YOUSSEF NADA SITS in regal splendor, slouched in a faux-ancien-regime chair next to a window overlooking Europe. His villa is perched on a hill next to Lake Lugano, whose dark green waters snake between alpine foothills. Thick forests run down to the lake's edge; this primordial view is marred only by a few towns cut into the banks. Nada's picture windows are decorated with trophies from his trips around the world on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. On one table stands a deep-blue glass vase from Pakistan; on another are silver candelabras from North Africa. A strange pewter peanut graces a third -- a memorial to his days in agriculture. The furniture is an assortment of Eastern and Western styles, set next to giant handwoven rugs from Central Asia. Nada is now frail but still dapper in a gray shirt with French cuffs, a flowered tie, a black blazer, and gray flannels. His eyes are dark and drawn, his goatee thin. He appears exhausted, but then he leans forward, eager to explain who he is.
"Engineer, I am engineer.
"Businessman, I am businessman.
"Banker, I am a banker.
"Intellectual, I am intellectual.
"Politician, I am a politician.
''Activist, I am activist.
"Islamist, I am Islamist.
"Terrorist, I am not."
It's hard to argue with that bullet-point resume. In hindsight, the charges of terrorism leveled against Nada seem like an act of desperation by the U.S. government, fulfilling a need to do something, anything, after the 9/11 attacks. A case of Aktionismus, a German word that means "a love of action": action for action's sake. Despite Nada's extensive contact over the years with German speakers, he can barely communicate in the language, but he knows this word. He stumbles over it and says it again, "It is all Aktionismus." Then he sits back, pleased with himself. Linguist I might not be, but you get my point.
And in fact, for all the intense cooperation between U.S. and Swiss prosecutors, the charges that Nada financed terrorism have never been proven or explained publicly in a convincing way. In hindsight, Nada's Banque al-Taqwa was a disastrous investment for members of the Muslim Brotherhood but less likely a secret funding vehicle for terrorists. Perhaps it could be proved that some of the initial profits from the bank were given to terrorist organizations such as Hamas. Investors had given Nada wide latitude to donate their zakat -- their tithe, one of the five pillars of Islam. Thus when money came in during the bank's early, profitable days, he was authorized to skim off the requisite 10 percent zakat and channel it to any charity he chose. It's conceivable some went to questionable groups close to the Brotherhood, but that hasn't been proven. None of his bank's transfers -- and authorities had access to all of them because they were executed through mainstream Swiss banks -- were dubious enough to allow prosecutors to even bring a case to trial, let alone get a conviction.
Not only were Nada and Himmat not tried, but the travails of the past years apparently rejuvenated them. Nada has relished the role of underdog, setting up a website to refute some of the more absurd allegations made against him. He has spent countless hours regaling journalists, academics, and prosecutors with tales of his Islamist exploits. In a series of long interviews on Al-Jazeera television, he even claimed to have been the Brotherhood's foreign minister. Himmat, true, had to resign as head of the Islamic Community of Germany, but like Nada he remains in his villa, essentially in retirement. Both are now over seventy.
Their fates highlight an interesting development: in some ways the 9/11 attacks were the best thing that happened to the Brotherhood. Yes, there was a crackdown and for a while the Brotherhood suffered. But more important, the attacks made most Westerners judge Islamists by one criterion: is the person a terrorist? If so, then the full weight of government power would be brought to bear, from torture and war to prosecution and jail. But if not, then the person was okay. He or she wasn't Al Qaeda. Such people weren't blowing things up. They were not only tolerated but valued. Far from problematic, their extremist and undemocratic views were a sign of credibility. They could talk to the "Muslim street." They became one of democracy's most highly valued commodities: a dialogue partner.
***
Herve Terrel strides briskly into a cafe with oak and brass fixtures across from the Madeleine, a huge church in central Paris that looks like a Greek temple. It is early morning, and Terrel is on his way to work in the French government's interior ministry, where he helps formulate policy related to the country's Muslims. When I first met him in 2004, France was literally burning -- Muslim ghettos were aflame with burning cars -- but Terrel was unperturbed, absolutely certain that France had the right strategy: co-opting the Muslim Brotherhood.
With more than four million Muslims, France has one of Islam's largest populations in Europe. The immigrants have added a youthful element to an aging population and helped forge business and cultural ties to the Muslim world. But most are concentrated in ghettos like Amriou's, where they live cut off from French society, with poor prospects for education and jobs. The 9/11 terrorist attacks focused attention on these communities, where young Muslims were recruited to fight the West in Afghanistan. In 2005, tens of thousands rioted, burning cars night after night. Terrel is part of a group of high-level civil servants charged with coming up with a solution.
In 2003, French officials had already decided that Muslims needed a voice and set up the French Council of the Muslim Faith. The body was to be elected, but officials had a problem: who should vote? French citizens don't register their religious affiliation, so the country has no list of Muslims. The solution was for mosques to elect representatives. Bigger mosques would get more votes, based on the theory that they represented more Muslims. That formula helped one group in particular: the UOIF, the group in France closest to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The UOIF is an amalgam of several Islamist groups with roots in Said Ramadan's Islamic Center of Geneva. The group came to prominence in 1989 when two girls were ejected from school for wearing headscarves. The UOIF began to organize protests and quickly established itself as a force in the slums of major French cities. Until then, France's Muslim organizations were divided according to their members' countries of origin. The UOIF, by contrast, advocated an "Islam de France;' although it saw no contradiction in paying for this with foreign money. The group receives extensive funding from Arab countries. Even today, UOIF officials say, one quarter of its annual budget of just under three million euros, or about $4 million, comes from donors abroad, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. That support means the UOIF mosques are large, claiming more votes in the council elections -- far beyond the UOIF's actual strength. In 2003 elections, the UOIF won control of twelve of the twenty-five regional councils that represent the central council across France -- it suddenly was thrust into a position of power.
The UOIF was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Terrel readily conceded with a cocked eyebrow, but he could handle them. "If you say the UOIF is not the Muslim Brotherhood, it's a kind of naivete. They are. But they also accept the rules here and want to play the game. That's why they're so seductive to people who don't really understand things."
I wondered if he fell into that category. Why then fix the voting rules to favor the big Saudi-funded Muslim Brotherhood mosques? Perhaps the interior ministry should have set up a voting system that tried to reach other Muslims -- more secular ones who didn't go to mosque every day.
Terrel disagreed emphatically. "Favoring the Brotherhood was the point. It's not a problem to deal with them; on the contrary. In all of Europe, the only groups that have thought of how to find their place in society are Islamists." True, the Brotherhood does not represent all Muslims, but for Terrel they are attractive because "they have the intellectual level to talk with a government official" like him. In other words, they wear suits, have university degrees, and can formulate their demands in ways that a politician can understand. It reminded me of Amcomlib's decision to drop its support of the old Muslim leader Ibrahim Gacaoglu in favor of Said Ramadan. Ordinary people don't make good interlocutors. They don't have a political program that you can discuss. Ordinary people are messy.
The UOIF was also attractive because it helped fill a hole in social services that the state was unwilling to address. UOIF mosques offer after-school tutoring, day care, and activities for women. One outside supporter of this work was Dounia Bouzar, a prominent French Muslim social scientist, who argued in a book of 2001 that groups like the Brotherhood make valuable mediators between mainstream society and Muslim immigrants. Their services, she argued, help Muslims integrate. But after watching the situation develop over the next few years, Bouzar changed her views. Instead of integrating Muslims, the Brotherhood's all-embracing form of Islam builds a cocoon around its people, allowing them little contact with mainstream society. Education is often stunted and chances for professional success limited. "It's a vision of society that separates people into two camps, Islamic and non-Islamic." said Bouzar. "They have a need to Islamicize everything." By embracing groups like the UOIF, Western politicians essentially went along with this paradigm, tacitly accepting the Islamist tenet that Islam is the answer to every problem.
Bouzar and other Muslims began to realize that most difficulties that Muslims face don't have to do with religion -- and thus it didn't make sense to put a religious group in charge of solving them. Muslims' problems were common among all poor immigrants: unemployment, poor education, street crime. There is nothing specifically Muslim about these issues. The argument that Islam is the answer, however, was so seductive that soon Washington was formulating similar policies, echoing its actions from half a century earlier.
***
In late 2005, the U.S. State Department decided that European Muslims needed Americas help. Too many were living in parallel societies, cut off from the mainstream. Extremism and violence were rampant; it was no coincidence that three of the four 9/11 hijacker pilots had been radicalized in Europe or that Islamist terrorists had killed hundreds in London and Madrid. What Europe needed, the State Department figured, was help to set up an international network "to discuss alienation and extremism."
The idea was intriguing. The United States was the target of Islamic radicals, but its own communities had not produced the violence found in Europe. Experts had long debated the reasons for this. Some cited the fact that often the Muslims who immigrated to the United States either had jobs or planned to study. In Europe, by contrast, Muslims had come to work in industrial jobs that didn't exist anymore. They had working-class levels of education and lacked the skills to find new employment, leaving many frustrated, with too much time on their hands. Social services were thought to be related to the problem. In the United States, unemployed Muslims had few welfare benefits to help them out. If they wanted to survive, they had to work long hours. In Europe those who lacked employment could claim relatively generous welfare benefits and have time to indulge in extremist politics. Other explanations were batted around too: that Islamic violence was largely an Arab and Pakistani phenomenon; whereas a high percentage of Muslims in Europe had immigrated from these regions, those in the United States represented a broader array of homelands.
But no one made the single argument that informed the State Department's plan: that the United States had better Muslim leadership. A State Department-sponsored conference on November 15 and 16, 2005, called Muslim Communities Participating in Society: A Belgian-US. Dialogue, brought together sixty-five Belgian Muslims and US. tutors from the Islamic Society of North America. The US. diplomats thought so highly of ISNA that it seems to have been appointed as a co-organizer of the conference.
From a historical perspective, this was almost comical -- a case of taking coal to Newcastle. ISNA, as seen in Chapter 14, was founded by people with extremely close ties to Nada and the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in Europe. The State Department was importing Muslim Brotherhood Islamists with roots in Europe to tell European Muslims how to organize and integrate. Even more interesting, some of those European Muslims invited to the conference were themselves part of the current Muslim Brotherhood network.
One participant was a Belgian convert named Michael Privot, who at the time was vice president of a Saudi-Muslim Brotherhood organization called the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations. This body was founded with direct support from the Muslim Brotherhood's umbrella organization in Europe, the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe. Privot was also vice secretary of the Complex Educatif et Culturel Islamique de Verviers, a center of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Brussels. It was also the home of one of Hamas's fund-raising groups, the Al- Aqsa Foundation (a group banned in several European countries, including Germany and Holland, for supporting terrorism). The meeting offered a chance for Muslim Brotherhood activists like Privot to meet their US. counterparts. In addition, the State Department helped bring Belgian Muslims to the United States -- to be trained as imams by ISNA and to participate in an ISNA summer program in Chicago. In short, it was a networking session for the Muslim Brotherhood -- paid for by US. taxpayers.
State Department officials acknowledged that they had invited people accused of extremism but said they did not care about track records. Instead, all that mattered were the groups' or individuals' current statements. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the US. ambassador to Belgium, Tom Korologos, said, "Some of the organizations whose members participated in the Conference have been accused of being extremist. It is possible that some individual members of those organizations have made statements that have been termed extremist. Our view, however, was to base our selection on the stated policies and specific actions of organizations and individuals today with regard to harmonious Muslim integration into American and European society." And then, with a rhetorical flourish, he concluded that "four or five more conferences like this can lead to a network of moderate Muslims."
In internal communication, however, Mr. Korologos's staff revealed a less altruistic goal. In one cable sent at the end of 2006, the US. embassy in Brussels conceded that "the embassy's engagement with Belgian Muslims is seen by some members of the majority community, and some Muslims also, as interference in Belgium's internal affairs." This was justified, the cable concluded, not to build a network of moderates, but rather to "increase our credibility with both Muslims and mainstream Belgians with the ultimate goal of creating a more positive image of the US., its policies, society, and values."
In 2007, a similar project took place in Germany. The US. consulate in Munich actively backed the creation of an Islamic academy in the town of Penzberg. The group behind the academy had close ties to Milli Gorus -- essentially a Turkish version of the Muslim Brotherhood, which regularly appears on lists of extremist organizations in Germany. That is why the Bavarian state government' led by the conservative Christian Social Union, was opposed to the academy. The situation was complex -- members of the group in Penzberg seemed to make a good-faith effort to distance themselves from extremism -- but many German officials were not convinced and wanted to wait a while before accepting the group's newfound moderation. Thus the State Department's quick embrace of the group created a bizarre political constellation: the Bush administration, which had lambasted "old Europe" for being weak on fighting extremism, was actively undermining a conservative European government for being too tough on Islamists.
The embassy's actions formed part of a broader change in strategy -- but one debated largely in secret. The strategy was, as a 2006 cable from the U.S. embassy in Berlin put it, a "policy of using American Muslims to reach out to other Muslims." This paralleled U.S. efforts in the 1950S to enlist Muslims in Munich for similar public relations purposes. Though it did smack of manipulating Islam, in many ways this activity is not controversial: why not send U.S. citizens to tell the story of the United States? The problem lay in who got chosen for this role. Just as in the 1950s and '60s, the United States opted for the Brotherhood.
The most public advocate of this new strategy was the prominent political scientist Robert S. Leiken of the Nixon Center think tank. In a widely read piece in Foreign Affairs, he and his colleague Steven Brooke made numerous sensible points. For example, they pointed out that the Brotherhood has often been treated as a monolith and that Western officials have ignored moderates in the movement. They also noted that terrorists have often held the Brotherhood in contempt for not embracing global jihad -- thus, in the context of Middle Eastern politics, the Brotherhood is not the most extreme group. They also rightly said the United States should not be afraid of engaging the Brotherhood, or any group, if it furthers U.S. interests.
These are all valid observations, but the article misses a few key points. While it is correct, for example, that the Brotherhood does not embrace global jihad against the West, its support of jihad in Israel and Iraq means it explicitly endorses terrorism. The authors also do not seriously address the sheer volume of the group's anti-Semitic utterances over the years, up to the present. They acknowledge the existence of this problem, but more as a historical fact than a present and ongoing reality. To exemplify the Brotherhood's thinking today, the two political scientists cite one moderate sermon that they heard in London. It's worth considering that the authors were present in the mosque as the guest of the man giving the sermon; perhaps his words were tailored to please them? The authors make no effort to balance positive developments with recurring problems -- for example, the continuing role of Youssef Qaradawi. They note only that the UOIF in France doesn't invite the imam to its conferences anymore, but fail to acknowledge his role in setting norms in Europe through his fatwa council, websites, and television broadcasts. Maybe most important, the article conflates the Brotherhood in the Middle East and the West. One can argue that Western countries should reach out to oppressed Brotherhood members in authoritarian Egypt. But this doesn't mean that one also has to endorse the Brotherhood's role among Western Muslims. What seems moderate in Egypt can be radical in Paris or Munich.
This endorsement of the Brotherhood began to spread beyond the State Department. The Department of Homeland Security continued to oppose the Brotherhood and made any sort of affiliation with the organization grounds for refusing a person entry into the United States. Thus Tariq Ramadan, Said Ramadan's son and a popular lecturer among young European Muslims, was refused admittance. Besides his familial affiliations, the younger Ramadan wrote a foreword for the first collection of fatwas issued by Qaradawi's fatwa council. The merits of the department's actions can be debated -- Ramadan was hardly a terrorist, and if his views are objectionable, they should be debated, not silenced -- but in any case it was largely a rearguard action. By the second half of the decade, even the CIA -- reflecting its mindset of the 1950s -- was backing the Brotherhood. In 2006 and 2008, the CIA issued reports on the organization. The former was more detailed, laying out a blueprint for dealing with the group. Called "Muslim Brotherhood: Pivotal Actor in European Political Islam." the report stated that "MB groups are likely to be pivotal to the future of political Islam in Europe ... They also show impressive internal dynamism, organization, and media savvy." The report conceded that "European intelligence services consider the Brotherhood a security threat and critics -- including more pluralistic Muslims -- accuse it of hindering Muslim social integration." But the report nevertheless concluded that "MB-related groups offer an alternative to more violent Islamic movements."
The new Obama administration evinced similar support. During the presidential campaign, the Obama team appointed Mazen Asbahi as its Muslim outreach coordinator, although Asbahi had extensive contacts with Brotherhood organizations and was even head of the Muslim Student Association, which was founded by people with ties to the Munich mosque. This information was either disregarded or missed when Asbahi was vetted during the campaign. He resigned in 2008 only when the facts, dug up by an online newsletter focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, were published in a national newspaper.
In power, the Obama administration has continued its predecessor's endorsement of Islamists. In January 2009, for example, the State Department sponsored a visit of German Muslim leaders to one of the bastions of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, the International Institute of Islamic Thought -- the organization set up after the epochal meeting in 1977 at Himmat's home base near Lake Lugano. The German visitors were key government officials in charge of integration or recruitment of minorities into the police. One of the briefers (or "one of those giving the briefing") was Jamal Barzinji -- who as seen in Chapter 14 had worked for Nada in the 1970s and later was one of the triumvirate who set up a number of key Brotherhood-inspired structures in the United States.
Like many Brotherhood-related groups, IIIT faded from public view after the 9/11 attacks but has experienced a renaissance recently. IIIT had been closely associated with a raft of Islamist organizations in northern Virginia that were raided by federal agents because of their suspected ties to extremist Islam. As elsewhere, this action followed a familiar pattern. The groups in question, including IIIT, were primarily problematic for ideological reasons -- for trying to push the Brotherhood's vision of an Islamicized society, which clearly cannot work in a pluralistic culture. But instead of being challenged on the field of ideas, where they could easily be shown to hold beliefs antithetical to democratic ideals, they were accused of supporting criminal activities and were raided. This had a double effect: it created the strange spectacle of the legal arm of the government trying desperately to prosecute these groups while, at the same time, the diplomatic arm held them up as models of integration. In addition, the failure to convict the Muslims was seen as an exoneration, almost a seal of approval.
***
Few people illustrate the West's fascination with and repulsion toward the Brotherhood better than Ibrahim el-Zayat, the young Muslim leader given the reins of the Islamic Community of Germany in 2002, when Ghaleb Himmat was forced out. Just thirty-three years old at the time, he became only the fourth head of the organization, after Said Ramadan, Faisal Yazdani, and, for nearly thirty years, Himmat. Zayat represented the new generation, in some ways the culmination of years of Islamist efforts to find a foothold in Europe and build something lasting.
Born in Europe to an Egyptian father and German mother, Zayat was perfectly at home in the West but had close ties to the old country. He spoke German and English fluently and held a master's degree in political science from a German university. He understood how political decisions are made in Germany -- the complex interactions of think tanks, church, and political foundations where "opinion makers" meet and discuss ideas, which filter up through the political parties to become a consensus that is eventually implemented. It is not grassroots activism or organizing, but a system that gave power to elites, who are meant to cull out radical ideas and come up with sensible solutions. A consummate lobbyist, Zayat knew this. At times, he seemed to do nothing but go from one conference to another: to a Protestant church's political academy, a Catholic church's roundtable, a Social Democrats' intercultural dialogue, the European Parliament's subcommittee on minorities, and so on, always present, always cutting an impressive figure, usually dressed in a blue power suit with a pressed white shirt and richly patterned tie -- a man who might be a junior executive at an investment bank.
But what sets him apart from other politically ambitious men of his age are his ties to Islamism. His father, an Egyptian, had settled in Marburg and became a leader in local Muslim affairs. Zayat assumed this mantle. He seemed to have either founded or been closely involved with every recently established Muslim Brotherhood-related group in Europe. These included the European Trust (board of directors with power of attorney), the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (board of directors), the Muslim Student Union (past president), the European Mosque Construction and Support Community (power of attorney), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (European representative), the Islamic Education Institute (member), the Society of Muslim Social Scientists (associate director), and the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (board of directors).
And that was only his pro bono work. He made his money through Islam too, as head of SLM Liegenschaftsmanagement GmbH, a company that buys and sells real estate on behalf of mosques. One of his biggest clients is the Turkish Islamist group Milli Gorus. Given the large population of ethnic Turks in Germany, Milli Gorus has somewhat eclipsed the Muslim Brotherhood in terms of influence in that country, but Zayat has helped bridge this gap through his business and personal ties. He founded SLM at the age of twenty-nine, in 1997, along with another young Islamist, Oguz Ucuncu, the current head of Milli Gorus. Zayat is married to the daughter of Mehmet Erbakan (the former head of Milli Gorus) and the niece of the movement's founder, Necmettin Erbakan. Zayat's ties to global Islamism are so extensive that he has been featured in long profiles in major German media. In one sensationalistic work, he was described as the spider in the center of a web of terrorism. The book The War in Our Cities was so riddled with factual errors and shrill assertions that Zayat's lawyers had a field day forcing the book publisher to strike out passages or issue retractions. But its overall point was valid: Zayat is one of the most influential Islamists in Europe.
The question remains whether Zayat and others like him -- from ISNA functionaries in Chicago to UOIF members in Paris -- can be called members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Is it even fair to use that term when most of these people were born in the West, might not speak Arabic or Urdu, and support local laws and customs? In Zayat's case, the Egyptian government simply claims that he is a member of the Brotherhood, implying that it still has a functioning overseas network of people who take orders from Akef in Cairo and support the party back in Egypt. The Egyptian government tried him in absentia in a military court. But then again, Egypt's track record on human rights is so miserable and persecution of the Brotherhood so extensive that it's hard to trust anything its officials say on the matter. More intriguing, Ikhwanweb, the Brotherhood's official website, also claimed he was a member. Later, however, it issued a retraction and a denial from Zayat.
The question is to some degree pointless because the Brotherhood nowadays functions as two phenomena: One is narrowly de fined as an Egyptian political party. The other -- more relevant in the West in the twenty-first century -- is an ideological universe that includes the works of Qaradawi and Qutb, Ramadan and von Denffer, and could be defined even more broadly as including nearly identical movements around the world, including Pakistan's Jamaat or Turkey's Milli Gorus. In this sense, it's hard to see how Zayat, with his extensive ties to all these groups, could be considered as functioning outside the Brotherhood. Although he tries to prevent this label from being attached to him, he seems to be losing the fight. In 2005, he unsuccessfully sued a German parliamentarian to prevent her from using the term in reference to him. The court affirmed her right to express her opinion that he "clearly is a functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood."
Personally, I avoided the term when talking to Zayat. Over the years, I had come to know him fairly well. I had interviewed him twice and we had participated in numerous conferences, including a series of closed-door roundtables sponsored by the Catholic Church, aimed at breaking down the barriers between Islamists and Germany's security services. At one of those meetings, I had seen him emotionally defend the Brotherhood as an important reform movement -- undoubtedly true in the context of Egyptian politics. But I also could see why he rejected the label. He was born in Germany, his kids went to Montessori schools, and he had a sharp, if somewhat bitter, sense of humor. He didn't want to be pegged as a puppet of Akef's and of the other old men in the Brotherhood's Cairo headquarters.
Our final meeting took place in his office in Cologne. After taking over, Zayat had essentially moved the Islamic Community of Germany's operations to Cologne from Munich, although officially the group was still based in the Munich mosque. In a way, this reflected the group's history of strongman rule. When Himmat ran it, he was based in Switzerland. Now Zayat was running it from Cologne. The mosque remained in Munich, a pawn in larger struggles.
Zayat's office in Osterather Strasse is home to numerous other Islamist-leaning organizations, including the Society of Muslim Social Scientists, the Muslim Student Association, a Muslim bookstore, a kindergarten for the Islamic Community of Germany, and the national offices of the Islamrat, an umbrella group of Islamic organizations, most notably Milli Gorus. I arrived early and sat waiting for him in the bookstore. A clerk greeted me with a suspicious look, a grunt, and a gesture toward a chair, but later he warmed up when I asked if he could recommend an introduction to Islam. He thrust into my hands a copy of von Denffer's On Islamic Comportment, a collection of essays by well-known Islamist authors, including von Denffer's mentor, Khurshid Ahmad.
A few minutes later, Zayat came in, looking stockier and grayer than he did when I had last seen him, but as professional as ever. We headed out in his BMW 3-series sedan, a comfortably messy older model with an old-fashioned car phone. As we zipped into traffic, I was reminded of why I liked him.
"A lot of people say that Ian Johnson is a CIA agent because you write so little."
"My boss says that too." I said.
"You should write more. Sloth is a sin."
We tore through traffic, exchanging more pleasantries and jokes on the way to lunch.
We parked and stepped into a cafeteria-style Turkish restaurant. Zayat immediately took command, ordering a tureen of soup and a huge plate of sliced meat topped with croutons and doused in garlicky yogurt. At the cashier he whipped out his wallet and paid before I could react. "You're with an Arab now, you have no chance!" he said, leading us to a table.
Zayat had been having a hard time. German officials want a dialogue with "Muslims" -- in some ways a strange term that lumps together completely different people, from first-generation Turks who speak little German to Bosnian immigrants and local converts. They know that Zayat and his allies in Milli Gorus represent many Muslims, especially the more troubled youth, who pose the biggest security threat. But Zayat's web of links has begun to be known in Germany, and he is not always welcome. The Federal Center for Political Education, for example, had listed him as an approved interlocutor on Muslim issues. That had carried a lot of weight because the center was set up after the war to promote democratic education in West German society, and its recommendations are generally seen as safe. But when commentators pointed out Zayat's links to the ideological world of the Brotherhood, the center quickly pulled his name off its website. Then he seemed to achieve a breakthrough when he participated in the German federal government's Islamkonferenz, a government effort to establish a formal dialogue with the Muslim community. But when Zayat's presence was made public, he was dropped. In 2009, police raided several mosques and prayer rooms linked to the Brotherhood, and some German newspapers said the head of the organization in Germany was Zayat, further tarnishing his reputation.
All this has helped push Zayat out of the front row of acceptable dialogue partners, but he continues to organize and keep the network functioning, allowing others to step forward. This background role is probably not what he wants, but it's something he and the Brotherhood have mastered over the years. A few years earlier, he had wired money to the Taibah International Aid Association, a Bosnian organization linked to fundamentalist groups. He concedes that he made the transfers, but says he was just doing this on behalf of Saudi donors. When I ask him why he was involved with the Saudis, his answer is disappointing: "To prevent worse from happening." one of the classic cop-out answers given by people who stay in bad groups too long.
"I don't deny that I'm in these groups." he says, getting a bit tense. "When I'm asked clearly, then I answer."
That's part of the problem, of course. Brotherhood figures and groups are always saying they have no ties with extremists, but only admit them when asked about specific connections. They never make clear statements, nor clean breaks with the past. The Islamic Community of Germany has never owned up to its past, for example, or taken a real interest in its history. At its annual meeting in late 2008, the group celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, even though it wasn't legally established as the Mosque Construction Commission until 1960. It claims, on its website, that it was founded by the old soldiers (who had first met in 1958, hence the anniversary), but the group didn't mention that it threw the soldiers out. It has begun offering a Said Ramadan Prize for people who have helped the cause, but doesn't note that Ramadan was also kicked out. It acknowledges that a string of radicals have passed through its mosques, but says each one is an exception. The past is always being rewritten or excused away.
That doesn't prevent Zayat from winning friends. Some people are swayed by the group's claim that its rough edges represent authenticity. One of the best examples is Werner Schiffauer, a prominent German anthropologist who has written extensively about Islamists in Turkey and Germany. His approach is rigorously modern: informants are given pseudonyms, and their statements taken at face value. He does no investigative work and only checks stories against each other for internal logic -- he never consults public records or tries to create a historical narrative. His research is also driven by a sense of guilt: that foreigners are victims and German society is oppressive. Thus he has become an advocate for groups like Milli Gorus; for example, he once served as a friendly witness on behalf of a group member. I remember seeing Schiffauer's ideological worlds collide when Zayat's Society of Muslim Social Scientists gave him an award at its annual meeting. When Schiffauer, speaking as a good leftist, said Muslims were victims of society, just like homosexuals, the room exploded in anger. One man had a violent fit of anger and had to be escorted from the room. Schiffauer ended up arguing with the man, stating that he didn't care what the man thought. In essence, the Muslim man was supposed to act as a proper subject of study, supplying partial proof of a theory that defined Muslims as victims.
Cultivating friends is important, Zayat says, but he wants me to understand something more important. With our meal long finished and teas drunk, he waves away all the groups he's joined and all the troubles he's had. There is an important lesson in this, and he wants to impart it to me. I hunch over the table and listen. It has to do with a group that wanted to build a mosque in Berlin, Inssan e.V. The group was founded by Muslims after the 9/11 attacks and needed money. Zayat arranged for the European Trust to donate several million euros to buy a piece of land for it in Berlin. When the purchase became public, a furor erupted over Zayat's involvement, and the local district government denied Inssan a building permit. So I asked Zayat if that was because his group was involved.
"No, you can't say that. If a plan to build a mosque is made public, everyone is against it. Mosques must always be built secretly."
Surely that can't be right, I said. m been to German cities and seen how local Muslims had built bridges to local communities and gotten wide support for their projects. It didn't always happen that way -- racism was still a big problem -- but it seemed to me that over the long term, transparency was the best bet. Wasn't the fact that Inssan's mosque project was undertaken by a small group of activists funded by the Brotherhood the real problem?
Zayat's answer was timeless, something that could have been uttered by von Mende, Dreher, or Ramadan: "No, it's not that. It's secrecy. If it's not public, you can build any mosque, regardless of who's behind it. You just have to keep it secret."