The Adventures of Chester: THE GOD COMPLEX II

By all accounts, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali Is a bright young man, and a good Muslim. Born in Houston to Jordanian parents, he was a valedictorian at an Islamic high school in the Washington, D.C. area, where he spent his teen years teaching religious studies at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia. After graduating, he moved to Saudi Arabia in 2000 to study the Koran at the Islamic University of Medina.

Yesterday, federal authorities in Alexandria, Virginia, unsealed an indictment against Abu Ali, charging him, as the New York Times reports, with providing material support for terrorism and training with Al Qaeda overseas. According to prosecutors, in 2002 the American citizen allegedly contacted terrorists in Saudi Arabia, and received training from them in the use of weapons and in document forgery. Moreover, the feds claim, in 2002 and 2003 Abu Ali and Al Qaeda discussed plans for Abu Ali to assassinate President of the United States George W. Bush, by shooting him or detonating a car bomb in his vicinity. Abu Ali denies the charges.

He may be innocent. At this point, the indictment seem rather weak its based mainly on the testimony of unnamed co-conspirators-- and Abu Ali claims he was tortured while in Saudi custody. Moreover, federal accusations lodged against American citizens for assisting terrorism have often proved wrong, as witness the Brandon Mayfield case. Still, if nothing else, Abu Ali's indictment opens a window onto Saudi-supported Islamic education in America, and the degree to which the ideology of religious supremacy has crept into our nations mosques and Islamic cultural centers.

As the New York Times reports, Abu Ali's high school, the Islamic Saudi Academy, is a private institution that serves hundreds of Saudi citizens and is subsidized by the Saudi government. As for the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, according to a recent report by the Center for Religious Freedom, this organization was one in which researchers discovered hate literature published by the Saudi government. A sample of the material found in the Center includes the following passage:

Zionism, which is the worst racism in history because of its violence, atrocities, selfishness and arrogance, invests all the means available to it, together with the other enemies to destroy this religion [i.e., Islam] and exterminate its followers, weakening and paralyzing them to say the least.

Interestingly, Abu Ali's father works for the Saudi embassy in Washington. CRF researchers discovered Saudi-subsidized hate literature in two religious and cultural sites in the city, the Islamic Center of Washington, and Masjid Al-Islam. More interestingly yet, researchers found Saudi-sponsored hate literature in Abu Ali's hometown of Houston, specifically the Al-Farouq Mosque. One screed called upon Muslims to

...form a society that is committed to the Islamic way of thinking and Islamic way of life, which means to form a government that implements principles of justice embodied in sharia...Until the nations of the world have functional Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.

Another quotes one of the founders of modern Islamic radicalism, Sayyid Qutb.

[Believers] should realize that their self-value derives only from Islam, without which they are like animals or worse. They must know, however, that true honor can never be achieved unless they continue actively to involve themselves in the Islamic Movement. Those who remain in isolation will be in the Hellfire.

There is no proof that Abu Ali or his father read, or were affected by, these documents. Still, it seems clear that the young man lived and worked in an atmosphere permeated with Saudi hate literature and Islamofascist ideologyan atmosphere, moreover, that has produced foul results. As the CRF notes, quoting the 9-11 Commission report, Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders draw on a minority tradition in Islamic teaching that extends from at least Ibn Tamiyya, through the founders of Wahhabismitself one of the foundations of Saudi Arabia through the Muslim Brotherhood to Sayyid Qutb.

As I noted in a previous post, The God Complex I, Qutb's manifesto Milestones is a veritable handbook of Islamic grandiosity and will to power that contains such passages as

The earth belongs to God and should be purified for God, and it cannot be purified for Him unless the banner, No Deity Except God, [i.e., a core Islamic belief] is unfurled across the earth.

What Qutb could not have foreseen were the vast resources of Saudi Arabia pumping out Islamofascist literature to the ummah across the globe. Nor could he and other radical Islamic thinkers have foreseen how the internet--as Olivier Roy notes in his Globalized Islam--allows for a deculturalized form of the religion to possess intelligent, angry and impressionable Muslim minds. Whether Abu Ali is part of this mindset remains unclear. What is clear, however, is the problem of Islamic grandiosity, an abyss into whose depths we are only beginning to peer.

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Steven Vincent contributes weekly to The Adventures of Chester. Don't miss his blog In the Red Zone, or his book by the same name, in the sidebar.

Posted by on February 24, 2005 6:57 PM to The Adventures of Chester