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  • How a Mosque for Ex-Nazis Became Center of Radical Islam

    The Beachhead

    How a Mosque for Ex-Nazis Became Center of Radical Islam

    Documents Reveal Triumph
    By Muslim Brotherhood
    In Postwar Munich
    A CIA Plan to Fight Soviets

    The Wall Street Journal
    July 12, 2005
    Page A1

    By IAN JOHNSON, Staff Reporter of 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.

    The Islamic Center of Munich, seen here at right, sits gently tucked
    away in a quiet suburb. Bottom, the city where Ghaleb Himmat was said
    to have run the Munich mosque. Top left, the Islamic Center of
    Nuremburg.

    "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% and 10% of the continent's population --
    need to be walled off2 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 Düsseldorf. 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 Düsseldorf 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 Düsseldorf, 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."


    Almut Schoenfeld in Berlin contributed to this article.

    Write to Ian Johnson at [email protected]

    URL for this article:
    http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111964664777469127,00.html
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