been
identified by investigators in several Western countries as having links to
terrorism. Investigators believe the bank helped channel money to the
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and may have transferred money for al
Qaeda operatives.
In 2001, the U.S. issued a list of "designated" terrorists that included
Mr. Himmat and a fellow shareholder, Youssef Nada. The Treasury Department
froze their U.S. assets. Last month, Swiss authorities dropped their own
investigation, citing lack of evidence. The men's money, however, remains
frozen and the U.S. has indicated that it is continuing its investigation.
Messrs. Himmat and Nada deny any involvement in terrorism. A longtime
member of the Munich mosque, Mr. Nada said in an interview that he no
longer attends it or its board meetings. He said the mosque wasn't a formal
headquarters for the Brotherhood because the group is no longer a formal
organization. Now, he says, it has become something different: a matrix of
ideas. "There is no form you sign," Mr. Nada said. "We are not an economic
and political organization. We are a way of thinking."
The U.S. terror-funding investigation was enough to end Mr. Himmat's career
at the Islamic Community of Germany. In 2002, he resigned, he said, because
by being put on the terrorism watch list he was no longer able to sign
checks for the community, meaning it couldn't pay its staff. He says the
organization is doing well on its own and he doesn't contemplate returning
to it. "It is running," he said. "There is no need."
In April, German police raided the mosque, claiming that it was involved
with money laundering and spreading intolerant material, a crime in
Germany. Police carted off computers and files from the offices. That was
one of several raids on the center, although none have resulted in charges.
Mosque officials say the organization's days as a focal point of political
Islam are long over. "This center has developed from a center that was
important in Germany and internationally to a local institution," says
Ahmad von Denffer, a leader of the mosque. The Islamic Community of Germany
has since moved its operations to Cologne, where its current president
resides.
Inside the world of political Islam, though, the Islamic Center of Munich
remains something special. Some of the ideology's top leaders have served
or spoken there. And the Muslim Brotherhood's current murshid, or "supreme
guide," Mahdy Akef, headed the center.
Mr. Akef fondly remembers his time in Munich from 1984 to 1987. A short,
friendly man with an elfish smile and big glasses, Mr. Akef says the center
is now one of several belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. During
his stay there, he says, visiting statesmen from the Muslim world visited
the Munich mosque to pay respects to the world's most powerful Islamic
organization. The mosque was so important that when he was arrested in
Egypt in the 1990s on allegations that he had tried to form an Islamic
political party, one of the charges against him was that he headed the
center.
The Muslim Brotherhood is still formally banned in Egypt but a tiny office
in Cairo is tolerated. Sitting on a sofa under a map of the world with
Muslim nations colored green, Mr. Akef says the Brotherhood did indeed
spread out from Munich to others cities in Germany and Europe. Mr. Akef is
a controversial figure who has spoken sympathetically about suicide bombers
in Iraq. But he avoids answering questions about terrorism or
fundamentalism. Instead, he prefers to talk about the community work the
mosque did in Munich, helping to beautify a nearby landfill and plant pines
in the mosque grounds.
"We made this dump beautiful and now it's full of trees," he says. "It's
one of the most beautiful parts of Germany."
A Piece of History
Facts about the Islamic Center of Munich:
Founded: 1958
Construction completed: 1973
Total cost: $1.2 million
Number of attendees at Friday prayers: 500-600
Location: Munich's northern suburbs
Birth of an Ideology
Some key events in the Muslim Brotherhood's evolution.
1928: Hasan al-Banna founds the Muslim Brotherhood.
1949: Mr. Banna is assassinated. Leadership passes to collective "guidance
office."
1954: Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Egypt after attempted assassination
of Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser; hundreds are arrested and many
flee abroad, including Said Ramadan.
1958: Mr. Ramadan settles permanently in Geneva. Mosque project is
launched in Munich.
1962: Mr. Ramadan's group of students takes control of Munich mosque
project. Mr. Ramadan is co-founder of Muslim World League.
1964: Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi financial backers begin to split.
1968: Munich mosque secures financing from Libya through Ghaleb Himmat and
Youssef Nada.
1971: Hundreds of Muslim Brothers are released from jail in Egypt; group
begins to move toward non-violence. During the rest of the decade, violent
splinter groups, such as al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, form.
1973: Munich mosque opens. Ghaleb Himmat takes control.
1984: Mahdy Akef takes control of Munich mosque for three years.
1995: Said Ramadan dies.
2001: Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. Messrs Nada and Himmat
are placed on U.S. terrorism watch list for allegedly financing terrorism.
Investigation centers on their role in Bank al-Taqwa.
2002: Mr. Himmat resigns from Islamic Community of Germany and is
succeeded by Ibrahim el-Zayat. Most headquarters functions move from Munich
mosque to Cologne where Mr. Zayat lives.
2004: Mr. Akef becomes Muslim Brotherhood's supreme guide.
Cast of Characters
Gerhard von Mende: Latvian-born Turkic-studies professor. Served in Nazis'
"Ostministerium" during World War II, where he championed the Muslim
peoples of the Soviet Union who had been conquered by the Germans. After
the war, aided and monitored the former Soviet Muslims living in Germany.
Died in Duesseldorf in 1963.
Nurredin Nakibhodscha Namangani: Born in modern-day Uzbekistan to family
of imams. Freed from Soviet jail by Nazis and served as imam for SS
division. Returned to Germany in 1956 at Mr. von Mende's request. Served as
imam in Munich for several decades. Died in Turkey in 2002.
Said Ramadan: Born in Egypt, married daughter of Hasan al-Banna, who
founded the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1954 fled Egypt after Brotherhood
banned. Wrote Ph.D. thesis on Islamic Law at Cologne University. Went to
Munich in 1958 to help students and ex-Nazi soldiers build mosque. Left
mosque project in mid-1960s. Died 1995 in Geneva.
Ghaleb Himmat: Syrian-born student who edged out Mr. Ramadan to lead
mosque-construction project in 1973. Presided over Munich mosque's rise to
become one of the world's most important centers of political Islam. Moved
to Campione d'Italia, to live next to friend Youssef Nada. In 2001,
designated by U.S. as a terrorist financier. Resigned in 2002.
A note on sources for this article
The history of the Islamic Center of Munich was drawn from interviews with
several dozen people involved in the mosque's construction, as well as
documents stored in 17 archives in Europe and North America. Many of the
papers are declassified intelligence reports, some made available only in
the past two years, although others have sat undisturbed for more than a
decade.
In Germany, the foreign-ministry archives in Berlin provided official
documents from Gerhard von Mende's various institutes.
Other information was culled from two Bavarian state archives in Munich,
which show the exchanges between officials in charge of dealing with
Germany's new Muslim population. Most of the minutes from the mosque
construction commission come from these archives.
Another key source of information was Mr. von Mende's personal papers,
which his family made available. These papers detailed his intelligence
contacts, the organization of his network and personnel issues.
Here is a complete list of archives consulted:
In Germany: Gerhard von Mende, personal papers 1945-1963, in possession of
the family, Berlin; the Federal Archives, Berlin; the Deutsche Dienststelle
(WASt), Berlin; Political Archives of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin;
the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of
the Former German Democratic Republic, Berlin; University Archives,
Humboldt University Berlin; Institute of Contemporary History, Munich;
Bavarian Central State Archives, Munich; Munich City Archives; Federal
Archives, Koblenz; Archives of North Rhine-Westphalia, Dusseldorf.
In the U.S.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington;
U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Fort Meade, Md.; Holocaust
Museum, Washington; National Security Archive, Washington; Hoover
Institution Library and Archives, Stanford, Calif.
In the United Kingdom: the Public Records Office, London.
In Switzerland: the Swiss Federal Archives, Bern.
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(Almut Schoenfeld in Berlin contributed to this article.)
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