Europe’s Itinerant Imams

If there is to be another mass terrorist attack on the United States, the chances are that it is being confected across the Atlantic under the influence of a foreign imam. According to the French Interior Ministry only 10 percent of some 1,500 imams in France are French citizens and fewer than half speak French. According to Zaki Badawi, the dean of the Muslim College in London, the majority of imams in the United Kingdom are now imported from tribal regions of South Asia (Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh). They know neither English nor England. Their credentials consist of a fundamentalist interpretation of a Koran memorized in a madrassa funded by Saudi Arabia. In Britain, where Islamist sects openly recruited for the Taliban, such imams are imports preferred under the religious tolerance provisions of the Immigration Act of 1971. Once having secured entrance to any individual European country under the Schengen Treaty ending internal borders, these preachers crisscross Europe, often on Saudi funds, proselytizing and sometimes spreading messages from Osama bin Laden and forming networks for a new breed of terrorist such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The itinerant imams, plus the Islamist students who loiter in European universities (like the infamous Hamburg cell that piloted 9/11), plus illegal aliens streaming across the Mediterranean (like the Moroccan sleeper cell that executed the Madrid bombings) comprise the immigrant first generation. But recruiters for holy war fish in a European pond stocked as well with unemployed and alienated second-generation Muslim immigrants, undigested by a continent wary of immigrants. In France, the jobless rate is 20 percent for immigrant men; it’s about 9 percent for the native-born. In Germany, the rate is 15 percent for immigrants, 7 percent for native-born Germans. By contrast, in Australia, Canada, and the United States, the jobless rates for foreign and native-born workers are virtually the same. In Britain, average unemployment hovers around 2 percent, but for immigrants the rate is almost 5 percent.

Some of the jobless turn to crime and land in jail, where the more honorable try to turn their lives around. Not infrequently these jailhouse transformations are ministered by foreign imams. A French intelligence report on jihad recruitment notes that Islamization for “a minority” of French youth “represents a vehicle of protest against . . . problems of access to employment and housing, discrimination of various sorts, the very negative image of Islam in public opinion.” A year ago the deputy director of the French interior intelligence service told me of his worries that foreign imams were radicalizing their flocks and hatching terrorist plots. One French authority on Islamism told the London Guardian that radical foreign imams find a susceptible audience in France’s rundown suburbs: “The kids there already watch Arab stations on satellite TV, with the bloodthirsty slogans and anti-Western propaganda. They’ve already been radicalized.”

Indeed, the proletarian suburbs of France and Belgium host Muslim militants who, when they are not staging strident anti-Semitic demonstrations, may mount a raucous defense of a rapist, such as that recently shown on 60 Minutes. According to a government intelligence report, Islamism has become “an autonomous phenomenon” in the Netherlands, meaning that even without any influence from abroad some youths are embracing the radical fundamentalist line. It has become “part of the [Dutch] youth culture,” and the same may be said about the youth culture in the Muslim enclaves of Belgium, Britain, France, and Spain.

Add to this mix not only imam recruiters but also al Qaeda and Zarqawi’s concerted quest for bearers of Western passports, then stir with the U.S. Visa Waiver Program, and we are in a national security stew. Bin Laden and Zarqawi have been steadily recruiting European Muslims, partly because they are perfectly aware that, thanks to our reciprocal Visa Waiver Program with Western European countries, European nationals can fly to the United States without so much as an interview by U.S. officials. A Nixon Center study of 144 mujahedeen detained in Europe found that more than one-third (53) were European nationals and eligible for the Visa Waiver Program.

A few radical clerics–like Abu Qatada, said to be the spiritual counselor of September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and al Qaeda’s “spiritual emissary to Europe”–languish in British prisons. But others–like Sheik Omar al Bakri, leader of a movement called Al Muhajiroun–are at liberty and carry on robust propaganda campaigns. The preeminent European performer and media darling for jihad was the telegenic, one-eyed, claw-handed imam, Abu Hamza al-Masri.

HAMZA’S NORTH LONDON FINSBURY PARK mosque was only the best-known Muslim house of worship to have been taken over by imams from South Asia and the Middle East. The mosque was the inspiration of the Prince of Wales and other British aristocrats. Two decades ago the prince approached King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who sprang for £1.3 million to construct the modern red brick structure, with its four floors of prayer halls, in a largely Bangladeshi neighborhood. Conceived as a genteel, tolerant, cosmopolitan center of study, the mosque became a haven for terrorist suspects. When the original trustees attempted to resist the takeover, they were attacked by militant gangs who barred them from entering.

Enter Abu Hamza, who had arrived in Britain from his native Egypt to study engineering. In 1996 the former bouncer presented himself as a mediator. In return for resolving the trustees’ conflict with the militants, Hamza secured a letter from the trustees allowing him to preach in the mosque. Soon worshippers began noticing groups of young men staying overnight there. Many were Algerians recruited by Djamel Beghal, an Algerian computer expert whom Osama bin Laden had assigned the task of setting up cells in Europe. Like Hamza an engaging figure, he circulated among the drifters and asylum-seekers steered to Finsbury Park, inviting them to linger after Friday prayers and join “study groups.”

By the spring of 1998 Beghal had several would-be suicide bombers staying with him in the mosque. One was Richard Reid, the South London petty thief who would gain notoriety as “the shoe bomber.” A second was Zacarias Moussaoui, whose brother, Abu Samad, blames Finsbury Park for radicalizing Zacarias. Other Finsbury Park terrorist all-stars included Ahmed Ressam, arrested attempting to bomb the Los Angeles airport at the Millennium; Anas al-Liby, now on the FBI’s most wanted list and in whose Manchester flat police found al Qaeda’s terror manual in 1995; several of the eight Britons to be held in Guantanamo Bay, such as the computer student Feroz Abassi, first recruited for weapons training in the mosque, and Rashid Ramda, then facing extradition to France for planning and financing the bombing of the Paris metro. The United States had its own representative in Earnest James Ujamaa, a Muslim convert who helped run the mosque’s website in 1999 before returning home and trying to set up al Qaeda training camps in Oregon.

Questioned about these suspects, Hamza–dubbed “Captain Hook” by the British tabloids, in honor of the steel prosthetic device on his right hand–would insist that he knew nothing of their extremist links, noting with studied insouciance that “thousands of young people from all over the world come to hear me preach. I am very famous.” Indeed, video and tape recordings of Hamza’s sermons circulated in mosques throughout Britain and beyond. The Yemeni government sent evidence saying it was from his mosque that Abu Hamza’s son, his stepson, and his press officer were recruited for a bombing mission in December 1998 against British targets in the port city of Aden.

Hamza’s star began to fade in February 2003, when British authorities pursued a plot allegedly to poison British troops with ricin traced to camps in Kurdish sections of northern Iraq. One hundred fifty police in rapid-entry units, wearing full body armor and supported by armed officers, smashed a battering ram through the front door of the Finsbury Park mosque. The authorities found hundreds of documents used for identity forgery. Officers, having sought the advice of Muslim colleagues on “how to behave respectfully,” covered their shoes and focused their search on offices, avoiding prayer spaces. The juxtaposition of such consultations with a battering ram indicates the intricacy of Britain’s Muslim problem. In the wake of the raid the British media featured protests alleging violations of “the sanctity of a mosque to silence a preacher.”

The enterprising Hamza, banned from preaching inside the Finsbury Park mosque, held forth outside the building every Friday afternoon. At one such gathering this past March, a week after the Madrid bombings, a militant with blond brows buttonholed me, vowing another attack on the United States. The look in his eyes was dead serious. As Richard Reid demonstrated, the Visa Waiver Program makes it child’s play for a British citizen to board a plane bound for the United States.

ON MAY 27, 2004, the British finally closed the Hamza show under U.S. prodding. On the basis of a new anti-terrorist extradition treaty signed with the United States, Scotland Yard busted the elusive imam and began extradition proceedings after an 11-count indictment was unsealed in New York. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Hamza faced charges of trying to establish a terrorist training base in Oregon in 1999, helping to recruit for al Qaeda, and abetting the taking of 16 tourists hostage in Yemen in 1998, which ended in several deaths. U.S. officials voiced concern that the arrest could spark reprisals against Americans in Europe.

The home secretary says he has an American pledge not to seek the death penalty for Hamza, a condition of extradition under British and European Union laws. The new extradition treaty sets a strict timetable for hearings and appeals so that within a year Hamza should be awaiting what promises to be the terrorist trial of the new century.

The Hamza arrest is part of a dawning European effort to restrain foreign radical imams. Calling them a public danger, France has deported more than a dozen imams in the past year and threatens to expel two more. Italy deported a Senegalese imam in November, calling him a “danger to state security.” He warned that Italian soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan risked attack. Days later 19 Italians in Iraq were murdered–reportedly by Zarqawi’s network. In March 2003 Britain jailed an imam from Jamaica for nine years for urging followers to kill Hindus, Jews, and Americans. After the Madrid bombings by a Moroccan sleeper cell influenced by a foreign imam, Spain is considering a law empowering authorities to monitor imams. But these efforts already have encountered opponents who brandish the banner of religious toleration. One of two imams expelled from France last month quickly won a court ruling allowing him to return.

Religious toleration is far too important to cede to the jihadis. John Stuart Mill wrote that the seminal battle for individual rights and democracy in the West concerned religious freedom. That cause shaped the American founding and creed and was the precursor to enlightenment and modernization in the West. As the Egyptian thinker Tarek Heggy reminds us, “the tolerant model” of Islam predominated into the twentieth century. Its renewal could revitalize and help to integrate Muslims in Europe.

More immediately, Europeans might listen to Zaki Badawi from the Muslim College of London, who proposes that the answer to the plague of foreign imams, imported from backward regions and unfamiliar with European languages and cultures, is a deliberate effort to educate second-generation European Muslims to be imams. In this, Europeans should heed the example of Abdellah Boussouf, an imam based in Strasbourg, who is working on a training program in concert with France’s elected National Muslim Council, which groups the country’s main Muslim organizations (from moderate to the more militant Muslim Brothers). The program is enthusiastically supported by the new French interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, who says French Muslims need to “face the issue of training imams . . . so that a real ‘French Islam’ can emerge.”

Villepin is not proposing a government program to train Muslim ministers but calling on private divinity schools that respect human rights to act. Divinity schools centered in tolerance could also offer quality jobs to a few of Europe’s Muslim immigrants and facilitate their entrance into society. When homegrown tolerant imams compete with foreign radical imams, one specter haunting Europe and the United States might be dispelled. In the meantime, radical foreign imams should remain an object of attention for intelligence services, security authorities, and journalists.

Robert Leiken is the director of the Immigration and National Security program at the Nixon Center and author of Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and National Security after 9/11.