At all times, the encounters are uncomfortable and it is made abundantly clear that your presence—and that of your TV camera—is not welcome. But it really doesn’t matter. As long as you do not stand directly on the mosque’s property, you are perfectly within your rights to film. When I relay that information to the mosque-eteers, I’m usually met with grim silence as they silently curse the infidels’ laws. Why, if only sharia were in effect, I’d have my microphone cord wrapped around my throat in no time. The vibe in Munich was no different.
“We’ve gotten a lot of bad coverage over the past few years,” the hijab-clad woman shared as her bearded companion looked on intently. “Someone wrote a book about the mosque that was filled with lies.”
I politely explained that I had come to the Islamic Center of Munich to document its pivotal role in the rise of Islam—really, Islamism—in modern Europe. The conversation was brief and to the point, and my cameraman and I departed without incident, with instructions to call later when the mosque’s imam would be around. In the end, I had no luck reaching him—the snail proved much more approachable.
The supposed “book of lies” the woman referred to is called
A Mosque in Munich
, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ian Johnson. In reality, it is a meticulously researched and sourced work that chronicles how the Islamic Center of Munich—an unassuming building in a quiet residential neighborhood—served as the Muslim Brotherhood’s main entry point to the West in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.
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“It was a refuge for senior key Brotherhood people,” Johnson told me when I interviewed him about the mosque in June 2012. “The board of directors was a who’s who of radical Islam people from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, North Africa, and of course, Europe ... people who were key members of the mosque in Munich moved to the United States and helped set up and organize Islam there as well.”
So we’ve noticed.
“It really had nothing to do with Munich,” Johnson continued. “It wasn’t a local mosque for local Muslims. It was a political entity that was trying to organize political Islam around the world.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the Brotherhood designated its senior operative in Europe, Said Ramadan—father of Tariq—as the point man for getting such an important project off the ground. Ramadan, who led the Brotherhood’s operations against Israel during the Jewish State’s 1948 war for independence, was well connected with the oil-rich Saudi Royal Family, and had close ties with Islamists around the world.
“Initially, the mosque was an idea of the West Germans, who wanted to harness Islam for their political purpose in the Cold War,” Johnson told me. “But the project was taken over by young students, mostly members or sympathizers with the Muslim Brotherhood. They took over the project and brought in Said Ramadan.”
From Munich, the Brotherhood’s message spread throughout Europe and the United States via the construction of mosques and Islamic schools, or madrassahs, and the founding of numerous Islamic organizations and bodies, all frequently backed by generous Saudi funding. In short, the Saudis (and increasingly today, other oil-rich Gulf states like Qatar) provide the money and the Brotherhood and its sympathizers supply the imams, ideology, and literature in Islamic centers across the West. I’ve seen it myself firsthand in frequent visits to Western mosques, in the form of Korans printed in Saudi Arabia, libraries filled with the works of Brotherhood ideologues like Qutb and al-Banna, and pamphlets by Brotherhood-linked groups like CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Muslim American Society.
The Saudi/MB nexus dates back to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brutal crackdown on the Brotherhood, which prompted many top Ikhwan leaders to flee Egypt for Saudi Arabia. According to French terrorism expert Gilles Kepel, a sometimes uneasy but mutually beneficial relationship soon developed between the two Salafi heavyweights:
After being driven out of Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s, many Brothers found shelter in Saudi Arabia. The Saud family establishment was extremely hesitant and cautious vis-à-vis the Brotherhood, and they were never permitted access to the core of Saudi society, and to deal openly with religious issues. This was seen as the exclusive domain of the Wahhabis, who had formed an alliance with the ruling family.
But the Saudi elites nonetheless saw the Brothers as useful because—to put it bluntly—they could read and write. While the Wahhabi ulama were ill at ease in dealing with the modern world, the Brothers were well traveled and relatively sophisticated. They knew foreign languages and, unlike the Wahhabi ulama, were aware that the earth was not flat. The Brothers had been in jail, had political experience, and were skilled in modern polemics that resonated widely with ordinary people. Most of all, they had stood courageously against Saudi Arabia’s archenemies, the communists and secularists, and were eager to continue the fight.... More broadly speaking, a cross-fertilization of ideas took place between the exiled Brotherhood and the austere teachings of what might be described as the Wahhabi rank and file.
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Interestingly enough, as the Brotherhood’s power and influence has grown over the years, the Saudi government has developed second thoughts about getting so cozy with a revolutionary movement specializing in regime change. As far back as 2002, Saudi Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, the Royal Kingdom’s Interior Minister until his death ten years later, reportedly lamented:
The Brotherhood has done great damage to Saudi Arabia. . . . All our problems come from the Muslim Brotherhood. We have given too much support to this group.... The Muslim Brotherhood has destroyed the Arab world.... Whenever they got into difficulty or found their freedom restricted in their own countries, Brotherhood activists found refuge in the Kingdom which protected their lives.... But they later turned against the Kingdom. . . .
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The Saudis realize, particularly now, in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, that the Brotherhood has the Land of the Two Holy Mosques firmly in its crosshairs. That’s one reason why in 2011, as revolution was beginning to sweep across the Middle East and North Africa, the Saudi Ministry of Education reportedly banned the works of Brotherhood leading lights Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb from Saudi libraries and schools and began investigating how the MB was using Saudi cash to spread its influence throughout the Islamic world.
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The Saudis may be too late. The Saudi Royals, certainly no strangers to fomenting jihadist incitement and chaos worldwide themselves, could be on the verge of being outmaneuvered by the Ikhwan in a strange case of jihadi comeuppance. But even if the relationship between the Brotherhood and the Saudi Royals unravels completely, the mosqueing of the West promises to continue. Indeed, Qatar and other Gulf States— awash in oil money, sympathetic to the Brotherhood’s ideology, and eager to stay on the right side of what they see as a rising Islamist wave—are ready and willing to open their considerable coffers.
Another player to watch in the mosque-building game is the Brotherhood-allied regime in Turkey. In 1998, while serving as mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was imprisoned for four months after reciting a poem that included the lines, “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.”
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Bear in mind that his conviction for inciting religious hatred occurred during a period when Turkey was still a secular nation. Since 2002, when it came under the stewardship of Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (known as AKP), Turkey has drifted gradually but unmistakably toward becoming an Islamist state that is hostile to Israel and the West and embraces Islamic terror groups like Hamas.
Erdogan’s AKP has used stealthy, Brotherhood-like tactics not only to consolidate power at home but also to project influence abroad—particularly in Germany and Austria. It’s estimated that some 3.5 million Turks now live in Germany, while Austria boasts a 225,000-strong Turkish Muslim population. In both countries, multi-million-dollar mega-mosques financed by the Islamist-led Turkish government are sprouting up at an alarming rate.
I paid a visit to one of them, the newly built Cologne Central Mosque, in June 2012. With its massive domed structure, the mosque complex—which cost $40 million to build and takes up an entire city block—resembles a nuclear reactor (as some locals unhappily observed to me). Those features, combined with two 100-foot-plus-high minarets that are visible from blocks away, have made the Cologne Central Mosque one of the largest mosques in all of Europe. So large, in fact, that on several occasions during my visit, I witnessed passersby stop in their tracks and crane their necks skyward to take pictures of the imposing structure.
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Could the Turkish government’s selection of Cologne for this mega, mega-mosque have anything to do with the nearby presence of Cologne’s famed High Cathedral of St. Peter? The cathedral is a world-renowned historic landmark and symbol of German Catholicism—it’s also the largest Christian building north of the Alps. Sounds like a symbolic challenge by the Turks to me. So does the growth of Turkish-run mosques in small German towns that I visited around Cologne, like Herten and Reckling-hausen. In Herten, for instance—where the population is now 10 percent Turkish Muslim and the Muslim population rapidly growing—I spent time at a large structure that locals call the “Blue Mosque,” where the parking lot was filled with cars decorated with Turkish flags. Can you say, “unassimilated?”
I found the same problem across the border in the traditional Austrian town of Bad Voslau (population: 11,000), just outside Vienna. Ottoman Turkish armies reached the gates of Vienna twice—in 1529 and 1683—before being turned back by Western forces. Today, the Turks are waltzing into and around Vienna with little resistance. In 2010, a mosque official gave me a tour of the new Islamic Cultural Center of Bad Voslau, an elaborate complex that stirred, you guessed it, heated opposition from non-Muslim locals when it was first proposed. As you also probably guessed, approval for the $1 million-plus mosque was rammed through anyway by cowering city officials. According to locals I interviewed, the new mosque had not improved relations between local Turks and non-Muslims, as officials had promised. In fact, Bad Voslau’s Turkish community—which is based mainly in an enclave around the mosque—had reportedly become even more insular and disconnected from mainstream German society.
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Such news must positively warm the hearts of non-Muslim residents of Lanham, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., where the Turkish government announced in May 2013 that it would be financing a fifteen-acre, $100 million mega-mosque.
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What’s happening in Lanham, Herten, Bad Voslau, and cities and towns across the West where Muslim populations are growing and mega-mosques are popping up is a phenomenon I call the “enclave effect.” A Muslim Brotherhood–linked Islamic center opens—the beachhead is established. And rest assured, if you build it, they will come. The crowds get bigger and bigger each Friday for prayers, as worshippers travel from miles away to attend the spanking new mosque—which was supposedly built to serve the needs of the
local
Muslim population. Women in hijabs and men in Islamic garb become common sights around the neighborhood and shops pop up everywhere with signs written in Arabic. Soon, local non-Muslims who’ve lived in the neighborhood for years begin to move out and Muslims move in. Before long, an enclave is established: self-segregated and centered around a large Islamic center, or “beehive,” as the Brotherhood calls it.
In Europe, many of these areas become no-go zones for non-Muslims where sharia law is enforced and even police are hesitant to enter. The Tower Hamlets section of East London, in the shadow of London’s financial district, is well on its way to no-go status. I’ve walked the streets of this area on numerous occasions, spent time in its outdoor bazaars, and observed the massive flow of South Asian immigrants in and out of Friday prayers at the vast East London Mosque—which serves as the de facto British base for Jamaat-e-Islami, considered the South Asian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a stunning experience to see thousands of predominantly Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims dressed in Islamic garb spill out of the mosque and swarm the streets of East London, giving the area a distinctly non-Western, Islamicized feel.
In the summer of 2011, Islamists (reportedly in league with our old friend Anjem Choudary), put up posters around Tower Hamlets proclaiming it a “Sharia Controlled Zone” where “Islamic rules are enforced.”
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They wasted no time in getting busy “enforcing.” Harassment of non-Muslims—particularly homosexuals, women, and alcohol consumers—at the hands of self-proclaimed “Muslim London Patrols” has become a regular occurrence in East London.
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Britain’s
Daily Mail
newspaper described the Tower Hamlets borough’s descent into Islamist oblivion in stark detail:
This vocal minority, who are causing increasing concern in the area, have lent this corner of the capital a new nickname—the Islamic republic of Tower Hamlets.... Residents have grown used to the fact that the council-run libraries are stocked with books and DVDs containing the extremist rantings of banned Islamist preachers. There is a Muslim faith school where girls as young as 11 have to wear face-covering veils. There are plans to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of municipal money to build a set of Islamic arches—the so-called “hijab gates,” which would look like a veil—at either end of Brick Lane, which is packed with Indian restaurants and clothes shops.... Bangladeshi-born Lutfur Rahman became the first directly elected mayor of Tower Hamlets. He originally stood as the Labour candidate but was deselected by the party amid allegations about his links with an organisation known as the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE). The fundamentalist group believes in jihad and Islamic sharia law, and wants to turn Britain and other European countries into Islamic republics.... Leaders of the group want to impose hardline views on local communities. With bitter irony, it is said to have pocketed £10 million from the taxpayer by attracting state grants designed to “prevent violent extremism.” . . . “You basically have a large umbrella Islamist group that appears to have almost a stranglehold over a major council in the East End of London,” said one local resident.
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