Salafi Communities in America II

Jafar Sheikh Idris and Sheikh Ali al-Timimi. In the DC area, they began in the 1990’s very small with a small office in DC for an organization called the Society for the Adherence to the Sunnah which was where the program of Ali al-Timimi was based.

The office was run by Idris Palmer and Friday night lectures were given at the home of Jafar Sheikh Idris. The classes at the home of Sheikh Jaffar created a brotherhood amongst the students that grew and attracted an extremely diverse group of students from all racial and economic backgrounds. Eventually these classes would be given by Sheikh Ali al-Timimi and at other times by Sheikh Jaffar’s son Yusuf.

Under the tenure of Sheikh Ali, the classes would expand tremendously and the tapes and CD’s of the lectures would be mass produced, sold and spread all over the US, Canada and the UK.

Sheikh Ali became such a popular local figure that his classes became “the place to be” for the youth of the masjids throughout the DC-area. People would come who were raised in Muslim homes.

Some were even secular or sufi and generally very far from the Salafi Dawah. The attraction of Sheikh Ali was the fact that this was a man who was born and raised in America, spoke in clear English, and not only had a great knowledge of the deen but was college educated, an IT professional, a cancer researcher and a very serious intellectual. This was a man who could take the knowledge of the Salaf and make it applicable to your everyday life and could speak in a language we all understood.

Contrary to media reports, he was not a firebrand and seldom raised his voice, and sounded like an NPR host most of the time. How he differed from the other Salafi leaders in the community is that he would - from time to time - address political issues and acknowledged the world that we live in.
Eventually the brothers put together an organization called “Dar al-Arqam” where everyone would come together for the classes and get together for food and laughs afterwards. We used to have volleyball tournaments after the classes and did other activities together.

There were NUMEROUS active sisters that would attend these classes at Dar Al Arqam from all over the area. These sisters were also highly educated and brilliant women who loved Islam and not victims of misogynist pigs.

Generally, I also want to add that the people in this DC salafi circle tended to be thinkers, and highly educated individuals - including the African-Americans - but those of us who were not educated were made to feel welcome and a part of the family.

There was a number of African-American brothers in this circle who had college degrees and good jobs particularly in the IT field.Those were some very good times. The best times of my life…



Even during the time of growth, there was an overzealous element that and only grew more and more narrow. They were known amongst other Muslims for causing an uproar at local masjids where they would publicly confront the imams and lecturers on what they perceived as bid’ah.

They quickly became disliked by the leaders of many local Muslim communities. This kind of attitude and ill advised outbursts stopped the amazing growth from being even more than it was. In the beginning, it really centered around a couple of issues:-

• Whether or not it was a MUST to call oneself a salafi even if he/she adheres to the salafi dawah-
• Loyalty to the Saudi throne even if one is not Saudi (They will say “the rulers”, but they mean the Saudi throne) On the first issue, there were many of the opinion that it was almost sinful to not distinguish oneself as a salafi and became more and more belligerent and uncompromising over time.
• The zealots were also prone to banging brothers over the head on their position on the Saudi King. It was not good enough to recognize that Saudi Arabia printed copies of the Qur’ans and gave money to spread the dawah. One – in these people’s minds - must be loyal to and praise the Saudi rulers. You couldn’t even remain silent on the issue.
• IANA (Islamic Assembly of North America) on one side and QSS (Qur’an and Sunnah Society of North America) on the other. I
• Sheikh Ali give this lecture in the UK on it in an effort to arrest this cancer’s growth. That lecture got Sheikh Ali permanently thrown out of salafiyyah.

Source UMAR LEE

Profile of an Ameriican Salafi

On July 26, a former Washington cab driver and resident of Gwynn Oak, Maryland, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for providing material support to a terrorist group.

Ohio-born Mahmud Faruq Brent, 32, admitted to attending training camps run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT, Army of the Pure) in 2002, a Pakistan-based jihadist group established during the 1980s campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After training at various locations in Pakistan, Brent returned to the United States, residing in Baltimore when he was arrested in August 2005.

• Brent told Tarik Shah - who pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda - that he had been up in the mountains training with the mujahideen. [1]
• Through Shah, Brent's training is linked to other cases of Americans who attended LeT-run camps in Pakistan.
• After Shah's arrest, he agreed to record conversations with Brent in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
  In Shah's cellular telephone, along with Mahmud al-Mutazzim, another name Brent used, was the contact information for Seifullah Chapman, who also knew Brent. Chapman, a former marine, was part of the "Virginia Jihad Group", another informal network convicted of terrorism-related charges stemming from their training in Pakistan.
• He was sentenced in 2005 to a 65-year prison term.

As disturbing as these cases are individually, collectively they demonstrate an even more troubling trend of radicalized American Muslims -

• bound by Salafi ideology
• Receiving training overseas and returning to the United States for potential future operations.

The Virginia Jihad Group

Based out of Falls Church, Virginia, the informal Virginia Jihad Group was led by Ali al-Timimi. A US citizen, Timimi was sentenced to life in prison for soliciting others to levy war against the United States.

Eleven people were charged in the case, and the prosecutors successfully argued that the network was part of the jihadist threat akin to al-Qaeda. Timimi was born in Washington, his father a lawyer for the Iraqi Embassy.

At age 15, he moved with his family to Saudi Arabia. While there, he grew interested in Islam, inevitably the Salafi variety that is espoused by the Saudi religious establishment.

After returning to the US, he received a PhD in computational biology from George Mason University in Virginia. In addition to his academic pursuits, Timimi was an Islamic teacher in the northern Virginia area.

Yet he was also involved with the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), a group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that receives funding from the Saudis to promote Salafi Islam in the US, especially in the prison system.

Naturally, Timimi's scholarly ties, more than anything, reveal his ideological proclivities.

• Establishing a center for Islamic education, Timimi contacted the well-known Egyptian-born Salafi Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Khaliq and translated his works into English. Abd al-Khaliq openly promoted the Salafi Islam prominent in the Persian Gulf region, and privately encouraged more militant Salafism among his followers, telling them that US troops were legitimate targets of the jihad.
• Ties to Salafi organizations Timimi's work for IANA - which included leading a five-person delegation to Beijing in 1995, where he defended female circumcision at an international women's conference - ties him into a much broader circle of Salafis, such as those in the Saudi Salafi establishment.
• Like many others who have been a part of that movement, he sought more militant teachings that condoned violence against Americans.

Yet the path to militancy often begins with seemingly benign teachings at austere mosques and Islamic centers. Commonly called Wahhabi, they call themselves Salafi, but for purposes of da'wa (proselytizing) and education, they do not emphasize their denomination.

It is simply presented as "pure" Islam, and theirs is a purification movement. A former chairman of IANA, Muhammad al-Ahmari, told the New York Times that as of 2001, roughly half of his organization's funding came from the Saudi government, with the remainder primarily coming from private individual donations from the Gulf region.

IANA received at least US$3 million from 1995 through 2002, which funded the distribution of 530 packages containing Korans, tapes, lectures and other instructional Salafi educational material to prisoners in the US.

Part of the funds, however, also went to disseminating what is among the most militant Salafi material to date in the US.

The group's webmaster, Sami Omar Hussayen, was a graduate student in Idaho when he posted two fatwas from Saudi Salafi-Jihadis Salman al-Awda and Safar al-Hawali, which incited jihad against Americans.

Sami's uncle, Saleh Hussayen, is a high-ranking Saudi minister who gave at least $100,000 to IANA. He was also a director of a northern Virginia organization (the Safa Group) with, the US government contends, about 100 front companies operating under it to launder money to al-Qaeda through Isle of Man and Swiss bank accounts.

• Those raids, which took place in late 2001 and early 2002, have not yet come to trial.
• More inexplicable yet, Hussayen also came under scrutiny for a trip to the US, where, on September 10, 2001, he stayed at the same Marriott Residence Inn near the Washington area's Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon the following day.
• Hussayen was questioned by the FBI, but there was no evidence he actually met or interacted with the hijackers. He was said to feign a seizure during the interview and taken to the hospital, where he was declared to be in good health.
• He returned to Saudi Arabia and to his post as minister of religious endowments, overseeing the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina.

The Jamestown Foundation.